Download - Winston Churchill

“ How could we bear to be treatedlike schoolboys...to be turnedout on parade by tens of thousands tomarch and cheer for this slogan or forthat; to be forced every hour to conceal thenatural workings of the human intellectand the pulsations of the human heart?Why, I say that rather than submit tosuch oppression, there is no length wewould not go to....We are in the midst ofdangers so great and increasing, we are theguardians of causes so precious to theworld that we must, as the Bible says, ‘Layaside every impediment’ and prepare ourselvesnight and day to be worthy of theFaith that is in us.” —WSC, Paris, 1936as to call upon the faithful in Britain to “unite in helpingthe police to capture these murderers.” But the bravery ofsuch moderates was barely noted by the Western press,and hardly mentioned in Washington. It should havebeen detailed in a White House press conference on developmentsin foreign affairs.Conclusion“Let us preach what we practice,” as Churchill saidat Fulton, and begin to compete seriously in the strugglefor public opinion. No student of Winston Churchillshould ever forego the art of rhetoric in the ways we havein these last five years.We will defeat this latest scourge of militant Muslimterrorism. It is a fierce and ugly ideology. But the samewas true of international anarchism, Soviet bolshevism,and Nazi fascism, and all those have been defeated. Allviolent ideologies, from wherever they come, are by theirnatures less worthy than democracy.And so on this anniversary of Fulton, which markedthe commencement of a war of ideas more than a standoffof armies, let us reenergize our convictions. AsWinston Churchill said to an ally in a speech entitled“Collective Security” in 1936: all aggressive action mustbe judged, not from the standpoint of Right and Left, butof “right and wrong….We are in the midst of dangers sogreat and increasing, we are the guardians of causes so preciousto the world, that we must, as the Bible says, ‘layaside every impediment,’ and prepare ourselves night andday to be worthy of the Faith that is in us.” 17Endnotes1. Pilpel, Robert H., Churchill in America: 1895-1961: AnAffectionate Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976),section title. The press conference notes quoted are on pp. 214-15.2. Ibid., 223.3. Taubman, William, Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente toDétente to Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 133.4. Pravda, Moscow, 1 August 1946, as reported in the sameday’s Associated Press. Robert Pilpel traced the phrase “iron curtain”to a 1942 usage by a German finance minister. Sir Martin Gilberttraced it yet farther back, to the Russian émigré philosopher VasilyRozanov in Apocalypse of Our Time (1918): “With a rumble and aroar, an iron curtain is descending on Russian History.”5. “Prime Minister to President Truman,” T. 895/5, on 12May 1945, CHAR 20/218, Churchill Archives Centre, CambridgeUniversity. I appreciate the aid of the Archives, and the support ofthe Marine Corps University Foundation which made those visitspossible.6. Churchill usually restricted his doubts about the UnitedNations to private discussions with advisers. He did write a causticpassage against the organization as peopled with so many small statesas to be a “Babel” at times, but that prose came later, when writingthe final volume of his war memoirs.7. The Military Staff Committee is mentioned in the UNCharter, articles 26 and 47. The committee meets regularly. Yet it isso obscure that when I asked one speaker who had just lectured onUN peacekeeping operations about it, he balked, asked me to repeatthe question, and then had no reply. Books on containment and thepostwar world also forget the committee. Dr. Janeen Klinger of theArmy War College believes that the onset of Cold War made militaryactivity by the UN so unlikely that its military staff committeeimmediately proved moribund. She points the reader to Eric Grove,“UN Armed Forces and the Military Staff Committee: A LookBack,” International Security, vol. 17, no. 4, Spring 1993, 172-82.8. A critical meeting between U.S. and British officials tookplace at the British Embassy in Washington on 22 May 1943. Thosepresent included Vice President Henry Wallace and Sumner Welles, aState Department appeaser before the war and a bitter critic ofChurchill’s; in 1946 he would say kind things about the Fultonspeech.9. “Telling America’s Story Abroad” is the official objective ofthe Voice of America.10. While the entire budget for the Department of State andour foreign aid program is less than $35 billion, that of theDepartment of Defense is nearing $500 billion.11. “Voice of America: Cuts at a Glance,” Associated Press, 23February 2007.12. There are several of these, including Military Studies in theJihad Against the Tyrants, c. 1994, discovered in Manchester, England,some years later.13. 28 August 1944; see Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchillvol. 7, Road to Victory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 918.14. Ibid., 1046, speech of 31 October 1944.15. Harmon, Christopher C., Terrorism Today, 2nd. ed.(Abingdon, Oxford, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2007), ch. 5.16. It is encouraging that the latest White House nationalstrategy for counterterrorism does make a passing mention of thisincredibly important pattern in terrorism.17. Gilbert, Martin, Winston S. Churchill vol. 5, Prophet ofTruth 1922-1929 (London: Heinemann, 1976), 788. Paraphrase andquotations, 24 September 1936, Theatre des Ambassadeurs, Paris. ,FINEST HOUR 135 / 31