May 14, 2013

EDITOR’S ESSAY: FINEST HOUR 140, AUTUMN 2008

===================

Late in his long life, my father was dismayed to find himself in a world he no longer recognized. From the price of peanuts to manners and mores, he declared himself on unfamiliar ground. An era of striving had morphed into an era of gratification. The older I get, the more I understand what he meant.

Forty years ago, at a time marked by a no-win war in Asia, assassinations in America and repression in Europe, Finest Hour launched its first thin photocopied issue. It was nothing I’d be proud to reprint. But to mark the anniversary we offer several of the best articles from early issues not yet posted on our website, an index to others that are on it; “climacterics” (Churchill’s word) in our own story; a review of conferences since 1984; a hundred of the best Churchill books. And, in “Forty Years On” (the words are from the Harrow song), leading thinkers tell us what if anything has changed in the world view of Churchill since 1968.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

Whatever it thinks of Churchill, the world has changed beyond the imagination of those alive and sentient in 1968. Unprecedented events—assassinations, undeclared wars, impeachments, scandals, natural catastrophes and those of our own making—have accompanied the end of empires evil and benign, the liberation of some but not all peoples, the replacement of state terror with a stateless variety, the growth of the collective, the diminishment of the individual. All of this would concern Winston Churchill. Some of it did.

And one senses a torpor among the English-speaking peoples: a reluctance to focus on the essentials, a preference for inconsequentia. We indulge a film and broadcast media, that brothel of the western dream, as Mark Weingarden put it: “morally uncomplicated, comic-book depictions of heroes and villains, simple stories for uncurious people.” Churchill remarked: “We live in the most thoughtless of ages. Every day headlines and short views.” We strain those views through Politically Correct lenses so that moral lessons are homogenized, no one offended, no “insensitivity” expressed. Problems and threats are now “issues” and “challenges,” lest they be of our own making. Poll-driven politicians demonstrate, in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, “how far a meretricious personal charm will get you in the media age.”

It is foolish to believe, as Paul Alkon writes herein, that our times are simply a replay of Churchill’s. There will never be another Third Reich—perhaps something worse, but not the same. Winston Churchill’s lasting value lies in his approach to challenges: not what he did in 1915 or 1940, but the broad principles he stood for, which are in the end timeless. And Churchill is unscathed by forty years of “deconstruction” (as we call lying about history). The history is still there with its flickering lamp, as he reminded us, stumbling “along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”

One of the most learned of scholars, President Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College, reminds me that forty years on, Sir Winston is in transition as the World War II generation dies. From a figure people remember, if only as a voice on the radio, he has become a figure for the ages. Larry ranks him with Washington and Lincoln in the United States, “provided we understand him fully—which is not easy, because it’s difficult to get our hands around him.” How extraordinary that Churchill thought so deeply about transcendental matters! We could build a whole conference around just one of his essays, “Mass Effects in Modern Life” (1927, republished in Thoughts and Adventures in 1932). It could have been written yesterday. In it he ponders the trends toward mass-thought, mass-behavior, the cult of celebrity, the decline of the individual and of personal responsibility. Other essays of his contemplate the replacement of religious morals with a kind of vague internationalism; the refusal to act until “self-preservation strikes its jarring gong.” Until the terror of imminent extinction flickers….

It is astonishing that a politician who never went to university thought so deeply about these things. And Churchill communicated them so well: “There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik,” he wrote in “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” “which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the White Ant.” In 2008, alas, we can apply that to many beside Bolsheviks.

It has been the work of this little magazine to reflect on the Washington or Lincoln of our time: to venture outside the trivial and the legendary, above the frothy soap opera picture, above the memorabilia, above even the blood, sweat and tears; to defend his greatness from carpers and cranks; to show that Winston Churchill was one of a kind, not just the person of a century, but of a millennium. We do so imperfectly. But we shall continue. Here’s to Finest Hour’s editors of the future—and to the next forty years. RML