Our Great Leaders videos examine the case for and against Churchill’s status as the greatest Briton ever.  Continuing our engagement with this debate, here Richard Langworth puts forward his defence of Churchill’s legacy.

Richard M. Langworth CBE has served as Senior Fellow for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, publisher of Sir Winston’s official biography, since 2014. This text is from an address to the Chartwell Society of Portland, Oregon, on 10 May 2021.

PART 1: CANCEL CULTURE

Defence, defence

Senator Packwood, Justice Gillette, members and guests of the Chartwell Society: I welcome you, if only virtually, so you won’t even be able to throw rolls if I say something silly. Taking his first tv screen test, Sir Winston muttered: “Even though we have to sink to this level, we always have to keep pace with modern improvements.” At least you’ve made me put on a tie, which I haven’t done since the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise.

Like everyone in our cowed and whipped world,  I bow before the awesome powers of the Wu Flu.[1] Defence, defence! We need a spark from God knows where, as Churchill said. Because if we’re prepared to be frightened and ruled by fear, then the only thing to do is fight to the last.

Seems we’ve heard such words before…

At least those alive and sentient on this day 81 years ago heard them—when as our chairman says, Lord Halifax was not summoned to Buckingham Palace. It was that other fellow, the “half-breed American.” A civil servant remarked: “I spent the day in a bright blue new suit from the Fifty Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.”

I’d like to quote Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, whom you hosted two years ago: “If nature has changed to the point where people are ready to be despotized, then they’re going to be despotized, because there are always those ready to do that to them, and there are a lot of them right now. Ultimately that means the end of self-government, where the ordinary person gets to decide anything.”

The alternative is the promise Churchill held out, which as Dr. Arnn says is also the promise of Western civilisation: “That each of us is entitled, under the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to live a full and human life.”[2] But if we believe in that alternative, we’re going to need greatness and leadership.

Experts and the mental pandemic

I never thought I’d see the day when we would grow accustomed to the idea that free people should be policed on the advice of experts who disagree with each other and reverse themselves. Dr. Arnn often quotes something young Winston wrote to H.G. Wells in 1902, when Churchill was only 28:

“I cannot think that there can ever be a society governed by experts,” he wrote. “Expert knowledge is narrow knowledge…practical decisions involve weighing all the factors.”  Five decades later he remarked: “Scientists should be on tap, but not on top.” [3]

No one can be an expert about all the factors involved in, say, Covid. And even as the pandemic eases, the mental pandemic continues. Ironically, the most virulent expressions of mental distemper—the most ferocious tocsins—are over here, and diminish as you move east. They’re weaned somewhat in London, and lose steam in Paris, where President Macron, leader of the free world, speaks for the defence. Not one French statue shall be toppled, not one street renamed, he says, because they are part of French history.

By the time you get to Prague, or Budapest or Bratislava, in the old Warsaw Pact, the tocsins are barely detectable. Thirty years ago, who would have guessed? It’s incredible that the nations which ought to be in the best position not to slide over the cliff are where we are most afflicted with the mental pandemic.

Cancel Culture

And Winston Churchill, of all figures, is a prime target of people drunk with the madness called cancel culture. We in the Churchill Studies business—and that includes you, for you know more about him than most—have adopted a siege mentality. Indeed Andrew Roberts and I contemplated organizing a rapid response team to confront each new lie as it erupts. We thought to use a friendly newspaper or cable channel. We gave it up when we realized the reality. Such is the mental pandemic that few who have made up their minds would let us try to change them.

It’s especially noticeable on social media, a fountain of ignorance Churchill never had to confront. In his day when you said something you usually signed your name to it. Anonymity is, I suspect, part of what drives the worst outbursts on Twitter.

Andrew has a much larger megaphone because of his inciteful biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. It’s the Churchill volume to read if you read only one. In March he teamed up with a brilliant young Ethiopian, Zewditu Gebreyohanes, in a point by point refutation of a one-sided panel in Cambridge, home of the Churchill Archives of all places, which relegated Winston Churchill to the outer reaches of Nazism.

