President Trump — like Churchill, the indispensable man

The upcoming Winston Churchill biopic reminds us that a nation’s elite tend to have nothing but disdain for an indispensable man — a man such as Trump.

I tend to be leery of biopics because I hate having my history filtered through Hollywood. It always grates on me when I hear a parent explain to a child that this or that movie “is history.” No, it’s not. History is history. All books and movies are merely interpretations and retellings of that history, with some retellings being a whole lot better than others.

Hollywood has always taken liberties with its biopics. There’s the happily married, completely heterosexual Cole Porter in Night and Day (Porter’s homosexuality got better treatment in the otherwise awful De-Lovely);  the cutely Irish, completely heterosexual, almost impressively non-Jewish Lorenz Hart in Words and Music (Hart was a brilliant, anguished Jewish homosexual); the charmingly goyish Jerome Kern in Till the Clouds Roll By (Kern was another Jewish kid from New York); and on and on, in an endless parade of movies both old and new in which history takes a backseat to marketability and prejudice.

I tend to know old musicals, but if you’re really interested in the liberties Hollywood takes, I recommend History v. Hollywood, a website that tackles the challenge of separating historic fact from Hollywood fiction. (The Desmond Doss/Hacksaw Ridge post is especially compelling.) Some of the changes make sense, such as time compression or composite characters. After all, a two-hour movie can only touch the high points of a real person’s life or a history event. Other changes, though . . .  well, I have a three-letter word for you: JFK.

Knowing Hollywood’s general tendency to bastardize stories, and its modern tendency to go hard-Left in its rewrites, explains  why I’m not 100% enthused about the upcoming film Darkest Hour, which is the newest Churchill biopic, due out at Thanksgiving. Gawd alone knows what the movie will do to Churchill’s amazing ascendency in the early months of World War II. Still, the first trailer hints at a movie in which the historic license might be reasonable and the historic facts might be true:

What I find fascinating about the trailer is that it seems to focus so tightly on the elite’s contempt for Churchill. After all, technically speaking, he was one of them — he came from wealth and the uppermost of upper castes in an aristocratic society — yet in practical terms he was not of them at all. He fundamentally offended their values, values that, in the years following WWI, leaned to pure pacifism and a naïve faith in the power of words and sophistication to face down predators.

Is it just me or does that remind you of what’s going on now with Donald Trump? Technically, he should be seen as one of the elite. He came from a monied background that, while not making him a member of America’s self-styled blue bloods, was certainly enough to make him a natural candidate for America’s elite.

But instead of constantly congratulating himself on his sophistication and elegance, Trump instead turned into a scrapper. His wealth wasn’t based on paper exchanges through banking deals or tinkering about with electronics; it was made in the hard-charging world of New York property development.

Moreover, once had made his billions, Trump didn’t endow universities that already have more money than God or subsidize symphonies that can’t make in the free market. Instead, he spent his money on parties, beauty contests, and gilt-furnished penthouses in shockingly excessive buildings.

Trump is a class traitor. No wonder the upper echelons of the American Left, the ones who call the shots with help of all the useful idiots they’ve engineered in America’s colleges and universities, despise him as they do.

And no wonder the upper echelons of the American conservative movement, people who believe themselves to be a better, more principled group of people than both the Left and the angry American working classes, despise Trump. Not only are his hands dirty from work and politics, he also has no scruples about waving those dirty hands about as a badge of honor. The NeverTrumpers would much prefer that he hide their dirt decently away as the better class of conservatives — from Papa Bush to Dubya to Romney, and even to John McCain (to whom I wish a successful treatment and a speedy recovery) — always tried to do.

I wonder, though, if there’s going to prove to be a deeper linkage between Churchill and Trump than just the quality of their enemies and the crudity of their habits. (Churchill was a rude old drunk, although he had a wit and intellect that Trump does not share.) Both are, I think, “indispensable men.”

An indispensable man, as I define, it is a person with quite obvious character flaws, flaws that often offend most a society’s elites, who nevertheless appears at the right time to save his nation from disaster. The “indispensable man” title is a no-brainer when it comes to Churchill.

Can you imagine Neville “Peace In Our Time” Chamberlain providing the morale leadership (and no, I didn’t misspell “moral”) that Churchill provided to the British people? Through the long days of the Blitz, which killed more than 30,000 British people, Churchill never gave up and he never stopped giving the British people the rationale necessary for them to keep slogging away when they were the only nation standing against the Nazis.

It’s worth adding here something that many Americans, which is that, within months of starting the war, the Germans controlled most of Western and Northern Europe:

If Hitler had been content to maintain the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviets and had backed off his fight with the British, he might well have maintained his victories into the indefinite future. The whole of Europe would have been purged of Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the homosexual or gender fluid, and the politically inconvenient. The Poles and other Slavs (who gave their name to the word “slavery”) would have provided an endless supply of slave labor to keep the whole enterprise afloat. The Nazi socialist experiment would eventually have collapsed of its own weight, but it took 70 years for the Soviets to collapse (and they too declared war on Jews, gypsies, the mentally ill, non-Russian slavs, etc.) and there’s no reason the Nazis couldn’t have lasted at least that long.

Likewise, if Chamberlain had continued in power, or if a Chamberlain wannabe had filled his shoes, there’s every reason to believe that England would have entered into a negotiated surrender with the Nazis. In that case, England probably would have functioned as Sweden and Switzerland did — ostensibly neutral but otherwise perfectly happy to make nice with the German money men.

