![]() “What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure.” Those who write mournfully today about the loss of the British Empire must perforce admit that the Tory majority of 1938 proposed to preserve that empire on just those terms. In what was perhaps his best ever speech, delivered to the Commons five days after the Munich agreement, on October 5, 1938, Churchill gave voice to the idea that even a “peace-loving” coexistence with Hitler had something rotten about it. That appears facile now, but was exceedingly uncommon then. ![]() He excoriated it as a wicked and nihilistic thing. Nor did he speak of it as a depraved but possibly useful ally. But alone among his contemporaries, Churchill did not denounce the Nazi empire merely as a threat, actual or potential, to the British one. This is for one purely subjective reason: I don’t care about the loss of the British Empire, and feel that the United States did Britain-but not itself-a large favor by helping to dispossess the British of their colonies. I find that I cannot rerun the tape of 1940, for example, and make it come out, or wish it to come out, any other way. ![]() But history really begins where evolution ends, and where we gain at least a modicum of control over our own narrative. I am quite sure that he is correct in this. Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing the evidence of the fossil record in the Burgess Shale, offered the dizzying conclusion that if the “tape” of evolution could be rewound and run again, it would not “come out” the same way. I can think such thoughts, and even adduce evidence for them, and feel all the cargo in my hold slowly turning over until there is no weight or balance left in the once sturdy old vessel. His declining years in retirement were a protracted, distended humiliation of celebrity-seeking and gross overindulgence … His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that “history” had so far denied him-the winning of a democratic election. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. ![]() It is truth, in the old saying, that is “the daughter of time,” and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Herewith, a brief sampling.įrom a review of Churchill: A Biography, by Roy Jenkins. Many of his Atlantic essays are collected in the book Arguably, published the year of his death. He had come to understand, he went on, that the American Revolution “is the only revolution that still resonates.” When the British-born Hitchens embarked on the process of becoming an American citizen (a process he completed in 2007), he wrote about that in The Atlantic too, describing how a new national identity had stolen over him: “I had just completed work on a short biography of another president, Thomas Jefferson, and had found myself referring in the closing passages to ‘our’ republic and ‘our’ Constitution”-references he wasn’t aware of until reviewing the proofs. (His reporting and other essays appeared in Vanity Fair.) Books being what they are, the Atlantic column gave Hitchens the freedom to write, in effect, about anything, and his range was wide: from Orwell and Trotsky to Lolita and Jeeves, from Hilary Mantel and Gertrude Bell to Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Luxemburg. He had been a columnist for The Atlantic for more than a decade, writing exclusively about books. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011, 10 years ago today. ![]()
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