Their response to “The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill” is on Hillsdale’s Churchill website. Read it and you’ll marvel at the wilful ignorance and slipshod history of the panellists. They remind me of Churchill’s description of orators who, “Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they sit down, they do not know what they have said.”[4]

Some racist…

Moreover, wrote Roberts and Gebreyohanes,

a racist or white supremacist wants bad things to happen to non-whites, whereas Churchill dedicated much of his life to protecting: Punjabi farmers from invading Taliban tribesmen, Sudanese civilians from the Khalifa’s slave-trading, Cape coloureds from the Afrikaaner republics, Indians from the Japanese (who killed 17% of the Filipino population from 1941 to 1945), amongst many other examples.[5]

As Churchill put it:

“We will endeavour…to advance the principle of equal rights of civilized men irrespective of colour. We will not—at least I will pledge myself—hesitate to speak out when necessary if any plain case of cruelty of exploitation of the native for the sordid profit of the white man can be proved.[6]”

Ms. Gebreyohanes’ part in all this is one of the most encouraging things about the defence effort. She can’t be accused of any of the biases they like to throw at old-time Churchillians. (Incidentally, while working on this paper, she filled me in on what Ethiopians think of Haile Selassie, their famous leader. She says it is much less than Churchill thought of him when he was thrown out by Mussolini in 1936.)

Take Bengal…please

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has benefitted from the work of prominent Indian historians, on the long, badly misrepresented role of Churchill in the Bengal Famine: the hottest topic in the broad array of “Churchill Derangement Syndrome.”

Zareer Masani, biographer of Indira Gandhi, painstakingly describes Churchill’s efforts to alleviate the famine:

“The true facts about food shipments to Bengal, amply recorded in the British war cabinet and government of India archives, are that more than a million tons of grain arrived in Bengal between August 1943, when the war cabinet first realised the severity of the famine, and the end of 1944, when the famine had petered out. This was food aid specifically sent to Bengal, much of it on Australian ships, despite strict food rationing in England and severe food shortages in newly-liberated southern Italy and Greece.[7]”

Dr. Masani noted that the deplorable things Churchill said about Indians, always quoted over the Bengal famine, were in fact aimed at Delhi separatists, not the Indian people. Further, they have mainly one source—Leopold Amery, his Secretary of State for India.

Churchill loved to tweak the excitable Amery. He never dreamed that 75 years later, Amery’s diaries would be dredged up to prove he hated brown people. In fact Churchill made fun of everyone: Britons, Arabs, Americans, Chinese, Italians, Albanians, regardless of whether they were white or any other colour.

Churchill respected peoples…

…when they deserved respect. “I cannot see any objections to Indians serving on His Majesty’s Ships where they are qualified and needed,” he wrote in 1942, “or, if their virtues so deserve, rising to be Admirals of the Fleet.”[8] Later in his war memoirs he wrote:

“The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine forever in the annals of war…. Upwards of two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the forces, and by 1942…were coming in at the monthly rate of fifty thousand…. The response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.[9]”

In July 1944, over lunch with the Indian statesman Sir Ramaswamy Mudaliar, a member of the war cabinet, Churchill was heard to say “the old notion that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must disappear.” He was quoted as saying: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.”[10]

Reality checks, honest debates

Tirthankar Roy of the London School of Economics led the defence against the leading text of the British Empire Hate Lobby. He showed that under the Raj, things got better not worse for the Indian masses by almost every standard of measurement: “As a society that had invented the idea that the touch of another person could cause pollution,” Dr. Roy wrote…

“India did not need the British to know how to oppress and degrade other people. British rule, imposed from the outside, unleashed forces of change, weakening this home-grown cruelty. The Depressed Classes welcomed the British as their deliverers from age-long tyranny and oppression by the orthodox Hindus. The migration of millions of Indians from servile labour back in their villages to mines, factories and plantations all over the Empire created the possibility of real freedom. Of course, after the war, most Indians believed the British needed to leave for India to thrive. But they did not think that the British were the root of India’s problems.[11]”

Abhijit Sarkar of Oxford wrote a controversial thesis suggesting that Muslim-Hindu prejudices were at the heart of the food shortages:

“The All-India Grand-Assembly pursued the famine for political purposes. It alleged that the Muslim Bengal government was creating new Muslim grain traders, undermining the established Hindu traders. It publicized the government’s failure to avert the Bengal famine to prove the economic “unviability” of creating a separate Pakistan.[12]”

There is much debate about Dr. Sarkar’s theories among Indians. I’m happy to say that we’ve published both the pros and cons, made in good faith, and a desire for the truth.

