Birthday Reflections on Winston Churchill- Nobel Laureate, War Lord, Drunk, Depressive, Racist, Killer, Imperialist, Savior

 11-30 is Winston Churchill's birthday. 

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and rightfully so. 

The English language has had four masters, four Jedis...men who could write psalms in English: William Tyndale( the King  James Version of the Bible is based on his translation), William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill. They could match King David in psalm writing. 

He was a great warrior, and an apex racist. He had no qualms or guilt or reservations about killing brown people in India, or black people up the Nile, or white, non Anglo-Saxons , in South Africa. 

He was witty and pithy. 

“It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don’t believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it.” 

“ "I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly." 

“Lady Astor said to Churchill, “If you were my husband, I’d poison your tea,” to which he responded, “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it!” 

He drank too much; and like Lincoln succumbed to elongated periods of depression, which he called “ the black dog.” 

He had a spotty record as a war lord during World War I; he conceived of the idea of forcing the Dardanelles, to open a path to Czarist Russia. But the admirals and  generals on the ground were timid and incompetent. The enterprise ended in the Gallipoli debacle; which  forced his resignation from the Cabinet. 

It should be noted here, that the last  British officer off of the Gallipoli beach, at the British withdrawal, was Clement Attlee.  Attlee later became leader of the Labour party; he was so impressed with Churchill’s strategic vision that he willingly  and loyally, served as Churchill’s defacto second in command in a coalition government during World War II. 

Which brings us to World War II. 

Churchill was a part time depressive, a literate warrior with no qualms about killing, a bona fide racist cum chauvinist pig. An aristocrat from an ancient warrior family, his mother was a Brooklyn beauty. 

And it was this flawed vessel that Providence chose to save Western Civilization from the Nazis. 

World War II is the bastard child of World War I, the Demon Child. World War II  was fought as an addendum to World War I. World War I was one of the three dumbest wars of all time, ranking up there with the War Of Jenkins' Ear and the American-Iraqi War of 2003. 

World War I was dumb on a vast scale, a series of incredible blunders, producing only one great general, the Turk, Mustafa Kemal. 

World War II was different, brilliant leaders, and pure unadulterated savagery. It was the most savage war in history.

"The statistics of the war are almost mind-numbing. Estimates differ, but up to 70m people died as a direct consequence of the fighting between 1939 and 1945, about two-thirds of them non-combatants, making it in absolute terms the deadliest conflict ever. Nearly one in ten Germans died and 30% of their army. About 15m Chinese perished and 27m Soviets. Squeezed between two totalitarian neighbours, Poland lost 16% of its population, about half of them Jews who were part of Hitler’s final solution. On average, nearly 30,000 people were being killed every day."

World War II was caused by one man, Adolf Hitler. Hitler's major mistake was not tactical, nor strategic but cosmic. He thought,after dealing with German and European politicians and the British Appeaser, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, that he was the most savage man on earth. He did not take into account, nor did he comprehend that Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union, and that half Brooklyn boy, Winston Churchill were just as savage as he was. Hitler's great failing was underestimating the savagery of Churchill and Stalin.

Great Britain survived World War II because of just one man, just one man-Sir Winston Churchill, an aristocrat from the line that gave England the great warrior, the Duke of Marlborough; he was also half Brooklyn punk(from his mother).

He was a killer, a racist, a street fighter. 

And he could write- "I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But 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, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 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 say, "This was their finest hour."

"When Churchill became Prime Minister, he immediately created a coalition to ensure that the government would work together. The War Cabinet consisted of Churchill, former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, Labour leader Clement Attlee and Labour deputy leader Arthur Greenwood. Halifax had been Churchill’s rival for the premiership when Chamberlain had stepped down earlier in the month.

