In the News Archives - Page 12 of 28

Atatürk Erdogan — Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Webtekno, Istanbul)

Turkey, Erdoğan, David Goldman and Winston Churchill

15 October 2019 Comments 0 Comments

In the light of recent controversy over the right posture to take over Turkey and the Kurds, this three-year-old post seems as instructive as ever. Updated and republished.

David Goldman, Teacher

The 2016 Hillsdale College Alaska cruise aimed to educate, and so it did. I learned more from David Goldman about Erdoğan, Turkey and the Middle East in an hour than from anything I’ve read over the last five years.

David Goldman, a New York economist, is a columnist for First Things magazine and writes under the name “Spengler” for Asia Times Online. Previously he was the global head of credit strategy for Credit Suisse, and head of fixed income research at Bank of America.…

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Don Cline’s outstanding collection of Churchill press photos was given by Don and Lorraine to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, where they live on in Churchill’s memory, and Don’s. This example was taken at Dover, 28 August 1940. “…we saw a smoldering aircraft in a field, and Churchill asked the driver to pull off the road and get as close to the wreckage as he could….though I warned Mr Churchill about the dangers of being out in the open during an air raid, he said that he must have a look, and when he saw the tangled mess he said ‘Dear God, I hope it isn’t a British plane.’ He was reassured that it was not.” —Detective Inspector Walter Thompason, in dark suit to WSC’s left. (Public domain, Crown copyright expired)

Don Cline 1949-2019: The Woof of Churchill and the Warp of Scotland

30 September 2019 Comments 2 Comments

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts’s outstanding biography was at Don Cline’s bedside, and he almost made it through. I opened his copy to where the last bookmark fell. It was January 1944, a scene redolent of the fascination we shared. The writer was Lady Diana Cooper: “There was our old baby in his rompers, ten-gallon cowboy hat and very ragged oriental dressing gown, health, vigour and excellent spirits. Never have I seen him spin more fantastic stuff, the woof of English and the warp of slang.”

That passage will now always remind me of Don, who himself spun fantastic stuff.…

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Fateful Choices, by Ian Kershaw: Japan, Germany, USA (updated 2019)

18 August 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941, by Ian Kershaw. New York: Penguin, 600 pp., $35. At a time when Churchill’s war leadership is vilified in lopsided paeans to Roosevelt, Sir Ian’s classic World War II study reminds us that FDR wasn’t perfect either.

A recent article suggests that Japan’s decision to surrender in 1945 was by no means unanimous. A few years ago, Sir Ian Kershaw said the same thing about Japan’s decision to go to war in the first place. Long before the war, Winston Churchill mused:

“What a story!…

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Johnson, Trump…can we stop comparing everybody to Churchill?

15 August 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Politicians, like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump at the moment, are often compared to Winston Churchill. In a way it’s nice PR for Sir Winston. Half a century since his death, the Greatest Briton still dominates media. His Google hit count is 100 million. (Franklin Roosevelt, the West’s other great war leader, is at 72 million.)

Rightly or wrongly, every day on the Internet, Churchill is praised, lampooned, quoted and misquoted. But comparisons to modern politicians have worn thin. They may emulate him, but should not be compared to him.

Johnson’s Day in the barrel

On 15 June the Wall Street Journal focused on British prime minister in waiting Boris Johnson.…

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Read Ian Jack’s thoughtful piece in “The Guardian,” http://bit.ly/2SLDPi5. (Illustration by Matt Kenyon)

Boris, Racism, Imperialism, and “The Road to Mandalay”

29 July 2019 Comments 1 Comment

If we want to be fair, isn't "The Road to Mandalay" a remarkably progressive 1890 endorsement of interracial harmony? Interpreting it as mere lust after "an exotic object and someone to be 'civilized'" only displays ignorance. Clearly the writer didn't read it well. It contains no expressions of lust, only loneliness. That is what Kipling's soldier is saying. He wants to go back to a land and a girl he loves, and both are Asian.

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Read BBC News for an early report on the new PM’s cabinet at https://bbc.in/2y89KzJ

“The Respectable Tendency” and the New PM, 1940-2019

25 July 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Anent the new PM

My friend Steve Hayward had the wit to paraphrase, in reaction to the arrival of Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street, some comments about another incoming PM, eighty years ago next May. “Cambridge Cute,” says another friend of Steve’s good piece.

Speaking of Cambridge Cuties, I immediately thought of what Andrew Roberts described as “The Respectable Tendency,” the British establishment, in his great book, Eminent Churchilllians. So I dug into the sources to find more of what they said back then about the new Prime Minister. (Lightly paraphrased.)

“Coup of the rabble…”

“Even whilst the new PM was still at Buckingham Palace kissing hands, the junior private secretary and Chamberlain’s PPS, Lord Dunglass [Alec Douglas-Home] joined Rab Butler and ‘Chips’ Channon at the Foreign Office.…

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Churchillian Fiction Continues to Roll off the Presses

21 July 2019 Comments 1 Comment

Churchill quotes in the realm of fiction are a well-known feature of the popular culture. So good an aphorist was Churchill that even posthumously, he continues to “manufacture” quote fiction. Sometimes it’s the work of an obscure figure, pinned on Churchill to make it more interesting.

The scholar Manfred Weidhorn has an explanation for what we call Churchillian (or Yogi Berra) Drift: “You do not find yourself the target of Churchillian Drift unless, like Churchill, you are already a fine aphorist. Part of the reason it’s so easy to misattribute brilliant sayings to great aphorists is that they have already coined so many brilliant sayings themselves.”…

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Lectures at Sea (2): Churchill and the Myths of Ireland

14 July 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Churchill and Collins were much alike, William Manchester wrote, “fearless, charismatic, fiercely patriotic, ready to sacrifice everything for principle." Reading Churchill’s book "The Aftermath," the historian Paul Addison pointed out something I hadn't noticed: “The admiration Churchill expresses for the Irish of all kinds.” Ireland excited Churchill’s passion, but mostly in a positive way, for he always respected Irish patriotism and heroism. In the event he proved himself an ally, not an enemy, in Ireland’s quest for peace and freedom.

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Lee surrenders, 9 April 1865. “He was a foe without hate, a friend without treachery, a soldier without cruelty, and a victim without murmuring.” (Painting by Thomas Nast, 1895, Wikimedia Commons)

Robert E. Lee and the Fashionable Urge to Hide from History

7 July 2019 Comments 2 Comments

On the tearing down of statues and symbols, Shelby Foote cited a state senator, who got her fellow senators to disallow the use of a Confederate symbol—not the Battle Flag—by the Daughters of the Confederacy. "I don't understand that," he said. "It's a violation of the Greaat Compromise. It's an arousal of bitterness. Now she, along with a great many others, do not want to be reminded. She has every right to want to hide from history if she wants to. But it seems to me that she's trying to hide history from us—and that's a mistake."

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Lectures at Sea (1): Churchill and the Myths of D-Day

24 June 2019 Comments 0 Comments

“Churchill and the Myths of D-Day is excerpted from a lecture on the 2019 Hillsdale College Round-Britain cruise. Hillsdale cruises with “lectures at sea” are an annual event, usually occurring in May or June. For information on the 2020 cruise to Jerusalem and Athens, click here.

I’m here to talk about Winston Churchill. I know this audience knows who he was! Did you know a survey of British schoolchildren reveals that one in five think he was a fictional character? And better than half think Sherlock Holmes was a real person?

My book is about the non-fictional Churchill.…

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