March 2010 - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill and the Baltic

19 March 2010 Comments 1 Comment

Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest Online finely describes the Museum of the KGB, established in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius to document the victims of Soviet occupation of the Baltic States from 1940 through 1991:

Yet those poor Lithuanian partisans who fought a hopeless guerrilla campaign against the Soviet occupation after 1945 kept waiting for us to show up,” Mead cointinues. “Apparently they made the mistake of believing all those fine words that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill wrote in The Atlantic Charter.

I have no doubt that Roosevelt and Truman were right to avoid war with the Soviet Union after World War Two…But war over eastern Europe in 1945 was unthinkable; containment was the best we could do.…

Winston S. Churchill 1940-2010

10 March 2010 Comments 3 Comments

You can read about Winston Churchill’s career elsewhere. I’d like rather to indulge in the remembrance of a friend.

We met through the post forty-two years ago, when he became the third honorary member of the Churchill Study Unit, after his grandmother and his father. The latter had only just sent a letter of encouragement to our little group of stamp collectors when he himself died. It was June, 1968. In sending condolences, I asked Winston to take his father’s place. He accepted, adding, “It is consoling to know so many share my loss.”…