We care about Adolf Hitler’s penis, as a society. Quite a lot, it seems. A British documentary claims, finally, to have solved the mystery of the Nazi leader’s schwanz – was it big or was it small? – and to have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the famous chant of “Hitler’s only got one ball,” a favorite among British soldiers, wasn’t just an idle insult.
The key evidence is genetic: a blood-stained piece of fabric from the Hitler bunker. The documentary filmmakers tested it against a sample from one of Hitler’s closest living relatives to make sure the blood was his. And it was. That meant his genome could be sequenced and then analyzed for genetic clues about his personality, health and, of course, his manhood.
A similar venture in 2014 failed when the disgraced historian David Irving sold filmmakers a strand of the Führer’s hair – only for it to turn out to be someone else’s. The documentary puts to bed some persistent myths about Hitler, not least of all the secret Jewish ancestry thing. Hitler was not secretly Jewish. But what about his penis? A missing nucleotide base suggests Hitler had Kallmann Syndrome, a condition that affects the onset and course of puberty and can lead to various forms of genital malformation, as well as lifelong low testosterone. Around10 percent of sufferers will have a micro-penis: a very small penis, typically less than 2.7 inches in length when erect. But none of this proves anything. It doesn’t prove Hitler had a micropenis or any other kind of physical anomaly, not even low testosterone. It just makes these things more probable.
As we might expect, the documentary relies more on innuendo and supposition than hard fact. There is, at least, a medical report from the early 1920s that says Hitler had an undescended right testicle. Otherwise that’s it. The report was only discovered in 2010, so it can’t have been the basis of the famous chant. The film asks why Hitler would have asked to be cremated. Was he trying to hide something? The answer, actually, is that he made the request late in the war, after he saw the mess Italian partisans made of his old friend Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci. He didn’t want to suffer the same fate. But surely something must have been really bugging Hitler to make him so power-mad? Surely he must have been compensating for something to want to invade Czechoslovakia and then Poland, and then France and then Norway and then, fatefully, the Soviet Union? No normal man with a normal penis would want to do that.
Here we reach the crux of the matter. I’m not about to launch a defense of Hitler and his virility. But I do think it’s worth asking, quite seriously, why we believe any of this matters. There is a “small penis theory of history,” and its target is always those who might once, before the advent of Leopold von Ranke, have been called “Great Men”: towering figures who, for good or ill, decided the fate of nations and whole epochs. This theory has a wide currency. You’ll hear it at middle-class dinner parties. You’ll read it in tabloid papers and “serious” books, too. Virtually every ruler, especially a ruler of a more dictatorial bent, is accused at some point of having a small penis. In our own time, Vladimir Putin has been; and, of course, Donald Trump, including by former porn star Stormy Daniels.
Perhaps the most insidious variant of this tendency is something I call the gay interpretation of history. Rather like the Whig view of history, which sees everywhere and at all times a move towards the sunny uplands of “progress,” this degraded vision sees everywhere and at all times a move out of the closet into open homosexuality.
Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Achilles and Patroclus, the Spartans at Thermopylae, cowboys, pirates, soldiers, martial artists – any male figure from history is liable to be branded a repressed homosexual.
I was on the receiving end of such claims myself when I appeared in the 2022 Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men, which was about plummeting testosterone levels and some of the things young men are doing to reclaim their masculinity. Those things included lifting weights, cleaning up their diets, doing martial arts, shooting guns and just spending time with other like-minded young men. The trailer for the documentary, which featured a montage of these activities, was greeted with howls of derision in the media. Talking heads and celebrities, everyone from Stephen Colbert and Cenk Uygur to George Takei, announced virtually in unison that The End of Men was a barely concealed gay Nazi fever-dream.
In his celebrated book The Four Loves, published in 1960, C.S. Lewis offered a withering rebuttal to the claim male friendship harbors a secret – or not-so-secret – sexual core. “Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact they have never had a friend,” he said.
It’s easy to blame Freud, the man who did more than anyone else, perhaps, to place sexuality at the center of our understanding of, well, everything. Yet, as much as I don’t like the Viennese witch-doctor, I’m not sure that’s right. There’s a reductive tendency in western thought that stretches back longer than the early 20th century.
