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Understanding Churchill
Pericles and Churchill: Matching Leadership, Millennia Apart
15
Feb
2024
By JUSTIN D. LYONS
Pericles sought to preserve Athens, its glory, power and reputation. Churchill demanded struggle not only for Britain, but for the very meaning of Britain—something larger than its borders, more powerful than its military strength and, ultimately more important than its survival: liberty. Churchill’s war was a battle for the freedom of man, to be defended first at home and then upon whatever far-flung fields the conflict would rage.
Vanishing National Anthems: Do We Still Know the Words?
31
Aug
2023
1
By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
“Even the single-stanza Star-Spangled Banner is under threat from alternate anthems. One proposed replacement is that Chamber of Commerce production America the Beautiful—widely admired because everyone can sing it. Still, if we can put up with desecrations of the anthem by pop singers at Super Bowls, the rest of us can afford to miss the high notes in ‘rockets’ red glare...’”
Reporting Churchills: Henry Lucy on Winston and Lord Randolph
31
Jul
2023
By DAVE TURRELL
Winston “was evidently fully supplied with notes,” Lucy wrote, “but he did not use his manuscript for the purpose of reading a single sentence...a debater who will have to be reckoned with whatever Government is in office. Probably a ministry composed of his own political friends have most to apprehend.” The last sentence is telling. It was obvious that Winston was his father’s son—a political disrupter by nature.
Churchill and Health Issues: The Paradox of Coincidental Success
05
Jan
2023
1
By Nicholas Bosanquet and Andrew Haldenby
In 1942 Churchill broadcast on a four-year plan for postwar reconstruction, including what he called “the spacious domain of public health…. I was brought up on the maxim of Lord Beaconsfield which my father was always repeating: ‘Health and the laws of health’…. Here let me say there is no finer investment in any community than putting milk into babies. Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”
Churchill and H.G. Wells Debate Government by Experts
09
Nov
2022
1
By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
Churchill challenged Wells’s prediction of a future world government run by experts: “Human nature is a much more intractable and masterful thing than your speculations admit,” he told HGW. “We shall not change so quickly as you think.” Churchill’s views hadn’t changed 30 years later when he wrote: “It is at once the safeguard and the glory of mankind that they are easy to lead and hard to drive.”
How Churchill Saw the Second World War as a Moral Conflict
20
Oct
2022
1
By JUSTIN D. LYONS
Hitler appealed to everything that is darkest in the human heart. Churchill himself appealed to different passions. He summoned the virtues of the British people and helped them find strength within themselves. He sought to elevate rather than to debase; to raise Britons from a desire for security above all to a contemplation of the just and the noble; to embolden them to face sacrifice and death rather than see the armies of evil pound their booted rhythms on the earth.
Ties That Bind: Washington, Lincoln and Churchill, Part 2
31
Mar
2022
By D. CRAIG HORN
There is no glory in war and no victory in retribution. Each of these leaders could look beyond war to Churchill’s “broad sunlit uplands.” Washington warned against aggravating the Patriot-Loyalist divide lest it destabilize the new nation. Abraham Lincoln took that precept to sublime heights in 1865: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.”
Ties That Bind: Washington, Lincoln and Churchill, Part 1
24
Mar
2022
Churchill for Today: His Six Precepts for Confronting Terrorists (Part 2)
16
Mar
2022
By CHRISTOPHER C. HARMON
"Democracy, I say, is not based on violence or terrorism, but on reason, on fair play, on freedom, on respecting other people’s rights as well as their ambitions…. I trust the people, the mass of the people, in almost any country, but I like to make sure that it is the people and not a gang of bandits." —WSC
Churchill for Today: What He Thought and Said about Terrorism (Part 1)
22
Feb
2022
1
By CHRISTOPHER C. HARMON
Churchill: "What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorizing not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country. We cannot admit this doctrine in any form. Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.”
Religion and Politics: Churchill and the Theologico-Political Problem
17
Dec
2021