Month: February 2020

Bombing Auschwitz: “Get everything out of the air force you can.” -WSC

Bombing Auschwitz: “Get everything out of the air force you can.” -WSC

Bomb­ing Auschwitz” is Chap­ter 31 in my book, Win­ston Churchill, Myth and Real­i­ty: What he Actu­al­ly Did and Said. Avail­able in Kin­dle or paper­back from Ama­zon.

The Auschwitz myth

“War is main­ly a cat­a­logue of blun­ders,” Churchill wrote. [1] A war leader is “the slave of unfore­see­able and uncon­trol­lable events. Anti­quat­ed War Offices, weak, incom­pe­tent or arro­gant Com­man­ders, untrust­wor­thy allies, hos­tile neu­trals, malig­nant For­tune, ugly sur­pris­es, awful miscalculations—all take their seat at the Coun­cil Board….” [2]

Churchill’s most fla­grant inac­tion, accord­ing to many crit­ics, was fail­ing to bomb Auschwitz, the noto­ri­ous Nazi death camp, or the rail lines lead­ing to it.…

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Update: How Many Words did Winston Churchill Produce?

Update: How Many Words did Winston Churchill Produce?

How many words, how many speeches?

“How many speech­es did Churchill make, and in how many words? Also, how many words did he write in his books and arti­cles? [Updat­ed from 2014.]

Word counts

Through the won­ders of com­put­er sci­ence (Ian Lang­worth and the Hills­dale Col­lege Churchill Project), we know that the present cor­pus of works by and about Win­ston S. Churchill exceeds 80 mil­lion words (380 megabytes). This includes 20 mil­lion (120 megabytes) by Churchill him­self (count­ing his let­ters, mem­os and papers in the 23 vol­umes of Churchill Doc­u­ments. Here are his the top word counts among his books:

The Churchill Doc­u­ments: 10,000,000*

Win­ston S.

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Question for Readers: What did Churchill Mean by “Man is Spirit”?

Question for Readers: What did Churchill Mean by “Man is Spirit”?

“Man is spirit”

Win­ston Churchill retired as Prime Min­is­ter on 5 April 1955. On April 3rd, he met with his non-Cab­i­net min­is­ters. His last words were report­ed by William Sid­ney, Vis­count De L’Isle and Dud­ley, his neigh­bor in West­er­ham, to Mar­tin Gilbert. “Man is spir­it,” he told them. Then he added: “Nev­er be sep­a­rat­ed from the Americans.”

The lat­ter is well under­stood. In 1956, when he wasn’t around, there was quite a seri­ous sep­a­ra­tion, over Suez. “Man is spir­it” is hard­er to under­stand. What did Churchill mean?

A pro­fes­sor teach­ing Churchill’s states­man­ship says his class is going back and forth on that.…

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Cole Porter and a Vanished Culture: Brewster and Mussolini

Cole Porter and a Vanished Culture: Brewster and Mussolini

 “You’re the top: You’re a Brewster body”

Down­load­ing a Cole Porter clas­sic, “You’re the Top,” to Spo­ti­fy, I real­ized how much the lyrics have changed. Some vers­es were altered, oth­ers just dropped, because they’d only baf­fle peo­ple. Take for exam­ple my favorite—a verse now extinct, because it’s well-nigh unrecognizable:

You’re the top! You’re a Ritz hot toddy.

You ‘re the top! You’re a Brew­ster body.

You’re the boats that glide on the sleepy Zuider Zee,

You ‘re a Nathan Pan­ning, You’re Bish­op Man­ning, You’re broccoli!

Brew­ster and Com­pa­ny was a car­riage mak­er found­ed by James Brew­ster in New Haven, Con­necti­cut in 1810.…

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William F. Buckley, PMF*: A True Churchillian in the End

William F. Buckley, PMF*: A True Churchillian in the End

The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy....It is my proposal that Churchill’s words were indispensable to the benediction of that hour...." —Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.

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On Sovereignty: Churchill on the UK and Europe, 1933-1953

On Sovereignty: Churchill on the UK and Europe, 1933-1953

Sovereignty is back

Britain has left the Euro­pean Union. “It was a tran­scen­den­tal night,” Andrew Roberts writes of Jan­u­ary 31st. Read his excel­lent piece on Brex­it and the UK’s regained sov­er­eign­ty in the Dai­ly Tele­graph: “Britain has become an adult once again, tak­ing ulti­mate respon­si­bil­i­ty for our own choic­es and actions. [It] has bold­ly stepped out on its own, tak­ing a risk, cer­tain­ly. But then which great his­toric nation­al action has not involved some ele­ment of risk?…

By stat­ing that no for­eign law shall hence­forth have juris­dic­tion over British law, we have thrown away the jurispru­dence com­fort blan­ket and become an adult, tak­ing ulti­mate respon­si­bil­i­ty for our own choic­es and actions again….…

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