"Let me give a picture of the spiritual events in the soul of the modern man. Historical knowledge stream on him from sources that are inexhaustible, strange incoherences come together, memory opens all its gates and yet is never open wide enough."

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life

My title owes its inspiration to two obvious sources. The first is to Nietzsche’s famous essay, "The Use and Abuse of History for Life," in which he lays out his tripartite scheme of "monumental," "antiquarian," and "critical" history. More on this in due course.

The second source is the prominent references to Churchill or the lessons of his time, made fresh again just this week by Secretary Rumsfeld’s comparison of appeasers to critics of our current war policy. This has been growing for a while. A few months back there erupted over the space of just a few days a parlor game among pundits and journalists across the political spectrum, from Richard Cohen on the left to Rich Lowry and Michael Barone on the right, about what year our current situation bears an analogic relation. Is it 1914, or 1938? Or 1941, 1946, 1952, or even 1969? And is President Bush Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, or Lyndon Johnson--or even Jimmy Carter, who was himself called, by among others me, America’s Stanley Baldwin? Significantly, throughout these speculations, no one is cast as Churchill, despite nearly everyone’s attachment to his memory.

On one level this is a sign of intellectual health and vitality. Henry Ford famously said that "history is bunk," which prompted one of Arnold Toynbee’s only memorable remarks, made upon the Ford’s death: "Henry Ford is history." Today Americans especially are besotted with a fascination for history, as can be seen in the phenomenal and growing popularity for serious books on the American founders and, notably, our wars. On the other hand, this can become sloppy and untethered to a serious ground of understanding political life, especially in its moral dimensions. This can be seen in the popularity of "counterfactual" histories written or edited by tyros such as Niall Ferguson, dilating such questions as "Suppose JFK had not been killed in Dallas," or "Suppose Halifax had become Prime Minister instead of Churchill in 1940?" (Answer: He would have settled with Hitler; Andrew Roberts speculates that ultimately this would have handed the whole of Europe to Stalin, changing Churchill’s famous formula in the following way: "From Narvik in the North Sea to Toulon in the Mediterranean, from Calais in the English Channel to the very heights of the Pyrenees an iron curtain has descended across the continent.")

This kind of speculation can make for a fun parlor game; it can also be used to bolster either the case for history’s randomness, or for the importance of the role of personal force--in other words, such a framework can be used to diminish Churchill, or bolster the case for his essential greatness--leaving us exactly where we started. Nietzsche warned of this, writing that "as long as the soul of history is found in the great impulse that it gives to a powerful spirit, as long as the past is principally used as a model for imitation, it is always in danger of being a little altered and touched up and brought nearer to fiction or poetry."

I will come back to Nietzsche’s categories of history at the end, and won’t attempt here a summary or analysis of Nietzsche’s complicated and convoluted teaching in this famous essay, beyond remarking that its obscurity owes precisely to his trying to have it both ways--that is, trying to undermine Hegelian historicism without being able to break from the metaphysical premises of historicism. Or, perhaps more accurately, Nietzsche was challenging historicism in order to radicalize it, a project which has largely succeeded.

Nietzsche was a key figure in the modernist project by which History--with a capital "H"--has come largely to replace nature as the standard by which we understand the human experience. This culminates, of course, in nihilism, or, in today’s commonplace term, "postmodernism." Churchill stands as the antithesis of Nietzsche, not only by personal example, but also through his own historical writings, which seek to vindicate history as an illumination of nature, and therefore as a powerful aid to understanding the unchanging ground of our changing experience.

As with many modern philosophers starting with Machiavelli, we should not let the problematic character of their main teachings deny us their accurate and useable insights into political life, just as, for example, we know that Churchill himself was a discrete reader of Machiavelli. Nietzsche’s framework for understanding the use and abuse of history and many of his aphorisms turn out to be quite helpful in reflecting on some of the contemporary uses to which Churchill’s memory is now put.

