The People Should Read Churchill

Posted on October 12, 2006
Filed Under Politics |

If you will not fight for the right, when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

-Winston Churchill.

I have derided and belittled the people of this sceptered isle for their slavish devotion to reality T.V. and the banalities of celebrity’s lives but to give them their due they did vote Sir Winston Chruchill The Greatest Briton Of All Time. Now I’m not sure I agree with them but he did come out with some great soundbites. Some examples:

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

And best of all that I found:

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

He was a consummate orator and could teach Blair (who I have to admit is a very good speaker) a thing or two about how to play a crowd, as his (Blair’s) speciality is the soundbite. Speeches broken by pauses to allow for easy editing later, something which wasn’t considered or available in Churchill’s day. Blair uses speeches to manipulate millions of people for days at a time whereas Churchill had to grab the crowd he had by the balls and make them believe, in that instant, in what he was saying. Blairs style is not suited to rousing a population to war, though this is what he has had to attempt. Churchill knew what he was fighting for was not power, control, or fame but the very survival of his country and he made you believe it too.

The original quote goes against everything Blair stands for. He has spent the last 9 years in power drawing more and more control to himself and the immense bureaucracy he has constructed in the name of “…improving public services.” and we have let him get away with it. He has eroded the freedoms which Churchill was extolling us to fight to protect in the name of security, and again we let him get away with it. His legacy will be immense public spending, high taxation, and a war (which if the figures are to be believed) has cost more Iraqi lives than all the britons lost in WWII. The enemy is not who we are told it is; the moslems with their veils, suicide bombers, and overreaction to every slight. It is our own government with its spin, we-know-best attitude, and smiling authoritarianism. If we do not fight now against this enemy within then we will have to fight later when it may be too late.

We are encouraged to shirk responsibility for ourselves and to blame ’society’ for our failings. We are told to live in fear of an enemy we cannot see. We are told that we don’t know what is good for us. Well I for one have had enough. I am responsible, I am not afraid, and I know exactly what is good for me and it is not this government.

Thanks to Naomi @ The Martian Anthropologist for bringing the first quote to my attention.
Other quotes courtesy of The Quotations Page. (Apologies for the pop-under.)

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