I first titled this writing “Thoughts on the Presidential Election” but immediately realized I didn’t need the word “Presidential.”   What other election is there?   Come to think of it, that gets at the main point of this piece: to my way of thinking, this presidential election was far too big a show — to the extent that it obscured the rest of the political process.  Quick, name a bill going through Congress right now, or is Congress even in session?  Once they got shuffling, slurring, vaguely creepy Joe out the door, it was wall-to-wall Trump and Harris.

This article or essay, whatever it is, shares what this election cycle brought up for me and invites your best thinking about what I offer.  I started writing it on Friday, November 1st, a few days before the election, and completed all but the concluding section by the next day.  I then took a break to decide how I should finish it up, the part where I talk about you and me.   I completed what’s here on November 4th, so I don’t know how the election came out.

To start this off, the first thing that comes to mind is that the damn thing seemed to go on forever.  Remember Asa Hutchinson?   When was that?  Or maybe better, who was he?  I just recall the name.

Words come into my head about what went on, none of them positive: undignified, immature, something out of the WWE or Jerry Springer (remember him?).  “Who you calling garbage?”  “I am too a smart and strong woman!” “It’s Hulk Hogan everybody!”  I read somewhere that two billion dollars was spent by the two candidates.   Not million, billion.  For a governmental office.  Absurd.  Crazy.  A national obsession.  Somebody asked me what I was going to do over the weekend and I answered that I was going to write up something about the election, which I find . . . I searched for a word . . . “ridiculous” is what I came up with.

And it was these two?  Three hundred million-plus people in this country to choose from and the system generated two people I find singularly unimpressive—limited in capability, uninformed, simplistic, inarticulate, and Trump, outright sleazy. We’ve come from James Madison to this?  How’d that happen?  I was supposed to get behind one of these two?

At least, I thought to myself, in a few days it’ll be over.   But came bouncing right back, “Don’t kid yourself, Robert, it’ll won’t be over on Tuesday.  Right after the election, it’ll be, who runs next time?  “Vance, you think?  Walz is a joke, but how about The Rock?  Beyoncé?  Maybe Kelly Clarkson.  She’s lost a lot a weight, charming, nice smile.  She’s over the divorce.  Musk can’t do it because he was born in South Africa or someplace.”

This Election (it deserves to be in caps like the World Series) was but a marker in a continuous, never-ending process.  The Dodgers won the Series, but right away it was, “Soto is a free agent, the Yanks are in trouble if they don’t sign him for next year.”  The Elect a President show (imagine that in lights like the Celine Dion show at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, or I guess she’s been sick) will go on to the point that the American political process will come down to picking between two people—a third choice? what do you mean Jill Stein?—to be in charge of the country for the next four years.  After this election, it’ll be: “What’s [Trump, Harris, whoever won] going to do about inflation [the border, abortion, Ukraine, Gaza, fluoride in the water, Easter egg baskets, etc., etc., etc.]?”

“You know what?” Kamala said this past week.  “We are here because we are fighting for a democracy.   Fighting for a democracy.  And understand the difference here, understand the difference here, moving forward, moving forward, understand the difference here.”  A central pitch in her campaign was that Trump is no less than a threat to American democracy.

Really?  We’re a democracy and it’s under threat?  A couple of years ago in an article, I wrote this about democracy:

As a matter of fact, we don’t have a democracy in this country.  Our form of government is a republic.  We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands.  Within our republican political system, there are many departures from simple majority rule.  In the beginning, senators weren’t directly elected but rather chosen by state legislators and the President still isn’t (the Electoral College).  States with small populations like Wyoming have as many senators as New York and California.   The Supreme Court is appointed.  The President can veto legislation.