This came vividly to mind when I noticed the appearance of Churchill’s famous stance on appeasement in a most unlikely place--Vice President Al Gore’s film and book, An Inconvenient Truth, which is really just an update of his use of Churchill in his previous book Earth in the Balance. In Earth in the Balance, then-Senator Gore makes a direct comparison between the struggle against totalitarianism--first in the form of Nazism and then in the form of Soviet Communism--and the struggle to save the global environment:

It is worth remembering how long we waited before finally facing the challenge posed by Nazi totalitarianism and Hitler. Many were reluctant to acknowledge that an effort on the scale of what became World War II was actually necessary, and most wanted to believe that the threat could be wished away with trivial sacrifices. For several years before the awful truth was accepted, one Western leader spoke out forcefully and eloquently about the gathering storm. Winston Churchill was uncompromising in his insistence that every effort be immediately bent to the task of ensuring Hitler’s defeat. After Neville Chamberlain concluded the Munich Pact of 1938, which gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for his pledge not to take over still more territory, most Britons were happy and supported the policy that later was condemned as appeasement. Churchill, however, grasped the essence of what had occurred and of the unavoidable conflict that lay ahead.

From here Gore goes to quote at length the ultimate paragraph of Churchill’s Munich speech in the House, though, like the BBC’s Wilderness Years adaptation of the speech done in the late 1970s, he omits the final phrase, "as in the olden time."

From here Gore continues his main theme: "Thus do we meekly acquiesce in the loss of the world’s rain forests and their living species, the loss of the Everglades, the Aral Sea, the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, the topsoil of the Midwest. . ." etc. "Bitter cups all--but only ‘the beginning of the reckoning,’ only the first of a steady stream of progressively more serious ecological catastrophes that will be repeatedly proffered to us . . ."

In An Inconvenient Truth Gore ratchets up the comparison, making out skeptics of his eco-apocalypticism, or doubters of the proposed remedies such as the Kyoto Protocol, to be the moral equivalent of Nazi appeasers. Gore cites the conclusion of Churchill’s 1936 speech attacking appeasement: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

Now, one needn’t be a so-called climate skeptic--in fact, one can be in complete agreement with Gore about the climate issue--to wonder about the felicity of this use of Churchill. Never mind whether this usage is consistent with Churchill’s own brief musings about climate change in his essay "Fifty Years Hence," in which he speculates that we might be able to control our climate favorably someday--a suggestion that, made today, gets you roped off to the lunatic fringe. ("Geography and climate would obey our orders," WSC wrote.) One might also raise the other urgent comparison--whether the Clinton-Gore administration--or indeed the Administrations of both parties over the last generation--gave sufficient attention to the gathering storm of Islamic radicalism that threatens to wash over the Western world in ways both violent and demographic. Is the problem of climate change--ostensibly an adverse tradeoff of the use of fossil fuels to power the prodigious and salutary economic growth of modern civilization--really the moral equivalent of Nazi and Communist malevolence and hatred? Is ExxonMobil or Arch Coal really motivated by a loathing of nature or mankind? Are dissenting scientists like MIT’s Richard Lindzen morally comparable to Nazi appeasers?

To sort this out it is worth stepping back for a wider view of the transliteration of Churchill into more recent controversies, and compare Gore’s application of Churchill with the uses of Churchill in connection with the raging debate over arms control in the 1970s and 1980s. Here one saw a wide spectrum of figures such as Ronald Reagan, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, and Pat Moynihan drawing comparisons between the 1930s’ enthusiasms for disarmament and appeasement and the 1970s enthusiasm for arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. In 1977 Norman Podhoretz summarized the mood in Harper’s magazine: "I have been struck very forcibly by certain resemblances between the United States today and Great Britain in the years after the first world war. . . The parallels with England in 1937 are here, and this revival of the culture of appeasement ought to be troubling our sleep." Scoop Jackson complained: "To enter a treaty which favors the Soviets as this one does on the ground that we will be in a worse position without it, is appeasement in its purest form. . . It is all ominously reminiscent of Great Britain in the 1930s." Ronald Reagan went as far as to compare Jimmy Carter to Neville Chamberlain. After Carter’s 1979 State of the Union speech in which he hailed the upcoming SALT II treaty as a means to peace, Reagan remarked: "Heard in the background music to that speech [was] the sorry tapping of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella on the cobblestones of Munich. He, too, talked of peace in our time." (Interestingly, Reagan’s political and policy advisers were unanimously against his making this comparison, for various reasons. Fred C. Ikle, who had served as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Nixon and was a Reagan adviser, wrote to Peter Hannaford in the spring of 1979 with the "editorial suggestion" that "analogies to the 1930s should be avoided in discussions of our foreign and defense policy addressed to the general public. I fear, to the younger generation, they may either fail to stir up the right associations or appear anachronistic. Even for expert audiences, the many differences between that era and ours tend to provoke unnecessary quibbling." Allen concurred, writing to Hannaford that "In connection with Fred Ikle’s suggestion concerning use of the 1930s (especially the Chamberlain line), I am in complete agreement." Another interesting tidbit from this time is that after Carter signed the SALT II Treaty in Vienna in July 1979, he disdained to use an umbrella as he ambled across the airport tarmac in a driving rain to board Air Force One, conscious of the imagery of Chamberlain’s return from Munich. Later, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter read the first volume of Churchill’s World War II memoirs, The Gathering Storm, and offered his own parallels to the period.)

