April 4, 2015

Finest Hour 133, Winter 2006-07

Page 11

Congratulations to Churchill Centre academic ‘adviser and frequent speaker Dr. David Jablonsky on his forthcoming book, War by Land, Sea and Air: Dwight Eisenhower and the Concept of Unified Commands (Free Press), which undoubtedly will have many wise observations on Winston Churchill.

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Danielle Lloyd, the reigning Miss Great Britain and girlfriend of soccer player Teddy Sheringham, was prepped by her boyfriend for an appearance on the BBC television show, “Test the Nation.” Sheringham asked her, “Who was Winston Churchill: a rapper, U.S. President, Prime Minister, or King?” Replied Lloyd, “Wasn’t he the first black president of America? There’s a statue of him near me that’s black.”

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Objecting to opposition reaction to George Bush’s speech on the fifth -anniversary of 9/11, columnist Tony Blankly created a fictional response to Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech in June 1940, which may amuse cynics who wonder if the Western Allies today could win World War II. (Churchill said, “…if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age….Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.'”

Blankly’s fictional responder says: “Now that’s just fear-mongering, plain and simple. He’s trying to scare the public into supporting his failed policies. Oh, there may be a few men around Hitler who are a little rough. But sinking into the abyss of a new Dark Age? Winston needs a new speechwriter. And while he’s about it, he can just drop that Christian civilization business. There is no excuse to insult the several non Christians in England. That’s just Churchill politically playing to his rural, religious base. And, by the way, the last time I saw Winston on his knees, he wasn’t praying. He was looking for a dropped corkscrew. At this solemn hour, I just felt that Churchill’s brazen political stunt of a speech needed a dignified response.”

Yes, that sounds very much like the politics of the present.

Churchill can be quoted to prove any side of any argument, as one John Elliott of Bishopton, England proved in the letters column of Britain’s The Herald. Bush, he writes, who proclaims himself a Churchillian, “has even gone as far as borrowing a bronze bust of the great man to adorn the Oval Office….In 1939, Churchill described Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the Petition of Right as being ‘the indispensable foundations of freedom and civilisation.’ Without them, he went on to state, the individual would be ‘at the mercy of officials and liable to be spied upon even in his own home.’ On another occasion, Churchill stated that the manner in which a society treats its prisoners is the measure of how civilised it really is. Perhaps the time has come for our ambassador in Washington to go the Oval Office and ask for our bust back.” We report, you decide!