Churchhillian Lessons

Sir Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for most of World War II. He is widely understood to have been the greatest statesman and wartime leader in modern history; his leadership credited for winning for the Allies the Second World War.

We are now in opening chapters of a different war, but against a similar enemy. Churchill's description of the threat posed by Fascism could easily be mistaken for a description the threat of Islamism:

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man.

What was it that he considered sacred to man?

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope.

The intention of this post is to explore, albeit superficially, Churchill's statements, his posture as a wartime leader and the relevance of these for us today as we face down an enemy as ruthless as the Fascists of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

At the outset of World War II, Churchhill gave a speech in the House of Commons, steeling the people of Britain for the long, bloody and costly war that he saw as an inevitability:

Outside, the storms of war may blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our own hearts this Sunday morning there is peace...We must not underrate the gravity of the task which lies before us or the temerity of the ordeal to which we shall not be found unequal.

More importantly, for a nation still coming to terms with its colonialist past, he addressed preemptively and directly with two concerns he envisaged the people of Britain would have:

This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain...it is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual...Perhaps it might seems a paradox that a war undertaken in the name of liberty...require...the surrender for the time being...many of the dearly values liberties...

These two concerns (perception of imperialism and the curtailing of liberty) are precisely the two concerns that the West faces in its battle with Islamists. How often has one heard the meme of the United States invading Iraq to plunder it of its natural resources? How often has one heard the meme that civil liberties are being stolen by power hungry executives in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia? Our predecessors of the early 1900s understood the nature of war and the sacrifices that needed to be made to wage it effectively. In contrast, within a week of the dramatic and devastating attacks of September 11, editorials run in major US newspaper reacted reflexively to the Administrations efforts to improve intelligence gathering (quote drawn from Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age):

The rush has already begun to "unshakle" the Central Intelligence Agency and its fellow spy agencies. Some easing of restrictions may be warranted...any changes...could end up compromising important democratic principles without yielding any tangible gains in the fight against terrorism... (The New York Times, 17 September 2001)

Over the next couple of years, the New York Times would spill much ink to compromise legal and vital national security efforts (see links at bottom of this post by Malkin).

Churchill's direct public retorts of Fascist philosophy where infamous:

…there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen with pitiless brutality, the threat of murderous force. That power cannot be the trusted friend of the British democracy...

Compare this with the ambivalence with which the Bush Administration have taken to the supporter and facilitators of Islamists. Consider "...our friends the Saudis..." Or consider the way in which the Whitehouse describes Pakistan:

Pakistan is a key ally in the war on terror. President Musharraf understood that he had to make a fundamental choice for his people.  He could turn a blind eye and leave his people hostage to terrorists, or he could join the free world in fighting the terrorists.  President Musharraf made the right choice, and the United States of America is grateful for his leadership.

In the conflict of our generation, the tenets of Western Civilisation are under attack from the fascist forces of Islamism.

As an illustration of this, a document purportedly prepared by Islamic Scholars, for the edification of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, indicates the extent to which the alpha of Islamism is planning, subversively, to rape the West of its freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy and hope:

THE FIFTH POINT OF DEPARTURE: To dedicate ourselves to the establishment of an Islamic state, in parallel with gradual efforts aimed at gaining control of local power centers through institutional action [by] draw[ing] up an Islamic Constitution in light of efforts deployed up to now [and] to draw up Islamic laws, civil laws, etc.

For those with an even basic working understanding of Shari'a, freedom, justice and mercy are despised, whilst concepts like honour, duty and hope are distorted.

We need leaders, like Churchhill, that are unashamed and forthright in describing the Islamist threat. We need leaders, like Churchhill, that speak over the chattering elite in the Mainstream Media and directly to the people they lead. And we require leadership, like Churchhill's, that provides moral and strategic clarity in this long unyielding war.