Churchill called the last volume of his World War II chronicle Triumph and Tragedy. He had held the West together not only by his fierce commitment to fight the tyrant to the death, but also by making real the beckoning hope of redemption from the shadow of darkness. At the darkest moment, after the fall of France, he dared to raise hope in his “Finest Hour” address to Commons: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward intobroad, sunlit uplands.”
But it became increasingly clear that the immense effort that brought victory might not be enough to arrive at those uplands. In his speech marking the victory over Germany in May of 1945, he took some time to turn people towards another threatening reality that the joy of victory was obscuring for most:
We must make sure that those causes for which we fought for find recognition at the peace table in facts as well as words, and above all we must labour that the … United Nations … does not become an idle name, does not become a shield for the strong and a mockery for the weak. It is the victors who must search their hearts in their glowing hours, and be worthy by their nobility of the immense forces they wield.
What he dreaded did become true, in significant part at least. The United Nations sank itself on the vestigial hatred that so plagued Christian Europe and which was adopted as its own by the exterminationists of the Middle East. Well it is that Churchill did not live to see Yassir Arafat, armed with a pistol, holding forth at the podium of the General Assembly, or the UN’s infamous adoption of the resolution equating Zionism with racism, and the transformation of its interest in human rights to an endless series of motions condemning Israel, to the exclusion of almost every other concern.
In that same victory speech, Churchill foresaw perhaps the most insidious of the dangers that he needed to call the people’s mind even at their moment of triumph:
You must be prepared for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes if you are not to fall back into the rut of inertia … We must make sure that the simple and honorable purposes for which we entered the war are not brushed aside or overlooked in the months following our success, and that the words “freedom,” “democracy,” and “liberation” are not distorted from their true meaning as we have understood them.
He was referring to the onslaught of Doublespeak, of the People’s Republics, and the subversion of language that has been the greatest success of the Marxists. Their cultural revolution nearly won over this country uncontested, were it not for those brave few who dared to risk their reputations and careers to stand for truth, in all the various theaters in which the new totalitarians pressed their battle: Vivek Bhattacharya against the lies of the COVID establishment; Riley Gaines and J. K. Rowling against the invasion of women’s sports by male mediocrities and girls’ locker rooms and women’s prisons by fully Persons with Fully Intact Male Genitalia; Jordan Peterson and others against the war on free speech; and many others also deserving honor.
The stunning victory of Israeli and American arms is on the one hand; on the other, there is the stunning attempt by the usual media culprits to deny credit.
The unfought battles Churchill so clearly decried are ours to win. It is not only that we seek a victory for freedom, democracy, and liberation, but of coherence itself. In the land that is the cradle of the Christian civilization that Churchill proclaimed was the true nature of the battle in World War II, a constitutional government exists under which freedom of worship is guaranteed in practice as well as in statute, in which large communities of Muslims and Christians thrive together with the Jews and who share equally in political rights both on paper and in practice.
No such situation exists in any other country in the Middle East. Everywhere else, Christian communities are beleaguered and disappearing; Jews are entirely absent from places like Iraq where they lived for millennia. They are entirely absent from those parts of the Holy Land that were given over to the PA to rule, by the choice of the PA. The same was true of Gaza: despite having had centuries of Jewish presence prior to the twentieth century, for the decade and a half after Israel unilaterally withdrew and unconditionally allowed it to govern itself, not a single Jew was allowed to remain.
And yet, the enemies of coherence, the enemies of civilization have peddled to the gullible, the ignorant, and the malevolent the endlessly repeated mantra that it is Israel that is an apartheid state.
And while the goal of the exterminationists is not at all hidden, certainly not after the blood and mass sexual predation of October 7, 2023, somehow it is those who have been targeted for extinction, the Jews, who are engaging in genocide. My goodness, when one sees the ease with which Israel took apart Iran’s air defenses, they certainly could have done a lot better at genocide if that’s what they want.
While the Jewish population of most of the rest of the Middle East has descended to zero, Gaza’s population has multiplied. And, as has been attested to by all who know the figures, Israel could have done a much better job in Gaza as well, where the ratio of civilian deaths to military in urban warfare has been the lowest in modern times. The mullahs and their followers chant “Death to Israel,” but for the meaning-free linguistic nihilists, Israel is the one committing genocide.
At the very moment we celebrate a victory over the vicious mullahs and their reign of terror, an advocate of such linguistic nihilism has assembled a sizeable political force in America’s largest city, which is the home of more Jews than any other urban area in the world and is now the Democrat nominee for mayor of New York. In the city that suffered thousands of deaths at the hands of jihadis and which has just now given a Muslim the nomination of its dominant political party, the really urgent problem is — (drum roll) — Islamophobia. In a fact-free, meaning-free world, it is indeed.
There only.
A jaded and indulgent class has allowed the nihilists to take over our universities and grab ahold of our culture. They shrug their shoulders, like the French of the Thirties, and muse that a fight could hardly be worth it. They don’t believe that anyone really wants to fight and to labor as Churchill succeeded in getting the West to do against Hitler. They are endlessly pessimistic about the human soul and entirely cynical about virtue as having any reality other than as cosplay, a covert mode of vying for status and power.
But the human psyche decays without challenge and without having to measure itself against truth and a given, objective reality. It thrives when it digs deep within itself to find vision and courage and competence, when it realizes it is part of a great story as a player, not an onlooker, when it realizes the answers to its existential challenges cannot be found in mere abstractions and clever memes.
A large part of the 2024 victory came from the very younger generation whom the woke culture believed it had trained and owned. Jordan Peterson found a growing response from young people who found engaging life’s difficulties directly makes life an adventure worth living, and brings the soul back to life. Charlie Kirk found a tremendous response to his direct challenges to the youngest voters, a group the left had taken for granted and whom Kirk put into play by taking their minds and souls seriously. The voters he touched may well have been decisive for Trump in Pennsylvania.
Where are we, then? The stunning victory of Israeli and American arms is on the one hand; on the other, there is the stunning attempt by the usual media culprits to deny credit and minimize this achievement, even as they succeeded in minimizing or completely obscuring the most astonishing peace breakthrough in modern Middle East history, the 2020 Abraham Accords.
And then, back on the first hand, most recent polls show a very large margin of Americans don’t buy the media’s version of the events in Iran and strongly approve of Trump’s policy as implemented.
Best to return to Churchill to conclude, the man who knew that we must stand up for Western civilization.
After Rommel’s armies had been decisively turned back from their attempt to gain the Suez Canal, then to conquer the Holy Land as part of a grand pincer attack, many sensed that the tide of the war had turned. Churchill addressed Britain and the world then, both celebrating the victory of El Alamein and steeling people for the many difficulties that still lay ahead.
We have victory — a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts …
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
We too must take good cheer from the mighty feats of arms of the Twelve Day War. And then we must set ourselves to the fight that lies ahead still, a fight we have every good reason to expect to win, but only if we keep high our spirits and our resolve.
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