Misquotes: “At your throat or your feet”
The Huffington Post reports that the National Memo’s Joe Conason criticized Joe Scarborough’s ambivalent attitude toward the Clintons by misquoting Churchill: “It’s what he said about the Hun, which is, ‘They’re either at your feet or at your throat.'”
“You just used a Winston Churchill quote to compare me to a Nazi because you don’t like the facts,” Scarborough replied.
“No, I didn’t compare you to a Nazi,” said Conason. “He wasn’t talking about the Nazis, he was talking about World War I. [The Huns] were not Nazis.”
Ah, all Huns are not Nazis, but in Churchill’s context, most Nazis were Huns! What joyful combination of red herrings this is…
Scarborough and Conason were both wrong. It was during World War II, not World War I (Churchill’s speech to Congress, 19 May 1943). but Churchill was quoting someone else—regarding the German Army, not the Nazis:
The proud German Army has once again proved the truth of the saying, “The Hun is always either at your throat or your feet….”
A great line, but no cigar for either pundit. Ref.: Churchill in His Own Words, 62.
4 thoughts on “Misquotes: “At your throat or your feet””
Sorry, no. Closest I can come is about Mussolini: “The organ grinder [he meant Hitler] still has hold of the monkey’s collar.” 1941, 30 DECEMBER. PRESS COFERECE, OTTAWA.
Did Churchill say this about Hitler……..?
“The further up the tree a monkey goes, the more you see of his arse.”
I’m thinking about Trump in this context.
The phrase was likely used earlier (after all, he put quotemarks around it), but there is no record of Churchill having done so. Nor have I been able to track it to another source on the web or in Ralph Keyes’s excellent The Quote Verifier. I’d be interested to know the source. While Churchill may have described the Germans as “Huns” in WW1, his frequent use repopularized the term in WW2.
Churchill WAS referring to the German army in WW2; however this was an old saying known in WW1 or before, it seems to me. So it could be accurate to say it was said about the Germans in WW1 also. Even though there may not be a attributed written source to his I would say it highly likely that Churchill had said it before and was merely quoting himself or others. And the “Hun” was primarily, though not exclusively, a WWI term.