Imagine a world without Winston Churchill. The very best we could hope for would be an America surrounded on all sides by hostile dictatorships. There’s no way Britain would have survived.
Of course, we’re so busy now tearing down statues and erasing our history, there are college graduates who never heard of Churchill, are only just barely cognizant that World War II ever happened, have no idea what it was about, and take the blessings of liberty for granted.
Which is how you lose them.
We live in evil times. But let’s look back on the last days of 1941.
The U.S. Navy had been decimated at Pearl Harbor. France was conquered. Bombs fell on London every day. The Nazi armies were closing in on Moscow. One wrong decision too many, one failure of nerve, one too many weather disasters… and that would be the end. The enemy was that close to winning World War II.
And yet they didn’t. For the Allies, there were still hard times to come. For the enemy, things could not have been going better. Adolf Hitler was very nearly the master of the world.
But eventually the bubble burst. As high as the war machine had built the house, it all came tumbling down.
Because God intervenes in history.
Today the ungodly press forward to create a global government; and they imagine that certain insane public policies they follow will help them do it. Ruptured national borders, soaring taxes, transgender mania, restrictions of free speech and religion, the constant threat of riots, censorship, fomenting class and racial hatreds–these are the tools they’ve chosen for their task.
The Soviet Union pioneered in all these policies, and wound up wrecking their economy and going literally out of business. Their place has been taken by Red China, the tyrants’ haven that has made common cause with globalists.
They’re riding as high as Hitler rode in 1941, and they may ride higher yet: certainly they expect to. But how big, how costly, how imperious, how oppressive, and how irrational can any government grow before it self-destructs?
They’ve learned they can’t conquer the world by force of arms; so instead they work to buy it. To win by lies, flattery, and scare tactics what they could not win with fleets and armies.
But the higher you rise, the farther you fall.
Now would be a good time, if it’s not already too late, for them to question the wisdom of their policies. We see no sign of them doing that. Higher and higher, bigger and bigger, crazier and crazier–who believes they’ll stop before they crash?
Pray hard.
There are still people alive who were here for World War II, but you’d almost think that war had never happened, judging by the little that we’ve learned from it.
The British ruling class spent years appeasing the Third Reich, making excuses for Hitler, trying to be Mr. Nice Guy, and they still got the living daylights bombed out of their country–and a brand-new German battleship, the Bismarck, determined to cut off their imported food supply.
Some folks you just can’t be nice to.
Imagine a world in which Winston Churchill died in 1931.
Without Churchill, the Third Reich conquers all of Europe. The United States, if we survive at all, endures a state of perpetual siege–unless our own leaders, as so many of Britain’s were willing to do, enter into some kind of “understanding” with the Nazis.
Liberty is fragile. It’s at odds with Original Sin. Only by God’s providence do we have it; only by His providence do we keep it. There’s always someone lusting to take it away from us.
Remember that freedom is the gift of God, and no one has the right to take it from us.
It was probably the last year, the last chance, that World War II could have been avoided–1936. But everything the leaders of Great Britain could have done wrong, they did wrong.
This is sin and folly at its apex. This is Europe practically committing suicide.
There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death (Proverbs 14:12)
My mother used to sing this to each of her children, in turn, as a lullaby: Bell Bottom Trousers. Most of the versions on Youtube have naughty lyrics that we never got to hear. Most of the arrangements are for loud, brassy music; but my mother sang it softly, as a lullaby. With different lyrics!
“Bell bottom trousers, coat of Navy blue/ Your daddy was a sailor, you’ll be a sailor, too.”
Thing was, our daddy really was a sailor, during World War II. And the old storage space in our house–all that was left of the attic, after he’d converted it to bedrooms–was chock-full of stuff he brought back from the war. Dad’s ship was based in the Philippines, and he had a lot of little knick-knacks from there: plus the whole panoply of his sailor duds.
Oh, where is all that stuff now? Dad and Ma moved so many times, and we played carelessly with the souvenirs as kids: I don’t think there’s any of it left, other than a few Filipino coins from the war years.
But it was a nice lullaby: and I was very proud of my Daddy the sailor–never crossed my mind that he was little more than a kid himself, when he clapped eyes on the Pacific Ocean. How young he was…
I had a hard time writing this column, because the subject matter makes me mad.
