Josef Stalin Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill’s Consistency: The Fulton Warning Continues

15 April 2021 Comments 0 Comments

Excerpted from “Churchill’s Steady Adherence to His 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech in Fulton,” written for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the Hillsdale post with endnotes and more images, please click here. (Part of the text is taken from “Iron Curtain 75 Years On,” while adding relevant timelines.)

Fulton then and now

Initially condemned as a warmonger for telling the truth about Soviet intentions in his 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, Churchill was soon acknowledged as a prophet—sometimes by the same individuals and media who excoriated him. Churchill himself never backed off.…

Athens, 1944: Some Lighter Moments in a Serious Situation

8 October 2020 Comments 1 Comment

“There’s a lot of ruin in any nation…”

The Greeks are still not laughing about their mid-1940s civil war, so levity may be inappropriate. Nor was at the time was Winston Churchill. “There is a lot of ruin in any nation,” he once mused. In Athens, 1944, Britain was “responsible for building up the nest of cockatrices for EAM [communist partisans] in Greece.” (His vocabulary was broad: A cockatrice is a mythical, two-legged dragon or serpent-like creature with a cock’s head.)

Nevertheless, the peace deal Churchill brokered between warring Greeks in 1944 had so many hilarious moments that, 75 years later, we may be permitted to indulge in lighter aspects.…

Galloping Lies, Bodyguards of Lies, and Lies for the Sake of Your Country

30 September 2020 Comments 3 Comments

About lies. Can you please advise whether or not Sir Winston Churchill said: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Many thanks. —A.S., Bermuda

That one lies with Cordell Hull

It was Franklin Roosevelt‘s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, not Churchill. I have a slight variation of it in the “Red Herrings” appendix of Churchill by Himself, page 576: “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.” Although commonly ascribed to Churchill (who would have said “trousers,” not “breeches”), this is definitely down to Hull.…