How Should We Use History?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns history and the correct use of it. History is to be learned from, not relived. Individuals are using lots of analogies to World War II recently, and they are sounding more ridiculous as time passes.

According to Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal, western media and political elites try to use history – particularly World War II – to analysis current events. 

Every single political event and leader is, like a broken record, compared to some bad Marvel comic version of its World War II self. Trump is Hitler. Trump is Neville Chamberlain. Russian President Vladimir Putin is Hitler. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Winston Churchill. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is Winston Churchill and the leader of the free world.

Stop!

For a time when millennials were coming of political age, the Harry Potter comparisons were repeated ad nauseum. The eventual response to Harry Potter analogies eventually just became, “read another book” and eventually the comparisons died down.

And that’s what I’m saying now. Pick another event in history besides World War II, please.

It isn’t always Munich in 1938. Not every politician you don’t like is Hitler. Not every aggressive foreign power is the Third Reich. And not every attempt at peace is Neville Chamberlain-like “appeasement.”

And if you are going to go with a World War II history analogy, at least get the facts straight.

I’d like to make this point about Churchill based on actual history because there has been quite a bit of digital ink spilled in claiming that Zelenskyy is like Churchill and that criticizing him is like the U.S. suddenly stabbing Churchill in the back while he was fighting Nazis.

Frankly, Zelenskyy’s public eruption with Trump was very un-Churchill-like. Churchill was a wise and clever statesman who knew exactly the position that the U.K. was in during the war. He knew that, as he said t the Tehran Conference in 1943 with FDR and Josef Stalin, between the American buffalo on one side and the Russian bear on the other, England was no more than a sad little donkey.

So he flattered and gently cajoled FDR and Stalin both publicly and privately….

I keep seeing this sentiment on social media that the United States should give Ukraine whatever it wants and take nothing in return as reward for their heroism against the Russians. Somehow this is supposed to be comparable to our relationship with Churchill in World War II, which was one of perpetual self-sacrifice.

Wrong.

Certainly, we often fought and died together. But the United States didn’t help the U.K. simply out of charity and kindness. It was a natural alliance of need and common interest, but we also took the Brits for all they had.

The loans the U.S. extended to them – the war material we gave them – came at a great cost. The U.K. only finally paid back the loans from the U.S. in 2006, and it had to do so with interest.

Rightly or wrongly, American leaders were ruthless with an ally of far more consequence and power than modern Ukraine….

We didn’t go running to fight World War II, we were pushed into a deeply unpopular war by world events….

So please give the shallow history lesson a rest for a bit and let the president meet with Putin jaw-to-jaw before we rush to war.