Excerpted from “Great Contemporaries: T.E. Lawrence,” written for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text and more illustrations, please click here.
Churchill and LawrenceIf the Almighty dabbles in the creation of individuals, He must have chortled when He conjured up Lawrence of Arabia. For here was the ideal adviser, foil and friend of Winston Spencer Churchill. To paraphrase WSC’s apocryphal quip, Lawrence possessed none of the virtues Churchill despised, an all the vices he admired.
He was “untrammeled by convention,” Churchill wrote, “independent of the ordinary currents of human action.”…
This tribute to an extraordinary Churchillian was written twenty-three years ago in 1997. Please pardon references to contemporary events no longer in the news, though it would seem that some other Redburn thoughts are startlingly relevant.
Ashley Redburn, Anglo-AmericanCynics sometimes suggest that Western Civilization needs a war every few generations to maintain its sense of values and faith in itself. Ashley Redburn was a man who believed it. “England,” he declared grimly, “needs to be conquered in war and occupied by a vengeful enemy before its spirit can be revived. Germany and France between them have ruined Europe for two centuries.…
On a radio talk show distributed by National Public Radio, one Aliyah Hasinah said World War II had been started by a Eugenics-besotted Winston Churchill. On August 8th, the Editorial Board of The Blade replied: “NPR gave airtime to an activist who has a clear ax to grind against Churchill, yet it couldn’t find a scholar or biographer to give us a depiction of the whole man? …. Churchill was not a perfect human being. He was often wrong and some of his failures were spectacular, But for the most part, he epitomizes eloquence, courage and love of country.…
This is a reply to a July petition to rename Winston Churchill High School, Bethesda, Maryland. Founded in 1964 as Potomac High School, its name was changed the following year to mark Sir Winston’s passing. It is a distinguished school whose alumni include two sons of the late Jack Kemp, both of whom pursued their famous father’s sport. Jeffrey Allan Kemp (’77) was an NFL quarterback; his brother Jimmy Kemp (’89) played in the CFL and is president of the Jack Kemp Foundation. State Senator Cheryl Kagan (’79) serves in the Maryland legislature.…
“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 expressionsIn 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 anotherNo 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.…
Excerpted from “Back in the News: Richard Burton’s Fraught Relationship with Winston Churchill,” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, June 2020. For the complete text, please click here.
The Burton – Churchill KerfuffleThe 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.…
