Winston Churchill remains, time and again, the man Britain crowns as its greatest ever figure. Yet his views on nationalism sit uneasily with the liberal establishment that so often tries to claim his legacy. In one of his clearest statements on the subject, Churchill drew a distinction that today’s elites would rather erase; nationalism as a lust for domination was a vice, but nationalism as love of country, tradition, and culture was nothing less than the “first of virtues.”

He warned against those “false guides” who muddled the two in order to reduce nations and peoples to a uniform pattern, stripped of identity and rooted only in material satisfaction. That insight could not be further from the prevailing orthodoxy since his departure, an orthodoxy which even sees the EU, on its own website, misrepresenting his words to claim he sought to abolish the “ills of nationalism.”

This is not hearsay, nor the invention of latter-day spin doctors. It is Winston Churchill in his own words, delivered during his first post-war speech in Holland in 1946. Speaking as both a war leader and a statesman, Churchill was crystal clear: true nationalism, rooted in loyalty to country and culture, was a virtue and the very foundation of a free and happy family of nations.

"I will now, Mr. Speaker, if you will permit me, if I do not trespass too long upon your courtesy and goodwill, speak of nationalism. Is it an evil or is it a virtue?

"Where nationalism means the lust for pride and power, the craze for supreme domination by weight or force; where it is the senseless urge to be the biggest in the world, it is a danger and a vice. Where it means love of country and readiness to die for country; where it means love of tradition and culture and the gradual building up across the centuries of a social entity dignified by nationhood, then it is the first of virtues."

"It is indeed the foundation of a progressive and happy family of nations. Some of our shallow thinkers and false guides—and there are many today—do not distinguish between these two separate and opposing conceptions. They mix them together and use all arguments according as their fancy or their interest prompts them. They condemn nationalism as an old-world obsession and seek to reduce us all, both countries and individuals to one uniform pattern with nothing but material satisfactions as our goal."

"Or again, or sometimes with almost the same breath, they pervert the noble sentiments of patriotism to the hideous, aggressive expansion of old-world imperialism, and to the obliteration by force or by wrongful teaching of all the varieties and special cultures, all those dear thoughts of home and country without which existence, however logically planned, would be dreary and barren beyond thought or imagination."

*Speech taken from The Churchill Project-Hillsdale College