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Daniel Mandel, in Front Page, has an excellent appreciation of Winston Churchill:
Just over 130 years since a boy christened Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was delivered at Englands Blenheim Palace. He survived the trenches of France, political reversals and even being struck by a New York City cab to lead Britain from its greatest peril in May 1940 to victory over Nazism five years later. Monday marked the 40th anniversary of his death. In the age of Islamist terror, can we draw inspiration from his career?
Yes, but only, it seems, from his finest hour. Until his moment arrived in 1940, Churchill was frequently dismissed even within his own party as an imperialist adventurer with baroque ambitions, a throwback to an earlier epoch, an author of military debacles out of touch with a supposedly emergent world of international comity. In short, he was regarded then as most contemporary liberals might view George W. Bush or Ariel Sharon today.
And yet, if Churchill had faltered, bowing to party consensus in the 1930s or to counsel urging that Britain sue for peace in 1940, world history might have been very different. Assuming Western civilization had survived, he would have joined the ignominious company of men like Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.
Instead, he sacrificed high office for years to sound the warning against appeasing the violent forces of totalitarianism. No one save he who foresaw the danger so far ahead was fit to lead when the supreme test arrived. And lead he did, for 18 months when Britain stood alone with but a slender lifeline to an isolationist United States. His mistakes were legion and often costly, but his leadership carried the allied cause.
Churchill was guided by a few elementary ideas: that Britain and the Anglo-sphere more generally was a force for good; that its division and vacillation invited destructive forces to fill the vacuum; and that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Together, they might even be called the Churchill Doctrine.
There’s a lot more.
