http://localhost:8080/magnimity-feeble-minded Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian Sun, 18 Jul 2021 13:21:16 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 http://localhost:8080/magnimity-feeble-minded#comment-45325 Fri, 16 Jul 2021 21:06:45 +0000 https://richardlangworth.com/?p=12378#comment-45325 I recently came across a copy of Piers Brendon’s Winston Churchill: A Brief Life (1984). Would you have perhaps reviewed it, and if so where might I find that file?
Right now I am about half way through the book. To this point it seems to be just what it claims to be, a brief account of WSC’s life, and nicely written. But interesting here is that it reflects your point that in Churchill’s time beliefs in what was right are not necessarily those we hold today.
I believe that with each generation we become more conscious of human rights and take action accordingly. WSC, with his “fair play and magnanimity,” demonstrated that. We still have a long way to go and there have been many terrible falls in the centuries along the way. On the flip side, we are increasingly encountering excesses of zealotry in the name of human rights that actually erode them. But overall I think we are inching forward. Thus 100 years ago, even 60 years ago when I was a young adult in the UK, there was the belief by the British in their “moral superiority,” but that expressed today would be quite rightly condemned. It makes no sense to vilify, by the standards we hold today, the beliefs held in good faith by past generations. No matter how wrong they now appear, they were sincerely thought to be for the betterment and advance of civilization. It is not logical to use today’s standards to judge standards of past ages. Yet today many supposedly educated people apparently cannot grasp that simple truism.
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Well said, thank-you. I’ve emailed you two reviews of Piers Brendon’s book, which certainly meet Emerson’s dictum never to read anything that is not at least a year old. I published them back in 1984. Dr. Brendon is an old friend, former Keeper of the Churchill Archives, and recently the author of Churchill’s Bestiary, a charming book on WSC and animals, which I reviewed with pleasure. That didn’t prevent Ashley Redburn and me from criticizing parts of his Brief Life, though it has its many good points. He is more diffident about WSC than I am, but honest differences of opinion are all to the good.
You will have to forgive me for not buying into the “only a man of his time” excuse. My maxim in defense of WSC is: surrender nothing, lest you lose everything. If we try to let him off with the excuse that “everybody back then was a racist,” we do him an injustice. Young Winston made himself very unpopular with the Edwardian establishment, defending the likes of blacks and Indians early on, and preaching human rights to the Boers long after everybody else was excusing them. Arguably he could have furthered his career by just “going along.” You might like my pieces on South Africa beginning here. I greatly appreciate your thoughtful comments. —RML

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