“Pat Buchannan, and more recently, Ron Paul, are the closest to being like Winston Churchill in our time.”
Get real.
Churchill would have pi**ed on Buchannan, and Ron Paul couldn’t muster up enough intellectual firepower to burn calories. Churchill is a light bulb while either of these men is but a pale shadow.
I will give Pat credit for ONE thing, though, and that is the “Broken Clock” quality of being right at least twice a decade. It’s the prime reason why he’s MSNBC’s token conservative curmudgeon, after all.
“”...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.