It was Churchill who made the difference. Churchill who provided backbone. Churchill who got the U.S. to engage in the lend-lease program that supplied the British with weapons and other essential materials before the U.S. officially entered the war. And of course, it was Churchill who fully understood that all he and his fellow Brits had to do was hold on until the Americans entered the war.

In America, in the 21st century, I think it is Trump who will make the difference. Trump has abandoned his class to declare that we cannot make nice with Islamists or a mass influx of ordinary Muslims, because neither is congenitally capable of making nice with us.

And again, let me explain here why Trump is right and the Leftist elites at home and abroad are completely wrong when they refuse to recognize that, while a few Muslims can immigrate and sort of assimilate well enough not to be a problem, the moment you have a critical mass of Muslims, medieval things happen. A few bees buzzing around fertilize flowers and make honey, virtues that allows us to avoid the risk of stings; a swarm of bees kills.

To understand Muslims swarms, let me quote Peter Hammond’s summation. As you read it, note that this summary, which was first published in 2008, predating by several years both the Arab Spring and the influx of Muslims into Europe, predicts precisely what happened to those countries that expanded their Muslim populations or allowed their Muslim extremists to hold power:

As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will be for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens. This is the case in:

United States — Muslim 0..6%
Australia — Muslim 1.5%
Canada — Muslim 1.9%
China — Muslim 1.8%
Italy — Muslim 1.5%
Norway — Muslim 1.8%

At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs. This is happening in:

Denmark — Muslim 2%
Germany — Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom — Muslim 2.7%
Spain — Muslim 4%
Thailand — Muslim 4.6%

From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature halal on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:

France — Muslim 8%
Philippines — 5%
Sweden — Muslim 5%
Switzerland — Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands — Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad & Tobago — Muslim 5.8%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris , we are already seeing car-burnings. In Russia, grade-schools were attacked. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam and results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam, with opposition to Mohammed cartoons and films about Islam. Such tensions are seen daily, particularly in Muslim sections, in:

Guyana — Muslim 10%
India — Muslim 13.4%
Israel — Muslim 16%
Kenya — Muslim 10%
Russia — Muslim 15%

After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, such as in:

Ethiopia — Muslim 32.8%

At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare, such as in:

Bosnia — Muslim 40%
Chad — Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon — Muslim 59.7%

From 60%, nations experience unfettered persecution of non-believers of all other religions (including non-conforming Muslims), sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon, and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels, such as in:

Albania — Muslim 70%
Malaysia — Muslim 60.4%
Qatar — Muslim 77.5%
Sudan — Muslim 70%

After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some State-run ethnic cleansing, beheadings, stoning, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out the infidels, and move toward 100% Muslim, such as has been experienced and in some ways is on-going in:

Bangladesh — Muslim 83%
Egypt — Muslim 90%
Gaza — Muslim 98.7%
Indonesia — Muslim 86.1%
Iran — Muslim 98%
Iraq — Muslim 97%
Jordan — Muslim 92%
Morocco — Muslim 98.7%
Pakistan — Muslim 97%
Palestine — Muslim 99%
Syria — Muslim 90%
Tajikistan — Muslim 90%
Turkey — Muslim 99.8%
United Arab Emirates — Muslim 96%

Trump speaks of massed Muslims as Churchill spoke of the Nazis — he recognizes them as a danger to Western, enlightenment civilization. And just as the British elites hated Churchill in the 1930s, the American and Euro-elites hate Trump today.

And if you need a tighter analogy between the British elites of the 1930s and the American and Euro elites today, here it is: Many of the British elite were pro-Nazi. Not only were the completely on board with the eugenics part, as was the case with George Bernard Shaw, but they also liked that the German National Socialists believed in keeping the rich rich, the elite elite, and the poor opiated with government handouts. Moreover, it pleased them that the Germans were violently opposed to Soviet communists, who stripped the wealthy and titled of their elite standing. The British elite could readily get behind that program.

In the same way here, the elite are wholeheartedly behind the Islamification of Europe. Europeans have willingly surrendered their women to the Muslim’s sharia principles and punishments, and certainly won’t protect the gays when their turn comes too. America’s elites are breathlessly following along behind.

Unlike his peers, Churchill understood that freedom is the most important value. Freedom from government death squads, freedom from government control over the marketplace, freedom from government eugenics. He saw clearly that the ills individual men can visit upon each other would never equal the damage a tyrannical government can visit upon all of its citizens.

Trump, although he lacks Churchill’s erudition, arrived at the same conclusion — call him a “freedom savant” if you will. He gets it. He gets that regulations are killing the economy; he gets that free market theory is great, but that a nation that is so committed to it that it willingly destroys its own economy is no nation; he gets that you cannot bow down before dictators, although I suspect he’s willing to dance a few rounds with Putin to see what he can get out of him without impairing America’s interests; and he gets that importing tens of thousands of people whose principles are antithetical to freedom can spell America’s death.

Anyway, I’m wandering a bit now and can only hope that I’ve made my point. In the meantime, I’d like to suggest a few posts:

Evan Sayet’s He Fights.

Daniel Greenfield’s NeverTrump nostalgia for a Hillary that never was.

Kurt Schlichter’s We Must Elect Senator Kid Rock