By now, most of us know Donald Trump has a bronze bust of Winston Churchill in his office. The bust, by Jacob Epstein, has a furrowed brow and the haunted expression of a man who has just swallowed his cigar. I like Epstein’s sculpture but this isn’t one of his best.
Is this the face of a man said to have survived 50 gunfights and 20,000 bottles of champagne, the man who ‘rallied the English’ against the Nazis? No. It is the face of a man stuck next to a notorious bore at dinner.
As the English-speaking world knows by now, New Zealand sacked its UK High Commissioner for a comment referencing this very bust. During a Q&A with the Finnish Foreign Minister in London, Goff made what he probably thought was a harmless jest at the expense of Trump’s recall of history.
The former foreign minister was referring to an accusation supposedly made by Churchill after the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which British PM Neville Chamberlain allowed Hitler to set the terms for his seizure of a chunk of Czechoslovakia.
“[Churchill] turned to Chamberlain,” quipped Goff. “‘You had the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, yet you will have war.’
“President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office,” Goff told the room. “But do you think he really understands history?”
Har har. The 1938 Munich Agreement has become a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states, so the room tittered at Goff for linking Chamberlain fawning over Hitler, with Trump fawning over Putin.
Winston Peters sacked Goff immediately, an effective way to share his joke with the world and make us look embarrassingly obsequious. Helen Clark says she would have ticked Goff off, rather than fired him. “New Zealand is being cautious to the point of looking a little odd among Western nations now,” she said.
But this ignores a burning question, for me, anyway. What would Churchill have made of Trump? The American president clearly hero-worships him.
Churchill, of course, did understand history, or at least an imperial version of it, joking, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
(Unlike Trump, Churchill was funny.)
As a former journalist, Churchill understood the role of the media. “A free press, he wrote, “is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.”
Unlike Trump, Churchill respected scholarship from science to the humanities. The guy won a Nobel Prize for Literature.
During WWII he effectively mobilised brilliant university students and graduates: the ‘tame magicians’ of the war effort, responsible for technological marvels like radar. Alan Turing toiled in the code-breaking huts of Bletchley Park along with English scholars and a ‘papyrologist’ (someone who could read ancient manuscripts). Churchill’s embrace of university intellectuals contrasts with Hitler, who terrorised and murdered them. The Nazi ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ led to Jewish mathematicians like Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel losing their jobs. Within a few months, Germany had thrown away its status as the world leader in mathematical research – to the gain of the US.
Today, scientists are fleeing the US.
Although no living American politician could be compared with Hitler, one of the greatest monsters to have ever lived, Trump is shedding generations of talent. This is captured in headlines: the science journal Nature: ‘Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere’; The New York Times: ‘The end of the university as we know it’; The Washington Post: ‘Trump policies sow chaos, confusion across scientific community’; Science magazine: ‘Overseas universities see opportunity in US ‘brain drain’.’
If science is the study of the nature of reality, Trump’s assault on reality requires an assault on data. Unlike Churchill, who pored over reports from the academic statisticians and economists of ‘S-Branch’, Trump appears to actively dislike evidence. His government has deleted at least 3000 irreplaceable datasets, in what has been called “a digital book burning”.
The non-profit internet archive the Wayback Machine has cataloged more than 73,000 web pages from US government websites which have vanished since Trump’s inauguration. North American scientists are trying to download huge datasets into personal hard drives, but it is impossible to save it all.
The Nature headline crystalised the problem – an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for example, are in Trump’s crosshairs, for collecting climate data he doesn’t like.
NOAA supplies real-time weather data used by New Zealanders from farmers to the captains of large ships. As Norm Henry, chief of science and innovation at MetService told Newsroom, the global meteorology community “relies on international data sharing, reflecting the fact that weather doesn’t respect political boundaries”.
As usual, there is a Churchill quote.
“Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.”
• Jenny Nicholls
