The Voodoo Right And The Woke Left Holding Hands In Front Of The Statue of Churchill. Why?

They Are Determined To De-Legitimate Our Understanding Of The Greatest Catastrophe Of The Twentieth Century

Voodoo Right

As most Roots & Wings readers will know, I regularly post essays that challenge the woke project of queering or decolonising our history. In this post, I would like to discuss a different but equally disturbing phenomenon, which is the attempt by the Voodoo Right to discredit Winston Churchill and our understanding of what the catastrophe of World War Two represented.

For the record, the Voodoo Right consists sections of the right who cannot reconcile themselves to their cultural marginalisation and instead of attempting to understand their predicament they are drawn towards simplistic quasi-mystical magical ideas. They interpret events in the world through conspiratorial explanations. They are classical reactionaries in the sense that they simply react and unthinkingly adopt attitudes and positions that are antithetical to their opponents. So, their response to the feminisation of western culture is to express views that are more than borderline misogynist. Their reaction to the woke left’s obsession with White Privilege and White Supremacy is to embrace their whiteness and flaunt a racialised distorted form of white identity. They match the woke left in their intolerance and dislike of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

By now, many readers have become habituated to the insane ravings of the decolonising racialist left about Churchill. They describe him as a war criminal and frequently assert that the British Empire was worse than Nazi Germany.

Sections of the Voodoo Right go a step further than their decolonising cousins, and they claim that the main villain of World War II was not Hitler but Churchill. This representation of Churchill as the moral inferior of Hitler was on full display on a recent Tucker Carlson show when his guest, the voodoo right-wing pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper, made this slanderous accusation against Churchill. Apparently, Carlson is in full sympathy with Cooper’s views. He introduced Cooper as ‘the most important popular historian working in the United States today’.

Cooper’s hatred directed at Churchill runs in parallel with his aspiration to discredit the view that Nazi Germany was responsible for World War II and the Holocaust. According to Cooper, Churchill was kept in power by powerful Zionist interests. Old-fashioned conspiratorial antisemitism is integral to the antediluvian outlook of the Voodoo Right. That is why Cooper can so causally dismiss the death camps as an accidental outcome of the fact that the Nazis did not have the resources to care for their Jewish inmates.

The Voodoo Right’s attack on Churchill is intermeshed with old-school Holocaust denial.

Inevitably, Cooper’s exchange with Carlson provoked a strong reaction from sections of the media, who were rightly outraged by this attempt to rehabilitate the actions of Nazi Germany.[i] However, it is important to realise that the sentiments he expressed resonate with a wider layer of intellectually illiterate, conspiratorial-minded voodoo rightists. For example, the cranky right-wing influencer Candace Owens has gone on record claiming that hatred of Nazis is a form of indoctrination. She questioned the veracity of Dr Mengele’s medical experiment on Jewish concentration camp inmates on the ground that it would have been ‘be a tremendous waste of time and supplies'.[ii]

There is a remarkable convergence in attitude between the woke left and the voodoo right. Both wings attempt to revise the meaning of the Holocaust. The Voodoo Right blames Jews and Zionists for the Holocaust, while the pro-Hamas woke left seeks to dispossess this catastrophe of its unique meaning. The Western fans of Hamas go so far as to blame Israel for causing a Holocaust in Gaza. According to this scenario, Jews are not the victims but the perpetrators of a Holocaust.

Situating The Voodoo Right In An Historical Context

In one sense, the Voodoo Right’s politics can be interpreted as the mirror image of the woke left. Some self-identified right-wing people have reacted to the provocations of woke identity politics by embracing an extreme version of far-right politics. In effect, they have embraced the woke elite’s caricature of what someone from the right looks like.

It is also the case that old conspiracy theories are making a comeback. Thanks to the depoliticisation of public life and a general mood of disorientation, a simplistic representation of the world has captured the imagination of sections of society. One symptom of a loss of meaning is the growing influence of conspiratorial thinking. It is in this context that old Zionist conspiracy theories about World War II should be situated.

