August 03, 2017
The Nazis burned books. Liberals take down statues. In Candice Millard’s Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill, we learn of a young Winston hell-bent on war. He was a war correspondent because he wasn’t invited to battle, but he soldiered on nonetheless and ended up in a POW camp that he later escaped from. The book shows a ragtag band of redneck farmers, the Boers, overpower the greatest superpower in the world. Like WWII, it’s a Western civil war that was much more about the evolution of our culture than oppressing the weak. This paradigm is the backbone of all of history. To go back and stare at it through SJW glasses isn’t just inaccurate—it’s propaganda. The book gets into the history of the Boers and describes P.W. Botha Sr. (the apartheid president’s father) fighting alongside Zulus in exchange for a share of the land if they won (they did). So, even an extreme case like South Africa isn’t as simple as a pedagogue like Jared Diamond insists it is in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
Dunkirk still has a lot of rescuing to do and I’m not just talking about apathetic Puerto Ricans who see the film as a bunch of crazy white people fighting each other for no reason (one of the few things she and Buchanan might agree on). Feminists have derided the film. Over at Marie Claire, human nose Mehera Bonner whined, “Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness—which apparently they don’t get to do enough.” She too almost vomited, but seems to think getting bombed on a pier while pleading to boats for rescue is a “celebration.” The generation who got their history from Hamilton were disappointed there weren’t more blacks and Hispanics in the film. “Ooooh another so-called historically accurate war film about white men that got sent to war against other white men. Hollywood is so whitewashed,” was one particularly galling comment on Twitter.
As far as I’m concerned, Dunkirk isn’t simply about reversing the narrative that nonwhites were the victims and whites were the villains. Whites were Nazis, too. The movie is about reintroducing nuance into history. History is a tangled ball of warring tribes where the West eventually won. As Buchanan says in The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, “Western man was among many villains, but Western man was also the only hero.”