Same reason Stalin is still popular in Russia. No need for any kind of ideological connection, if you lead your country through WW2 and won, you are going to be popular.
unless you're FDR cuz the economic and political changes he made in order to win the war, including running 4 times and providing a safety net for the vulnerable, were MOST UNCIVIL :pinocchio-evil:
In fairness, he does get viewed with a lot of reverence and the only reason he's lost a hit of stature is a long term active propaganda war against him and the new deal.
FDR was instrumental in destroying the left by sapping it's energy through welfare programs.
effectively destroyed the left in the U.S. but weirdly if he lived longer might have saved it in the soviet union (assuming he was able to solidify his plans of economic and political cooperation with the USSR).
yeah iirc fdr wanted to cooperate with the soviets against colonialism and the bri'ish
Churchill was a charismatic figure and a good public speaker. He was so at a time where the British public really needed someone to look up to. And he actually won a world war.
He was also an unashamed racist and imperialist which only elevates him even further in the eyes of elite wetoids.
whir whir whir
Hey, who turned this lathe on?! Anyway, I was just wondering how long they could weekend at Bernie’s trump like they did for Churchill’s radio speeches.
It's still so weird to listen to Churchills speeches now, because he doesn't actually sound all that good. At least to me, a dumb Dane, Churchill sounds like a fat drunk british guy you'll meet on a holiday in Spain. I can't for the life of me understand how he was considered charismatic or even good at speaking, considering that he was slurring his words a third of the time. He doesn't even sound all that posh, or maybe he is such an upperclass-twit that I just can't recognize his subtleties.
WW2 was essentially the last time Britain was relevant on the world stage before it became part of America's shadow. If you want to be nostalgic for a period when the UK still mattered, Churchill's time would be the most recent.
Being in office during times of crisis also helps a lot- think of how popular Giuliani was after 9/11 despite being absolute dogshit. Regardless of how much the UK contributed to the war effort and how much of that can be attributed to Winston, at the end of the day the Allies were victorious and England stood standing while other nations fell, giving him an incredible amount of prestige.
he was in a leadership position during the most traumatic event in british living memory. and despite everything that came after the imperial mindset of britain is so strong that they've only recently begun to fully realize that they're no longer a world superpower.
They’re no longer a world superpower.
Yesterday I saw a comment that mentioned the size of the 2021 UK military budget. I would have guessed it was $5 or maybe $10 billion
The actual number
~$72 billion
If you aren't a world superpower - you can at least cosplay as one.
They don't even have a functional army. It's all attachments, like parts you can add onto an army to make it more effective as specific tasks. They don't have a core to it.
How much of that is for the navy? That seems like a pride thing more than anything, no way they let that falter
Google is increasingly useless to the point it would literally be faster to do the analysis myself than it would be to find it already done somewhere. I did some heuristical type analysis and found their naval budget to be 2/3rds of their army budget. That required me to make assumptions like their naval aircraft costing the same as their ground based ones, their ratio of land based and sea based helicopters being similar as that of the US, their land and sea based helicopters being of similar cost, the salary of navy and army personnel being the same on average, etc etc.
muh inspirational speeches
muh quippy quotes and slogans (some true, some misattributed)
muh good ol boy misogyny and nationalist racism
I assume he never had hangovers. He just stayed drunk the entire time. His kidneys? All stones. Stones all the way down.
I also like to point out that Elizabeth II is the Queen that saw the collapse of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen, yet she's also celebrated in the west. Maybe we should celebrate the Queen too, but for the reason explained before hehe.
I mean, compare Elizabeth II with Victoria.. one saw rapid expansion of the Empire, the other well... more or less became a vassal of the United States.
Of course the Queen is not like super responsible for the decadence of the Empire but it's fun to point out.
did the empire really collapse tho? the anglosphere is still doing anglosphere things. what changed is that the capital is now unquestionably in washington dc, not london.
The British Empire collapsed and the nature of empires changed. USA had the ability and knowledge of how to operate these new empires and essentially took over the role of the old world empires.
Things like the Suez Crisis sealed the deal on this passing of the torch.
i remember my high school teachers really talking him up and then listening to recordings of him and being very underwhelmed. especially the " we will fight them on the beaches " speech. dude sounds drunk and sleepy
I love the thing about what he said right after that
"And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that's bloody well all we've got!
I'd say that he is a lot more popular with pop history people than serious historians. He is a toff and probably the last one to be involved in anything of real note in the UK.
Nationalists, especially Anglos, love war. And Churchill was the one that helped win the last big war they were in.
Never underestimate the length of a people's memory of war.
