Hitler Archives - Richard M. Langworth

“The Wilderness Years” with Robert Hardy: Original Review

7 November 2019

“Churchill: The Wilderness Years”

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has just republished “Scaling Everest,” Robert Hardy’s recollections of playing the Wilderness Years Churchill. They are from 1987, his speech to one of our Churchill Tours, at the Reform Club, London. We are grateful to his executors, Justine Hardy and Neil Nisbet-Robertson for permission to reprint. For Part 1, click here.

I thought the occasion appropriate to republish my original review of the “Wilderness Years” from 1981, some years before we met. I thought at the time I had “laid an egg”—in Churchill’s phraseology, not RH’s.…

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cruz churchill — Ted Cruz (L). Maybe if he’d smoke a cigar? (Daily Telegraph)

Senator Cruz: Minor Misquote, Major Misinterpretation

16 April 2016

Ted Cruz, speaking on 5 April, “sparked an outcry” by misquoting Churchill: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, Cruz intoned, “we risk the future.”

The London Daily Telegraph reported: The references drew a swift—and fierce—reaction from social media.” Social media is not a likely place to contemplate the fine points of history. It wasn’t in this case, as you can read in the newspaper article.

What Cruz said was “…risk the future.” For Churchill it was more than risk. In his “Finest Hour” speech, 18 June 1940, Churchill told Parliament: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find that we have lost the future.”…

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Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality

13 January 2016

Per the previous post, I append for reader comment the contents of my next book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What Churchill Stood For.

I have written on most of these matters in the past; the book recasts it afresh. I also acknowledge and cross-reference the work of experts who know far more than I, particularly in the fields of genealogy and medicine. I would be glad to hear your thoughts; please use the “contact” page.

The historian David Stafford wrote: “Myth only develops and takes hold when the time is right, and the climate has long been ripe for the emergence of myths about a wartime hero who stood firm against a totalitarian foe and smote an evil empire.”…

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Reviews of “Churchill and the Avoidable War”

23 November 2015

"I’ve touched on this before: if Hitler had been assassinated in 1937, he would have gone down in history as one of the greatest Germans. If assassinated in late 1941, before the tide began to turn, he would have gone down among Germans as a military genius. Horrible as it is to say or contemplate, it was necessary for him to stay around to the bitter end so that Germans could see what fools he made of them." —Manfred Weidhorn

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Was WW2 Avoidable?

13 November 2015

continued from previous post…

Churchill and the Avoidable War

Preface

This book examines Churchill’s theory that “timely action” could have forced Hitler to recoil, and a devastating catastrophe avoided. We consider his proposals, and the degree to which he pursued them. Churchill was both right and wrong. He was right that Hitler could have been stopped. He was wrong in not doing all he could to stop him. The result is a corrective to traditional arguments, both of Churchill’s critics and defenders. Whether the war was avoidable hangs on these issues.

Chapter 1. Germany Arming: Encountering Hitler, 1930-34

“There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples….But…

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Churchill’s Choice: Hitler vs. Stalin

31 October 2015

I find the glorification of Churchill quite disgusting. It is typical British-American arrogance to ignore the outcome of WW2 for the peoples of Eastern Europe, not to speak of the Germans. Churchill knew from the beginning about the terrible fate of the Russians and many other East European peoples under Bolshevist dictatorship. He obviously didn’t care. He was obsessed with anti-German hatred. Knowing that he bombed German cities, killing thousands of civilians long before the Germans were retaliating, makes him in my opinion even worse than Hitler. Why did he go into alliance with Stalin against the Germans?…

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Churchill’s “Infallibility”: Myth on Myth

10 July 2012

Mr. Daniel Knowles (“Time to scotch the myth of Winston Churchill’s infallibility,” (originally blogged on the Daily Telegraph but since pulled from all the websites where it appeared), wrote that the “national myth” of World War II and Churchill “is being used in an argument about the future of the House of Lords.”

Mr. Knowles quoted Liberal Party leader Nick Clegg, who cited Churchill’s 1910 hope that the Lords “would be fair to all parties.” Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames MP, replied that Churchill “dropped those views and had great reverence and respect for the institution of the House of Lords.”…

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Did Churchill Praise Hitler?

25 June 2009

"I am surprised that the head of a great State should set himself to attack British members of Parliament who hold no official position and who are not even the leaders of parties. Such action on his part can only enhance any influence they may have, because their fellow-countrymen have long been able to form their own opinion about them and really do not need foreign guidance." —WSC, 1938

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Churchill, Mein Kampf and the Koran

25 February 2009

"All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world.Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message." —WSC

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