Winston Is Back

Winston Churchill, who would have celebrated his 140^th birthday today, was a man who was wrong about almost everything in his life.

He was wrong about India, jeering at Gandhi as "a half-naked Indian fakir" and, when the Mahatma was on one of his hunger strikes, firing off an indignant telegram to the Viceroy demanding to know why Gandhi hadn't died yet.

He was wrong about Ireland, where is name is still a dirty word because of his role in organizing the infamous Black and Tan paramilitary death squads to terrorize the Irish population.

He was wrong about women's suffrage when, as Home Secretary, he subjected hundreds of suffragists to forced feeding (which was like waterboarding, only grosser) in prison.

He was wrong during the abdication crisis of 1936 when he backed Edward VIII's plans to marry his paramour, Wallis Simpson, who was simultaneously sleeping with Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop.

He was wrong about the cockamamie Gallipoli invasion in World War I, when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he sent thousands of ANZAC soldiers to their deaths in a hopeless military adventure.

He was wrong when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924, he put Britain back on the gold standard, triggering a deep recession that mushroomed into a general strike two years later.

And he was wrong about what he called "the soft underbelly of Europe," forcing Eisenhower to postpone the D-Day invasion for a whole year and embark on a bloody campaign up the Italian peninsula instead.

Have you ever looked at a map of Italy? It's crisscrossed by hundreds of mountain ranges and rivers, all horizontal, which provided better natural defenses for the Germans than man could ever build. Some soft underbelly!

In fact, he was right about only one thing in his life: the absolute necessity of standing up to Hitler. But that one thing was so important, it dwarfs all his failures and permanently establishes him as the greatest statesman in British history, and one of the greatest in all of world history.

In the 1930s he was a lonely voice warning about Nazis intentions, but nobody listened. He cautioned Chamberlain not to give in to Hitler at Munich, and when Chamberlain did it anyway, he retorted, "You were given a choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and now you shall have war."

When war came and the bankruptcy of Chamberlain's appeasement was exposed, Churchill was named Prime Minister. But everyone in British ruling circles, including his own foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, wanted to sue for peace on whatever terms Hitler offered.

But despite the enormous pressure, Churchill refused to give in. Instead, he marshaled the English language and sent it into battle with some of the most stirring speeches since Shakespeare:

"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall NEVER surrender!"

And this:

"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"

It was not only Britain's finest hour; it was his, too. And the world was saved.