Here let us recall the core of Churchill’s critique of what he called "the prolonged and solemn farce" of disarmament. Churchill understood that the core of the problem was not arms themselves, but the moral character of the regimes with which the democracies sought to negotiate arms reductions. For Churchill, Armaments were a symptom, not a cause, of international tensions, and repeatedly urged Britain’s leaders to look to "the political and economic causes which lie behind the maintenance of armies and navies." "Disarmament has nothing do to with peace," Churchill averred; "When you have peace, you will have disarmament." In the 1970s arms control became the centerpiece of U.S.-Soviet relations and the chief barometer of whether relations were improving. Reagan knew this was a fig leaf, and cited some of the same examples as Churchill, such as the Washington Naval Agreement of 1921. "Do arms limitation agreements--even good ones--really bring or preserve peace?", Reagan asked in 1979. "History would seem to say ‘no.’" Reagan liked to say--and did say directly to Gorbachev at their first meeting--that "we do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other." Hence, the issue of trust--not the numbers of throw-weights of different classes of missiles--was the key to resolving Cold War tensions. And significantly it was a series of small steps, taken wholly outside the realm of arms control, that led first to a thaw and then to the undoing of the Soviet Union.

I have written elsewhere on the suggestive trivia that President Reagan cited Churchill more often than all other American presidents combined, quite a feat when you note, as John Ramsden does in his splendid and copious survey of the legacy of Churchill since 1945, that quoting Churchill is a bipartisan pastime in American politics. (The president who made the fewest references to Churchill was Bill Clinton, prompting Ramsden to observe that "Clinton made few rhetorical gestures towards Churchill in an eight-year presidency, being perhaps the first President since Herbert Hoover to neglect that duty, and did not turn up in Fulton for the fiftieth anniversary of Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in 1996, despite an earlier intention to attend.") Reagan absorbed Churchill’s logic as well as his words. At the core of Churchill’s understanding of the folly of appeasement was his clarity about the nature of totalitarian regimes--that they were not normal regimes as Aristotle would recognize them and as the appeases deluded themselves, but dangerous perversions for whom outward aggression was essential to survival and perpetuation. Writing in Colliers in 1937, Churchill noted the grim logic of totalitarianism:

But what is the regime to do in the face of all these difficulties? They promised to cure unemployment. They have largely done so, but how? Only by a process of rearmament and of ever more severe national discipline which cannot be kept up perpetually. To relax their grip may be at the same time to release avenging forces. Dictators and those who sustain them cannot quit their offices with the easy disdain--or more often relief--with which an American President or a British Prime Minister submits himself to an adverse popular verdict. For the dictator the choice may well be the throne or the grave. The character of the men who have raised themselves from obscurity to these positions of fierce, dazzling authority does not permit us to believe that they would bow their heads meekly to the stroke of fate. One has the feeling they would go down or conquer fighting, and play the fearful stakes which are in their hands. . . Thus we are confronted with a situation in Europe abhorrent to its peoples, including the great mass of German and Italian peoples, in which bands of competent, determined men under ruthless leadership find themselves alike unable to go or to stop. It may well be that the choice before Germany is a choice between an internal and an external explosion. . . Economic and political ruin may stare them in the face, and the only means of escape may be victory in the field. They have the power to make war. They have the incentive to make war; nay, it may well be almost compulsion.

One might, without too much stretching or heavy-lifting, apply this insight to Islamic radicalism, which without its intense hatreds and sanctification of violence might lose much of its popular appeal in the troubled parts of the world where it seethes and recruits. Indeed, one repairs to Churchill’s bracing formulations about Islam in the original edition of The River War, such as this: "Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science--the science against which it had vainly struggled--the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome." Now, of course, fundamentalist Islam is reaching as fast as possible for the very fruits of modern nuclear science such as to bring about, in its frothiest vision, the fall of modern Europe. Meanwhile, Europe might be said to be following the course of . . . appeasement.