More than simply a republic, America is a constitutional republic.  The federal constitution puts a brake on what can legitimately be a matter of collective determination.  The Constitution sets up a separation of powers and checks and balances that prevent majorities in one branch of government—perhaps dominated by powerful factions (the old term for interest groups)—from wielding control.  The Constitution’s first ten amendments, called the Bill of Rights, spell out protections of individuals from the totality as represented by the federal government.  They give explicit acknowledgment of the view that individual citizens have inalienable rights — the term used in the Declaration of Independence. These are rights possessed by all humans and they can’t be taken away.  These rights are not up for a vote.

In the early years of this country, the distinction between a republic and a democracy was an important one.  John Adams declared, “There is no good government but what is republican.”¹

 Over the course of this century, democracy has taken on the quality of an unquestioned religious law worth killing and dying for, but that wasn’t the case in this country’s early years.  In the article, I quoted a number of major figures from back then, including the aforementioned James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and the respected French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, all of whom were highly critical of democracy.   I noted that the writer James Fennimore Cooper saw democracies as tending

to press against their proper limits, to convert political equality into economic leveling, to insist that equal opportunity become mediocrity, [and] to invade every personal right and privacy; they set themselves above the law; they substitute mass opinion for justice.

I’m coming down on Harris here, but it needs to be said that the presidency in this constitutional republic doesn’t square with Trump’s pronouncements about “running the country”—as if being president is akin to playing the boss on a TV reality show.

Over the course of the campaign, it struck me that the people running for president were in effect applying for a job that didn’t have a posted job description.  Did you ever hear it come up that the president does this and doesn’t do that?  It’s after the fact now, but perhaps it will help up the line if I offer a job description here.  It’s what the U.S. Constitution says about the duties of the office of president.  It’s in Article II.

Before I do that, however, I’ll briefly refer to what’s in Articles I and III about the responsibilities of the legislative and judicial branches of government, because the presidency does not stand alone: its functions integrate, complement, these other two branches of government.  Article I says “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”  Article III says “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”  The point: the president does not make laws or hand down court decisions.

I went through Article II and extracted what it says about what the president does:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

See what you make of it, but my reading of it is that according to the United States Constitution the president is not the leader of the country.  He (or she) doesn’t embody the country, represent it, speak for us all, or call the tune.  He’s not a dictator, philosopher king, or the Dalai Lama.   He needs the consent of others to do things.  Congress legislates.  The Judiciary adjudicates.  He suggests.  He executes.  He serves.

This past week, Harris said, “Hey guys.  Let’s talk for a moment about Gaza.  We all want this war to end and to get the hostages out, and I will work on it full-time when I am elected president.”  Trump has made it clear that if he got in, he’d get together with Putin and Netanyahu because, you know, he’s close personally with both of them and work out deals around Ukraine and the Middle East.  What I would  have liked to hear from a candidate is something to the effect, “If I’m elected president, I’m going to urge the people’s elected representatives in Congress to take on the issues in Ukraine and Gaza and Israel and Iran and debate them from the perspective of what this country’s policies and actions should be and I’ll implement whatever they decide.”  To me, that is how this country is supposed to work.

So why don’t we do it this way?  I don’t want to oversimplify matters, but I think you go a good distance toward understanding what’s going on if you see it as a power play.  Those currently engaged in pulling the props out from under the Founders (“Jefferson had a mistress!”) and this country’s political and social heritage (“Racism, sexism, oppression, and exploitation, repeat after me”) and referring to America as a democracy and making a huge to-do of the president know what they are doing.  It’s about them getting themselves and theirs dictating what goes on in this country and in the front row at the feeding trough.

If you can sell democracy—putting anything and everything up for a vote; constitutional restraints, including free speech, just get in the way—you take power away from individuals and give it over to the collective, or better, those who can control the collective by monopolizing the information and idea flow, throwing money around, and making people pay if they cross them.  And if you can sell the notion that it’s the president and his cronies who decide whether or not to blow up Iran, you just have to manage one person to get your way, and everybody is manageable.   Ironically given how they are pitched as putting the masses in charge of their fate, democracy and “the leader of us all” concept of the presidency (FDR was a good example) result in minority control, which in our time is a mix of moneyed big shots, the pseudo-educated, corporate and media elites, revengeful and exploitive ethnic and racial elements, managers and bureaucrats, intimidated and paid-off politicians, and bullshitters.

