Churchill 101

Thanks to the manner in which the Ivory Tower makes poster children of its most problematic professors and the zeal with which college administrators excise “dead white guys” from their curricula, Winston Churchill is probably not as well known on many American college campuses as Ward Churchill.

Indeed, I found foundations, scholarships, institutes, centers and even high schools named after Great Britain’s most famous prime minister but few classes on his life and work. About the only college course on Winston Churchill that I could find on a quick Google search was one at Hillsdale.

Perhaps some of the great man’s views rub academics the wrong way. “There are only two places where socialism can work; Heaven, where it is not needed, and Hell, where they already have it,” Churchill had said.

“Churchill was 65 when he became prime minister [of Great Britain] in May of 1940,” Churchill’s most recent biographer, Deborah Brezina, notes. “In 1898, he saw radical Islam in battle in Sudan.”

“He fought Hitler in World War II and warned of the danger of communism.” Churchill was a back bencher in the British parliament when he took issue with his own Conservative Party’s policy of appeasement of Hitler under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s.

“You had a choice between war and dishonor and chose dishonor and still got war,” Churchill told Chamberlain. Brezina’s book, The Spirit of Churchill, contains many such vignettes. She serves on the National Advisory Board of the Churchill Archives Centre.

“Real leaders should define the differences between good and evil,” she said in a talk recently at the Heritage Foundation, adding, “When we lose our historical memory, we lose our sense of who we are.”

Brezina is also on the Board of Trustees of The President James Monroe Memorial Foundation. “After 9/11, that is the man to whom we looked,” Brezina said of Churchill. “When Hitler ran into Churchill, he ran into a leader who would not say, ‘Okay, we’re going to fight a little bit and quit,’ like the French.”

“Churchill said, ‘Such people are unable to tell the difference between the fire brigade and the fire.’”

He actually made a dangerous journey into occupied France to make a last ditch effort to convince his hosts not to give up. When they asked him what he would do if the Nazis invaded Britain, he told them he would drown as many of them as he could in the Channel and shoot as many as possible who made it to dry land.

Ironically, Churchill nearly prophesied the September 11th attacks upon the United States when he warned of “another stone age arriving on the gleaming wings of science.” “We must seek peace but always be prepared for war,” Churchill warned.

“Peace through strength won World War II and the Cold War and is winning the War on Terror,” Brezina notes. Churchill himself got to see the consequences of inaction fairly early in life, up close and personal.

“When Churchill served in the army, General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon was beheaded and his head carried through the streets of Sudan,” Brezina recounted. “Sound familiar?”

“It brought down the Gladstone government because of its slow response.”

“Fanaticism is not a cause of war but a means by which uncivilized people fight,” was the lesson that Churchill learned from the experience.

Brezina has taught in both public and private schools and sees the former wanting. “It starts in grade school,” she says. “We must start with the school board that hires the teachers.”

“We hire the school board,” she notes. Currently, she serves on the faculty of Summit Ministries. As it turns out, her grounding in scripture aided her in her study of Churchill. “He wrote in psalm style,” she said.

Churchill was also an early supporter of the state of Israel, a position which would also leave him on the outs in most of today’s American college and university catalogues. He wrote of the plight of the Jews in The Jewish Chronicle in 1941.

As Brezina tells it, Churchill once got to raise that point with the Nazis themselves. While with the British delegation waiting to meet Hitler before the war, Churchill asked one of the Fuehrer’s aides to ask his boss what he had against Jews.

After the aide delivered the inquiry, Hitler refused to meet the delegation. Only a wall separated the two future adversaries, Brezina said.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.