Defence international

We are proud to welcome scholars East and West in defence and debate of accurate history. A “Churchill Derangement Primer,” which you can find on my website, lists every accusation and attack from “A is for Aryans” to “W is for White Supremacy,” providing links where you can find sober, honest, footnoted discussion of the charge in question. The truth doesn’t always favour Churchill. But the average isn’t too bad.

For instance, we have published “Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth about Churchill’s Use of Racial Epithets.” I ran every offensive racial or ethnic slur through our digital resource—one hundred million words by and about Churchill, including his own books, articles, speeches, letters and papers.

I began nervously—didn’t know what the result would be. I found that they are extremely rare. For example, I could find not one instance of Winston Churchill using the n-word, or even being quoted using it, though Leo Amery used it frequently. Will the historians who consistently accuse Churchill of it revise their screed? We’re waiting.

Churchill’s defence also benefits from the fact that he is as respected as ever among the broad mass of people. In 2020 Richard Cohen established an independent Facebook group called simply “Winston Churchill.”  You can post anything you want there. About 95% of the posts are positive and they come from all over the world. In six months—I’m amazed by this—the group grew to over 20,000 members. In India, Amman Merchant and Herbert Anderson have established blogsites puncturing Churchill slander. And Hillsdale’s Churchill Project has 60,000 subscribers. These are encouraging numbers.

PART 2: PRECEPTS -SURRENDER NOTHING, HONOR THE WHOLE

Here are two precepts for us to follow when confronting perversions of the truth surrounding Winston Churchill.

First, “Surrender nothing”

In protecting his good name we cannot dissemble. As Mark Steyn says in another context[13], “Unless you’re prepared to surrender everything, surrender nothing.” When President Macron declared that no statue or street in France would be renamed, miraculously the threats against them dissipated.” That takes courage, and the strength of one’s convictions. Churchill’s example eight decades ago is apposite.

“Surrender nothing” means never using weak excuses, like “Churchill was just a man of his time,” or “everybody was a racist back then.” This is not good enough. It doesn’t do him justice. Churchill was not a man of his time—he was far ahead of it. He was demanding human rights for people of colour long before it was expedient to do so. He was, in fact, considered a dangerous radical when, early on, he took up the causes of non-whites in the far reaches of the Empire.

“Traitor to his class”

It didn’t take young Winston long to start prodding the establishment. Aged 25, he was imprisoned as an accused British combatant in the Boer War. No sooner was he locked up than he engaged his Boer captors over their treatment of native Africans.

“Is it right,” his jailor demanded, that they “should walk on the pavement [sidewalk]—without a pass too? That’s what they do in your British colonies. Brother! Equal! Ugh! Free! Not a bit. We know how to treat them…. We’ll stand no damned nonsense from them.”[14] Recording this, Churchill asked:

“What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man…. The dominant race is to be deprived of their superiority; nor is a tigress robbed of her cubs more furious than is the Boer at this prospect.[15]”

Churchill labelled his jail time “In Durance Vile.”[16] Ever afterward he nursed a deep sympathy for convicts. As Home Secretary a decade or so later, he commuted sentences and stopped jailing people for petty offences, causing many a harrumph from the John Bulls of Edwardian Britain.

He was called a “traitor to his class” by the Tory aristocracy—even by his cousin Sunny, 9th Duke of Marlborough.[17] Churchill might have replied quoting his mentor David Lloyd George, whose name the Duke had forbidden at Blenheim Palace. “A fully-equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two dreadnoughts; and Dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.”[18]

“Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem…”

Consider India and Gandhi, which today’s experts wish us to believe Churchill despised. In 1906, when young Winston was Undersecretary for the Colonies, Mohandas Gandhi appealed to him over the oppressed Indian minority in South Africa. A quarter century later, Churchill lost his battle against the Act which granted India more self-government. So he invited Gandhi’s friend, Ghanshyam Das Birla, to Chartwell. (Apparently he didn’t hate Indians enough not to invite them to lunch.)

“Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables,” Churchill told Birla. Indeed the abysmal treatment of Untouchables, or Dalits, had been basic to Churchill’s opposition to self-government. “You have got immense powers,” Churchill continued. “So make it a success.”

Birla asked, “What is your test of success?” Churchill replied—as he often replied when such questions arose: “Improvement in the lot of the masses, morally as well as materially. I do not care whether you are more or less loyal to Great Britain…but give the masses more butter….Make every tiller of the soil his own landlord….Tell Mr. Gandhi to use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success.” Does that sound like a man who hated Indians?

Birla went home and repeated the conversation to the Mahatma. Gandhi replied: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”[19]

On Segregation and Africans

Here is another quote which his detractors always ignore. In 1942, Churchill was confronted with an influx of American forces in Britain, accompanied by the segregation of black troops. In cabinet he declared:

“We need not, and should not, object. But they must not expect our authorities, civil or military, to assist them…. So far as concerned admission to canteens, public houses, theatres, cinemas, and so forth, there would, and must, be no restriction of the facilities hitherto extended to coloured persons as a result of the arrival of United States troops in this country.[20]”

One more example—because we must be armed to the teeth against the charge that he was racist. In 1954, when he was still Prime Minister but nearing retirement, the Apartheid government in Pretoria made one of its periodic demands to annex three black-run British protectorates within its borders. Once again, Churchill’s precepts were consistent, and he minced no words:

“There can be no question of Her Majesty’s Government agreeing at the present time to the transfer of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland to the Union of South Africa. We are pledged, since the South Africa Act of 1909, not to transfer these Territories until their inhabitants have been consulted [and] wished it. [South Africa should] not needlessly press an issue on which we could not fall in with their views without failing in our trust.[21]”

Within a few years, Britain had granted all three protectorates independence. Today, Botswana, the former Basutoland, is one of the most prosperous and democratic countries in Africa.

Second, honor the whole

Among precepts frequently forgotten is Churchill’s broadness and modernity of thought. His notoriety rests on the 18 months that began 81 years ago today. Of course he didn’t win the war. His achievement was that, when Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone, he didn’t lose it.

“Take away Churchill in 1940,” wrote Charles Krauthammer, “and Britain would have settled with Hitler—or worse. Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.”[22] And Churchill himself declared: “Nothing surpasses 1940.”[23]

Nevertheless, like the Nobel Prize Committee, who insisted on considering not just the war but his life’s work, Churchill cannot be remembered only in terms of his finest hour. This is the mistake almost every casual admirer makes. Unlike us, they don’t know the whole story—one of the key precepts. It is up to us to tell it.

PART 3: A LIFE DEVOTED TO CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY

Churchill was far more than the hero of 1940. His thinking on concepts like liberty, representative government and the rule of law are as important today as ever. Holding the Anglo-American relationship central, he had a vast appreciation for and understanding of the British and American constitutions, and the pros and cons of each.

Britain’s constitution is unwritten. America wrote it all down. Churchill thought the British alternative rather better because, he thought, the meaning of a written constitution can misrepresented, particularly by unelected judges or bureaucrats.[24]

In 1936 he wrote an article, “What Good’s a Constitution?”  He never mentions the USA, but the whole piece contemplates the dangers of misinterpreting America’s founding documents. A constitution, he says, is only a “form” for what a nation believes in. Misinterpretation will alter that form.[25]

You should read this eloquent article. It appeared only in Collier’s, and the rare volumes of his essays, but I can email it to  you. Here you will find all the arguments for and against activist courts. Read it and decide for yourself how relevant Churchill’s thought is today.