One last reference to the Constitution.  This is what it says in Article II about selecting a president:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress. . . . The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves.  . . . The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed.

It’s enough in this context to affirm that the Constitution doesn’t dictate a nation-wide, forever-and-a-day, phenomenally costly, attention-monopolizing, mediocrity-surfacing, and misleading (our political system is not a one-person operation) extravaganza complete with schoolyard insult-level discourse, dressed down business moguls jumping up in the air, and hokey Saturday Night Live appearances.

This presidential election was geared to get us to focus on Trump and Harris—attend to me, care about me, come to my rally, donate to my campaign, support me.  To finish up this writing, I want the frame of reference to be what’s going on with you and me.   Whatever you and I do about presidential elections or anything else politically is going to be among the finite number of actions that will comprise our lives between now and the oblivion and we need to keep that in mind.  Recently in a writing, I took a stab at articulating what I think our lives come down to: “I see our fundamental challenge in life is an individual one: to become the truest, wisest, most productive, most decent, most honorable, and happiest person you can manage in the finite time allotted you on this earth.  Sing your unique song and look out for yourself and yours, find someone to love who will love you back, wish everyone well and help them when you can, try not to harm anybody, even in small ways, be kind, and then die, and try to leave some good behind.”²

I’ve decided that my existence as a human being should be characterized by the highest quality possible to me and personal integrity.  With that as the standard, I couldn’t get with the presidential election hoopla and inflated conception of the presidency it promoted and neither candidate did it for me as a political figure or person, and these days I’m not into compromises and going with the lesser of two evils and I stayed out of it.  I didn’t vote.  Sorry, but I’m not sorry.

Though I don’t have a specific person in mind, I do have an image of somebody I could get behind as a presidential candidate in the future.   It’s someone like an American president a century ago who has been all but forgotten, Calvin Coolidge.³

Calvin Coolidge became president in 1923 upon the death of president Warren G. Harding and was elected to a full term in 1924.  He was a Republican, but that isn’t what draws me to him, he could have been a Democrat.  He declined to run for a second full term as president in 1928.  He was 56 years old and could have kept it going for another four years, but he thought he had completed his work, wasn’t personally ambitious, didn’t feel a need for the limelight, and didn’t view himself as indispensable.

The big reason we’ve heard so little about Calvin Coolidge is because the people who have done the public talking all of my life don’t like presidents like him.  They like top-down, activist presidents who make big things happen of the sort they personally favor, like wars, government control of people’s lives, and showy collectivist ideas: Abraham Lincoln (“Kill ‘em!”), Franklin Roosevelt (“Have I got a program for you”), John Kennedy (“We’re going to the moon!”).   That wasn’t Coolidge.

Coolidge was born in Plymouth, Vermont and grew up among Vermonters, whom he referred to in a writing late in life as “hardy and self-contained people.”  Coolidge was descended from a people with a history and a heritage they were proud of and he gained strength and direction from that in conducting his life.   He was quiet about it, but he cared deeply about others: his wife and two sons, his neighbors, his community, his state and nation.  From all reports, he was a civil and giving person.  No shadiness and scandals with Coolidge.

Coolidge was educated, an honors graduate of Amherst College where he was a successful debater; accomplished, a successful attorney and governor of Massachusetts; and literate, a serious student of philosophy, Hegel and such.   He was committed to racial justice, which included respect and concern for white people.  He was rooted in this constitutional republic and saw himself continuing the American story.  At its core, the American political system is an experiment in personal freedom and responsibility.  It is the opportunity and the challenge to individual human beings to make something worthwhile out of their lives in both the private and public spheres.  It cherishes the right of people to control their own destinies.  Calvin Coolidge sought to free people, not control them.  He didn’t hector people to be this way or that or try to manage their lives and he didn’t take kindly to anybody else doing it.   To him, America was about Americans and their lives, not him and his life.  He wasn’t trying to be the star of the movie, look at me.  He always rented the houses he lived in to keep costs down.

