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67924d9
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There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,' Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. 'Severity always,' went the British motto, 'justice when possible.
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winston-churchill
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Wade Davis |
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072d4f4
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It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
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personality
biography
larger-than-life
winston-churchill
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d90fcc7
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It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him--the winning of a democratic election.
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time
history
truth
crisis
british-empire
conservative-party-uk
elections
imperialism
soviet-union
united-states
winston-churchill
power
britain
democracy
russia
cold-war
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Christopher Hitchens |
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0704f3c
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"Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell--the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War--urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but "anything is better than submission." Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn't be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, "should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs."
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nuclear-weapons
winston-churchill
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Eric Schlosser |