We can say, though, with some certainty what the effects are. The reaction to The End of Men is a fine illustration: instead of empowering young men to improve their lives, society tells them to distrust their instincts and desires, to retreat from friendship and ambition and, for heaven’s sake, not to make a noise. “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful,” said Lewis; we make “men without chests.” Lewis meant that metaphorically, but it’s also true in the most literal sense. Men possess a psychological and emotional depth and a range of needs that can’t be reduced to the heat between their legs. The sooner we appreciate that, the sooner we’ll understand the best – and worst – of what men have to offer. Until then, our conception of men will remain small, shriveled and not much use for anything.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.
Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they’re calling it? We can’t even agree on what it’s called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you’re over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One?
Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth’s surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things. Way more than Rome, way more than the Mongols, way more than anybody, ever, or maybe in the future, ever.
Britain was the most powerful country in the history of the world. And then 25 years later, it was this kind of sad, soggy welfare state, which is, to some extent, what it still is, except maybe even a little bit worse. What happened?
There are a couple of levels on which to think about this. First is just geopolitical, and I guess they spent a lot of money in these wars and the ruling class, half the class at Eton in 1910 was killed in the trenches. You can think of a lot of different ways to explain what happened to Britain. The fact remains, however, the British won the two biggest wars in human history. They won and yet they’re still greatly diminished and to some extent humiliated. What is that?
So again, the first explanation can be described in economic terms. The United States took over. The British Empire just moved west to its child, the US. They just transferred the power and a lot of the gold to this new country, which had its systems and some of its customs.
But there’s something deeper. If that were the whole story, then Britain would still be recognizably Britain. The English people would still be recognizably English. They would just be not in charge anymore. They would have less money and less power. But the country would be, by any conventional measurement, thriving, just not running the Bahamas and Hong Kong and Pakistan.
But that’s not what’s happened. After winning the two biggest wars in human history, Britain has shrunken not just physically, but in some way that’s hard to describe. Its culture has changed, some might say has been destroyed, and it’s become something completely different. And what is that? And why does it matter what it is?
Well, it matters because what’s happened to Britain, to England, is also happening to many countries in the West, certainly its heirs, the Anglosphere: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland. It’s happening to those countries. It’s also happening to the rest of western Europe all at the same time.
A bunch of different profound, never seen before phenomena are happening to all of those countries, and again, including ours here in the United States. So it’s worth understanding what has happened to Britain. So maybe the best image that describes it is the one that we’re about to show you.
In case there’s no context in the tape, what you’re watching is a woman being arrested outside an abortion clinic. And keep in mind, as you watch this, she’s not being arrested for throwing a firebomb, a petrol bomb, through the window of this abortion clinic in the UK, or even for obstructing access to this abortion clinic. No – she is being arrested and taken to jail for praying outside the abortion clinic.
Watch this.
So what is that? It’s hard to argue that if your government is arresting people for praying that you’re watching a political phenomenon. Because, of course, praying is not simply a non-violent act. It’s not even a physical act. It can’t possibly, at least in secular terms, affect outcomes or harm anyone. Praying for people can never be a crime. But it is a crime in Great Britain, literally a crime. And the woman you saw is not the only person who’s been arrested for doing it. So clearly we’re watching a spiritual phenomenon here. There’s sort of no arguing it once you see things like that.
But what is that spiritual phenomenon and what are its effects on the people of this country? Before we go further, we should just say that if you visit the “Yookay” as it’s now called, or London, its capital and completely dominant city, the first thing you’ll notice is it’s actually pretty nice. The nice parts of London are as nice or maybe even nicer than any city in the United States. Certainly nicer than any city in Canada or Australia. It’s a great city, filled with lots of happy people.
But broadly speaking, this country has changed dramatically, and it’s changed in ways that are recognizable. Here’s what you recognize. The people of Great Britain are going through a series of crises, and they’re all internal. Drug use, alcohol use. Their appearance has changed. People are no longer as well kept, the streets, the landscape is not tidy anymore. It’s got lots of litter and graffiti in some places. To technocrats, these are not meaningful measures of anything. Who cares if you’ve got graffiti? Does that affect GDP? Well, maybe. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a reflection of how people feel about themselves.
People with self-respect do not tolerate public displays of disorder or filth or graffiti or litter because they care about themselves and their family and they understand intuitively, as every human being does, that once you allow chaos and filth in your immediate environment, you are diminished. So you just don’t allow that. No healthy society does.
