My take on "man of the
century": I don't know. I don't know what it
means. The most important man? The most
influential? The most positive? I didn't vote for
Einstein, but for Churchill. I think the 20th
century had three great men. Edison, who invented
the century, and Roosevelt and Churchhill, who
together helped to assure it would be worth
living, and who gave people hope in the face of
despair. I voted for Churchill, who almost
single-handedly keep the West aware of the need
to oppose Hitler at all costs in all arenas. The
world normally needs men who will compromise from
rigid ideals in order to create achieveable ends.
Churchill was not such a man, and in most
ordinary circumstances would have been no more
than a gadfly, but war and a Holocaust were not
ordinary circumstances. Churchill never
compromised, and there were times when it seemed
that he alone retained sanity in an insane world.
Looking from our time, it is impossible to
understand some of the subtleties of the politics
of the Great War. Recollect that many influential
Americans leaned toward isolationism in a war
between Hitler and his fellow monster, Stalin.
Hitler continuously suckered in freemarket
America with his rabid anti-Communism. Given
Hitler's racial theories and respect for England,
it is entirely possible that a peace could have
been arranged with England. So Churchill seemed
to many at the time to be keeping England in an
unnecessary and unwinnable war, aligned with the
monster Stalin and his monstrous ideology,
Communism. For Churchill, the course was clear.
When asked if he was ashamed to be allied with
Stalin, Churchill replied than if Mr Hitler
should invade Hell, he should immediately form an
alliance with the Lord of Darkness, for Hitler
must be conquered in order that the world might
survive. How bad was Hitler? Not just worse than
Stalin, but worse than Satan. Churchill believed
it, and he made other people believe it. And he
was right. It is astounding to look back at
Churchill's life because in hindsight no man has
ever been so consistently right about everything,
but nobody really paid attention to him until
they had no other choice.
Go to bed every night and thank
your God for two things (1) that Churchill saw
the light (2) that the the crazy warmongers were
indeed crazy, and wouldn't leave isolationist
America and isolationist Russia alone. It is good
to remember that Germany and Japan could have
divided up the rest of the world if they had
honored their non-aggression pact with Russia and
side-stepped American interests. Russia and the
US were prepared to stay out of the fray, but
were forced in, for which we can be thankful
because evil triumphs when good men do nothing,
and it seemed for the longest time that only
Churchill knew this.
If Shakespeare was the greatest
wordsmith in the history of the English language,
I submit that Churchill was a respectable second.
Remember his real-life words, which soar almost
to the heights of Shakespeare's imagined Henry V:
"We have advanced to rescue
not only Europe but mankind from the foulest and
most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever
darkened and stained the pages of history.
Upon all of (us) a long night of
barbarism will descend unbroken by even a star of
hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must, as
conquer we shall. 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 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 Commonwealth last
for a thousand years men will still say ...
this was their finest hour."
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