QotD: Summing up Churchill
"Churchill was the last British Prime Minister to have a serious influence on global events, and his actions during World War II [and across his sixty-year political career] helped to end this influence...
...."Late in life, Churchill became depressed by the fact that he would leave Britain very much worse than he found it. He had been born into the richest and most powerful imperial nation in the world. By the time he died, the wealth had largely gone and the empire was largely going – and with it Britain as a great power. Many factors and many people were responsible for this, and Churchill was one of them.
...."[V]ictory [in WWII] was personified in the being of Churchill himself. The fact that victory came later and at higher cost than it could have without him has always been obscured by the very fact of victory itself...
...."The British people needed Churchill to be great, the embodiment of their desires and beliefs. They needed to believe that it was indeed they, the British people, who were responsible for victory. Within living memory, Britain had been the greatest power on earth, and the British did not believe that this could have appreciably changed by the 1940s. So it seemed natural that they must have won the war, albeit with a little help from others...
...."The fact that Britain was no longer the most powerful nation took decades for its people to adjust to.
...."In the deepest of ironies, it was Hitler who made Churchill a historical figure... He would have ended his political career in 1929, as [a failed] Chancellor of the Exchequer – just as his father had. He would have been a minor figure in British political history, and would be largely forgotten today. It is because of Churchill’s role in World War II, and because he wrote so much of the history himself, that we remember Churchill..."
~ Nigel Knight, concluding his book 'Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked'
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