But all through the West, these are not just features, they’re defining features. All western cities are filled with litter and graffiti, and people who look like they didn’t bother to get dressed this morning, but are instead wearing their pajamas in Walmart. It’s not just in your town, it’s everywhere in what we refer to as the West.
The point that underlies all of this is a really obvious one, that too few people say. This is the behavior of a defeated people. This is what it looks like when you lose. This is what it looks like when you’re on your way out to be replaced by somebody else. This is what it looks like to be an American Indian.
Now, one thing nobody in the United States ever says about the American Indians, except in a kind of pro-forma white guilt way, is these weren’t just impressive people – and no, they didn’t write the Constitution before we did – these were some of the most impressive people, most self-reliant, most dignified. Read any account of early American settlers, people who were pushing west, who came into contact with Indians and yes, were often scalped and forced to eat their own genitals and roasted over open fires. I mean, these were cruel people. But even the people who were in danger of being murdered by them respected them. Because the Indigenous Americans had a great deal of self-respect. They had what we call dignity. And now, hundreds of years later, the opposite is true. The poorest people in the United States are American Indians. Why? Because the federal government hasn’t given them enough. The federal government is completely in charge of the indigenous economy in the United States, and has been for over a hundred years, and it hasn’t worked. American Indians are still the poorest.
Why? Because the Iroquois and the Navajo weren’t impressive? No, they were the most impressive. Again, read the account of anyone who dealt with them. Even people who were dodging their arrows thought they were amazing people, because they were. And now they are by many measures, the saddest people in the United States. Why is that? Some inherent genetic predisposition to patheticness? They couldn’t deal with modernity? Well, they probably could. They were defeated. They were defeated. And in some deep, the deepest way, they wound up destroying themselves, and it’s not unique to them. That’s the point.
And just to be completely clear, all of this is observed with a great deal of sympathy, not scorn. No one’s mocking the American Indians. Everyone should feel bad about it. For real. Again, not in a silly white girl guilty way, but in a real way. These are amazing people. Greatly diminished. And the reason it’s worth remembering is the same thing is happening to the West.
And it makes you realize, especially if you travel a lot, that the problem is not necessarily the immigrants. The problem is what mass migration does to the people who already live there. They’re the victims of it in a way that, again, is hard to measure and sometimes hard to notice, but totally real.
So you walk through this city, London, and it’s been completely transformed by immigration. Completely. And the numbers are really, really clear. One hundred years ago it was 100 percent European white. Now it’s less than 40 percent. OK, that’s massive, unprecedented demographic change. The immigrant areas are absolutely poorer than the traditionally white English areas. There’s just no question about it. But wealth as measured by the government is not the only measurement. Actually, and this is true in the United States, too, lots of immigrants who have a lot less money than the native population seem a lot more balanced and happy, both because this is a huge upgrade for them just in terms of annual income and standard of living. But it’s more than that. They’re not defeated. They don’t hate themselves.
And if you have traditional nationalist opinions in the United States, I can confirm this personally, you’re never going to be stopped on the street and screamed at by some Guatemalan who’s like, you are racist for having your views on immigration. No, they’ll probably agree with you. The only people who ever get mad at you are the people who already hate themselves, and it’s always, famously, some private equity wife or somebody who should be happy about how things are going because they’re in the portion of the population that’s benefiting from it. But they’re not happy. They’re angry.
What is that? That exact same thing is going on in this country. Exact. And it’s part of a very recognizable syndrome, and it’s the most destructive of all. History is just filled with examples of people who get invaded and clubbed to death and have their women stolen from them, and they’re fine. They’re fine. It’s the people who feel defeated inside who no longer exist. And that is happening to the West. And it’s measurable.
What other society hates its own national symbols? It’s only happening in the West, only in Great Britain. This is coming to be true in the United States. It’s already true in Canada and Australia. What other country finds it embarrassing to fly their national flag? What are you saying if that embarrasses you? You don’t hate the flag. You hate yourself.
And it’s obvious because people who have dignity, self-respect, who believe in their own civilization want to continue it. How do you do that? By talking about it a lot? No. By continuing it through reproduction. No one is preventing the West from reproducing. And people who come up with these conspiracy theories, like, oh, they’re doing it. No, we’re doing it to ourselves. What else is abortion? It’s not empowering for women. Of course not. That’s absurd. Anyone who believes that is an idiot. Abortion is the way to stop people from reproducing. So is birth control, by the way, of course. So is convincing people that their dumb job is more important than having kids. It’s not. It never will be. Any person who can get clarity for a second will recognize that. It’s only about stopping you from having more of you.