On the regulatory state

His 1931 essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” is in his book Thoughts & Adventures.[26] It describes the same regulatory state which occupies our concerns today. In that bureaucracy unelected officials, not representatives of the citizens, make most of the laws. This, Churchill says, removes the difficulties of life which lay the grounds for the achievements of life:

“The individual becomes a function. The community is alone of interest: mass thoughts dictated and propagated by the rulers…. Subhuman goals and ideals are set…. The Beehive? No, for there must be no queen and no honey, or at least no honey for others. There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in collectivist philosophy which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the White Ant.”

Churchill then offers an uplifting alternative:

“But human nature is more intractable than ant nature. The explosive variations of its phenomena disturb the smooth working out of the laws and forces which have subjugated the White Ant. It is at once the safeguard and the glory of mankind that they are easy to lead and hard to drive.[27]”

Churchill wrote this with dictatorships ascendant. He always maintained that Hitler could be beaten—long before, and preferably without war. Why? asked Dr. Arnn. Answers: “1) He must be beaten. And 2) Hitler’s world is not natural. We won’t like it. Thus also for every government unrepresentative of the people. They pretend to be value-free, but they end up being prey to every petty tyranny that comes along.”[28]

“The central principle of Civilisation”

As Chancellor of Bristol University in 1938, Churchill spoke of the word Civilisation. The words are beautiful. One can read them in ten minutes—posted on our Hillsdale Churchill website.[29]

“There are few words which are used more loosely than the word “Civilisation.” What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinions of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained.

That is Civilisation—and in its soil grow continually liberty, comfort, and culture. When Civilisation reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all.

The central principle of Civilisation is the subordination of the ruling authority to the settled customs of the people and to their will as expressed through the Constitution. In this Island we have today achieved in a high degree the blessings of Civilisation.[30]”

An inheritance always in jeopardy

Professor Dan Mahoney of Assumption University introduces this speech on our website. Civilization, he says, is not a once-and-for-all achievement. Liberty is  “an inheritance that is always threatened by the temptations of barbarism and (quoting Churchill in 1940) “by the lights of perverted science.”[31] That means civilization must be defended, by what Churchill sometimes called “Arms and the Covenant.”  Mahoney continues:

“Peaceful, law-abiding, and liberal nations ought to form larger instruments and organisms of collective security, which would allow international law to be backed by what Thomas Pangle has called “a mighty sword in the hand of legal justice.” In a world of destructive technology and aggressive ideological despotisms, it is no longer enough to rely  on the precarious mechanism of a not always reliable balance of power.[32]”

In words meant to stir the civic virtue and courage of Western democrats, Churchill wrote:

“Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.[33]”

The urgent need for confidence

In the absence of a confident western civilization, ready to use not necessarily its power but its influence, the planet goes to hell. For example, Churchill didn’t have great hope for liberty in the Arab states he set up in 1921. His highest hope was in what became Israel. Nevertheless, he thought, the West must do what it could, hoping to use its influence for good. Because that influence is better than some of the other influences that occur from time to time. Suppose the Soviet Union had reorganized the Middle East in 1921?

If Britain ceased to be the leading world power, Churchill saw America as an acceptable substitute. He knew that was the best alternative. Why? Larry Arnn explains:

“Churchill informs us that something beautiful developed in the English-Speaking world. Think of what that means for a moment. There are two ways for human beings to get along: talking and fighting, Politics grows from talking. And it’s a profound connection when you speak the same language. Especially if it’s the language of Shakespeare. So what Churchill thinks is that, partly because of the accident of the English Channel, and the primacy of the Navy, and partly because the King could not overwhelm the Parliament, this idea grows. Soon it is on the oceans, spreading to another continent. That is inspiring to Churchill. [34]”

Globalizing Liberty

The idea is not Anglo-centric. As Churchill asks at Bristol:

“Why should not the same principles which have shaped the free, ordered, tolerant Civilization of the British Isles and British Empire be found serviceable in the organization of this anxious world? Why should not other nations establish a rule of law for the benefit of all?[35]”

The idea of universal liberty originated in England, Churchill says, yet it may apply to any country. The idea deserves, dare we say it, globalization! Failure to recognize this idea is what makes despots dangerous.

