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Articles
Churchill Today: A Life Worth Understanding in the Digital Age
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | June 11, 2022
- Category: Churchill for Today Explore
Today, “the leadership of the privileged has passed away, but it has not been succeeded by that of the eminent. We have entered the region of mass effects. The pedestals which had for some years been vacant have now been demolished. Nevertheless, the world is moving on, and moving so fast that few have time to ask, ‘Whither?’ And to these few only a babel responds.”1
The challenge today
In the film Stand-Up Guys, a character played by Al Pacino makes a thoughtful remark: “You really die twice. First when the last breath leaves your body, and second when the last person who knew you says your name.”
That may be true generally, but it doesn’t apply to Winston Spencer Churchill. Almost half a century since his death, those who knew him have dwindled to a handful; yet his name is all over the news. When the last person who knew him dies, Churchill will live on—like Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and, on the darker side, Hitler, Mao and Stalin. There will be plenty of detractors to illustrate his own faults. There always have been.
For some young people today he may fade into the blue distance of the Middle Ages. But anyone who thinks Churchill belongs to history doesn’t follow the news. We who know something about the real Churchill therefore have both a challenge and an opportunity. It’s called the Internet. Like it or not, information today turns more and more on that electronic Speaker’s Corner. In this bubbling, digital soup, Churchill can say anything, or do anything, from deserting a sinking ship to fire-bombing Dresden—quoted, or misquoted, by anonymous authors.
But the truth matters, or it should. Who was the real Churchill? What did he stand for? We’ll not get the answers from obscure zealots with wi-fi connections.
The digital warp
His name elicits 40 to 50 million browser hits, because today the Internet is where people go. So much of it is so rarely checked that it easily confuses truth with fiction. Yet a recent survey of British schoolchildren revealed that nearly half thought Churchill was a mythical figure, like Sherlock Holmes. This says something about public education, which too often simply omits Churchill.
Those who know he existed frequently misconstrue him. Take for example his injections of humor into serious situations. After discontinuing the plan to ring church bells if the Germans invaded Britain in 1940, he said: “I cannot help feeling that anything like a serious invasion would be bound to leak out.”2 Or when Hitler invaded Russia and was confronted by the Russian winter: “He must have been very loosely educated.”3 Such remarks caused offense back then. Today, some still do.
Web-crawlers today are sometimes perplexed at Churchill’s unexpected outbursts of magnanimity—because it is now so rare a quality. There was his remark about Erwin Rommel, commander of the German Afrika Korps, in the heat of battle in 1942: “We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.”4 That still earns the outraged complaint that he praised a Nazi. Ignorance again: The real Rommel “came to hate Hitler and all his works,”5 conspired in an assassination plot, and paid for it with his life. The real Churchill never hid his admiration for persons of quality, even among his enemies.
Quips and wisecracks
Churchill’s joking asides often give people entirely the wrong impression, causing them to draw false conclusions. Mainly this is because they are quoted out of context, the circumstances unexplained. The late William F. Buckley, Jr. offered an example:
Working his way through disputatious bureaucracy from separatists in Delhi, Churchill exclaimed, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” I don’t doubt that the famous gleam came to his eyes when he said this, with mischievous glee—an offense, in modern convention, of genocidal magnitude.6
Mr. Buckley had no idea how prescient he was. Years later, a book appeared accusing Churchill of willfully exacerbating the 1943 Bengal famine—which he actually tried to alleviate. And that private wisecrack of his has been used to prove he hated Indians. It was made, incidentally, to Leo Amery, who recorded it in his diary, which makes it hearsay. We do know that Churchill loved to tweak the excitable Amery with an occasional outrageous aside.7
Understanding the man
The real Churchill is a complicated subject, with a 50-year career and masses of documentation. Understanding him takes determination. Alas, a number of people today are determined to believe anything. From playwrights to pundits, politicians to polemicists, they can probably find more pure rubbish about Churchill on the Internet than in all critical books of the last century. Of course, some of the criticisms are well-founded. Churchill’s faults like his virtues were on a grand scale. But the latter far outweighed the former.
Through the work of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project and other institutions, the truth is having some effect. Public figures are more cagey when they quote Churchill nowadays. Sometimes they even ask for verification.
The late Senator John Warner once uttered the unverified Churchillism, “Americans will always do the right thing after all other possibilities are exhausted.” Taking no chances, he added that “good authorities suggest” Churchill didn’t say that (but if not, he should have).
Fair enough! The columnist George Will, voiced another misquote: “The greatest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” But Mr. Will then observed that Churchill possibly never said this. He was right: Churchill had more respect than that for the average voter.
It is good to portray the real Churchill. After all, he is fun to study. He requires explaining. He represents many sides to many questions, which may or may not matter today. History never repeats itself; Churchill’s specific policies may not apply today. But as Paul Addison wrote, his writings and speeches are full of reflections and philosophy that offer food for thought: “It is rare to discover in the archives the reflections of a politician on the nature of man.”8
Get it right!
Here’s a modest rule: Criticize and analyze him by all means. But get it right. Sir Winston recalled “a professor who in his declining hours was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.’”9 One can only wish Twitter and Facebook users would actually do that.
One of the least appreciated periods of his life, was as Leader of the Opposition in 1945-51. On issue after issue, he excoriated Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, of whom Churchill was very fond personally. Attlee had been his devoted deputy prime minister during the war.