And is there anything that’s a clearer representation of how you feel about yourself than how you feel about having kids? And by the way, it’s not just because these people are selfish and they want to go on vacation and don’t want to pay for children, or they’re worried about how much it might cost. Notice that none of these impoverished immigrants living on Snap and housing subsidies, they don’t seem worried about it at all because they know it’ll be fine. Most of the time it will be fine. They’re having kids when much more affluent natives are not, because they believe in themselves and their culture, their civilization. They’d like to see it continue. It’s the most basic of all human desires.
So here in Great Britain, which has about a 30 percent abortion rate, 30 percent of all conceived children are killed. Who’s doing that? It’s not the immigrants because they don’t hate themselves. They’re not defeated. They’re ascendant. And so they can see the future. They know that they may not live to experience it, but they’re still fully human. And they know you plant the tree not because you can bask in its shade, but because your grandchildren will. This is the most obvious of all human instincts and the most basic.
But the native population in Britain is not debating abortion because it’s not even a debate here. Everyone agrees it’s just an affirmative good, of course, to eliminate your own people. Absolutely. But again, no one’s making them do this. They’ve decided to do it themselves. But now their most enthusiastic campaign is for state sponsored suicide. They’ve already done this in Canada. It’ll come to the United States. What is that? That’s an entire people saying we should exit the stage. Our time is done. It’s over. Let’s go. Someone else will take our place. Not the first time that’s ever happened.
This is what defeated people do. This is what happens when you break people inside. And maybe it’ll just reach its terminus. Maybe there’s no way to stop it.
So in Great Britain, if you were to say, wait, what the hell is this? This looks nothing like the country I grew up in – guess who’s going to arrest you? Your fellow Britons. The ones whose great-grandparents lived here. The whites. They’re the ones enforcing this. They’re the ones determined to eliminate themselves.
During the great financial panic of 1907, the banker J.P. Morgan locked the titans of the financial world in his lavish private study to determine which banks to rescue and which to let fail. This intervention saved the banking system, restoring public confidence. But trust in Wall Street was shaken to its core. Six years later, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which sought to stabilize the American financial system by establishing a central bank to regulate credit and serve as lender of last resort. By the mid-1920s, the very mechanisms that were designed to promote stability had fueled a surge in stock market speculation. In 1929, a narrative history of this feverish bull market and its tragic unraveling, Andrew Ross Sorkin seeks to illuminate “the most significant – and largely misunderstood – financial disaster in modern history.”
Throughout the 1920s, National City Bank and its securities affiliate, the National City Company, had extended credit to investors and brokerage firms, allowing stocks to be purchased with as little as 10 percent deposit. Margin loans increased sixfold over the decade. Once confined to professional investors, stock speculation became a national pastime as Americans borrowed their way into the booming market. At the start of the year, the surging “Coolidge market” had begun to resemble a bubble. As Sorkin writes: “On February 2, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, fearing that a speculative bubble was taking hold, issued an advisory to the Fed’s regional banks, discouraging them from making loans to support stock speculation, particularly stock that was bought on margin.”
In an attempt to cool this market, the New York Fed had moved to raise the discount rate from 5 to 6 percent. “The Fed’s killing the goose which laid the golden egg,” complained Charles Mitchell, National City Bank’s president and chairman. To persuade the president-elect, Herbert Hoover, to take his side against the Fed, Mitchell called upon the influential auto magnate William Durant. “I’m sure there’s a way we can get to Hoover,” Durant reassured him.
Sorkin is at his best in his granular reconstruction of the unfolding collapse on Wall Street. He traces the months of 1929 week by week, from the Federal Reserve’s warnings about speculative lending in February to the cynical maneuvering of bankers and industrialists attempting to prop up the market. On March 26, defying the Fed’s tightening policy, Mitchell ordered his bank to extend loans, “no questions asked,” to support share prices. On another fateful evening, Durant, unvetted and uninvited, talked his way into the White House to privately urge Hoover to contravene the Fed.