On Sunday 26, Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 May 1940, the war cabinet met nine times to discuss whether Mussolini’s Italy should be asked to mediate a peace deal with Nazi Germany. Italy, although allied to Germany, had not yet joined the war against Britain and France.Halifax argued for a truce, and had already discussed the issue with Italy’s ambassador to London. Many historians argue that Halifax was being realistic. After all, the British campaign in Norway had been disastrous; Allied military operations in France had collapsed; there had been forced evacuations from Dunkirk; and Belgium had surrendered to Germany on 28 May. While the British government deliberated, the French government was crumbling as France was seized, city by city, by the Nazis.

Halifax thought the British government would have to acknowledge Hitler’s triumph in Europe. This would be humiliating but it could then try to secure a measure of autonomy and even continue to have an imperial role. A truce could also mean that Britain would avoid the violent battles that had been fought over Poland and France."

Lord Halifax was a very reasonable man, appeasement is reasonable.

Reasonable Halifax was making points, so Churchill outsmarted him, and called a conference of all the Ministers, all 28.

On May 28th 1940, the Outer Cabinet of Great Britain sat in smoky conference and debated and debated whether Britain should fight on. All had served in World War I, so they knew slaughter personally and intimately.  As they debated, the Germans were pulling up to the English Channel, having defeated the Poles, the Czechs,the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, and the Danes.

They were not debating Agincourt, the few against the many; they were debating the one against the conquering hordes.

Would resistance be Futile?

They debated and wavered,as reasonable men do.

Churchill "believed it was more important for Britain to go down fighting, as "those [nations] which surrendered tamely were finished". Most importantly, this was what the public wanted, and Churchill argued that even exploring peace terms with Hitler would be an admission of defeat."

Churchill was convinced that Hitler would seize the opportunity to take over the Royal Navy and its naval bases, and to set up a puppet state governed by British Fascists and ruled over by the pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor, the abdicated Edward VIII.

The Outer Cabinet debate went on and on; they were afraid to make a decision which would decide the fate of Britain, Western Civilization, the World.

Then the aristocratic war lord cum Brooklyn punk spoke up, demanding an answer with these words. "If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground".

They decided to fight. The few, the Happy Few.

How  serious was this debate?

What would have been the consequences to England if they had fought Hitler and lost?

The German Army Commander In Chief, Field Marshal  Heinrich Alfred Hermann Walther von Brauchitsch signed this order in regards to a  defeated Britain, "the able bodied male population, between the ages of 17 and 45(in Britain) will, unless, the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and shipped to the Continent."

Yes Reader, if the Nazis had won, they intended to de-populate the male population of Great Britain, IN ITS ENTIRETY, shipping them off as pets to the Continent.

Savage.

Hitler could make the reasonable assumption, he was the most savage player in the game....yet.

Churchill intended to respond this way- "We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,"

Exactly what did the Aristocratic warlord/Brooklyn punk  mean by that statement?

"The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There would have been neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go all lengths......Winston Churchill."

What does that mean exactly, "prepared to go all lengths."

"Peter Fleming, in his book, SEA LION, gives one of them. The British(Churchill) had decided, Fleming  says, as a last resort and if all other conventional methods of defense had failed, to attack the German beachheads with outlawed MUSTARD GAS sprayed from low flying airplanes."

Rather than let England, Western, Christian Civilization go down, Churchill was prepared to use OUTLAWED chemical weapons. There would be no sin beyond the pale which would not be committed to save Western Civilization,on the express order of Winston Churchill.

Hitler had met his savage equal on the Western Front; Stalin was Hitler's savage equal on the Eastern Front.

In the end, Hitler had no real chance, for it was two brilliant savages against one brilliant savage.

One more thing about Churchill which is really pertinent for 2021 politics.  The British Army had just suffered a catastrophic defeat in North Africa to Rommel, THE DESERT FOX. The BBC had two lawyers draft a press release which parsed the situation, so that it seemed the battle was a stalemate.

Churchill looked at the lawyers and said, "Don't do that, tell the bloody truth, all of it, the entire disaster."

The BBC men were shocked, "Why"

His answer reveals everything you need to know about Churchill The Warlord, " So  when we start winning the whole world will believe us." 

Truly,it can be said that Providence chose the right flawed vessel to save Western Civilization.