Excerpted from “Churchill’s Steady Adherence to His 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech in Fulton,” written for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the Hillsdale post with endnotes and more images, please click here. (Part of the text is taken from “Iron Curtain 75 Years On,” while adding relevant timelines.)
Fulton then and nowInitially condemned as a warmonger for telling the truth about Soviet intentions in his 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, Churchill was soon acknowledged as a prophet—sometimes by the same individuals and media who excoriated him. Churchill himself never backed off.…
“Harold Begbie” is excerpted from an article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To view the original, click here. To SUBSCRIBE for fresh articles weekly from the Churchill Project, reaching 60,000 readers worldwide: Click here, scroll to bottom, enter your email address in the box entitled “Stay in touch with us.” Your email address is never given out and will remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
“The hand of destiny”The Hillsdale College Churchill Project’s updated bibliography of works about Churchill has produced gratifying interest in early biographies.…
“Professor John Charmley says in a podcast that Neville Chamberlain believed a prewar grand alliance against Hitler was not feasible. He was referring to alliance between the UK and France and the United States and USSR. Do you agree?”
Answer:As Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) tells the District Attorney (Lane Smith) in “My Cousin Vinny” (1992), “that’s a B.S. question.”
(To voir dire Miss Vito on “general automotive knowledge” the D.A. had demanded the ignition timing of “a 1955 Chevrolet 327 V-8.” (Readers less mechanically inclined than Miss Vito may enjoy her devastating two-minute rebuttal to this “trick question.”)…
Excerpted from “Hitler’s ‘Tet Offensive’: Churchill and the Austrian Anschluss, 1938″ for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. If you wish to read the whole thing full-strength, with more illustrations and endnotes, click here.
Better yet, join 60,000 readers of Hillsdale essays by the world’s best Churchill historians by subscribing. You will receive regular notices (“Weekly Winstons”) of new articles as published. Simply visit https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/, scroll to bottom, and fill in your email in the box entitled “Stay in touch with us.” Your email remains strictly private and is never sold to purveyors, salespersons, auction houses, or Things that go Bump in the Night.…
We all know how a certain American politician was nicknamed “Pocahontas,” years after claiming to be, without foundation, a native American. This has often been tried. Sometimes, however, it backfires. “A friend got his son into a better public school by declaring he was tribal,” a colleague writes. “Unfortunately, they didn’t tell the boy, who was then invited to an after-school meeting for those interested in Indians. My friend attempted to correct himself, but he found that in that city, you can change your racial identification only once.” (Who writes these rules?)
During a recent encounter with the medical world I received a questionnaire with the inevitable question, “Race.”…
Journalist Leo McKinstry’s Churchill and Attlee is a deft analysis of a political odd couple who led Britain’s Second World War coalition government. Now, eighty years since the death of Neville Chamberlain, he has published an excellent appraisal in The Spectator. Churchill’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Chamberlain negotiated the 1938 Munich agreement. “Peace for our time,” he famously referred to it. In the end, he bought the world peace for a time.
Mr. McKinstry is right to regret that Chamberlain has been roughly handled by history. “The reality is that in the late 1930s Chamberlain’s approach was a rational one,” he writes.…
Excerpted from a Q&A post on the V1 for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the unabridged article, please click here.
Robert Lusser and the V1 “Flying Bomb”A journalist writes about the life of her grandfather, Robert Lusser, chief designer of the V1 flying bomb. She searched for what Churchill said about the V1 in his memoirs of the Second World War. “He mentions the weapon’s destruction in 1944 but nothing of what he thought of the V1 militarily. My grandfather’s papers suggest that Churchill praised the weapon after the war.…
Excerpted from an article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, September 2020. For the complete text, an appendix of Churchill’s words on Armenia, more illustrations and endnotes, please click here.
The age-long misfortunes of the Armenian race have arisen mainly from the physical structure of their home. Upon the lofty tableland of Armenia, stretching across the base of the Asia Minor Peninsula, are imposed a series of mountain ranges having a general direction east and west. The valleys between these mountains have from time immemorial been the pathways of every invasion or counter-attack between Asia Minor in the west and Persia and Central Asia in the east….…
The Greeks are still not laughing about their mid-1940s civil war, so levity may be inappropriate. Nor was at the time was Winston Churchill. “There is a lot of ruin in any nation,” he once mused. In Athens, 1944, Britain was “responsible for building up the nest of cockatrices for EAM [communist partisans] in Greece.” (His vocabulary was broad: A cockatrice is a mythical, two-legged dragon or serpent-like creature with a cock’s head.)
Nevertheless, the peace deal Churchill brokered between warring Greeks in 1944 had so many hilarious moments that, 75 years later, we may be permitted to indulge in lighter aspects.…
