Ralph Raico on Winston Churchill's love of war

But while Winston had no principles, there was one constant in his life: the love of war.  It began early.  As a child, he had a huge collection of toy soldiers, 1500 of them, and he played with them for many years after most boys turn to other things.  They were "all British," he tells us, and he fought battles with his brother Jack, who "was only allowed to have colored troops; and they were not allowed to have artillery."  He attended Sandhurst, the military academy, instead of the universities, and "from the moment that Churchill left Sandhurst … he did his utmost to get into a fight, wherever a war was going on."  All his life he was most excited—on the evidence, only really excited—by war.  He loved war as few modern men ever have—he even "loved the bangs," as he called them, and he was very brave under fire.

 

In 1925, Churchill wrote: "The story of the human race is war."  This, however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue.  Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy of classical liberalism.  In particular, he never understood that, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor.  Peace, not war, is the father of all things.  For Churchill, the years without war offered nothing to him but "the bland skies of peace and platitude."  This was a man, as we shall see, who wished for more wars than actually happened.

When he was posted to India and began to read avidly, to make up for lost time, Churchill was profoundly impressed by Darwinism.  He lost whatever religious faith he may have had—through reading Gibbon, he said—and took a particular dislike, for some reason, to the Catholic Church, as well as Christian missions.  He became, in his own words, "a materialist—to the tips of my fingers," and he fervently upheld the worldview that human life is a struggle for existence, with the outcome the survival of the fittest.  This philosophy of life and history Churchill expressed in his one novel, Savrola.  That Churchill was a racist goes without saying, yet his racism went deeper than with most of his contemporaries.  It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.

~ Ralph Raico, "Rethinking Churchill," The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories, by John Denson

Charles Darwin on survival and adaptability

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

~ Charles Darwin

Bill Bonner on evolution

There are two parts to Darwinism as it is popularly understood. One part is based on observation – at which Darwin was a master. The other is extrapolation – not so much on Darwin’s part, but his followers. The problem is that the part that is probably correct is child-like and obvious. And the part that is more grown up is nothing more than empty guesswork. He notes that some animals are better suited to their environments than others. If a polar bear were suddenly born to a hog here in Nicaragua, it probably wouldn’t last long. On the other hand, if a mutation produced a naked polar bear at the North Pole, it wouldn’t stand much of a chance either. Both would probably perish, leaving no heirs or assigns…and thus removing from the gene pool whatever crazy aberration that created them. Some things survive and reproduce; some don’t. The essence of Darwinism is nothing more than that simple-minded observation, as near as we can tell.

But the application of this notion far and wide is a threat to the intellectual eco-system. Because of it, people think they know a lot more than they actually know. To the question, why is the polar bear white, rather than black, they have a ready answer: because evolution made him white. But this is no answer at all…it just postpones thinking until the next question: why did evolution make him that way?

Then, the guesses begin: because he can blend into the snowy background and sneak up on seals. Oh. They tell us, for example, that he covers his nose – which is black – with his paw, so he can get closer without being spotted.

Smart bear. But you’d think if evolution could turn his whole body black it could whitewash his nose too. And what about the seals? Are they morons? You’d think those that couldn’t tell the difference between a bear with his paw over his nose and an iceberg would have been weeded out by now. Besides, why aren’t seals white?

Of course, the biologists and know-it-alls have their answers, but they are just putting 2 and 2 together in the clumsiest way. They really don’t know why polar bears are white. All they know is that nature hasn’t exterminated the white polar bears – yet.

Many of these deep thinkers also believe that Darwin proved that God didn’t create man. Instead, man arose by the process of evolution, they say, one accidental step at a time. Man is the product of pure chance, they claim. As if God couldn’t make it look like an accident, if He wanted!

~ Bill Bonner, "A Broken Down Stock Market," LewRockwell.com, February 26, 2008