Sorkin’s 1929 reveals a gallery of tragic figures whose genius and folly shaped the destiny of the United States at a critical point in its history. There is Thomas W. Lamont, the impoverished minister’s son turned JP Morgan partner and de facto chairman of the bank; Jesse Livermore, the self-educated speculator who got his start running bets for organized crime in Boston before making millions as a short-seller; Carter Glass, a son of the Confederate South who overcame his lack of formal education to become the leading congressional expert on banking and a driving force behind financial regulation; and National City Bank’s Mitchell – or “Sunshine Charlie” – whose boundless optimism disguised his fatal hubris.
On Thursday, October 24, as the bubble began to burst, Mitchell emerged from meetings with a consortium of bankers at the JP Morgan offices in Lower Manhattan. “I am still of the opinion,” he told the press, “that this reaction has badly overrun itself.” The “Big Six” bankers had formed a pool, injecting around $100 million into the market that afternoon. All of this was coordinated in secrecy. “If the public knew exactly what they were doing, it wasn’t clear whether it would instill confidence or undermine it,” Sorkin writes. It was to no avail. When the market opened the following Monday, October 28, the Dow suffered the largest single-day drop in stock market history. The rout continued into November. “In the space of just two months, the market had fallen by half, wiping out $50 billion, which represented about half the US gross national product.”
The market rallied into the spring of 1930, recovering almost half of its losses. But then “the air simply leaked out of the balloon.” Credit markets had been eviscerated. On June 17, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill, raising tariffs on foreign goods to an average of 60 percent, which worsened an already teetering economy. Then began a string of bank failures.
Critical accounts of Wall Street, far removed from the hagiographic magazine profiles of the previous decade, began emerging en masse in the media. Meanwhile, Hoover made himself easy prey for the Democrats, who swept the 1930 midterms, a prelude to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in the 1932 presidential election. What began as a vote of confidence in the American system would ultimately empower Roosevelt to reshape it entirely.
1929 revives a decisive episode in financial history amid renewed uncertainty about the resilience of American markets and the global economy. Based on eight years of exhaustive archival research, Sorkin’s study offers a rare combination of scholarly rigor and narrative verve. Implicit in his account is a cautionary insight: the very ambition driving America’s financial system ensures its perpetual vulnerability to excess and collapse.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.
For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630, but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I attended, with everyone desperately trying to open bottles using keys, pens, knives etc. Or using that technique where you bang the bottle against a wall with the heel of a shoe. Halcyon days. More likely the Cavaliers would have just taken the top off cleanly with a swift blow from a saber.
Early devices for extracting corks were called “bottle screws.” According to wine writer Hugh Johnson, the word “corkscrew” was first used in 1720. From there, this handy little piece of equipment has conquered the world, from early versions which were simply a piece of metal with a wooden handle to the full nerdery of the $130 Screwpull – beloved by wine bores of a certain vintage. The most common one when I was taking my first steps as a wine drinker was the metal man with his hands up, which usually just drilled a hole in the cork rather than removing it. As someone who has opened thousands of bottles of wine, I can safely say that the best corkscrew is a good quality waiter’s friend. I never leave home without one.
If you want to see the sheer imagination and thought humans have put in to removing a bit of tree bark from a glass receptacle, I’d highly recommend visiting the corkscrew museum (yes, there really is one, I literally have the T-shirt) at Domaine Gerovassiliou near Thessaloniki in Greece. There are corkscrews with winged demons on, others that look like medieval torture devices and some that fit into the top of walking canes, so a gentleman need never be without one.
But at some point, will this essential piece of drinker’s kit be seen only in a museum? A report from kitchenware retailer Lakeland says just over a quarter of British 18- to 24-year-olds own a corkscrew – compared with 81 percent of over-65s. I’m not entirely sure this is the killer statistic everyone thinks it is, though. One in four youngsters having a corkscrew means you’re in with a good chance of finding one in shared accommodation. We didn’t all have corkscrews when I was in my early twenties. But I did. I was a budding wine bore.
There’s no doubt, however, that the traditional cork is dying out, thanks to the ubiquitous screw cap. This has gone from being seen only on the cheapest wines to an entirely respectable way to close a bottle, especially in the Antipodes. Something like 70 percent of Australian and 95 percent of New Zealand wines are sealed this way. Screw caps are more reliable, too. It’s estimated that between 3 and 8 percent of corks are tainted with a compound called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) which produces the characteristic “corked” smell of damp basements. Extremely annoying when you’ve been keeping a bottle for a special occasion.