How did Coolidge do as president?  The American economy grew, wages rose, unemployment hovered around a low 3%, the national debt went down, tax rates fell, the budget was a surplus every year, and the federal government was smaller at the end of his six years than it was at the beginning.  Congress took control of immigration with the Immigration Act of 1924.  We didn’t send young people off somewhere to kill and be killed and we didn’t support anybody else doing it.  During Coolidge’s years, Congress endorsed by a vote of 85 to 1 the Kellogg-Brand Pact between the U.S. and France to outlaw war as a means of resolving disputes.  (Frank B. Kellogg was Coolidge’s Secretary of State and Aristide Briand was the French Minister of Foreign Affairs.)  Later, 47 additional countries signed on.  Not bad for a nobody-nothing president who’s been tossed down the memory hole of history by the presumed enlightened among us.

Perhaps a Coolidge type will contribute to taming things down politically and bringing us back to what we are supposed to be about as a country and get me off this couch I’m sitting on, at least to vote.

That’s me. Where are you with any and all of what I’ve brought up here?

Endnotes

1. See, Robert S. Griffin, “The American Political System and White Racial Discourse,” The Occidental Observer, posted December 13, 2022.
2. It’s in Robert S. Griffin, “Kinjies and Me,” The Occidental Observer, posted September 28, 2024.
3. This description of Coolidge is drawn from Robert S. Griffin, “Where is Calvin Coolidge When We Need Him?” The Occidental Observer, posted March 30, 2019.

 

Predictable outrage in the leftist media:

The Atlantic: An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

So the people who want to change the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College and gut the First and Second Amendment are worried that Trump will assault the Constitution. Of course, the left thinks that Trump will end free speech. Idiotic. And yet another example of leftists projecting their own authoritarian attitudes onto the right.

 The New York Times: To roughly half the country, Mr. Trump’s rise portends a dark turn for American democracy, whose future will now depend on a man who has openly talked about undermining the rule of law. Mr. Trump helped inspire an assault on the Capitol in 2021, has threatened to imprison political adversaries and was denounced as a fascist by former aides. But for his supporters, Mr. Trump’s provocations became selling points rather than pitfalls.

So dark. At least they didn’t do the usual leftist mantra calling J6 an insurrection—it would have been the only one in which the insurrectionists had no weapons.  And yeah, the Dems would never think of trying to imprison their political adversaries. It’s beautiful that Jack Smith will be axed and the political prosecutions and civil suits of Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and Letitia James will end.

I’m sure NPR is doing the same. I listened the night before and they had a story on Trump’s extreme rhetoric, claiming Trump was threatening the execution of Liz Cheney (ridiculous). But never mentioning the Trump=fascist=Hitler attempt from the entire left media and Harris herself to instill fear in the electorate—not to mention the previous assassination attempts were attempts on Trump, not Harris, likely because of the left’s fear-mongering about what would happen in a second Trump presidency and calling Trump Hitler reincarnated. Hard to blame them Democrats for lack of emphasis on policy. They really didn’t have any other issue to run on except Orange Man bad. Harris saying she wouldn’t do anything different from the Biden disaster (featured in Trump ads) certainly didn’t help her cause.

Takeaways: It is to be hoped that blue state secession, perhaps starting with CalExit along with the rest of the West coast, would become a reality. It’s obvious that we can’t live together and the hatred on the left for the rest of America is palpable.  We can’t even talk to each other. Many families have been torn apart, including mine.  Divorce is the only non-violent solution. Red state exit was always problematic as long as the left saw a path to a permanent majority which they were on the verge of achieving. Now it’s out of reach for at least four years. And red states would welcome a blue-state exit. Such a development would lead to an even greater sort  where red states would see an influx of White people and blue states an influx of college-educated elites who have been propagandized to hate their country along with their dependent low-IQ, welfare-dependent clients.

