Recently, I bought a copy of October/November issue of Military History magazine, which featured a cover story on Alexander the Great, who readers of this blog know has been a lifelong passion of mine, along with the ancient Greeks.
I was soon disappointed. His conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. was written off as pure narcissism. There was no mention of possible motives (the backdrop of the Greco-Persian wars; his father Philip II of Macedon’s dream of conquering Persia; his mother Olympias instilling in him a divine sense of purpose; his tutor Aristotle schooling him in the Homeric idea of arete, or excellence, which often saw its fulfillment in military glory; and finally his own inexplicable pothos, or longing, for the next horizon.)
There was no discussion of Alexander, having conquered Persia, instituting self-rule in the disparate regions of his far-flung empire. The notion that he killed all the men and enslaved the women and children is laughable. Who was going to run things and do the work? He wasn’t importing Greeks and Macedonians to do this.
Finally, there was no sense of his legacy, which includes the dissemination of Hellenistic culture, including Greek, the lingua franca of the empire. Centuries later, Greek translations of the Gospels would enable the spread of Christianity. In a sense, Alexander — who came from a world that knew how to spin stories and identities in words and images — made Jesus’ story more readily available. (Plus how could Alexander have no legacy? More than 2,000 years later there he was on a magazine cover.)
I thought about all this as I read The New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker’s review of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s “Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill.” To sum it up: He’s not a fan. Wheatcroft — and many of those who posted on the review — see Churchill as a colonial racist and military disaster who, among other things allowed three million people to starve in Bengal in 1940. Of course, that was the year, England held out against the Nazis as President Franklin D. Roosevelt tiptoed isolationist America toward the inevitable war. Without Churchill holding off the Nazis virtually alone there would be no Stalingrad in 1942-43, when the Russians magnificently outlasted the Germans in a sixth-month siege that is generally considered to be the turning point in World War II’s European theater. Without Churchill, there might be no Western civilization as we know it today.
I’m not going to defend a callous indifference to the starvation of people or a colonial racism steeped in the Rudyard Kiplingesque view of people of color as “the white man’s burden.” What I am going to say is that people are complex creatures. What can make them saviors in one sense — in Churchill’s case a bulldoze personality combined with a gift for the mother tongue that was heroic, epic, in the face of the Nazi machine — is precisely what can make them heartless killers in another. Like former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on 9/11 or former New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo at the height of the pandemic, Churchill was “born for the storm.” Such people rarely win the peace.
Above all else, Churchill wanted to save England so he could save the British Empire. The irony was that the price of America’s involvement in the war would be the sacrifice of that empire since President Franklin D. Roosevelt had no interest in the preservation of British colonialism. To save its pieces, including India, Churchill would have to give up the whole.
It’s a tremendous story, but it’s not one you’re going to get from reading history backward and applying our values to other peoples and times. There’s no question that in the past, we tended to lionize white male leaders although there is no such thing as a leader — of any gender in any time and culture — who did not have a terrifying ability to decide whose sunrise it was and whose sunset. But we do ourselves no favors by swinging the pendulum to the other extreme and canceling them out. Worse, we play into the conservative stereotype of non-conservatives as “woke” airheads.
Like Alexander, Churchill changed the course of history. You may not like it. But you can’t deny it.