Tag: John Colville

“Stalin never broke his word to me.” Were these Churchill’s words?

“Stalin never broke his word to me.” Were these Churchill’s words?

A mag­a­zine fact check­er writes ask­ing if Churchill ever said, “Stal­in nev­er broke his word to me.” The short answer is yes. The long answer shows how care­ful we should be when quot­ing Churchill.

The source of this quote is the jour­nal­ist C.L. Sulzberg­er (1912-1993), in his 1970 book, The Last of the Giants, page 304. In it Sulzberg­er reports his “five hours with old Win­ston Churchill” at Chartwell on 10 July 1956.

Churchill, wrote Sulzberg­er, thought Stal­in “a great man, above all com­pared to Khr­uschev and Bul­ganin,” and quot­ed Churchill as follows:

Stal­in nev­er broke his word to me.…

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Not Churchill, re Germany: “We butchered the wrong pig”

Not Churchill, re Germany: “We butchered the wrong pig”

A Ger­man cor­re­spon­dent writes: “Churchill is mis­quot­ed as saying—with ref­er­ence to the Nazis ver­sus the Soviets—‘We butchered [or slaugh­tered] the wrong pig.’ The impli­ca­tion: he should have fought Stal­in, not Hitler.

“This seems to me revi­sion­ist wish­ful think­ing. He could nev­er have said that, since there is no such idiom in Eng­lish. He would have had to say, ‘We fought the wrong ene­my.’ Can you reveal some authen­tic infor­ma­tion as to the ori­gin of this misquotation?”

Sev­er­al queries along these lines fol­lowed pub­li­ca­tion of Her­bert Kuhner’s “A Revival of Revi­sion­ism In Aus­tria.

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Athens 1944: Not Churchill’s Finest Hour? Hmm….

Athens 1944: Not Churchill’s Finest Hour? Hmm….

Question:

A r ead­er writes: “Rather late in the day, I have been read­ing The Spec­ta­tor (UK) Christ­mas Spe­cial dat­ed 15/21/29 Decem­ber 2018. Page 28 refers to one Ron­nie Boyd, who had been a teenage Ordi­nary Sea­man aboard HMS Ajax in Decem­ber 1944, when Win­ston Churchill arrived in Athens to try to end the ongo­ing civ­il war.

 “British forces ‘helped put down, with con­sid­er­able force of arms, a per­ceived partisan/communist uprising—the so-called Bat­tle of Athens, or the Dekemvri­ana in Greece,’ the arti­cle states. There fol­lows the extra­or­di­nary state­ment ‘Not Win­ston Churchill’s Finest Hour, it has to be said.’…

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