But however things turn out, Churchill tells us, it is irrefutable that constitutional principles, and the greatest documents from Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution, are in English. That was a thing of pride to Winston Churchill. And it should be to us.

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Endnotes

[1] The morning after my talk I was accused of using a “racist term” (Wu Flu). I looked up the euphemism in the Urban Dictionary, which would say it’s racist if it is. Such is the “mental pandemic” that it sets the terms of the debate by labelling something racist. If you dissemble, you acknowledge it. So don’t dissemble! Wuhan is not a race. China is not a race. If everything today is racist, then we’re all racists.

[2] Larry P. Arnn, Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, Franklin, Tennessee, 26 April 2021. Audio link to be posted later.

[3] Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC) to H.G. Wells, April 1902. WSC to Anthony Montague Browne, ca. 1959 in Montague Browne, Long Sunset (London: Cassell, 1995), 265.

[4] WSC on Lord Charles Beresford, 20 December 1912, in Richard M. Langworth, Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books, 2016), 325.

[5] Andrew Roberts and Zewditu Gebreyohanes, “Cambridge: ‘The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill,’ a Review,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 14 March 2021. (All websites cited were accessed in May 2021.)

[6] WSC, House of Commons, 28 February 1906, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 2, Young Statesman 1901-1914 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 163.

[7] Zareer Masani, “Churchill and the Genocide Myth: Last Word on the Bengal Famine,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 27 January 2021.

[8] WSC to Admiral Little, 14 October 1939, in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 14, At the Admiralty, September 1939-May 1940 (Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 240.

[9] WSC, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 195o), 182.

[10] Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Viking, 2018), 785.

[11] Tirthankar Roy, “The British Raj According to Tharoor; Some of the Truth, Part of the Time,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 7 August 2020.

[12] Abhijit Sarkar, “The Effect of Race and Caste on Relief in the Famine, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 29 January 2001.

[13] Mark Steyn, “Surrender Nothing,” Mark Steyn Show, 18 December 2020 accessed May 2021.

[14] WSC, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (London: Longmans Green, 1900), 60.

[15] Ibid.

[16] WSC, My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 273.

[17] R.W. Thompson, The Yankee Marlborough (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 127.

[18] Non-Churchill quotes in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books 2016) Kindle edition, 273.

[19] Remarks by Birla, Churchill and Gandhi are in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, The Prophet of Truth 1922-1939 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 618-19.

[20] War Cabinet: Conclusions (Cabinet papers, 65/28) October 1942, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, Testing Times, 1942 (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 1278.

[21] WSC, House of Commons, 13 April 1954, in Martin Gilbert & Larry Arnn, eds., The Churchill Documents, Vol. 23, Never Flinch, Never Weary, October 1951-January 1965 (Hillsdale College Press, 2019), 1538.

[22] Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), 23.

[23] WSC, The Second World War, vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 555.

[24] WSC, “What Good’s a Constitution?,” Colliers, 22 August 1936, 29, 39-40. Reprinted in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, vol. 2, Churchill and Politics (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), 386-93. Available upon request via email.

[25] Noted by Larry P. Arnn in an interview with Mark Steyn, 2 March 2017, Steynonline.com, accessed 2 May 2021.

[26] WSC, “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” The Strand Magazine, May 1931, 474-85. Reprinted in WSC, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932, many editions since).

[27] WSC, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Leo Cooper, 1990), 185, emphasis mine.

[28] Arnn interview, ibid.

[29] WSC, “Civilisation.” Chancellor’s Address, Bristol University, 2 July 1938, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 (New York: Bowker, 1974), 7 vols., VI, 5991.

[30] Ibid.

[31] WSC, “Their Finest Hour,” House of Commons, 18 June 1940, in Blood Sweat and Tears (New York: Putnams, 1941), 370.

[32] Daniel Mahoney, Introduction, “Churchill: What We Mean by ‘Civilization,’” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 8 February 2019, accessed 1 May 2021.

[33] WSC, “Civilisation,” Speeches VI, 5991.

[34] Arnn interview, ibid.

[35] WSC, “Civilisation,” Speeches VI, 5991.