And yet for all its occasional unreliability, I’ll miss the cork when it finally disappears. A large part of the appeal of wine is the ritual of opening the bottle, the satisfying pop followed by the gurgle of the pour. It all builds anticipation. Now, where did I put my corkscrew?
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.
Winston Churchill is one of Britain’s enduring symbols. His relentless drive, deep conviction and steadfast leadership means that he remains admired by millions around the globe. Yet for years, the political mainstream has been compelled to defend his memory from spurious attacks from the left, such as the British politician John McDonnell calling him a “villain.” Depressingly that threat – and the same pernicious desire to denigrate one of the West’s greatest heroes – can now be found on the right.
Spawned from a sinister fringe of the ultra-MAGA movement, these views have been propagated to millions. Tucker Carlson hosted the pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper on his podcast in an episode that has attracted over 33 million downloads. Cooper made a series of absurd and ahistorical claims – including that Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War Two – while actively downplaying Nazi atrocities in eastern Europe.
Carlson and Cooper are not alone. Major figures of the US online right, from Candace Owens to Dave Smith, have either backed Cooper or engaged in their own rewriting of the history of World War Two. Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s new AI alternative to Wikipedia, has an entry on Sir Oswald Mosley which states that “recent reappraisals” have validated his “policy prescience.” Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists; the clue to his policy ideas are obvious in the name of his organization.
Sadly, such revisionism is not confined to the United States. A new online fringe in Britain – from former Reform UK party candidate Ian Gribbin and party advisor Jack Anderton, to the popular contrarian podcast Lotus Eaters – have dabbled in revisionism of Churchill’s life, actions and legacy from an ultra-right perspective, essentially arguing that Britain should not have fought in World War Two. Of course, such views have been expressed in the past by Pat Buchanan, Alan Clark, John Charmley, David Irving and even Maurice Cowling, but were always niche. Today they are turbo-charged by tens of millions of people on social media. This new strain of ahistorical US-led Churchill skepticism must not be allowed to establish a bridgehead in British politics.
As my and Zachary Marsh’s new report for Policy Exchange, “Defender of the West,” argues, these critiques consistently misrepresent or manipulate the historical record to present myths about Churchill as fact, such as that he was behind the decision to offer a guarantee to Poland in April 1939, when in fact he was a backbench MP and in no decision-making role. (Nonetheless it was the correct decision of Neville Chamberlain’s government.) Or that it was Churchill who initiated civilian bombing raids, despite the fact that they had been a central part of Nazi military strategy since Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.
The repeated assertion by these critics that Churchill’s “warmongering” sustained an unwinnable war – forgetting it seems, that the Allies ultimately triumphed – is intended to suggest that Britain should instead have made peace with Hitler in 1940. Yet Hitler routinely breached every single agreement he ever signed, from the Munich Agreement to the Anglo-Germany Navy Treaty to the Nazi Soviet Pact. That he could be trusted to leave Britain and her empire alone is of the same naïve school of appeasement that Churchill himself rightly fought throughout the 1930s. He understood that a European continent dominated by any power – and particularly by Nazi Germany – was incompatible with Britain’s international interests as much as her values. Lebensraum did not just apply to the east.
Rebutting Churchill revisionism is not only important for protecting the principles of good scholarship and evidence within the academy, but is also essential because this transatlantic fringe is determined to expand its influence over insurgent right-wing populism both in America and Europe. In doing so, the aim is not simply to manipulate the public’s view of Churchill, but through his denigration to create the intellectual space for their other pernicious ideas to flourish, specifically that isolationism and nativism should triumph over internationalism and interventionism.
By blackening Churchill’s name (and of course that of President Franklin Roosevelt), the ultra-MAGA ideologues, several of whom have been disavowed by President Trump himself, hope to damage the cause of anti-totalitarianism more widely, to the benefit to Vladimir Putin. The attack on Churchill is not just an ivory tower spat; it is profoundly connected to calls for the West to rip up the postwar international order that Churchill helped build.
