Colm Gillis also mentions, in his excoriation of Boris Johnson, as “an achievement of the sultans,” the architectural feats of Mimar Sinan (“the great architect Sinan”). But those feats were not achievements of the sultans — they merely paid the bills. They belonged to Sinan himself, as his personal achievement. And Sinan, it might be noted, was born a Christian — whether Armenian or Greek is still disputed — and raised in a Christian milieu. He only became a Muslim when, at the age of 22, he was drafted into the Janissary Corps. Surely the fact that the leading mosque architect in the Ottoman Empire was born and raised a Christian is worth noting, even if it undermines Colm Gillis’s claim that Sinan’s buildings should be considered “an achievement of the [Muslim] sultans.”
Finally, in a fit of tu-quoque, Gillis offers, by way of a riposte to Boris Johnson’s observation that the Muslims did not make use the printing press until nearly 400 years after it had been introduced in the West, that the West had its “luddites,” too. But the Luddite movement as a force to be reckoned with lasted only from 1811 to 1816. it was not an expression of societal hostility to everything new, but only reflected the opposition of workers in a few industries, opposed to those machines that necessarily led to a loss of jobs, or to the use of lower-paid workers who would operate the machines. There was no general suspicion of innovation in England, as the cascading inventiveness of its industrial revolution amply demonstrates, nothing comparable to the unwillingness of the Ottomans, for many centuries, to make use of the printing-press.
Johnson’s authority for his ignorance is Winston Churchill. If Churchill said it, it must be true. However, Churchill was neither a historian nor a sociologist. He was a myth-maker whose literary skills were devoted to “demonstrating” the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race over all others. To achieve this sleight of hand, Churchill had to simultaneously denigrate other cultures, including Islam. It seems that Great Britain under Johnson will be beset by similar doses of myth, fantasy and supremacist doctrines.
Johnson was not mindlessly endorsing everything Churchill said. He was referring to Churchill’s by-now celebrated observations on Islam and Muslims that appeared in The River War. That particular quote was one of the most brilliant analyses of Islam, and its effect on its adherents, that anyone has yet produced, and Johnson was right to allude to it.
But what is positively fantastic is the claim by Colm Gillis that Churchill was not “a historian.” Churchill was not an academic historian, he never had to pass a Ph.D. exam or labored over a doctoral dissertation that few would wish to reread. He was something far better than that. In his life, Churchill was an army officer, a journalist, a government official, a politician, and a historian. He studied history by constant reading. One of his most famous remarks was his advice to a young man: “Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” Till the end of his life he remained a student, as well as a writer, of history. He was always a keen observer of men and events. And for more than half a century he was a direct participant in the most important events in British, and even world, history.
No other historian has ever held so many, so various, and such important, positions in his own government, and engaged in so many occupations — journalist, writer, lecturer — outside of it. He reported on British imperialism as a military man and journalist, in Sudan, India, and South Africa. During World War I, he was again at the center of things, as First Lord of the Admiralty. In the 1920s, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the 1930s, it was Churchill, though in the political wilderness, who alone warned the British elite, and through his journalism the British public, that Germany was rapidly rearming, that Hitler was an unprecedented threat, that Europe would almost certainly be engulfed, because of relentless Nazi aggression, in a Second World War, and that Britain had itself to rearm to counter Hitlerism. As British Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945, he was at the very center of world events. In 1945, he then resumed his career as a historian, working on his mammoth History of the English-Speaking Peoples, until he returned again as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955.
The distinguished historian Professor H. C. Allen of London University once suggested that when we consider the total bulk of Churchill’s historical work, “judged as an historian alone, and setting aside all his other manifold and in some cases greater achievements, Sir Winston Churchill’s fame would be secure.”
He wrote many kinds of histories; about his own life, about his distinguished ancestors, about World War II. The Oxford historian A.L. Rowse thinks his masterpieces are his 4-volume Life of Lord Marlborough and his 4-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a history of Britain and its former colonies and possessions throughout the world, covering the period from Caesar’s invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914). It’s hard to imagine that one man could have written a work that seamlessly covers nearly 2000 years of history, and that has earned the respect of such distinguished historians as H. C. Allen, A. J. Rowse, Andrew Roberts, and Martin Gilbert, among many others. Churchill was, in the writing of history as in so much else, a one-man multitude.
When Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values,” he was only the second Nobel winner who was given the literature award primarily for his works of history; the first was Theodor Mommsen in 1902, for his History of Rome. No doubt those who awarded Churchill the Nobel for his historical works did so only after learning from eminent historians about Churchill’s achievements as an historian.
But perhaps we should instead listen to Colm Gillis. Why should the opinions of Professors A. J. Rowse, H. C, Allen, Andrew Roberts, Martin Gilbert and a hundred other historians of similar distinction, matter? And what do those unnamed historians who nominated Churchill for the Nobel Prize, or those who were later consulted by the Literature Prize committee as they made their choice, know about history? They’re all part of a credulous cult of Churchill-worship. Why should we care what they think? Colm Gillis knows better; he dismisses Churchill, who he claims was “neither a historian nor a sociologist,” but a mere spinner of “myth, fantasy and supremacist doctrines” who exalted the white, English-speaking peoples above all others. Gillis mocks the attitude he attributes to Boris Johnson that “If Churchill said it, it must be true.”
“Question authority!” is the ipse-dixit message of Colm Gillis. To whom many of us will want to reply: “Why should we?”