Excerpted from “Forster, Appeasement, Danzig and Fascism: What Churchill Really Believed” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original text including endnotes please click here.
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Albrecht Forster and the Danzig NazisA reader refers to a Spartacus Educational article, “Was Winston Churchill a Supporter or an Opponent of Fascism?” Citing Churchill’s words to the Albrecht Forster, it argues that WSC supported appeasement and approved of Fascism.…
“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.”…
Sporadically, pundits compare Donald Trump with Winston Churchill. There’s even a book coming out on the subject. I deprecate all this by instinct and will avoid that book like the Coronavirus. Surface similarities may exist: both said or say mainly what they thought or think, unfiltered by polls (and sometimes good advice). But Churchill’s language and thought were on a higher plane. Still, when a friend said that Churchill never stooped to derisive nicknames like Trump, I had to disagree.
Whether invented by the President or his scriptwriters, some of Trump’s nicknames were very effective.…
In our electronic Speaker’s Corner (the Internet), Winston Churchill is beset by haters. Their knee-jerk spouts are laced with out-of-context quotes and preconceived notions. Call it Churchill Derangement Syndrome. Where is the truth? Perhaps we need a Derangement Index. Click on “A” for Aryan Supremacy, “B” for the Bengal Famine, etc. A handy reference to every derangement you can access with a couple of clicks.
An e-zine called This is Local London, describing its offerings as “quality local journalism,” is a standard example. Well, maybe not so standard. “The Problem with Glorying Winston Churchill” was written not by a historian or researcher, but a student at Wallington County Grammar School.…
On 11-13 May 1948, Winston Churchill was in Norway to accept an honorary degree from Oslo University. He gave five speeches—University, City Hall, Storting (Norwegian Parliament) and two dinners. All five can be found in Churchill’s speech volume Europe Unite, or Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963. They offer six gems of Churchillian wisdom. I plan to add them to the upcoming new edition of Churchill by Himself, my book of quotations.
Oslo VariationsA reader reminds us of these obscure orations by sending one: Churchill’s dinner speech on May 12th. His source is Churchill’s Visit to Norway (Oslo: Cappelens, 1949).…
Is Wikipedia right that Churchill admired Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for having the “good sense to shoot his son-in-law”?
It’s a great crack, but it is not verified.
Churchill had called Mussolini every name in his book: ”whipped jackal”…”organ grinder’s monkey”…”absurd imposter.” In 1944, after Mussolini executed his son-in-law, former Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, Churchill said in a broadcast:
…the successful campaign in Sicily brought about the fall of Mussolini and the heartfelt repudiation by the Italian people of the Fascist creed. Mussolini indeed escaped, to eat the bread of affliction at Hitler’s table, to shoot his son-in-law, and help the Germans wreak vengeance upon the Italian masses whom he had professed to love….…
