Posted on 07/02/2007 9:16:18 AM PDT by steve-b
...I've spent a great deal of time thinking about Churchill while working on my book "Troublesome Young Men," a history of the small group of Conservative members of Parliament who defied British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940 and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be largely limited to World War II buffs, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks about it, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the book's portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush's hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president's wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out -- but they're between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
“”...Did it ever occur to you that the world Churchill lived in is substantially different form today’s world, and so Churchill might have different views on foreign policy today...”
Well, DUH! Churchill sat at the head of a vast, globe-spanning Empire with 200 years of history and prestige behind it, which was now threatened by a war brought almost to it’s own shores. His primary concern was the survival of both Britain and it’s empire, beset on about eight separate fronts, against three different enemies.
His only foreign policy “view” was “beat the bastards”.
Events had conspired to deprive him of other options, and unlike Chamberlain and Halifax, Churchill understood that you don’t win wars (or ensure national survival!)by NOT fighting. The sad tale of Chamerlain is that he was simply a very stupid old man doing the best he could according to his own very limited intelligence. He would not pay the price of either war or peace, and so dithered and blundered his way into a conflict against a fiendish and ruthless man and his monsterous political movement. A two-headed beast that he (Chamberlain) could scarcely comprehend.
The wonderfully brave thing about Churchill was that he was determined not to reconcile himself to defeat with the fall of his only ally (France), but that he decided to change the course of events by fighting back, no matter how futile it might have seemed (to outsiders, and the mass of the British public) at the time. Britain still had a fleet, it still had an Empire from which to draw men and materials, and it had another advantage, often overlooked: the British Empire could attack the Axis (assuming sufficent force could be mustered) from several points along several thousand miles of Axis-held coastline.
Churchill was a master of political sums, and he did his homework most brilliantly in the dark days of 1940.
I said, “are the closest” to being like Churchill.
I didn’t say they are as good as Churchill.
“I said, “are the closest” to being like Churchill.”
If you consider either as even being in the same ballpark as Winnie, I would suggest that you’re severly misinformed.
Churchill was also a leader of men.
Mere details.
Not the main issue.
What makes Buchanan and Paul most like Churchill, is they are right.
Same ballpark, same county, same continent, same planet--
However far from Churchill they are,
Only says how much further away are their detractors.
Have to comment:
Conservatives would do well to note that in his first major public speech after running up his trial balloon, and in a couple of other public utterances just after that, Fred Thompson reiterated his long-held desire for “bipartisanship,” and even offered up a bizarre apologetic for Neville Chamberlain.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
P.S. Buchannan falls into the category of political animal I like to call a “Wraparound Conservative” in that he’s gone so far to the right that he’s beginning to sound like a leftist.
While I agree with Pat on the issue of immigration, and his position that American corporate leaders are selling their country out for personal profit, I find him otherwise severly out of touch on most other issues. Like in orbit out-of-touch.
In the case of Ron Paul, if the republican debates were any indication of his intellectual and political positions, I’d just as soon defiantly walk to the gallows while I can still remember that being an American once meant something.
Churchillian virtue is to be found in neither; one is flack for an increasingly shrill extremist fringe within the Republican party, and the other probably has French ancestry. Churchill had the virtue of being the one individual near the levers of power who understood the true nature of his enemies and did not flinch from the difficult course of fighting back.
“What makes Buchanan and Paul most like Churchill, is they are right.”
In the same way a broken clock is right twice a day, Dude.
If “being right” on one or two issues is the same as Churchill being “right” about the horror then facing the free world, then we have lowered the bar substantially.
Explain your logic, please?
Bush only has himself to blame for his troubles. He has the means to take on the ‘Rats but he won’t. Ala the Libby commutation he needs to come out swinging.
Holy crap.
But the POST itself would be Chamberlain’s daily reading.
IMO, Dr. Alan Keyes is this country’s modern Churchill. I just don’t know anyone else who qualifies for the label. He’s the man who has had a firm grasp of the true dangers to our republic all along, and who hasn’t swerved from speaking out boldly about it for decades, but who is largely ignored, or ridiculed, by the political establishment.
*flamesuit on*
My issues, vis-a-vis the War on Terror, have been the way it has been half-heartedly fought, disastrously directed, and that the stupidity has continued because it’s simply politically impossible for the leadership of either party to admit to have made the mistakes that they have, up to this point.
My biggest beef, and this is the absolute sadness, is that there are GENERALS, men trained in the history and art of war, who have not stood up and told the truth of matter; the high-tech, whizz-bang US Military has forgotten that a) infantrymen, sufficiently trained to be as deadly as possible, win wars, and b)we don’t have enough of them, sufficiently trained to be as deadly as possible, to win, and c) what we do have is mostly rendered ineffective because we’ve forgotten all about annihilation battle.