Trump has got to be aware that he must do his best to get rid of the opposition in the deep state—the unelected bureaucrats who are almost all Democrats and who blocked his efforts in his first term. Trump is older and wiser now—he explicitly acknowledged that he didn’t know how things worked when he arrived in 2017. I have great hope that his appointments will be far better than last time (although I wish he would get over his grudge with Jeff Sessions). His first move should be to fire Christopher Wray who, despite being appointed by Trump, turned the FBI into a totally partisan agency thoroughly on the left. And say goodbye to the poisonous policies of Alexandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland, chief architects of the worst aspects of the Biden administration. Freedom for the J6 protesters and sealing up the border would be great starts. And then let the promised mass deportations begin. A lot of self-deportation would happen if welfare for illegals was ended and a retroactive end to birthright citizenship (which has never been meaningfully litigated and would give the conservative SCOTUS majority a great chance to really make a difference).

And it’s over for Anthony Blinken as Secretary of State. This may not mean much in terms of policy because some of the names floated for State (Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo) would likely be just as bad, but I am sure that such appointments would get a lot of pushback from people like Tucker Carlson. And I am confident that Carlson will have a very large influence on Trump appointments. His run-ins with the ADL, his opposition to the Great Replacement, his calling out the ADL’s hypocrisy on immigration, and his rejection of important aspects of World War II mythology on which so much of Western mainstream ideology depends are huge pluses. There’s no question that the Ukraine war is now basically over. Zelenskyy will have to negotiate for a change. And quickly. Russia’s aim (and I think it’s their only aim) of controlling the Donbas will be achieved. It will strengthen Russia’s already strong embrace of traditional social and religious values and do the same in many other countries.

The first truly affirmative action presidency didn’t happen. Hillary was at least qualified, but Harris is a low-IQ woman who pretended to be Black and who slept her way into political power in a thoroughly blue state without any meaningful track record of accomplishment apart from her radical reputation. She is a creation of the liberal-left media who went from having no regard for her to suddenly promoting her as the savior of Western Civilization and all that is good. Maybe they should have stuck with the brain-dead Biden. If the Democrats had swept, there would have been four more years of no southern border; no free speech for people on the right and even possible prison sentences for social media posts, as the left has accomplished in the UK;  they would end the filibuster in the Senate, get rid of the Electoral College, and pack the Supreme Court; X would be confronting huge obstacles from the justice department (as they already are), increased advertiser boycotts, and apoplexy from the ADL; the gender insanity would get much worse, with the federal government mandating men in women’s sports, sex changes for children without parental consent, gender propaganda in schools, etc. The election is a much-deserved rebuke to people like Rachel Levine, the trans activist who advocated all the most extreme gender insanity.

Because the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world, Trump’s election will be a boost to the right in Europe which is already talking loudly about remigration. More than anything else, the West has to renounce the regime of multiculturalism and massive immigration which, if they continue, would completely destroy the people and culture of Europe. It’s no surprise that Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist and anti-immigration PM, was the first head of state to congratulate Trump even before his victory was official. “‘Good morning, Hungary! On the road to a beautiful victory,’ Orbán wrote on social media, captioning an image of himself watching CNN’s election coverage on television.”

And what comes after Trump could be even better. I know a lot of people on our side a cynical about J.D. Vance (and of Trump as well). But this GOP has come a long way from the days of G.W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney et al. and it’s hard to believe that that corrupt, traitorous party can come back. People like Liz Cheney and her war-mongering father might as well join the Democrats. They have no future in the GOP. And the supremely evil neocons like Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, and Max Boot are gone forever. Thank god!

