It would seem that the market for stories told over gin and tonics about the good old days of the Empire is experiencing a resurgence. Not that one would expect much else from a blog that produced the usage "Gandhi and his rabble," but Powerline is either being ignorant or disengenuous with a game they are playing with old Winston Churchill quotes about the late 19th century wars in Sudan. Indeed part of the game is to spread different bits of the trail along various reactionary websites, thus not leaving their retrograde implications in plain sight while driving up the hit counts of their buddies, and we have no intention of providing a complete list of links here. But here's the relevant bit from Powerline:
9/11: A Churchillian perspective
... Churchill's thought as related to 9/11. No one has surpassed our friend Steve Hayward in performing this task, as he did in his October 2001 essay: "A Churchillian perspective on September 11." Steve's essay reminds me that James Muller's long-awaited edition of Churchill's The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan will be published on September 1. For the unexpurgated quote giving Churchill's account of "the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries," see Peter Schramm's No Left Turns post: "The inexorable sternness of Churchill."
If you're wondering how Churchill could have had relevant thoughts about 9/11, then you clearly haven't heard about his reincarnation as George W. Bush (once again, we link to our rival view that Bush is the reincarnation of Joe Chamberlain). Anyway, the quote referred to at the end is a paragraph from Churchill's 1899 book that operates at the same level of sweeping generality about Muslims as "Mrs Mortimer" might have -- a Victorian travel writer hilariously resurrected by author Todd Pruzan, e.g.:
The Irish "are very kind and good-natured when pleased, but if affronted, are filled with rage."
Winston was running for elected office when The River War came out, so his motivations for a little jingoism at the expense of the "Mohammedans" are clear enough. And what of this River War itself? Well, the British and their assertive colony in Egypt are seeking to follow and control the Nile, which puts them into someone else's territory -- and that someone else (the Madhi army) kicks their arses a couple of times before finally getting beaten themselves. At which point Kerry man Horatio Kitchener was put in charge and managed to avoid Winston's contempt for the locals (via Wikipedia):
He ordered the mosques of Khartoum rebuilt and instituted reforms which recognised Friday - the Muslim holy day - as the official day of rest, and guaranteed freedom of religion to all citizens of the Sudan. He went so far as to prevent evangelical Christian missionaries from attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity.
The latter lesson not learned by Dubya in Iraq. Anyway, this romanticisation of Empire is consistent with the way the expression "Mau-mau" has travelled into reactionary discourse to mean either something that liberals do to free thinkers, or as another feather in Churchill's cap for having suppressed that rebellion. Churchill was a superb leader in World War II. But the rest of his career is filled with Imperial troublemaking, from Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, to Iraq, Ireland, and Kenya, and it's only because this post is already too long that we won't list more. It's a mark of how little history Dubya knows that he seeks this comparison with such relish.
UPDATE: Another Powerline contribution earns the coveted runner up spot in the weekly "Wingnut of the Week" award from The Poor Man.
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