Churchill’s Wisdom

Churchill on the US’s attitude towards post-Soviet Russia:

There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Yes, I know he wasn’t around to see it. Doesn’t make it any less true.

More from Churchill on the current situation:

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians….Nothing can save England j if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.

Here we have seen a change. Thanks to social media, wage earners have allowed the self-hating, defeatist brainy people to occupy their brains and plant the seeds of self-abasement there. Both the left and the right are in the throes of this self-hatred. What was a pastime of bored intellectuals is now a national hobby.