View From a Height

Listeners to Hugh Hewitt's radio show are probably familiar with the closing lines of Winston Churchill's famous "Finest Hour" speech. The speech was delivered in 1940, just after Dunkirk, during the mopping up after the Battle of France, and well before the Battle of Britain began. While much of the speech consists of a clear-eyed assessment of the war, the last paragraph is worth reprinting in its entirety:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole worlds, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 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."

I have this from a 1941 collection of Churchill's pre-war and wartime speeches, Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Fortuitously, the original buyer of the book tucked a column from the August 15, 1941 New York Times, just after the Atlantic Conference. Here's the closing:

...there is implied the creation of a post-war organization to maintain peace, with the United States a full partner in this effort.

This is the second great decision implicit in this hisoric Declaration of the Atlantic. It means that so long as the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt prevails, and so long as a great majority of the American people endorse his views on world affairs - as they do unquestionably today - the prestige and the influence and the resources of this country will be marshalled on the side of international law and order. This is the end of isolation. It is the beginning of a new era in which the United States assumesthe responsibilities which fall naturally to a great World Power.

One expects that Churchillian insights are still relevant today. Sad, then, that the most valuable words the New York Times has to offer on our current situation were written 65 years ago.