How Good Was the Good War?       PDF

Michael Vlahos

Just saying “World War II” is like scratching extra opinion on some great basalt stele. World War II was not a great event: rather, it is the American sacred. Invoking it is not retelling history but repeating homily. Its spare and tight four-year story is the heart of our national narrative.

The power of the World War II sacred comes across like a jolt: just feeling the passion from readers’ comments on Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War and the review here by John Lukacs is like underscoring with a razor.

We have seen the World War II sacred trumpeted in full during the 9/11 war. Its ancient rhetoric has been this administration’s neon rod and staff, its fire and brimstone: Munich, Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, the Battle of the Bulge. For seven years, political opposition has simply withered before the stainless authority of World War II.

This is the power of American holy war. Our great wars are crystallizing moments along the path of our religious nationalism: defining, reinterpreting, and celebrating ourselves.

But so it has been for all modernity. In the world of religious nationalism, war has operated like a liturgy. Its narrative cycle has been a touchstone story in which a people struggle, sacrifice, and transcend. The form of the rite—shared by so many cultures—should look familiar:

A threat to existence suddenly looms … the evil face of the enemy (that we had refused to see) is at once revealed … there is a national awakening … the Oath is sealed as the nation’s pledge … the Leader arises … and then comes the sacrifice of the pure, the pious, the young … there is a culminating moment of sacrifice and then national transcendence … the enemy is laid low and forever vanquished … and, in triumph, the nation is reunited and a world delivered from darkness.

This is the liturgy of religious nationalism; the grand creation of Western modernity. At its cresting, it was the world of Churchill’s young manhood. The great struggle of nations—and its irresistible, sacred promises—became his personal emotional focal point. Churchill knew the power of the ritual sacred as well as any man in modernity, and he knew how to invoke the juju of its anointed language.

This was not idle fantasy. In the formative zeitgeist of Churchill’s political rise, looming German power merged into existential threat. This was an almost atavistic British storyline going back to Napoleon. For Churchill, it instantly overturned the easy, dreamy narrative of Victoria’s empire resplendent, fearing nothing more than French Third Republic ironclads and tsarist commerce raiders. Now came the hard light of the 20th century.

So Kipling’s loving carapace was thrown off in many deep ways as insufficiently mythic for Kipling’s pupils—England’s earnest boys. As Churchill emerged from the compleat Victorian, he sought the far grander literary realization that a rising hard heroic promised.

We need to position Churchill in the new century’s framing of British sacred narrative—the story that consumed his mature life from Kaiser to Nazi to Commissar. Lurid as his historical recounting of evil nemeses became in branded prose, their persona nonetheless in his rhetoric represented the agents of glorious epiphany: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” His vision of Britain’s eternal greatness—his own apotheosis—desperately needed threats darkly mythic and heroic.

Paradoxically, when World War I crushed so much of the British spirit, it drove him on. Churchill’s life mission became exhuming and reanimating his mythical British Empire and restoring its true “Crown Imperial.” Above all, Churchill was attuned to the limitless opportunity his insight and its messaging power gave him. With every book he wrote, he enlarged the electric perimeter of English sacred war.

Because he so authentically inhabited this world, he could effortlessly step into the heart of its liturgy. So his own personally transcendent act—that leap of faith in 1940—instantly remade the awkward and doomed war of Chamberlain and Halifax. He saved Britain with sacred language that would have been laughed out of court just months before.

But he did something more, too. He began to script a new and bigger narrative—that of the Churchillian Mahdi. It is this that so heaps and tasks us Americans, and for good reason. This is what he did:

The Second World War became indistinguishable from his same-titled six-volume epic. Our American sacred narrative became The History of the English-Speaking Peoples. And our world-historical task became the dutiful discharging of his Fulton, Missouri charge of Iron Curtain and the Cold War—his Cold War.

Churchill’s rhetoric, so centrally mythic for Britons in 1940, became the organizing rhetoric of America in the Cold War, and he became The Man.

There was never any question that this man would be at the center of history. Samuel Hoare quipped, “Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it ‘The World Crisis’”—and he could pull this off in World War I. But he was bigger and smarter than narcissism.

Beyond even his worshipful acolytes today, Churchill achieved this: through his reification as American Mahdi—greater even than FDR—he effectively inserted himself and threaded his personal vision into American sacred narrative in the 9/11 war.

This status is not inconsiderable. Furthermore, it birthed no vague convening of cigar-circling puffers but rather a living brotherhood. The Churchillian Fraternity in America comes so much closer than, say, “neocon,” to revealing the inner reality of the 9/11 war.

The grand success of Winston Churchill was his interweaving of Victorian Imperial narrative—and all of its propaganda tropes—into the contemporary consciousness of American national identity after 1945. The proud fulfillment of his handiwork was that after 9/11, the Churchillian narrative instantly took over. In improbable and yet essential ways Winston Churchill has owned the 9/11 war. Moreover, he achieved this legitimacy because he truly understood the American mythic narrative cycle.

But here is the downside: most Americans do not want a “Crown Imperial” in their sacred story. Yet a boisterous minority still yearns. Indeed, we have watched them aggressively make it so these past seven years. Churchill’s success is thus a discordant visitation on America, helping to divide us as a nation.

In a sense, the battles on these pages represent Churchill’s real legacy and lesson for Americans. You cannot force an alien vision—even anointed by mythic provenance—on a people who want something different for humanity, whose national identity is rooted not in imperial destiny but in altruism here and salvation hereafter.   
__________________________________

Michael Vlahos is principal professional staff at the National Security Analysis Department of The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. His latest book, Fighting Identity: War’s Liturgy and World Change, will be published in November.