I was stunned by historian Andrew Roberts’s essay in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, titled “Why the Far Right Hates Churchill.” Since I was named after the former UK Prime Minister by my father, a proud WWII veteran, I thought it was important to expose the absurd claims of those who seek to rewrite history, most notably Darryl Cooper, a podcaster.
Claim One—Hitler wanted a limited war when he invaded Poland in 1939. The truth is that Hitler wanted Lebensraum for his people, which included all Eastern Europe and Russia. The UK and France had a treaty with Poland signed after WWI that mandated mutual protection in the event of an invasion.
Claim Two—A poll on X asks who the biggest villain of WWII is. Forty percent replied Churchill, with Stalin at 26 percent and Hitler at 25 percent, Hitler was the aggressor in the war, with twenty million dead in the former Soviet Union. The Nazis murdered six million Jews and five million non-Jews in the Holocaust.
Claim Three—The UK would be better off if it had accepted Hitler’s offer of neutrality in 1940. The UK had just lost half of its army in the battle for France and desperately withdrew the remaining troops from Dunkirk. According to revisionist Cooper, Churchill kept the war going when he had no way of winning, just bombers which is rank terrorism. Maybe Cooper should read about the six-month Battle of Britain when young fighter pilots heroically stood off armadas of German bombers seeking to destroy factories, cities and the British will to resist.
Claim Four—The UK would be in a better state if it had looked after its own people instead of adopting weird notions of international morality. This isolationism is a better policy than Churchill’s leadership of the Western alliance, according to Ian Gribbin, a candidate for Parliament from the far-right Reform party in the UK. Does he endorse the views of Oswald Mosley, the infamous British Fascist, who provoked the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 when his group of rowdies provoked trade unionists in the East End of London?
Maybe all the revisionists should read a new book by German literary critic and author Uwe Wittstock, Marseille 1940. It is the story of Varian Fry, a thirty-year-old sent to Vichy France to attempt the rescue of 500 notable artists and writers from the Nazi onslaught. He runs the Emergency Rescue Committee office that succeeds against all odds (bureaucracy, anti-Semitism, Nazi encroachment) in evacuating important figures such as Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Wifredo Lam.
The loudest voices making the most outrageous claims must be confronted with facts and compelling stories that give the young generation a chance to learn why Winston Churchill was a hero, not just for his country but for the civilized world. As Churchill declared in the depths of Britain’s despair: “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall never surrender.” That spirit must guide us now; we must never surrender in the face of lies and disinformation.
Richard Edelman is CEO.
