IN WAR: RESOLUTION
IN DEFEAT: DEFIANCE
IN VICTORY: MAGNANIMITY
IN PEACE: GOOD WILL
Churchill’s “Moral of the Work” opening volume one, “The Gathering Storm,” of his six-volume history of the Second World War.
I would want today’s Republicans to heed Churchill’s words of “IN PEACE: GOOD WILL.” (And by the way, they are presented in all CAPS in the book itself.) For there’s no reason except for the Republicans’ insistence on making a fight over everything, instead of dealing in good will, that we cannot have peace. There’s nothing in our circumstances, but only in our moral brokenness, that necessitates that our politics be in the form of warfare.
And I would want the Democrats to heed Churchill’s call, IN WAR: RESOLUTION. Because when the nation is confronted with a power that insists on plunging everyone into war –and Churchill’s book is about just such a problem– it is really important that that broken spirit NOT be the one wielding the power to shape the world around it.
When have the Republicans ever shown any good will? It’s been years!
But if there must be war, it’s absolutely essential that the good guys win it, like Churchill and FDR and the values of democracy and humane society and not Hitler and the values of domination and degradation and extermination.
I hope we’re now seeing a dawn of an age of RESOLUTION from the Democrats. There are some promising signs.
Enough of Democrats as Chamberlain. We want Democrats with the fighting spirit –the courage, the strength, the will to win– of Churchill.
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Andy Schmookler ran this year for Congress in VA-06. He’s an award-winning author, political commentator, talk radio host and teacher. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, he earned his Ph. D. from Berkeley writing the first of his books analyzing the forces that operate in civilized systems, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.
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