21 October
From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by
Arnold Kunst
At age 91
Winston Churchill could well have looked back on a life replete with
unmitigated failure. Defeated at the polls at the very end of a world war he
was so instrumental in winning, he returned to the back benches as head of the
Opposition, and once again he was a lone voice crying out in the wilderness,
this time decrying the threat of Stalin's voracious, unprincipled Soviet Union
in the 1950’s as he had against the threat of Hitler’s voracious, unprincipled
Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.
An
unabashed imperialist, he sat impotently by as the British Empire withered into
that toothless PR construct known as The British Commonwealth - Britain as a
world power was finished. He lived the vast majority of his life in the
wilderness as a member of the opposition and, if he weren’t careful would have
gone to his grave thinking his life a failure.
The rest
of us knew, though, that there were few months, from the spring of 1940 on, when
he stood alone on the bulwarks of civilization itself against the bottomlessly
evil and immensely powerful threat of Nazism.
Hey, he
wasn’t a failure after all!
The
moral of the story: in 1940 he was THE right man for the job, and all of us, and
all of our posterity, owe him a debt of gratitude of incalculable proportions.
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