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

[Robert G. Brown]

>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.
Well, one reeason. There were other, probably more inportant ones.

>>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.
Um, WCS was himself drunk at public events, and he went in his fathers'
footsteps in this regard. Randolph Churchill had serious problems with
alchohol...

There's the famous story of Chucrchill, drunk during which he was capable 
of very nasty (and oftimes brutally honest) comments...

Besie Braddock, a socialite, in the 30's: Winston, you are drunk!
Churchill: And you are ugly, but I shall be sober in the morning.

It takes unusual clarity to deliver like that under presuure. I also became
curious one evening, and decided to hunt down a photo of Ms. Braddock on
the Internet. I may make this photo available, based on demand, otherwise
I will leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I must say that Mr.
Churchill had no concern regarding slander, regardless of his mental state.

>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?"
Yes, another good example of Churchillian wordsmithery, under the influence
or not.

>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.
All true, and he was quite disappointed when he abdicated instead of standing
his ground, marrying the woman, and bearing the consequences.

>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.
All true, but it wouldn't stop the Churchill, if revived today, from dying
all over again after reading of current escapades...

>>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....
This is a defendable choice, for sure. Hilter is one of the VERY few people
who ever made Time's "Man of the Year" twice, and he did have a profound effect
on a lot of things. We'd like our "Man of the Century" to be a Good Guy, but it
is not a requirement, importance. -- effect on the rest of us -- is. If it is 
to be a Bad Guy, you've selected one of the Very Baddest Guys of all, IMO.

Perhaps the main difference between someone like Hitler (and Stalin, and similar
folks), is that they were defeated. Churchill was one of the winners, and it
is his influence (and not the others) that we live with today, and into the 
future....

>International law was a laughingstock until the Nuernberg trials.
>All of Eastern Europe collapsed to the Soviet Union.
Both of these statements are rather a bit on an oversimplification.

>Japan's Axis treaty emboldened them to attack British and American
>possessions.
Somewhat, perhaps more so the British than the American ones. Really, the 
Japanese overestimated the practical support that Germany was ever going
to lend them; in restrospect it is pretty clear that Hitler and friends
were using alliances with others as a way of puffing themselves up and
appearing to be stronger than they might have looked otherwise.

The Japanese defined the war on very much different terms, with different
goals and vocabularly than was present in Europe. Pragmatically, these were
two different wars to a very great degree.

>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.
If his anti-semitism had only remained rhetorical and theoretical, it would
not have been such a problem. One of the things that made Hitler both unique
and really awful was that he (and the people under him) actually followed
through on their ideas. Anti-Semitisn was old hat in much of Europe, but
large, determined groups of trained men in black uniforms, backed with armor,
automatic weapons, and gas chambers were quite novel, and really terrifiying,
for good and obvious reasons. 

Despite this, some men stayed, mostly becasue they didn't actually beleive
anything bad would happen. Niels Bohr had to be swept out of Copenhagen by
the British a tthe last possble moment; he refused to accept what would happen
otherwise...

>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.
Well, a bit of a stretch, but you've got the right idea.

I'm a lot more comfy with the idea that without Churchill as PM in 1940,
the UK could well have fallen to the Germans, and WW-II would have been 
a much longer and dicier proposition.

And it was a close call; Germany came very close to beating the USSR as it
was. I've stood on the spot occupied by the German artillary at their closest
approach to Moscow; you can see the Kremlin quite clearly from there. The 
margin of victory was slimmer at Stalingrad (now Volgagrad).

Churchill provided something England and the USA needed badly at the time,
and that was someone who would oppose Hitler unconditionally, yet shared 
common values. Without him, I beleive the west would have been lost.

>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.
That's certainly true. Einstein actually had little of practical value to
contribute at that point, even if he would have wanted to participate. The
real value of him writing the letter was that, as both a scientific and moral
leader, he allowed himself to be a fulcrum to get Manhattan into motion. He
felt the bomb had to be built, and that "We" had to build it first. Use of 
such a weapon was another question, to him and to many others involved in the
development of the bomb.

>Someone would have gotten the message across.
You're on the top of the slippery slope here....:)

>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.
Undoubtedly others would have done many of these things. Remove Einstein
from the scene in 1899, others come up with all the ideas, but it takes 
longer, and probably happens at different times, maybe not so fast, and
maybe under different conditions. Remove Hitler, and do we still get an
emerging Nazi party in Germany of the 1920's? Maybe... but Hitlers politcal
and personal aptitude is not there, and maybe that adds up to a big
difference, later.

We can go on like this forever... what if Churchill had died in WW-I? 
What if Lenin had lived long enough to allow Trotsky to prevail over
Stalin? What would have been different if FDR had lived? What if FDR
had been stronger at Yalta?

This is pretty wild speculation, analysis of what might have happened. It's
fun (in some ways), but it's quite different than what we were after earlier,
which was examing the people that actually were here, and did what they did,
and maybe judging their relative importance.

							Regards,
							---> RGB <---