Thursday
Not long ago, our beloved David Carr did a characteristic posting here entitled The joys of pessimism.
Here is how David ended that posting:
I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.
As he constantly is, I am sure you would all agree.
I remembered this while I was dipping today into Hitler and Churchill – Secrets of Leadership by Andrew Roberts.
Here is what Roberts says, on p. 93 of my 2003 hardback edition, about Winston Churchill's wartime leadership:
'Long dark nights of trials and tribulations lie before us,' he warned in an especially bleak radio address. 'Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be companions of our journey, constancy and valour our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted. We must be inflexible.' One man who immediately recognised the strategy behind Churchill's dismal honesty was Joseph Goebbels. 'His slogan of blood, sweat and tears has entrenched him in a position that makes him totally immune from attack,' wrote the Nazi propaganda chief in a magazine article entitled 'Churchill's Tricks'. 'He is like the doctor who prophesies that his patient will die and who, every time his patient's condition worsens, smugly explains that he prophesied it.' By preparing the public for bad news, Churchill denied the Nazis the full propaganda value of their victories. They could not wreck national morale if Britons had already heard the worst from the Prime Minister himself.
So now we know. David is really trying to cheer us all up.
The bulldog breed
Comparing someone to Winston Churchill?
Shouldnt that be an insult around here?
Read about the real welfare-warfare-mongering Churchill here.
Posted by Lemuel at February 27, 2004 12:41 PM
Sorry Lemuel, but saving Britain from Nazi Germany and suggesting Stalin needed to be pandered to rather less than Roosevelt ended up doing buys Churchill a great deal of forgiveness around these parts.
Posted by Perry de Havilland at February 27, 2004 11:56 PM
Does anyone remember the M*A*S*H episode where the British platoon got shot up and brought to the 4077th? Their commander came in a couple of days later and declared all of the wounded goldbrickers, laggards and slouches, fit only to be sent immediately back to the front.
Hawkeye and his sidekick were outraged and told the CO so, but he quickly corrected them, pointing out that had he fawned over them and professed his distress at their wounds, it would have crushed their morale and made them think they really were badly hurt. By denouncing them as layabouts, he actually improved their prospects for recovery.
Posted by Jeffersonian at February 28, 2004 01:49 AM
There is one difference between Churchill and David Carr's rhetoric: Churchill did think we would eventually win.
Posted by Patrick Crozier at February 28, 2004 02:38 AM
In Carr's defense, external forces--like the literal Nazi army--are historically more likely to fail than persistent internal ones at the job of ruining a country and subjugating a people.
Posted by JD at February 28, 2004 06:56 AM
The author of this little tirade seems to think that the alternative to fighting on in 1940 would have been palatable. Given that that would have meant the Gestapo in Whitehall, I doubt many Britons would have agreed with him. All in all, nothing more than a character assassination using modern hindsight rather than contempraneous analysis. As Perry says, whatever his faults, his example during the second world war earns an awful lot of forgiveness.
Posted by Mark Ellott at February 28, 2004 11:12 AM
Amazing how people nowadays can claim that making a deal with Hitler in 1940 was an option.
I doubt if Ludwig von Mises would have permitted such nuts on a site bearing his mane.
Posted by Jacob at February 28, 2004 04:40 PM