Reagan occasionally entertained the view that although it was in the Soviet Union’s interest to end the arms race and to liberalize, it would likely entail the undoing of Soviet Communism. He was nearly alone in this view, though he was entirely consonant with Churchill’s view that Communism was metaphysically defective--that it was against human nature. (Nixon and Kissinger, for example, did not share this view.) In other words, for both Churchill and Reagan, the moral character of the opposing regimes was paramount.

The problem with the entire arms control process in the 1970s was that it tried to evade this central truth by converting a moral problem into a technical problem. In other words, since the clash between democracy and Communism was so fundamental and irresolvable through any normal diplomacy, relations became centered around negotiations over the technical aspects of each side’s arsenal, hoping that agreements on technical details would reduce tensions. This did little or nothing to reduce tensions, precisely because it avoided the moral dimension of the problem.

Now at last we can circle back to Al Gore’s use of Churchill in connection with climate change by noting the asymmetry between this issue and arms control. Whereas the mistake of the arms control process was trying to turn a moral problem into a technical problem, Vice President Gore is trying to turn a technical and economic problem--greenhouse gas emissions--into a moral problem of the same dimension as totalitarianism. And one of the further oddities or ironies of this case is that then-Congressman and later Senator Gore was one of the few liberals who resisted the attempt to turn the underlying moral dimension of the arms control problem on its head with the idea of the "nuclear freeze"--the simplistic idea promoted, as Harvey Mansfield pointed out, by people who thought Ronald Reagan a simpleton. Throughout this bitter controversy, Gore remained firmly in the camp of arms control technocrats, offering some serious and thoughtful ideas in the field, such as the single-warhead midgetman missile. The more you look at Gore’s useage of Churchill in connection with climate change, the more it looks like a clumsy attempt to boot the foot of an athlete or elegant dancer in a wooden clog.

And so to return to our beginning, with Nietzsche’s tripartite scheme of historical usage, what he called "monumental," "antiquarian," and "critical" history. Monumental history provides the man of action with models of greatness. As Nietzsche explains it, "What is the use to the modern man of this ‘monumental’ contemplation of the past, this preoccupation with the rare and classic? It is the knowledge that greatness existed and was therefore possible, and so may be possible again. . ."

Antiquarian history is simply his name for the use of history in service of tradition, for the association of the good with the ancestral. Naturally Nietzsche has contempt for this.

It is Nietzsche’s understanding of what he calls "critical" history where the most mischief comes into play. Critical history is what we might ordinarily call "revisionism"--it seeks to render some of our past judgments obsolete and irrelevant, and thereby pave the way for creating a new horizon for future human experience. Critical history aims to supersede history, to free us from history, in order to chart bold new pathways independent or different from our historical inheritance.

And so here we begin to appreciate more deeply that Gore’s language about our "dysfunctional civilization," about our need for a "wrenching transformation" of society, of a need for a revolution in human consciousness, and above all his ascription of dissent from his point of view a akin to mental illness, partakes very much of the Nietzschean spirit of critical history. Like Nietzsche, Gore wishes to uproot the future, and forge a decisive break with historical continuity. How different is this from Churchill’s approach to history, which Nietzsche would have instantly recognized as monumental history.

Historical use of Churchill should be more closely tethered to his understanding of statesmanship. Honest doubt about a complex scientific forecast of the future, or the prudent precautions to take against it, is surely different in character from the moral evasion that mislabels or misunderstands political malevolence. People can disagree about the extent to which Churchill analogies can be applied to the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism today; still, it is striking to hear Vice President Gore say, along with a number of other figures, that climate change is presently a greater threat to mankind than terrorism, because, as he argues in his earlier book, the threat of totalitarianism is now an obsolete chapter in history. I wonder if he would still say that if Iran, Pakistan, India, and Israel embark on a nuclear arms race, or if Pakistan should slip fully beneath the waves of Islamic radicalism and become an open enemy of the West instead of the timorous and reluctant partner as it is now?

Seeing this narrow and peculiar use of Churchill brings to mind Churchill’s definition of a fanatic as someone who can’t change their mind, and won’t change the subject.

Steven F. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at AEI.