In recent weeks, most notably with the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s interview with the foul Nick Fuentes, fueling civil war in MAGA-land and at the influential Heritage Foundation – where I have given speeches in the past – we have seen how this same fringe has embraced anti-Semitic and white supremacist rhetoric. These views are infused with admiration for the authoritarian strongmen who would thrive in a world where countries like Britain and the United States abrogated their responsibilities towards smaller democracies. Gribbin, whilst standing for Reform UK in 2024, even combined his criticism of Churchill with praise for Putin, saying, “If only the West had politicians of his class.”
Historical debate and discussion of the merits of western internationalism are necessary and healthy for our discourse. Yet they must be routed in facts, evidence and made in good faith. These attacks on Churchill, the greatest Briton, seek to present the United Kingdom’s sacrifice and achievements in World War Two as an entirely pointless endeavor, which justifies a new isolationism. Rational, decent, conservative-minded people of all parties and movements should be steadfast in rejecting such dangerous ahistorical rubbish.
Lord Roberts of Belgravia is the co-author of Policy Exchange’s new report: “Defender of the West: A response to attacks on Churchill’s life and legacy”
Aleister Crowley, who was born 150 years ago today, was once one of my idols. No one else seemed to match the panache of someone who could make a name for themselves as a magician, poet, artist, novelist, prophet, journalist, mountaineer, and spy.
Yet, the outsized influence of such characters frequently attracts legions of charlatans. I met one during my adolescence when I became a student of a Tibetan Buddhist lama who claimed to be Aleister’s living son. It did not immediately occur to this bright-eyed seeker that the alleged son’s chief interest seemed to be in shagging his female students, but eventually it did, and I grew disillusioned. Naturally, I took off instead to learn at the feet of a more reputable Tibetan Buddhist lama; only to find that this new guru had not merely been sleeping with almost every vulnerable woman that walked through the door, but had also taken to pilfering the temple’s donations on late night pay-per-view and Chinese takeaways off London’s Caledonian Road.
Despite the various hucksters that his name attracts, the sheer force of Aleister Crowley’s personality makes him one of those few people who still seem to merit a new biography almost every year. He haunted fin-de-siecle England, developing a New Age religion called Thelema,and devoting much of his erratic life to the promotion of something he called magick, which, he claimed, was the art of transforming physical reality by pure will. The Beatles featured him on the album cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Jimmy Page took up residence in his old home, Boleskin Manor. And Timothy Leary, the leader of the 1960s psychedelic renaissance and coiner of the term “turn on, tune in, drop out” famously wished that the great occultist were alive so he could witness his final apotheosis through the mass consumption of LSD by rollicking Harvard freshmen.
Crowley’s life is almost too colorful to fit into a single volume, which is perhaps why so many treatments of him tend to focus on niche corners of his personality and career. He was born in 1875 to a wealthy brewery-owning family of hardcore Christian Protestants, who belonged to a group known as the Plymouth Brethren. The young Aleister (then Alick) idealized his father and appears to have gotten his knack for relentless proselytizing from him. The senior Crowley, rich enough from his commercial ventures to devote his time to provocative sermonizing, would ask local punters what they would be doing next year. And then? He would say, to which they would describe ambitions for the following year. And then? Crowley senior would ask, over and over again, until inevitably the local pub visitor would say: well, I suppose, then I shall die. To which he replied: that’s right – so you’d better get right with God!
His relationship with his mother seems to have been even more formative. By all accounts utterly overbearing and puritanical, she labelled him “The Beast” (a nickname that would stay with him for the rest of his life) from the Book of Revelation, the only section of the New Testament that Crowley enjoyed reading during the daily Bible study sessions that the Brethren kept up. When he was eleven his father died, and Crowley was shipped off to a series of tutors, where he would begin to appreciate a life outside the pious and cloistered and world of his parents. Although he would leave everything about their actual worldview behind him, Crowley seems to have carried on his rebellion against his parents through to his dying day.
Soon, he would arrive at Cambridge, where he developed a keen interest in local prostitutes, chess, and the burgeoning secret societies practicing a re-invented form of ceremonial magic. (He later added a k to the end of magic to distinguish it from the increasingly popular stage magic of the Edwardian period). Crowley joined TheGolden Dawn, an esoteric group of practitioners that had built a spiritual system around a hodge-podge of Kabbalah, Freemasonry, and astrology. He soon rose to the top and then fell out with the other leaders of the secret society, a pattern that would recur throughout his life, eventually going to law for the right to publish their ritual materials to the wider public.
