The egregious mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who is an extreme Left and marginally racist personification of the moral collapse of post-Thatcher Britain, has decreed that the statue in Parliament Square of Sir Winston Churchill be boxed up and invisible as a reaction to extremist graffiti. This is a vivid illustration of the moral decay of the country that was generally a beacon of respect for human rights from the time of Cromwell nearly 400 years ago until well within living memory.
Also in Parliament Square are many other great figures of British history, including Disraeli, Canning (in a toga), Palmerston, Lloyd George, Peel, Derby, and such foreign luminaries as Lincoln, Smuts, Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. The logical reply to the desecration of the Churchill statute accusing him of racism, would be to detail another member of the Metropolitan Police attached to those who protect the Parliament buildings across the square, to ensure the security of the statuary.
There is a distressing message in the mayor’s action. Since he is one of the leaders of Britain’s Muslim community, which is infested with extremists who frequently exhibit ambiguous loyalty to the United Kingdom and harbour forces of militant anti-Semitism, it is not easy to abandon the suspicion that he was acting on his own resentment of Mr. Churchill’s well-publicised reservations about Islam and his almost life-long promotion of the British Empire, with its implicit dependence on at least a partial notion of white supremacy. This is despite the fact that Winston Churchill looked benignly upon all peoples and races, specifically those with whom he had personally been in mortal combat, including the South African Boers, the Sudanese Muslims, and the Germans.
This capitulation to vandals who would defame and besmirch the man generally regarded by the British people as next only to Shakespeare, the greatest single figure in the nation’s history, is of a piece with the failure of British justice remotely adequately to indict and punish those immigrants from non-white cultures responsible over many years for the systematic rape of over a thousand white adolescent girls in Rotherham (UK). More specifically, those who painted coarse and racist words on the base of Churchill’s statue appear to have been incited by the current disgusting wave of anti-Semitism in Britain which Prime Minister Starmer has condemned but done practically nothing to counter.
Amongst many other qualities, Winston Churchill was celebrated as a philo-semite throughout his parliamentary career of 62 years, including serving the governments of five Prime Ministers apart from himself in nine different cabinet positions including chancellor of the exchequer, the home office, and the departments of war, munitions, trade, colonies, the air force, and the greatest navy in the world in the early phases of both World Wars. He not only had many Jewish friends, but supported the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which promised a homeland for the Jews in what is now Israel, and in the interwar years, strongly disapproved heavy restrictions on the immigration of Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Nazis and their sympathizers to settle in Palestine. As war leader, he approved an autonomous Palestinian brigade to serve in the Italian campaign fighting under what is now the flag of Israel. No one decried and fought with greater eloquence and courage than Winston Churchill the genocidal criminality of the Third Reich: ”The long night of Nazi barbarism… made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science.”
In his brilliant novel, “The Plague”, Albert Camus, in what was an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France, famously remarked of the many statues of distinguished figures in French history in Paris: “Only the mute effigies of the great personalities of the past reminded the living of what man had been.” To many, the cowardly and outrageous boxing up the statue of Britain’s greatest statesman in capitulation to immigrant racists and hooligans not only removes Camus’ consolation, but is a particular rupture of the covenant between Churchill and the Conservative faction he led to victory in the war with the Jews, in the darkest moment of their entire history of more than 5,000 years. He was perhaps Hitler’s most durable and implacable enemy (a status denied Stalin by his participation in the Nazi Soviet Pact).
The covering up of his statue affronts all of the British, but perhaps the Jews, tormented again, even in England, are made most uneasy by this surrender to racist lawlessness. And all are denied even the symbolic presence at the most prominent place in England of its greatest leader and of the greatest British friend of the Jewish people. It is sadly indicative of the seemingly temporary decline of one of the world’s greatest and most distinguished nationalities.
