[KLUG Advocacy] Re: [KLUG Members] (OT) Churchill

[Peter Buxton]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 05:34:33PM -0400, Robert G. Brown was only escaped
   alone to tell thee:

> On 03 Oct 2003 16:34:48 -0400, Bruce Smith <bruce@armintl.com> wrote:

> > After realizing that Ike wasn't going to change Churchill's mind,
> > Ike finally went to King George and ask him to speak to Churchill
> > about this.  After much time and effort, Churchill finally conceded.

Which shows why Eisenhower was the necessary commander of the AEF. He
knew Churchill's, and most Britons', weak spot.

> Yes, it's an interesting story. Churchill had a deep and abiding
> feeling for the British Monarchy (I'd hate to see how conflicted he
> would be, based on the recent shenanigans of the Royal Family)

He wouldn't. WSC's son was a bit of a public drunk, and some
acquaintance of WSC said she didn't know how the son of a great father
(and a great family) could be so irresponsible.  Churchill, grandson of
the 7th Duke of Marlborough, turned to her and said, "Do you realize
just what kind of people lay between the first duke and me?"

Clementine Churchill once said her husband was the last defender of the
divine right of kings. He thought Edward VIII should have married Mrs
Simpson.

The respectable British monarchy is the invention of Queen Victoria. Her
two predecessors were George IV, a notorious libertine, and William IV
("His late Majesty, though at times a jovial and, for a king, an honest
man, was a weak, ignorant, commonplace sort of person," said the
Spectator at the time). The poor behaviors of the current crop are
simply a return to Hanoverian form.

> For all of his faults, mistakes, and defects (being a rube not one of
> them, IMO), Churchill is easily my choice for "Man of The Century"
> (20th, that is).  Time Magazine chose Albert Einstein, but WC was on
> the very short list.

I think it's Hitler. International law was a laughingstock until the
Nuernberg trials. All of Eastern Europe collapsed to the Soviet Union.
Japan's Axis treaty emboldened them to attack British and American
possessions. His anti-Semitism drove astonishingly talented physicists
and chemists to the UK and US and motivated them by fear to build
weapons with their knowledge.

Not that Churchill isn't important. The British Empire would still be a
going concern if the British War Cabinet had chosen Churchill over David
Lloyd George to replace Asquith as Prime Minister.

And aside from two letters to FDR, written at the instigation of
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, Einstein's part in the Manhattan
Project was non-existant. Someone would have gotten the message across.
As for relativity: I can't say that no one else would have figured it
out, but you can't say they wouldn't have, either.

-- 
I wish our noses snapped together like LEGOs.