Aleister Crowley continues to appeal to teenage boys across the world because he epitomizes like few others that strange period known as adolescence
A few years later Crowley married. During his honeymoon in Egypt he claimed to have been contacted by a daemon called Aiwass, who spoke through his wife when they were visiting the Cairo Museum. Through her channeling, this spirit dictated what would become Crowley’s magnum opus, The Book of the Law, which, despite its supposed supernatural provenance, curiously resembles his own style of writing and humor. Anyway, like any good author, he used this new book as a means to promote his personal brand, bouncing around everywhere from Mexico (where he claims to have used a spell to make himself invisible) to the deserts of North Africa (where he engaged in a public homosexual, hashish-infused ritual to conjure the demon Choronzon from inside a magic circle). He also took his wife and young daughter on a dangerous trek across China (while trying to mentally invoke his Holy Guardian Angel), and established a proto-hippie commune in Sicily. The commune was shut down on the orders of Mussolini after a public outcry over reports of acolytes being ordered by Crowley to cut themselves with razors whenever they accidentally “strengthened the ego” by using the pronoun “I,” practices which may been responsible for the mysterious death of one of the students.
And for all the mystical mumbojumbo that we still associate with Crowley, one of the most interesting parts of his life was his relationship to politics. We now know that he wrote at least some propaganda for the German war effort during WWI. Was this simply another publicity scheme, or did he truly side with England’s Teutonic rivals? Crowley himself claims that his war journalism was simply a ruse to assist the British intelligence services in their efforts against the Kaiser and Irish separatism, for his own bizarre and eccentric writing appears to have helped to – for a time – discredit the cause of Celtic nationalism (he declared that the Irish were, in fact, the lost descendants of Atlantis). The great magus also claimed to have midwifed the entry of the United States into the war as an agent of British influence, knowing it was the best shot his country had to beat Germany. Whether this was in fact true, or just an excuse, remains unclear.
Now that 150 years have passed since his birth, we still await some valedictory summing up of the significance of his life and thought. The myth that has grown up around Crowley, built by himself and his many followers, is so formidable that it can be hard to see the saga clearly. One can certainly find slivers of genuine spiritual insight in many of his works, particularly those in which he is actually trying to seriously expound on a topic – like yoga. But the problem with Crowley is that one never quite knows when he is pulling your leg. His knack for publicity was unrivalled, and the dire financial straits he often found himself in meant that many of his published works were simply potboilers to pay off his many debts. He was both an eccentric genius and a morally abominable person, particularly in how he treated his wife and children. He alienated almost everyone he came across, and few can read the letters they wrote about him without wincing.
To my mind, his real significance was as an omen of the future – the first of a type. Why did I get my long-suffering parents to expend so many hundreds of pounds on these books of spells, magical formulae, and ancient hieroglyphs of no practical value whatsoever? Before people sold supplements on the internet, à la Andrew Tate, Crowley was flogging useless spellbooks to impressionable and wealthy Victorian collectors of esoterica. Before social media trolling, à la Candace Owens, Crowley was edgelording his way to media attention and commercial success by declaring himself a satanist. Did he actually believe what he was saying? Well, do any of them?
In the end, Aleister Crowley continues to appeal to teenage boys across the world because he epitomizes like few others that strange period known as adolescence; where rebellion against authority, curiosity about bizarre Eastern religions, experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, and intrepid sexual exploration all jostle together. Most of us, however, eventually, grow out of these phases and begrudgingly accept both the mantle of responsibility and professional obligations. Aleister Crowley, despite the surprisingly sophisticated nature of some of his thought, appears never to have needed to. Was it because he had been too deeply committed to his publicity strategy, or because he had truly transcended the bourgeois sexual hangups of the herd, or maybe because he was simply too messed up from his fundamentalist upbringing? Despite the legion of biographies, it is unlikely that we will ever know.
Whether or not Crowley truly inaugurated the “Age of Horus”from the boarding house in Hastings where he passed away, alone and riddled with the opium addiction that accompanied him through much of his adult life, is still debated amongst today’s occultists. That he unleashed at least some part of our cynical, hyper-individualistic, and sloppily spiritualistic culture is, I think, tragically undeniable. Happy 150th birthday, Aleister Crowley.