I do wish we could somehow exile these schmendricks to an alternative universe where Hitler wins WWII, and let them see how they like it there.
So the big movie this summer, so far, is Dunkirk–the story of how almost 400,000 defeated Allied soldiers were evacuated from beaches on the English Channel, by small boats, yachts, fishing boats, and every other kind of vessel you can name, rather than let them be killed or captured by the Germans.
To put it bluntly: If those men are left on the beach, the Nazis win World War II.
And if they had been lost there, a feminist jidrool would not be writing reviews complaining about what a bad movie Dunkirk is because there are too many men acting like men in it.
Mehera Bonner, whoever she is (http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/news/a28515/dunkirk-movie-review/), calls the film a “directorial gift to men,” complains about it being “so clearly designed for men to man-out over,” and finds it “an excuse for men to celebrate maleness.” Like, dude! Pride is for gays and lesbians and trans people, ya know!
I don’t think she likes men much, do you?
Maybe if they had filled the boats with wise Latinas and trans wimmin waving “Hillary for President” banners, Ms. Bonner would have liked the movie better. That damned history! Telling us that those were all men at Dunkirk, almost all of them white… It shouldn’t be telling us things like that! That story should have been retold, this time to conform with contemporary leftid ideology! With Donald Trump as Hitler, and Rosie O’Donnell instead of Churchill, and Bruce “Call me Caitlyn” Jenner in the White House.
Well, this is what all those men fought and died to protect. Or rather, it’s what they wound up protecting, through no fault of their own.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
Well, I’ve been driven indoors by “Let’s get it on, baby, eeee-yow!” or some such thing on my neighbor’s car radio. I was out there reading Alone–the horror story of the run-up to World War II.
It’s a horror story because we can see the same things shaping up today. Led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, opposed by Winston Churchill standing all alone, the entire British ruling class–right and left, in and out of power, politicians and intellectuals and noozies, everyone who mattered–insisted on believing in Adolf Hitler’s good intentions, and led their country down the garden path into a near-fatal disaster: World War II. Year after year, day after day, truthful and accurate information poured into Britain from ambassadors, foreign correspondents, and refugees, about what was going on in Germany–and year after year, day after day, Britain’s bigwigs refused to believe a single word of it.
Does this not strike you as eerily familiar? War was coming, doom was coming: and they refused to believe it: no accident that Nazi Germany came very near to winning the war.
I think I’ll watch Jurassic World now… and pray to Almighty God that He spares us another such catastrophe.
In 1931, while visiting New York, Winston Churchill very nearly died in an auto accident.
Think about that: World War II with no Churchill. I’ve begun to re-read William Manchester’s Alone, the middle volume of his three-book biography of Churchill. It focuses on the run-up to the most catastrophic war in human history–a war which Churchill, practically alone, saw coming, saw the risks involved, and tried to move the Western world to avert calamity.
This maddeningly eccentric man, steeped in the Victorian Age with all its moral standards, all its virtues and its vices, became, at the age of 65–retirement age!–prime minister of Britain in 1940–with France fallen, the Third Reich triumphant everywhere, Stalin allied with Hitler, and the British army, minus all its heavy equipment, just barely saved from extinction by its mass evacuation at Dunkirk.
Think of a world without Churchill. Who else could have rallied Britain to fight on? Who else could have given the speeches, made the decisions, absorbed the punishment, and not only preserved his country, but led it to victory against a force that will be remembered forever as the most evil, ruthless power ever to arise in Europe? Who else could have survived a decade of political isolation, enmity, mockery, and massive disbelief of everything he said?
Churchill’s career reminds me of how a classical Japanese smith makes a peerless sword. He starts with a heap of scrap iron that no one else wants, melts and hammers it into a single rod, then folds it back upon itself and hammers it out again. Then folds, hammers, folds, hammers, over and over again, so that the steel will be in microscopically thin layers–hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of them. Heat, fold, and hammer. Heat, fold, and hammer. And at the end, much later, the product is a perfect sword that can cut through almost anything.
In Churchill’s case the smith was God, and all that folding and hammering was God’s way of forging one man into an instrument that would preserve an entire civilization. The work took many years, but God is patient.
