It is said the history is written by the victors; and Winston S. Churchill is certainly the foremost author, in both senses of the word, of the events recorded in our article on capitalism and war. Had he not written so much we might fail to identify him among so many worthy candidates as the foremost fool and villain of his time.

As the architect of Gallipoli, Churchill might have had the decency to permanently retire in shame from public life in 1916. Instead, he managed to rehabilitate himself enough to acquire some share of the blame for the 1918 Armistice that set the stage for economic collapse, Fascist reaction, and military self-annihilation. Finding himself Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925 (with more than two million of his countrymen either unemployed or severely underemployed) Churchill effected Europe’s economic suicide by deflating the pound enough to put Britain back on the gold standard at its pre-war rate of exchange.

Re-created as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill equipped his nation with battleships enough to assure victory in any engagement resembling Trafalgar. Thus he altogether missed the potential for aircraft carriers to sink his new navy in the sea lanes off southern Asia in 1941, surrendering Britain’s control of that theatre for the first time in 300 years, while his island nation was very nearly starved into submission by submarine warfare.

For what purpose did the UK declare war? Churchill said it was to preserve the English-speaking people's global economic empires. He even went so far in this vein as to refer to Gandhi and Hitler as twin evils, indentifying ‘evil’ with ‘anti-imperial’ without the least regard for the method by which empire is opposed. Though his war policy was completely carried-through for him by Roosevelt II, Churchill lived to see Europe’s over-seas empires crumble, and the homelands of the English-speaking peoples flooded with refugees from prior conquests.

Was there any basis to choose sides in the war between Hitler and Stalin? If so, then Churchill himself tells us the choice was wrongly made: when finally confronted with the victorious Stalinism he did so much to create, Churchill dismisses the entire enterprise with We have killed the wrong pig. And where is the Soviet Empire now? Russia, itself shorn of empire, is agitating along with Britain for entry into the very free trade zone that der Kaiser might have created by peaceful means prior to 1914. Though now rechristened as the European Union, it is essentially a Fourth Reich wherein NATO has replaced the wehrmacht, and the Euro has replaced the reichmarck.

Clearly the Great War, together with its even greater sequel, has failed to force the economic aims of the victors upon the defeated. Hitler did not quite knock England out of the war, nor prevent the United States and Russia from occupying Germany. But [as this is written in 2002] BMW owns Rolls-Royce, Daimler owns Chrysler, and Toyota has eclipsed Ford to become the world's second leading auto manufacturer. The military occupations of Germany and Japan have now continued for more than half a century. Yet these nations have returned to dominate their respective economic spheres, having outlived the international socialist orders that the Allies fostered in Russia and China.

Before the Twentieth Century it could be said that a great many deaths will sanctify any cause. Now that the toll from the era of Churchill is in, mankind might have finally concluded upon the futility of war upon economic destiny, and perhaps be open to a discernment of that destiny by other means.

The great age of economic Keynesianism arrived in the second half of the Twentieth Century. It was a response to the geopolitical aftermath of World War II:

For the first time in late European history, the German bulwark against Slavic Asia had been removed.

The nascent Japanese challenge to a de-Europeanized China had been similarly aborted.

Every parliament in Europe and Asia was poised for emersion in the rising Communist tide.

These demands were augmented yet again by a series of wars in which the United States tried to defend European and Japanese imperial possessions from International Socialism. With the highly qualified exception of South Korea, all of these Asian-Pacific wars failed to achieve their political aim. Ultimately, the US could not even defend its own possessions in the Philippines — let alone French Indo-Chine, the Dutch East-Indies, etc.

But political success was irrelevant to the economic point of these expenditures. All a Keynesian economic order needs is the expenditure itself. Once profit has been gleaned-off the expense of war, post-war reconstruction, and war preparation, it is (economically speaking) just as well that the general public not receive anything in the way of added security. So long as safety remains unachieved, the promise of its arrival can be sold again and again to keep the wheels of commerce turning.

This period's greatest political warrior against International Socialism was Richard Nixon. He became popular as a congressman in the late 1940’s by denouncing the official thinking that had first sought alliances with Communism, and which had thereby assured the careers of Stalin and Mao. As US President (1969-74) he impressed popular culture as a somewhat Nazi-like figure: favoring the socialist imperium; but nationalistic in the scope of its application.

He created the two most autocratic of executive enthusiasms, viz.: the Environmental Protection Agency and the racial-ethnic spoils system known as affirmative action.

He alloyed executive authority with legislative abdication to dictate wages and prices. And he offered the public a guaranteed annual income.

But his China initiative offered bilateral relations — not formation of an Internationale.