Churchill on Paper
A library exhibit examines the great man as a prose stylist.
Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street in 1940
In War and Peace, Tolstoy contends that Great Men have no agency; instead, they are merely slaves to Providence. British philosopher Herbert Spencer liked this idea, but he put it a little differently: “Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”
There is certainly value in this view of the world, but taken ad absurdum it will lead to a rejection of exceptionalism — and even of free will: “His society” may well have led to the content of Shakespeare’s plays, but how to explain his facility for language?
One might well ask the same question about Winston Churchill, of whose literary output New York City’s Morgan Library has just opened an exhibition. In war and in peace Churchill was a human force field whose time was as much a product of him as he of it.
In his magisterial biography, Churchill, Roy Jenkins implored us to appreciate how much of a tangible difference to the course of history Churchill made, and how adroitly he drew on his understanding of the past to predict the future.
Contra Spencer, Churchill was special. He seems to have known it himself, telling Violet Asquith at a dinner party in 1906, “we are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow worm.”
Later, modesty obtained. “I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar,” was his verdict on his role. It is perhaps more accurate to say that he was not the only lion. But whatever he was, his resolution to achieve victory “whatever the cost may be” stood him in dramatic contrast with many of his peers.
The similarly bred Lord Halifax, who came perilously close to the premiership on the eve of the fall of France, was in favor of a negotiated peace with Hitler. Those who had recently occupied 10 Downing Street had been faced with a choice between war and dishonor: “They chose dishonor. They will have war,” Churchill warned.
Given the unfavorable circumstances in which his judgment was issued, he could hardly have guessed that when its full fury came he would be sitting in their place. We should be thankful that he was.
Churchill’s qualities transcended his gift for rhetoric. Evelyn Waugh’s biting characterization of the man as “simply a radio personality who outlived his prime” was a cheap and witless shot. His indomitable courage and instinctive understanding of the Nazis’ true station in the “dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime” played an equally critical role in his contribution to British survival.
But a voice ringing out in the darkness will not resonate without the right words to shape it, and it was his command of ideas and mastery of language that gave his roar its bite. As Edward R. Murrow put it, Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” This is the exhibition’s central theme.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Churchill had scant capacity for extemporaneous remarks. This much is obvious from his unscripted V-E Day speech, which is egregious among the collection on display. Such was Churchill’s reliance upon preparation that his friend, Lord Birkenhead, joked that “Winston has spent the best years of his life writing impromptu speeches.” The barb rings true: His words were meticulously fashioned and generally extensive.
So prolific was Churchill in his output that others often felt duty-bound to put him down. A vast memorandum to the secretary of state, Lord Elgin — under whom he served as under-secretary for the colonies as a young man — was finished with a peremptory, “These are my views.” This prompted Elgin to add, “But not mine,” and return the treatise to Churchill without further comment. It was a great British put-down of a not-yet-great Briton.
But time changes everything. Ultimately, Churchill’s unyielding prose found a receptive audience and a historical role. His uncanny capacity to identify what was at stake — so often parsed as much in terms of the virtues of the Anglo-American West as of the evils of the Nazis and, later, the Soviet Union — allowed him to cast the Second World War and its aftermath in its proper light and deftly to illustrate the perils of inaction as the world around his “island home” sank into “the abyss of a new dark age.”
Nowadays “Nazi” is a casually thrown synonym for “evil,” but this was not always so. Given understandable British reluctance to replay the horrors of the Somme, and Americans’ legitimate hesitation to be dragged into the new battles of the Old World, Churchill had his work cut out.
Fortunately, by the time he became prime minister he had been warning of Nazism’s hazards for a good five years — an ample period in which to collect his thoughts on the matter. That notwithstanding, his first speech to Parliament gave the measure of the man.
Addressing the Commons, he made no mention of those whose mistakes had led Britain to the brink of its first invasion since 1066; nor of his having been ignored on that score for so long. He could well have lamented that he had been rendered Cassandra and relegated to the political wilderness for the crime of being right.
But then, always preferring to move forward, that was never Churchill’s style. Instead, he said this:
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.
That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, “come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.”
The ideas that underpinned the British Empire and American Republic creep freely into Churchill’s writing, even when dubiously relevant. In 1936, when condemning the Japanese bombing of China, he lamented to an indifferent House of Commons that the Japanese were attacking the “stately language” of the Declaration of Independence, and the Chinese were fighting for “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
There he may have overstepped the bounds of credibility, but his oratory was generally better off for such enthusiasms. His readiness to separate the virtues of Anglo-American liberty from its authors and see freedom as a universal good formed an especially crucial distinction when contrasted with the crude appeal to exclusive racial superiority that emanated from Germany during its Third Reich.