It’s a huge blow to the corrupt legacy media. The New York Times ran between 5-10 articles and op-eds every day hating on everything about Trump, including his family, and I am sure the same was true of MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post,  The LA Times, etc. They have lost their credibility, spending their huge advantage in spreading propaganda on lies about Russia, Russia, Russia, the bullshit impeachments and prosecutions, the bogus J6 committee, the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines, and loving it when Trump was sued successfully by unhappy liberal women. A convicted felon is in the White House! Horrors! No one with any brain believes a thing they say related to politics.

A huge thanks to Elon Musk who campaigned with Trump and donated massively to him (Tesla’s stock is up over 14 percent as I write this, giving him yet more billions). And to Joe Rogan, who interviewed Trump and endorsed him. Both of these guys are former liberals who got woken up because of the extreme policies of the left—in the case of Musk I think it was when is son became his daughter and completely renounced him. Musk and Rogan have huge followings, especially among young men. Young White men likely voted much more for Trump this time around compared to last time. To the extent that they can overcome their college miseducation, they must see the writing on the wall and understand that getting the jobs and promotions they deserve will simply not happen with the left in charge. And when the culture shifts in the direction I expect it to, women will follow. It’s a law of nature: women are much more inclined to stay within the safety and protection of the herd.

But now is not the time for gloating and certainly not for complacency. It’s a time for doing all we can to pressure the Trump administration to do what they said they would do, starting with mass deportation. It won’t be easy. The formidable leftist legal establishment will put up all the roadblocks they can. And we will hear sob stories galore from the illegals—not to mention the liberals. I have to admit that watching what will be pathetic displays of weeping, anger, and sadness to be expected from the left will be heartwarming. As will be Hollywood celebrities threatening to leave the country. Please go!

But the last thing needed now is to think that this is a complete victory. We must be constantly critical of the backsliding that is so natural following a victory like this. We are a very long way from a real victory that would reestablish a White America. But it could happen eventually. This win may be a baby step. But it’s definitely a baby step in the right direction.

The Second World War was the decisive moment of the left’s ascent to power in the West. Historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, whose careers centre upon justifying it, are falsely presented by fellow anti-fascists as conservatives. The raison d’etre of the fake right is to occupy any space in which genuine, committed opponents of the left would otherwise exist and to continually surrender. They conspire in the anti-fascist monopoly; the real right are excluded from all institutions.

Hitler’s violation of the Munich settlement in March 1939 proved his perfidy and his intention to conquer. But why was Britain party to that settlement? The German invasion of Poland triggered the declarations of war by Britain and France. But why were those countries allied with Poland? The two statements are familiar. The two questions I arrived at myself, and since the answers have not been forthcoming from historians, I have sought them, and only thereby begun to understand the causes of the war.

To say that the war began because Germany invaded Austria, Czechoslovakia or Poland leaves begging any explanation of British involvement, as Britain only pledged support to Poland six months before the German invasion and was never allied with Austria, Czechoslovakia or France. The latter two were allied with each other since 1924, and both made pacts with the Soviet Union in the 1930s. France’s alliance with the Czechs (who dominated the Slovaks) made Germany’s demands toward the latter a British issue because British politicians and civil servants informally maintained the Entente with France: the unwritten understanding that the two would act together (with Russia) against Germany. The understanding was formed in 1904; the Great War had occurred, Russia had been superseded by the Soviet Union and Germany had been diminished at Versailles, yet through the succeeding twenty years, albeit with serious differences, Britain maintained a common diplomatic front with France against Germany. French politicians’ hostility to Germany and collaboration with communists was condoned and imitated by the war party in Britain. French politicians, exploiting British sympathy, aggravated relations with Germany and surrounded it with alliances, but refrained from declaring war alone, regarding British commitment as a necessity. Pro-war forces in Britain required six years to discredit, isolate and defeat the moderates and peacemakers; when they did so, Britain declared war and France followed.

