Summoning up his life’s impulses (and mine) CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER WROTE: “The catastrophe that awaits everyone from a false move, fatal encounter—every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether, and how, we ever come back.”
Churchill Quotes: “Action vs. Inaction….Religion of Blood and War”
N.B. We do not see Churchill in Woodville’s dramatic painting above. He had drawn his pistol not his sword, in deference to his weak right shoulder. For the skill and dexterity it took to sheath his sword and aim his pistol, see my review of Brough Scott’s Churchill at the Gallop (with Ben Bradshaw’s painting of Churchill in the charge.)
Action and inaction
Q: Could you verify the correct wording for the Winston Churchill statement: “I never worry about action, but only inaction.” There are various iterations among the sources. —S.D.
From Churchill by Himself, page 190 (note he placed quotemarks around “worry”): “I never ‘worry’ about action, but only about inaction.”…
“Fascists of the future” appears unabridged in the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, July 2020. For the complete text, please click here. Subscribe free to the Churchill Project and join our 60,000 readers. Regular notices of new posts appear as they are published. Simply click here, scroll to bottom, and fill in your email in the box entitled “Stay in touch with us.” Your email is never shared with anyone.
Question
“Is this quotation is attributed to Winston Churchill?: ‘The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists.’ There does not seem to be credible information on the internet linking those words to him, but I would appreciate your input.”…
Extracted from “Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth about Churchill’s ‘Racist Epithets,'” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original article, please click here. Readers please note: a footnoted version of this article was published in Grand Alliance, a Hillsdale journal of Churchill Studies, in 2022.
Epithets and expressions
In recent weeks Winston Churchill has become a target of ignorance. “Racist,” read the spray-painted label of the mob on his London statue. He should be knocked from perch, plinth and prominence. Some historians claim he used all the racist epithets we abhor, from the n-word to nationalities: “As the great tribal leader of 1940,” read one account, “his glorious speeches were peppered with references to the British race.”…
Crater eruptions: “Isn’t it enough to have this parent volcano continually erupting in our midst? And now we are to have these subsidiary craters spouting forth the same unhealthy fumes!” —Churchill’s reply to the son of a harsh critic, freshly elected to Parliament, who immediately began attacking him.
From one crater to another
No sooner does the campaign for Churchill’s memory quell emissions from one crater than another one erupts. The campaign to delegitimize Churchill as Hero continues, but the main volcanos have already erupted. Now we have the odd subsidiary crater spouting the same old stuff.…
Friends said, “If you expect to leave The Bahamas, do it now.” We thought it best. (I failed at retirement and needed my library in New Hampshire in my work for Hillsdale College in Michigan.) Accordingly, we changed our flights to Nassau and Boston from our usual April departure to March 25th.
Jet Blue was in chaos. In my first online chat session they said the change would cost $472. It’s always a good idea to disconnect and try another chat link. The second time it was “no charge”! We always use “Even More Space” (premium economy, early boarding), and those seats were wide open.…
The airwaves and Twitterverse are full of Churchill bile following recent sad events that have nothing to do with him. Surfacing again are attacks half a century old by the famed actor Richard Burton. Film critic John Beaufort first reported these in the Christian Science Monitor in 1972:
December 9th, 1972— Richard Burton has just given two of the oddest and most contradictory performances of his career.…
I’m Blanca Bueno, a journalist working in Barcelona for a cultural quiz show for Antena 3, Spanish television. (It is the equivalent of NBC’s “Who’s still Standing?“)
My work consists in writing the questions and checking if they are correct and well formulated, in order to be as precise as possible. We try not to spread wrong information to our contestants and our audience. Sometimes, to do this work, I need to contact to some experts, such as you, in this case. I need help verifying a question about Winston Churchill and lipstick.…
This article is dedicated to the memory of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), below with François Pienaar after the Springboks won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. (See videos at end of article.) Not only did he support and integrate the national sport; he combined Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and Die Stem van Suid-Afrika as a joint national anthem. His Churchillian magnanimity was a model for his time.…
Cheddi Jagan?! France’s foremost Churchill historian, Professor Antoine Capet of the University of Rouen, sends along a brand new Fake Churchill Calumny. (If the FCC didn’t have copyright, I’d register the initials.)
Here is one from those fair and balanced entities, “Crimes of Britain” and the “Malcolm X Movement.” In the background, snidely, they play “Land of Hope and Glory.” It takes only 57 seconds to recite seven* long-disproven, shopworn Churchill sins—plus one new one: “Churchill ousted democratically elected Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana, 1953.” Congratulations. That’s really original!
Herewith final installments by various writers in our two-month defense of Winston Churchill’s memory. These and the links below cover his most popular current sins—even castration and nuking the Maralinga. So, unless we get a new one, that’s a wrap! RML
Memory: “The stars still shone in the sky”
Lost in the pell-mell rush to denigrate his memory was the 8oth anniversary of Churchill becoming Prime Minster, 10 May 1940. I thought of his words as I read the ignorant, ill-informed, false attacks on his character. They occurred amid protest over a tragic event that had nothing to do with him.…