It is not true, therefore, that Churchill once said, “an empty car drew up and Clement Attlee got out.” When confronted with this alleged crack he replied that Attlee was a gallant and devoted servant of the Crown, and he would never say that about him. And this is important, because it shows us that whatever the political quarrels—which they fought tooth and nail—Churchill never indulged in personal attacks, and regarded his opponents as servants of the nation. That is something we have lost today, because too many politicians mainly serve themselves.
He really had an endearing, sometimes cynical, but at other times charitable attitude to his opponents. Here are two remarks we supplied recently to members of the U.S. Congress: “I have noticed that whenever a distinguished politician declares that a particular question is above party, what he really means is that everybody, without distinction of party, shall vote for him.”10 And: “Some people’s idea of [debate] is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.”11
Optimistic realist
Churchill was unabashedly proud of his country’s history, and of the good Britain, America and the Commonwealth democracies, including India, had accomplished. But he was not sure about the future. A fair description of him would be “optimistic realist”—especially about mankind, the same imperfect being, he declared, presented by science with increasingly potent and dangerous toys. It is hard to believe he spoke these words over 70 years ago:
…the spate of events with which we attempt to cope, and which we strive to control, have far exceeded, in this modern age, the old bounds, that they have been swollen up to giant proportions, while, all the time, the stature and intellect of man remain unchanged. It is therefore above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions.12
Still he saw hope: “the genus homo is a tough creature who has travelled here by a very long road. His…spirit has, from the earliest dawn of history, shown itself upon occasion capable of mounting to the sublime, far above material conditions or mortal terrors. He still remains man—still remains as Pope described him 200 years ago:
Placed on this Isthmus of a middle State,
A being darkly wise and rudely great…
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.13
Honoring leadership
Reviewing a book of Churchill calumnies, most of them false or distorted, Peter Baker powerfully argued that Churchill deserves his monuments:
None of our historical idols were as unvarnished as the memorials we build to them. The question is: What are they being honored for? Which contributions to history do we celebrate?…. Churchill has been venerated despite his manifest flaws, not because of them. Statues in Parliament Square and elsewhere are meant to remind us of his finest hour, not his darkest ones.14
What do those memorials honor him for? They honor a leader who strove, as he said of Neville Chamberlain, “to save the world from awful, devastating struggle.”15 When the struggle came despite his efforts, he did not win it—that was not in his power alone. What he did in his finest hour, Charles Krauthammer wrote, was not lose it:
The great movements that underlie history—the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures—are undeniably powerful, almost determinant. Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different. In the 20th century only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without him, in 1940, the world today would be unrecognizable—dark, impoverished, tortured.16
Churchill’s merit does not rest only on 1940. As Larry P. Arnn wrote in Churchill’s Trial, his entire life is an object lesson in the art of statesmanship: “Prudence, involving ‘calculating and ordering many things that shift and change,’ has from ancient times been held to be the defining virtue and art of the statesman.” His challenges were those of human nature and governance, relevant to his world and ours, Dr. Arnn wrote: “Churchill’s trial is also our trial.”17
“A little nearer to our own times”
The subject of those statues and memorials is the one of whom Sir Martin Gilbert wrote:
Churchill was indeed a noble spirit, sustained in his long life by a faith in the capacity of man to live in peace, to seek prosperity, and to ward off threats and dangers by his own exertions. His love of country, his sense of fair play, his hopes for the human race, were matched by formidable powers of work and thought, vision and foresight. His path had often been dogged by controversy, disappointment and abuse, but these had never deflected him from his sense of duty and his faith in the British people.18
“How strange it is that the past is so little understood and so quickly forgotten,” Churchill wrote a friend in 1929. “I have tried to drag history up a little nearer to our own times in case it should be helpful as a guide in present difficulties.”19
How do we do that? To paraphrase the words of a famous American admirer and president: Ask not what Churchill would do today. Ask what we should do, bearing Churchill firmly in mind.
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), “John Morley,” in Great Contemporaries (1937; London: Leo Cooper, 1990), 61-62.
2 WSC, House of Commons, 22 April 1943, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 297.
3 WSC, broadcast, London, 10 May 1942, in Churchill by Himself, 347.
4 WSC, The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), 177.
5 Ibid.
6 William F. Buckley, Jr., “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Boston, 27 October 1995, in Churchill Proceedings 1994-1995 (Hopkinton, N.H.: Churchill Centre, 1998), 82.
7 Bradley Tolppanen, “Great Contemporaries: Leopold Amery,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2019, accessed 28 October 2021.
8 Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 125.
9 WSC, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1950), 616.
10 WSC, Commons, 8 March 1905 in Churchill by Himself, 406.
11 WSC, Commons, 13 October 1943, ibid., 99.
12 WSC, Commons, 6 February 1941, ibid., 566
13 WSC, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, 31 March 1949, ibid.
14 Peter Baker, “The Case Against Winston Churchill,” in The New York Times, 26 October 2021, https://nyti.ms/3BsNEWS, accessed 28 October 20231
15 WSC, Commons, 12 November 1940, in Churchill by Himself, 331.
16 Charles Krauthammer, “Person of the 20th Century,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2019, accessed 28 October 2021.
17 Larry P. Arnn, Churchill’s Trial, reviewed by Justin D. Lyons, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2015, accessed 29 October 2021.
18 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol.8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 1365.
19 WSC to Lady Horner, 5 April 1929, in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol 11, The Exchequer Years 1922-1929 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press), 2009, 1456.