In his post-war “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Missouri, Churchill adumbrated this line of thought. Britain and America’s role in the world, he affirmed, was to defend the “title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home.” And, these being “the message of the British and American peoples to mankind,”
we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
The war predominates, for obvious reasons. But the exhibition also deals with both Churchill’s formative years and the emotionally mixed days after victory had been won — days in which he suffered from depression (“black dog”), a surprising post-bellum defeat at the polls — and faced up to the task of warning a war-weary world that the “sunlit uplands” that he had promised would be the fruits of victory were, alas, subject to a new shadow cast by an “iron curtain.”
As a child, Churchill did not seem set for greatness — who does, really? — and struggled at school, ever remaining in the shadow of his famous father, Randolph. “The stupidest boy at Harrow who is the son of the cleverest man in England” was his schoolmaster’s evaluation, and the report card in the Morgan Library’s collection does little to contradict the opinion. (One verdict was simply: “Very bad — is a constant trouble to everybody.”) As was common at the time, being sent to boarding school was a virtual estrangement from his parents.
The letters in the exhibition show a boy full of unrequited love and trapped within Victorian strictures that had little room for his effusive personality and specialized skills. Like many a great autodidact, he was unsuited to the confines of a curriculum. “Personally I’m always ready to learn,” he wrote, “although I do not always like being taught.” That he had written and had published two classic war memoirs by his 20th birthday vindicated his complaint.
It would be a grave mistake to presume that, after a rough school career, the boy magically transformed into a sage. Lord Birkenhead never spoke truer words than when observing, “When Winston’s right, he’s right. When he’s wrong, well, my God.”
But while Churchill was often wrong, he was never unsure. Of the British government’s policy toward Nazi Germany he wrote, “so they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.”
Whatever his flaws, these were words that could never have been spoken of him. Instead, he lived by his motto: “I never worry about action, only inaction.” The modern world owes that fact a sizeable debt — Herbert Spencer be damned.
Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review.
Source: nationalreview.com
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Mar 1, 2012 3:21 PM GMT+0900
North Korea agreed to a moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile launches in an accord with the U.S. that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a “modest step in the right direction.”
The government in Pyongyang will also halt uranium enrichment at its facility in Yongbyon and permit verification by international inspectors, according to statements released yesterday by both countries. Further talks will be held on implementing the terms, which also call for the U.S. to provide food aid to North Korea.
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- John Park, research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, talks about tensions on the Korean Peninsula. U.S. envoy Glyn Davies meets North Korea's First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Kim Kye Gwan today, the two nations’ first face-to-face talks since Kim died and his son, Kim Jong Un, became leader. Park speaks from Boston with Zeb Eckert on Bloomberg Television's "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)
The accord came out of talks between the U.S. and North Korea in Beijing on Feb. 23 and Feb. 24, the first since dictator Kim Jong Il died in December and his son, Kim Jong Un, inherited leadership of the impoverished, nuclear-armed country.
The new leader is following the “exact playbook” of alternating confrontations and negotiations established by his father and his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, according to David Maxwell, associate director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
“I do not see this as any kind of change or breakthrough,” Maxwell said yesterday in an interview, adding that North Korea was angling for food aid.
The U.S. agreed to make final plans to provide an initial 240,000 metric tons of food aid, to be provided in 20,000-ton increments every month for a year, with the “prospect of additional assistance based on continued need,” according to a State Department statement.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said yesterday in an e- mailed statement that the talks “offered a venue for sincere and in-depth discussion” of measures to build confidence and improve relations.
South Korea Reaction
South Korea, which is still technically at war with the North since their 1950-53 conflict ended without a peace treaty, welcomed the announcement and expects the agreements will be “faithfully carried out,” according to a foreign ministry statement on its website.
Yesterday’s agreement is “a basis to further its efforts to comprehensively and fundamentally resolve the North Korean nuclear issue,” the ministry said.
The Obama administration “still has profound concerns” about North Korea, Clinton told a House Appropriations subcommittee yesterday. “It is our hope that the new leadership will choose to guide their nation onto the path of peace by living up to its obligations,” Clinton said. “We, of course, will be watching closely and judging North Korea’s new leaders by their actions,” Clinton said.
IAEA Inspections
North Korea agreed to permit the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to verify and monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment activities at the facility in Yongbyon and confirm that the five-megawatt reactor and associated facilities are being disabled, according to the State Department.
North Korea said it will allow the monitoring “while productive dialogues continue.” The country’s chief nuclear envoy, Ri Yong Ho, will visit the U.S. next week and may meet State Department officials, South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper reported, citing an unidentified person in Washington.
The U.S. expects tough negotiations on the timing of the food aid and the IAEA inspections, according to a State Department official who briefed reporters.
The Obama administration won’t start providing the aid until groups to distribute it are in full operation to ensure the help isn’t directed to the military or North Korea’s elite, according to a second State Department official.