But to understand the Voodoo Right, exploring its origins in the post-World War II era is essential. The origins of the Voodoo Right can be located within the crisis afflicting conservatism during the 1940s and 1950s. The authority of conservatism was significantly undermined by the experience of fascism and the catastrophe inflicted on the world by Nazi Germany. These events undermined the legitimacy of conservatism, and right-wing political movements were forced to adopt a defensive posture.

A Historical Setback for the Right

The most significant ideological casualty of World War Two were the ideas associated with the right and, in particular, with fascism. It is well known that fascism was militarily defeated. But it was also all but annihilated as an idea. Moreover, Nazism succeeded in discrediting the political and moral credibility of all explicitly right-wing movements. Ideas about race, colonialism, Western superiority, the nation and the authority of tradition were significantly compromised by their direct or indirect association with fascism. As Paul Piccone, the maverick American social theorist, indicated, the ‘World War II defeat of fascism and Nazism led to the criminalisation not only of both of these ideologies but of the “Right” in general’.^[iii]

The war had discredited nationalist attachments to the past and tradition and dealt a blow to the ideal of national destiny. These values were closely identified with the Hitler regime as well as its allies in Italy and Japan. The association of reactionary values with fascism and with a catastrophic war forced explicit right-wing ideas to the margins of intellectual life.

The Second World War was far more ideological than previous global conflicts. The Nazi and fascist nations explicitly relied on the ideological appeal of nation, race and culture to mobilise their populations. Their propaganda often assumed the character of a cultural crusade against the values of the Enlightenment, liberalism and modernism. In turn, anti-fascism emerged as a powerful counter-ideology that motivated the civilian population and armies of the Allied nations. As the barbaric consequences of the behaviour of the Axis powers became exposed, anti-fascist sentiment gained greater and greater force. The influence and appeal of anti-fascism directly benefited the Soviet Union and the communist movement. As democracy’s ally against the fascist powers, the image of the Soviet Union was rehabilitated in the West – at least for the duration of the war. The imperative of defeating fascism bound together otherwise hostile political forces.

The reputation of the Soviet Union was greatly enhanced by its military success against Nazi Germany. Its ability to more than match Germany's military power, as well as its considerable sacrifices for the war effort, boosted its image. For a brief period, the Soviet Union succeeded in enjoying acclaim in the West as a model progressive society. After the war, the utopian  myth of the Russian Revolution once again gained traction. It appeared that the left ‘had been right about Russia after all’.^[iv] The French historian Francois Furet goes so far as to say that the Second World War was ‘even more of a political victory for the Communist idea than for the democratic idea’.^[v] His argument is based on the claim that the ‘end of the war marked the victory of anti-fascism rather than of democracy’.^[vi]

Furet is right to emphasise the significance of anti-fascism as a key motivational influence on the conduct of millions of people struggling for what they perceived as their freedom. And his argument that anti-fascism also boosted the appeal of communism is also persuasive. The Second World War exposed the horrible price exacted by the loss of freedom. The experience utterly discredited explicit anti-democratic and authoritarian philosophies. As a consequence of the war, democracy was morally rehabilitated. Even those right-wing politicians who retained their suspicion of democracy felt uneasy about openly questioning the status of this creed.

In the 1940s the political right faced isolation. Fascist regimes were identified with an authoritarian political style, which, in the public mind, they also shared with right-wing and conservative governments. In the post-Second World War climate, gaining public support for explicitly right-wing political projects was difficult. In Europe, the ruling Christian Democratic or Social Democratic governments attempted to distance themselves from the right and projected themselves as parties of the centre. Indeed, the newly founded Christian Democratic parties explicitly tried to provide a centrist alternative while hoping to retain the allegiance of the constituency of the old right.

One of the most important manifestations of the discrediting of the right was its marginalisation in intellectual and cultural life. In a frequently cited statement, the American literary critic Lionel Trilling declared in his 1949 Preface to his collection of essays that right-wing ideas no longer possessed cultural significance:

‘In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas’.^[vii]

While Trilling’s statement contains more than an element of exaggeration, there is little doubt that the experience of the interwar years and the Second World War marginalised the influence of right-wing and conservative intellectual traditions in Western culture.

