August 12, 2013

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 12

Actor Albert Finney, who played a creditable Winston Churchill in the BBC/HBO presentation of “The Gathering Storm” (FH 115:32) received an “Emmy” from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Accepting the award Finney launched into Winston-speak we’d never have had from Robert Hardy: “Dearest Emmy! You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs and over all who would seize this honour from us. You ask, what shall I say to those who would venture into the Empire of this new medium, made more sinister by the stage lights of perverted science? I answer that we shall cast them on the couches, we shall cast them on Long Beaches, we shall cast them where no studio can entertain their wiles; we shall never surrender….Never in the field of television production was so much owed by so many to so few….Now this is not the end of this speech. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. I ask you all, therefore, to follow me on to the sunlit uplands of this podium….” (There was much more of this, but enough is enough.)

British satirical magazine Private Eye (with tongue firmly in cheek): “Was Churchill the Most Evil Man of the 20th Century?…A leading German historian has produced new evidence to suggest that Churchill deliberately ordered the mass bombing of German cities in which millions of women and children were murdered; gave instructions that German U-boats should be sunk on sight; was responsible for starting the war in order to further his long-standing ambition to become prime minister. In his new book, Churchill Worse Than Hitler, Professor Wolfgang B claims that the so-called ‘London Blitz’ never took place and was simply a fabrication of ‘Churchill’s lie machine.’ But British historian David Irving accused his German colleague of’outrageous plagiarism,’ saying all these theories were ‘copied out of my own book, Churchill Worse Than Hitler, now accepted as the only true record of what happened in WW2, when Germany stood alone against the armed might of Britain’s hated and feared Home Guard….'”