Aid Details
The official said the U.S. has chosen aid intended to benefit young children and pregnant women. Some ready-to-eat meals would be made available to children suffering from malnutrition, the official said. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity about the private negotiations.
Republican U.S. lawmakers criticized the Obama administration for the terms it accepted. “Years of getting duped by North Korea should tell us that verification on their turf is extremely difficult, if not impossible,” Representative Ed Royce, chairman of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, said in an e-mailed statement. “That applies to food aid distribution, where the military has stolen food aid, or nuclear disarmament.”
Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona said the administration “is effectively violating long-standing U.S. policy not to link North Korean denuclearization commitments to food aid.”
‘Important Step’
U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague considers the agreement “an important step,” according to a statement from his office. “Recent changes in the North Korean leadership provide an opportunity for renewed engagement with the international community.” Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba in a e-mailed statement welcomed the move, while saying North Korea “must take concrete action toward denuclearization.”
Analysts in the U.S. debated whether the announcement represented movement by North Korea under its new leader.
“This could be one of the more significant diplomatic surprises of the year,”
George Lopez, a former United Nations sanctions investigator now at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, said yesterday in an e-mail. “Very few analysts believed that anything of substance would happen in the first few months after Kim Jong Un came to power.”
John Park, a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said yesterday’s deal had been scheduled for December and was postponed upon Kim Jong Il’s death. Its revival is significant as a sign of continuity, Park said.
‘Baseline Understanding’
“It provides something of a baseline understanding with the new leadership in Pyongyang,” he said. The agreement to halt nuclear activities at Yongbyon doesn’t affect work North Korea may be conducting elsewhere, according to Marcus Noland, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
“The working assumption is that there are other facilities scattered in unknown locations and this agreement doesn’t stop them from that,” he said.
Noland, author of “Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas,” called it significant that North Korea agreed to the amount of food aid offered by the U.S., saying Kim Jong Il had demanded 330,000 tons.
“The fact that they’ve accepted the U.S. position of 240,000 metric tons is an important indicator that there is somebody in charge,” Noland said. “Maybe it’s Kim Jong Un, a collective and maybe Jang Song Thaek,” the new leader’s uncle, he said.
Six-Party Talks
North Korea’s foreign ministry said the discussions in Beijing offered an opportunity for the resumption of six-party talks, which haven’t been held since December 2008. The six- nation forum is aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program through negotiations that also involve China, the U.S., Japan, Russia and South Korea.
The Beijing meetings were the third since the U.S. resumed direct talks with North Korea in efforts to bring the country back to the negotiations. China, North Korea’s main ally, will take “proactive steps” and continue to push for the six-party talks, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said today in a statement on the ministry’s website.
In October, Kim Jong Il said North Korea was ready to restart the talks as long as they occurred without preconditions.
The U.S. State Department said in August that North Korea must refrain from nuclear testing and missile launches and meet other conditions before the talks can resume. The North revealed its uranium-enrichment program in 2010.
Source: bloomberg.com
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김경아, 여성스포츠대상 6월 MVP 선정
【서울=뉴시스】김태규 기자 = 여자 탁구 대표팀의 '깎신' 김경아(35·대한항공)가 2012 MBN 여성스포츠대상 6월 최우수선수(MVP)에 선정됐다.
김경아는 지난달 열린 2012 국제탁구연맹 브라질오픈과 칠레오픈에서 우승을 차지했다. 이 같은 활약에 힘입어 국제탁구연맹 세계 랭킹이 11위에서 5위까지 뛰었다. 올림픽에서 유리한 시드 배정을 받아 메달 획득 가능성도 높였다.
김경아는 "남은 기간 열심히 준비해 런던올림픽 여자탁구에서 메달을 따낼 수 있도록 최선을 다하겠다"고 포부를 밝혔다. 또 LPGA에서 2차례 준우승을 차지한 서희경과 육상에서 잇따라 국내 최고기록을 경신하며 각종 국내 대회에서 우승한 육상의 이선애도 후보로 올라 높은 점수를 받았다.
여성스포츠대상 심사위원장인 정현숙 여성스포츠회 회장은 "후보에 오른 선수들이 모두 출중한 성적을 올렸지만 여자탁구의 부흥을 이끌고 있는 김경아가 올림픽 메달 기대감을 높였다는 측면에서 좋은 평가를 받았다"고 선정 이유를 밝혔다.
올해 처음 제정된 여성스포츠대상은 MBN이 주관하고, 문화체육관광부와 국민체육진흥공단, 스포츠토토가 후원을 맡았다. 매월 한국 여성 스포츠를 빛내고 위상을 높인 선수를 MVP로 선정한 뒤 연말 대상수상자를 선정한다.
Source: kr.sports.yahoo.com
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