Without Winston Churchill, a Chilling Destiny

President Harry Truman and former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a train on the way to Fulton, Missouri for Churchill to give his “Sinews of Peace” speech. Photographer/Studio: Massie, Gerald R. Photo courtesy of the Missouri State Archives.

If the legacy of Winston Churchill can be torn asunder, “whose, pray tell, can stand?”

The legacy of many of the world’s greatest heroes often is complicated as well as tainted and perhaps boarding on repugnant, and certainly, Sir Winston Churchill is no exception. As James Freeman notes in the WSJ, the former prime minister and the “20^th Century’s biggest adversary of communist and fascists dictatorships” has been found wanting by today’s tyrants and advocates of woke totalitarianism.

So, it would seem, the wokesters who claim they cannot abide anti-racism also cannot abide the man who stopped the world’s most notorious racist. Last Thursday, Canadians awoke to the dismaying news that a statue of Winston Churchill – “Hitler’s implacable foe” – had been defaced.

For the Edmonton Journal, Jeff Labile reports:

A Downtown statue of Sir Winston Churchill has been vandalized after someone dumped red paint all across the replica of the former British prime minister…

Churchill, who served as prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955, is seen as a national hero for his leadership during the Second World War but held many views that would be deemed racist.

A Balanced Look at Churchill

Elisebeth Checkel, president of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Edmonton, acknowledges Churchill’s complicated legacy, but she hopes people will continue to examine and debate Churchill’s views. She also hopes that the world will look at WC in a balanced way:

If we look at any historical figure, we will find the same thing, If we look at almost any person from the 1880s, we would find their views were if not repugnant to us nowadays, we would find they were disagreeable for sure.

If you look at Churchill’s later actions and life as he grew, as we all hope to do, his views did change. The balance should be celebrated because without Churchill we would not even have the right to protest in this country.

Their Finest Hour – the Battle of Britain Begins

June 2021 marks the 81^st anniversary of the German army overrunning France. Three months after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill, with France having surrendered to Germany, gave a rousing speech to the British House of Commons:

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.”

The Woke as Intolerant as the Taliban

Let us hope, for all our sakes, this woke generation, who are not “unlike the Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001,” as Licia Corbella writes in the Calgary Herald, never faces the sinister threat and evil the Greatest Generation unflinchingly confronted.