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