Victor Davis Hanson
Investors.com
1/21/2015
Fifty years ago this Saturday, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill died at age 90.
Churchill is remembered for his multiple nonstop careers as a statesman, Cabinet minister, politician, journalist, Nobel laureate historian and combat veteran. He began his career serving the British military as a Victorian-era mounted lancer and ended it as custodian of Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
But he is most renowned for an astounding five-year tenure as Britain’s wartime prime minister from May 10, 1940, to June 26, 1945, when he was voted out of office not long after the surrender of Nazi Germany.
Churchill took over the day Hitler invaded Western Europe. Within six weeks, an isolated Britain was left alone facing the Third Reich. What is now the European Union was then either under Nazi occupation, allied with Germany or ostensibly neutral while favoring Hitler…
…The wisdom and spirit of Churchill not only saved Britain from the Third Reich but saved Western civilization from a Nazi Dark Ages when no other nation was willing to take up that defense.
Churchill was the greatest military, political and spiritual leader of the 20th century. The U.S. has never owed more to a foreign citizen than to Winston Churchill, a monumental presence 50 years after his death.
The complete article is at Investors.com
Related: 50 Years After His Death, Churchill’s Words Continue to Inspire
A critical difference between a politician and a statesman is the ability to use the power of words not to further his own ends but to advance a cause or idea that benefits all.
In the 20th century, Winston Churchill–who died fifty years ago today–used words more effectively than any other leader of the free world as when he rallied the beleaguered British people against Nazi Germany and later alerted the world to the expansionist plans of the Soviet Union in his famous Iron Curtain address…