A year before, Britain had been the decisive actor at the Munich summit, in which Czechoslovakia was, according to Churchillian history, ‘given away’ to Germany in a vain attempt to avoid war. Why war would otherwise have eventuated and between whom tends to go unspecified. France was unfaithful from the start in its promises to the smaller nations and would have forgone them if Germany’s threats to Czechoslovakia were fulfilled. Britain’s solidarity was precisely what made France and the Czechs affect such boldness as they did. British politicians, including Neville Chamberlain, acted there, and before and after, as though allied with France; for this I have never encountered any explanation. A self-consciously pro-French, anti-German faction fostered by King Edward VII took over the civil service, Parliament and the media in the century’s first decade and brought about the First World War, in which Churchill exulted. As nothing appears to have interrupted the hold of that faction on British policy, I surmise that they and their successors deepened their power through the 1910s and 1920s, became what we now call anti-fascists in the 1930s and have had hegemony in politics and the publishing of history ever since.

There should be detailed accounts written on this continuation of British support for France against Germany in the interwar period, as it was probably the most consequential foreign policy option in modern British history. Instead the most famous historians have, since the war, directed their readers’ attention toward whatever justifies the course taken by Winston Churchill, not only as Prime Minister from May 1940 but in the previous seven years through which, in their portrayal, he was a prescient but unheeded seer of the German threat. Historians who have diverged, like David Irving and Patrick Buchanan, are treated not only as incorrect but as fools or scoundrels to be met either with vehement denunciation or aloof avoidance and disparagement. In the telling of court historians, Hitler’s insane and malevolent actions are always the explanation for the war. Only one party instigated conflict; everyone else involved was merely responding to the ‘Nazi menace’; every other factor cited is Nazi apologism.

National chauvinism could explain using such a selective approach to exonerate Britain and France, but it is also taken by Western historians in favour of the Soviet Union. The Soviets, it is implied, were no threat to anyone (until 1945). The numerous attempts at Marxist overthrows in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, Romania and other states since 1917 are mentioned only in the more detailed studies of the time, yet these were the primary provocation for the burgeoning of fascism and national socialism, which decidedly are included in the victors’ history as causes of the war. The ubiquity of the myth, probably Trotskyist in origin, that Stalin gave up on the idea of world revolution (or conquest) is convenient for his apologists in the West. ‘Socialism in one country’ derives from one letter by Stalin to a newspaper; it is belied by his and others’ more private utterances and the gargantuan military forces he amassed through the 1930s and positioned at the border with Germany in 1940-1, ready to convey socialism to many more countries.

The activities of the Comintern and the Soviet NKVD in penetrating the British civil service and recruiting agents of influence and prestigious non-communist advocates via front groups are the subject of dozens of books, television dramas and movies, yet I know of few historians who make any mention of them in relation to the causing of the war. Those Churchillian historians who mention the most famous Soviet foreign initiative, the Popular Front, condone it at least tacitly. They could hardly do otherwise, as Churchill was effectively part of a greater anti-German alliance of which the Popular Front was a vital international element. Churchill’s phrase from 1941 about being willing to make a favourable reference to the devil if the devil happened to be at war with Germany is proferred to superficial readers to imply that he became pro-Soviet out of necessity in light of Operation Barbarossa, but Churchill began to privately meet Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, a full seven years earlier. He was introduced to Maisky specifically to foster an anti-German rapprochement by Robert Vansittart, who personified the pro-French, anti-German faction preeminent in the civil service.

By another civil servant, Reginald Leeper, and for the same purpose, Churchill was also introduced to the Anti-Nazi Council, which he renamed the Focus in Defence of Peace and Freedom (or simply the Focus). The Anti-Nazi Council was the British arm of an international campaign initiated by Samuel Untermyer to force regime change in Germany, initially by boycott. Untermyer, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Baruch, Henry Strakosch, Eugen Spier and Robert Waley Cohen are the most well-documented of many wealthy Jewish activists who supported and collaborated with Churchill in this effort. As the boycott was found insufficient, threats of war, then war itself, became the methods required; as Britain was as yet governed by men like Chamberlain still inclined to value British interests higher than Jewish ones, regime change was required here too.