The only way to win this thing is to go back to what are considered more brutal, but infinitely more effective tactics.
Churchill would have known this on an almost-instinctual level. George W. Bush and Company, don’t.
While I agree with Pat on the issue of immigration, and his position that American corporate leaders are selling their country out for personal profit . . . .
You said it, right there: "corporate leaders are selling their country out for personal profit"
Supporting the appeasers of Hitler in Britain were the free-trading globalists, who wanted business as usual to continue and not be interrupted by a world war, and who believed that any reasonable leader would wish the same, including Hitler.
And they and the British political leaders believed all that stuff that Hitler told the people were just the usual nonsense you tell citizens to make them support you.
And German industrialists also believe this, which is why they bankrolled Hitler to power.
The free traders on both sides of the coming war, unwittingly did as much as anyone to bring on that war.
And in our time, when for the past 30+ years we should have been conserving energy and developing alternate means of energy, it was big business that kept us dependant on oil.
And now we've become embroiled even deeper in that can of worms known as the mideast.
Which means that Bucannan, Paul, and Churchill all struggled to counter the dangerous influence of big business on their respective country’s foreign affairs.
Alan Keyes, like Ann Coulter, is in the business of spouting incendiary nonsense, to fire up non-thinkers into buying his books and paying to hear him speak.
Baloney. Keyes doesn’t ever spout nonsense...and his rhetoric is only “incendiary” to those who are themselves dry as a branch.
Bravo!
“Supporting the appeasers of Hitler in Britain were the free-trading globalists, who wanted business as usual to continue and not be interrupted by a world war, and who believed that any reasonable leader would wish the same, including Hitler.”
Ummm, go back and read your history; Churchill was screaming about Hitler...in 1936. As for British business interests, neither Conservatives nor Labourites knew what tho make of Hitler, but BOTH had a vested interest in assuring that business (the business of the British Empire, thayt is) were not interrupted by war. The Conservatives because they drew their dividends from the Empire, and Labour because the welfare of British trade unions depended on the British government to PREVENT free trade. The issue came up under Labour governments all through the 1920’s and 30’s, especially in regards to Egyptian cotton, Indian textiles an dgrain, and a host of other goods and commodities that would have put British enterprise out of business -— by undercutting prices. Neither party were anything remotely close to “free traders”.
“And they and the British political leaders believed all that stuff that Hitler told the people were just the usual nonsense you tell citizens to make them support you.”
Again, incorrect. Mein Kampf had been available in Britain almost as soon as it could be translated. Anyone with half a brain could see what Hitler was up to, and what that meant for Europe, and Britain, in particular. Many did. The problem was that the solution entailed a course the British government and nation could not fathom following in 1933-38; the possibility of war. All the nonsense about Hitler being acceptible to certain conservative elements because he was “anti-communist” applies to France much more than it does Britain. In fact, the Nazi economic system horrified British conservatives because it a) eliminated the concept of private property, and b) reduced the industrialist to a mere manager, beholden to the state.
Really!
“The free traders on both sides of the coming war, unwittingly did as much as anyone to bring on that war.”
Once again, the British Empire never practiced Free Trade and didn’t believe in it. If it ever did, it courted certain economic disaster, and it’s leaders knew this. Learn something about economics, please.
“And in our time, when for the past 30+ years we should have been conserving energy and developing alternate means of energy, it was big business that kept us dependant on oil.”
I should think the American CONSUMER has just as much to do with this. Gasoline has always been cheap in this country (in relation to the rest of the world) and Americans traditionally love to drive tanks (preferably with tail fins, and room for 73) that get about 8 feet to the gallon. Big Oil simply satisifies the public’s stated preferance for gasoline, and God forbid!, exercises it’s right to lobby Congress on it’s own behalf. Start looking in the mirror when you yack about “dependance on foreign oil” because it’s you, and me, and our neighbors who won’t give it up. If we would, and demanded alternatives, there would be a market for an alternate fuel. Again, study economics; one does not produce a product and then wait for demand, one identifies a demand and THEN produces a product.
“And now we’ve become embroiled even deeper in that can of worms known as the mideast.”
I guess Pat Buchannan forgot all about his former bosses (Nixon) arming of Israel, coddling of the Saudis, supporting the Shah of Iran, Kissenger’s secret missions to Pakistan, and a host of other things both big and small. I guess none of that entails “emroiling us even deeper” in the sh*tpile, huh?
But then again, Pat always seems to have a selective memory.
That is your opinion, not fact.
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