Sunday, October 17, 2010

Where's Our Winnie?

We need another Churchill, writes Daniel Johnson in Standpoint:

...In June 1940, however, he was under no illusions. In private he compared the danger to that faced by England at the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, but he knew full well that the threat posed by Hitler was incomparably greater than that of Philip II, who — while a Habsburg, a Spaniard and a Catholic — had after all been the consort of an English Queen, Mary I. This time the stakes were much higher: not only "the continuity of our institutions and our Empire", but "the survival of Christian civilisation". Would any Western statesman speak of "Christian civilisation" today? To ask the question is to answer it: no, not even if he or she were a devout Christian, which Churchill most certainly was not. Yet it is no less true today than it was 70 years ago that Christianity is inextricably woven into the fabric of our Atlantic civilisation, even if we are much less conscious of the fact than our parents and grandparents. For them, the Nazi "war against the West" (as Aurel Kolnai called it already in 1938) was also a war against Christianity.

For the passionately philosemitic Churchill, that also (and crucially) implied a war against the Jewish people. He understood that Jews and Christians in the modern world stand or fall together. As the full horror of the Holocaust became clear from intelligence reaching him about the death camps, he was unique among Allied leaders in calling for bombing raids to halt the genocide, describing it as "probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world". Today, it is even harder to find Western leaders who grasp the enormity of the crime being prepared against Israel and the Jewish people in the name of jihad...

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