November 30 marks the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth. This anniversary comes five months after the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Calgary installed a statue of him at the McDougall Centre grounds. In defiance of cancel culture, it embodied, albeit to a lesser degree, Churchill’s call never to surrender, and never to forget political greatness and its meaning.
The anniversary of Churchill’s birthday serves as a powerful reminder of his greatness and emphasizes the urgent need to acknowledge greatness in our time. We live in an era plagued by a culture of repudiation, which leans heavily toward cynicism and offers simplistic moral judgments akin to Manichaeism. This prevailing relativism dismisses the very possibility of greatness, reducing individuals to mere pawns of historical forces and “systems of oppression.” These are symptoms of a culture with low literacy levels in the civic virtues upon which judicious political conduct depends. It is essential to resist this trend and affirm the significance of greatness.
Even to his critics on the left and right, Churchill defies attempts to minimize the possibility of greatness. At a minimum, the long shadow (or light) he casts over the past 59 years of world affairs since his death reminds us how long-term vision and influence is one, though not the only, mark that distinguishes the statesman from a mere politician.
Churchill was not just a politician. His willingness to switch parties twice offers a lesson for today’s partisan politics. After returning to the Conservatives in 1924, he quipped, “Anyone can rat, but it takes ingenuity to re-rat,” highlighting his belief that changing parties embodies the freedom of individual Members of Parliament.
Acknowledging Churchill’s greatness is not to indulge in hagiography or what Churchill called “gush,” but it does oblige us to reflect upon what greatness is and how Churchill embodied it. Fortunately, Churchill himself taught the standard of greatness that served as the epigraph for his magisterial The Second World War: “In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Goodwill.”
The epigraph distils the ethic of Churchill’s statecraft characterized by the cardinal virtues of courage (resolution, defiance), moderation, justice (goodwill), practical wisdom, along with magnanimity, friendship, and mercy. Magnanimity or “greatness of soul” stands out as the distinctive virtue of the statesman who, armed with the other virtues, undertakes actions of great magnitude, and Churchill’s practice extended it to include the capacity to inspire and elevate his countrymen and allies, and to sympathize with those who suffered from enemy attacks and the broken German populace among their post-war ruins.
Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts defends him against his many naysayers but observes his greatness does not entail perfection or infallibility. His early opposition to women’s suffrage, his direction of the Gallipoli operation, his notorious “Gestapo” speech during the 1945 election, and other mistakes suggest greatness does not entail perfection and serves also as a reminder that willingness to undertake great actions is accompanied with great risks for failure.
Some of Churchill’s decisions also remind us that greatness risks outpacing goodness. His necessary decision to attack the French navy in July 1940 to prevent the Nazis from taking its ships and arms wounded him deeply. After realizing the results of a bombing raid on Dresden, Churchill asked “are we beasts? are we taking this too far?,” which showed a remorse stemming from “dirty hands” that neither Roosevelt nor Stalin (who demanded the raids) displayed toward the German population.
For all of Churchill’s greatness in action, he was always cognizant that, according to one commentator, words are “the very soul of action.” Actions cannot be produced without the words to summon people toward their achievement, and words make possible the subsequent understanding and memory of them. There is something about political action that depends upon thought and leads to thought.
The production of action is reflected in President John F. Kennedy’s statement, upon awarding Churchill honorary U.S. citizenship: “he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” His speeches, including “We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches” and “Their Finest Hour” of June 1940, were some of the most inspiring and uplifting any rhetorician has composed. Understanding and memory of actions are found in Churchill’s many histories, including The World Crisis on World War One and The Second World War, which record the drama of the two world wars and present the perspective of the one in the “cockpit.”
While the cynic sees these as the author promoting his case, the broader view shows how they educate readers into the virtues of statecraft, particularly practical wisdom and magnanimity, that were necessary to wage those wars.
By inviting the reader into the cockpit, Churchill does not simply defend his record but encourages the reader to join in the deliberations and feel the weight of responsibility, thus delivering a civic education in practical wisdom and statecraft.
Although Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, some may consider it a consolation for not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the Swedish Academy expressed a broader perspective by comparing Churchill’s unique combination of leadership and writing to figures like Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Napoleon, and Benjamin Disraeli. They noted that words can carry the weight of great deeds, imparting lessons to future generations that actions alone may not convey.
For those capable of leisure, I recommend the volumes on the First or Second World Wars mentioned above, or his magisterial biography of his great ancestor, Marlborough: His Life and Times, which in writing it before World War Two prepared him for his “finest hour.” Illuminating shorter writings can be found in the volume of his essays, Thoughts and Adventures, including “Consistency in Politics,” “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” “Moses,” and “Painting as Pastime.”
The 150th anniversary of Churchill’s birth invites us to take up and read his words so that we, too, may learn something about statecraft and greatness in the defence of liberty. His speeches, whose recordings are archived online at America’s Churchill Museum, are always illuminating and inspiring. But his histories take us more deeply into the man and teach us that greatness is as much tragedy as it is epic.
John von Heyking is a professor of political science at the University of Lethbridge. He is the author of Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship (2018). His other writings on Churchill have appeared in The Finest Hour: The Journal of the International Churchill Society and American Oxonian. He writes here for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