The pretext consisted in persistently characterising Germany as a threat to Britain. Churchill’s reputation as the Cassandra who ‘warned us of the danger’ refers to his speeches in Parliament and on the BBC from 1934 claiming that the Germans were developing a larger air force than Britain and implying that they would, when ready, launch it all at Britain, whom against all evidence they were supposed to revile. The juvenile preposterousness of his fear campaign should not distract from the fact that much of the intelligence he (and later the Focus) cited was simply made up by Soviet agents like Jurgen Kucyznski, brother of the handler of the traitor Klaus Fuchs. Germany had no plan to bomb Britain and appears not to have prepared for any such conflict until Churchill’s lies were several years old and beginning to generate the desired antagonism.

The Focus, covert in itself, published and staged events under aliases including ‘Arms and the Covenant’, which referred to its members’ calls for accelerated rearmament (without regard to affordability) and the enforcement of the Covenant of the League of Nations against Germany. When the Soviet Union later violated the Covenant to invade or annex five member states of the League, this approach was abandoned, but Britain was by then at war with Germany. Support of the League had always been a leftist cause and a vehicle for ‘internationalism’, i.e., the supersession of nations, an aim remarkably compatible with the long-term goals of both the Soviets and Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s vision for the United Nations after the war was as a world government with the USA and the USSR as the leading powers. The entry of the latter into the League had been welcomed by leftists, including Tories like Anthony Eden, who became Churchill’s wartime Foreign Secretary and his successor as Prime Minister in 1954.

The Second World War was the decisive moment of the left’s ascent to power in the West. Historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, whose careers centre upon justifying it, are falsely presented by fellow anti-fascists as conservatives. The raison d’etre of the fake right is to occupy any space in which genuine, committed opponents of the left would otherwise exist and to continually surrender. They conspire in the anti-fascist monopoly; the real right are excluded from all institutions.

The Churchillian version of history relies entirely upon portraying Germany as a threat to Britain. No matter how much the wickedness of ‘Kristallnacht’ is magnified in significance, atrocities against civilians in the 1930s cannot suffice as a casus belli against Germany, since the Soviets eradicated more of their own people every few hours throughout the decade than Hitler’s regime killed on those two nights. Aggression toward neighbouring countries also fails as an explanation. Germany invaded the western side of Poland on September 1st 1939; the Soviets invaded their agreed portion sixteen days later. Whatever excuse remained for continuing to treat Germany as the sole enemy thereafter surely evaporated when the Soviets attacked Finland and then subjugated Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Yet by the time Britain ‘betrayed’ the Baltic, at least no less than it betrayed the Czechs, Churchill and the war party were powerful enough to elide the paradox. By Churchillian historians, Hitler’s peace overtures are dispelled by asserting either that they would not have been honoured or that they would have freed German forces to succeed in their invasion of the Soviet Union. The preservation of the communist empire at the expense of Britain’s own is deemed a necessity.

Stalin freeing up Germany’s eastern flank

Stalin and all the Bolsheviks had considered Britain their main adversary since the day of their overthrow of the Russian Republic. Stalin’s collaborations with Hitler, not limited to the pact of August 1939, make more sense in this light. All the capitalist states were to be subverted or conquered. The ideal scenario was one in which they fought and weakened each other while the Soviets grew their own capacity to dictate and threaten, as the Soviets did to the nations of eastern Europe as soon as they felt able. That scenario the pro-war forces in Britain and France delivered as though fulfilling a promise to Moscow. The Soviet perspective is routinely minimised. The same historians then assert that the Soviet Union did become a great danger as World War II ended, in Andrew Roberts’ case neatly crediting Churchill, speaking in Fulton, with prescience about the Cold War as well. Such involutions are undergone to justify the origins of the existing regime, the one established by Churchill and his comrades.