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Douglas Murray spent the first, like...hour of the podcast talking about how Darryl Cooper, the noted Winston Churchill historian, had spent his career tearing down Churchill and "just asking questions" about why Darryl is devoting so much of his time to focusing on Churchill.
Except in reality: Approximately a year ago, Cooper spent about 2 minutes making a throwaway comment about how he takes a devil's advocate position about Churchill with his friend, a big Churchill fan, as a way of riling him up and playing around with him. Douglass couldn't do 10 minutes of actual research into this topic before then spending an hour talking about how only experts, people who really understand the topic, should be allowed to talk about things publicly. Darryl Cooper in reality is a podcaster who puts out 30+ hour long series about things like: The Formation of Israel, The Civil Rights Movement/The People's Temple/Jim Jones, World War 2 from the perspective of the Germans[1], The History of Slavery, and The horror of war (a standalone episode called "The anti-humans".
[1]: His whole point with this, stated explicitly, is that Germany didn't just wake up one day and decide to be the Nazis, one of the most evil institutions to ever exist, and then at the end of the war just decide to stop being the Nazis. It was a long process of humans making (bad) human decisions. The implicit point here, and with almost all of his work, is that good people can be talked into doing really bad things, and to be cautious around "movements" (like The Peoples' Temple, or a lot of the civil rights groups) because they can slowly-then-suddenly turn into a nightmare.
Douglass showed his cards, and it turns out that he's an idiot with a nice voice. The Strange Death of Europe was a good book, but it turns out the person behind it is probably a fool.
The problem for Douglas with the DR is that he spent years doing talks and debates against mass immigration and anti-western thought where he based his whole rhetoric around the fact that, ultimately, 'we killed Hitler'.
When the foundation for that is questioned and the roles of good and bad are muddled or ignored, Doug has to respond.
It's a hallmark of what I would call, in the spirit of our new term; the faux Right. Every pontification towards what is good for Europeans has to be grounded in some form of bargain of what is 'fair'. And what determines fairness is generally just progressive morality from 10-20 years ago.
I think this is a relatively substantial mischaracterization of Murray, who has mostly called himself a classical liberal, except when he decided to embark on the contrarian project of rehabilitating the by-then-already-discredited term ‘neoconservative’ in the late 2000s and early 2010s (largely since abandoned).
He’s a gay cosmopolitan man who essentially wants the cosmopolitan liberal society of the early 2000s to continue forever. He’s pretty open about that, and it is the main reason he is opposed to mass immigration from the Islamic world.
I'm not seeing the mischaracterization. He can call himself a classical liberal neoconservative and suck as many dicks as he wants, he is still haggling against progressive morality.
Why else would a gay cosmopolitan man care so much about the legacy of Winston Churchill? It's because it's a part of his foundation for why the west deserves to survive. A moral narrative of redemption. He doesn't leverage how many amazing gay bars there used to be in London.
It’s because Murray is British and thinks British culture and history are the best in the world, and Churchill is by far the most beloved British political / cultural figure in history, topping almost every single poll of the greatest British people of all time. Ideology is entirely secondary, although in general Murray, as a fan of the British Empire - of which he considered neoconservatism / liberal imperialism a successor - likes Churchill’s imperialism. Churchill’s actual opinions are irrelevant on both sides (see, for example, Cooper’s insistence that Churchill’s primary motivation in prosecuting WW2 was some debts he allegedly owed to Jewish moneylenders).
Still not seeing the mischaracterization. Why would Churchill, the man whose decision making process ultimately nailed the final nail in the coffin of the British empire, be venerated by the likes of Murray? It's because Churchill opposed Hitler.
Ideology, for the likes of Murray, is central. That is why he spent 30 minutes waffling about good and evil on Joe Rogan when the topic of Darryl Cooper came up.
Not really. Murray’s ideology is the status quo as of the late 2000s / early 2010s. As polling suggests, in the UK among his generation that includes the extremely mainstream and almost universally accepted viewpoint (outside of the radical left and Indians) that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest Britons of all time because he ‘won’ the last major war that the country was involved in - and really there is no deeper complexity to that perception.
Murray’s ideology makes him a small-c conservative in some ways (he basically wants Britain as it existed in like 2007 to exist forever and for it to be filled with people who accept the major tenets of liberalism forever) and a classical liberal imperialist in others. The latter (liberal imperialism) isn’t an oxymoron, by the way, it has a long tradition in British politics going back at least 180 years.
It’s hard to hate Murray because, like Harris, he’s actually pretty open about what he believes and he openly acknowledges that this is mainly based on his perception of his own self-interest. He’s a gay man who wants to export liberal western culture, by force, onto the whole world and prevent mass immigration of people who hate him. You can disagree with him, but he is ideologically consistent.
The veneration of Churchill does not sprout from just winning 'a war' but what war, against who and for what cause. As I stated before, it makes little sense for a fan of British imperialism to idolize the man who functionally ended the empire with his decision making.
We can also see by Murrays own words and actions that he is haggling against progressive morality as he presents his own interests in terms of his sexuality.
To that end nothing I say is a mischaracterization, only a realistic clarification of where Murray is coming from and why.
No, not really. The British popular narrative of WW2 does not and has never centered the Holocaust. It's almost all about Dunkirk, the Blitz, and D-Day. Hitler is a villain, sure, but the real villains were 'the Germans', who 'we' beat twice in both world wars, many of which are often conflated by less intelligent people anyway. His veneration has a number of causes, mainly that he was an idosyncratic and peculiar figure who was immediately identifiable even at that time, and because he was in charge when the country came the closest it came to being fully conquered by military invasion in 400 or perhaps 900 (depending on how you see it) years.
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