The widely shared conviction that the political right bore a singular responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War led to its virtual disappearance as a force in intellectual and cultural life. As the American social scientist Daniel Bell recalled:

‘Since World War II had the character of a “just War” against fascism, right-wing ideologies, and the intellectual and cultural figures associated with those causes, were inevitably discredited. After the preponderant reactionary influence in prewar European culture, no single right-wing figure retained any political creditability or influence’.^[viii]

The right never recovered its intellectual authority. Today, in the early twenty-first century, it is difficult to appreciate that right-wing thinkers and intellectuals still exercised a powerful influence over cultural life not so long ago – in the first half of the last century.

The dramatic marginalisation of the right was inextricably linked to the thoroughgoing demise of fascism. There is no precedent in modern times for annihilating a political movement and ideology that had previously inspired and moved millions of people. Furet claimed that ‘since the Crusades, history offers few examples of a political idea defended by armed combat that was subject to such radical interdiction as was the Fascist idea’.^[ix] The powerful reaction against fascism also fostered a climate of opinion that was intensely suspicious of the entire political right. This stigmatisation of right-wing political views prevails to this day. Many conservatives are reluctant to describe themselves as ‘right-wing’ because of the negative connotations they convey.

To this day, references to the nation-state and nationalism are inescapably influenced by their reaction to the negative experience of the Second World War. Post-nationalist commentators interpret this global catastrophe as an experience that finally and irrevocably morally negates the legitimacy of the sense of nationhood and identities forged around national cultures. Such views gained widespread influence in Western Europe, but particularly in Germany, where the burden of guilt imposed on the public psyche has discouraged the cultivation of national identity. Despite the traditional association of conservatism with national culture, many prominent Christian Democrats became wary of nationalism.

Instead of developing a positive argument supporting the sense of nationhood, German Christian Democrats and their colleagues in Western Europe chose to fall in line with the anti- nationalist narrative that was in ascendancy throughout the western world. Their loss of confidence in their own tradition was expressed through a mood of frustration and impotence.

Understandably, many members of right-wing movements reacted to the setback suffered by their political tradition with anger and rage. Instead of devoting themselves to the challenge of rehabilitating conservatism and developing an intellectual tradition that could support the ideals of national sovereignty, national consciousness and the celebration of national tradition, they tried to find ways of minimising the destructive role of fascism and Nazi Germany in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the United States, Pat Buchanan advanced a narrative by trying to blame Britain for the two world wars. His book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (2008), claims that Churchill was responsible for influencing Britain to engage in an unnecessary war against Germany in 1914 and 1939. Buchanan’s objective was to undermine the dominant role exercised by what he called the ‘Churchill Cult’.

Buchanan’s attack on Churchill was relatively restrained in comparison with the campaign of vilification targeting Britain’s wartime Prime Minister by the contemporary Voodoo Right. However, in both cases, the objective of undermining Churchill’s reputation is motivated by the impulse of sanitising the role of fascism and the far right for the horrors of World War Two.

The targeting of Churchill is inspired by the belief that if his authority can be tarnished, then so can the representation of World War Two as a war where the good defeated the evil. The Voodoo Right believes that by calling into question the war aims of the allies, they can rehabilitate the reputation of the right and the far right. Like their woke cousins who are in the business of queering history, they seem to believe that rewriting the past is preferable to honestly confront the challenge facing the right in the 21^st century.

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[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/opinion/tucker-carlson-holocaust-denial.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/09/churchill-real-villain-second-world-war/

[ii] https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-07-10/ty-article/.premium/far-right-pundit-candace-owens-downplays-holocaust-says-nazi-hatred-is-indoctrination/00000190-9db9-ddf1-abb6-fdf906d90000

[iii]  Piccone, P. (1999)  ‘Twetieth Century Politics’, Telos, Fall, no.117, p.7.

[iv] Hopkins, H. (1963) New Look:A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain, Secker & Warburg : London,  p.25.

[v] Furet, F (1999)  The Passing Of An Illusion: The Idea of Communism In The Twentieth Century, The University of Chicago Press : Chicago, p.356.

[vi] Furet (1999) p.356.

[vii] Trilling, L. (1964) p.ix. The Liberal Imagination: Essays On Literature And Society, Mercury Books : London.

[viii]       Bell, D. (1980) Sociological Journeys, Heinemann: London, p.149

[ix]  Furet (1999) p.368.