The real Winston Churchill

I’ve been talking a lot here lately about the Claremont Institute’s Winston Churchill award, which, from the quality of its most recent recipient, seems a pretty meaningless, or worse, a subversive affair, using Churchill’s name and fame to honor a wisecracking defeatist, and so fool people into thinking that wisecracking defeatism represents the spirit of Western resistance. In doing so, the award fulfills one of the central tasks of modern culture, which is to empty words, symbols, and even artistic expressions of their substantive meaning, in areas ranging from religion to politics to the Constitution to ballet to popular entertainment, while continuing to pretend to be devoted to the truths that those words, symbols, and expressions are supposed to represent. Let us then restore to the name Churchill its true meaning by remembering the deeds and character of the man for whom the award is named. The following is from the peroration of Winston Churchill’s June 18, 1940 speech to the House of Commons, weeks after Dunkirk, just before France surrendered, leaving Britain alone in the fight:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2006 01:35 PM | Send