A Hush Over Europe.
Winston Churchill.
Broadcast to the United States from London
Source
Holiday
time, ladies and gentlemen! Holiday time, my friends across the Atlantic!
Holiday time, when the summer calls the toilers of all countries for an all too
brief spell from the offices and mills and stiff routine of daily life and
breadwinning, and sends them to seek if not rest at least change in new
surroundings, to return refreshed and keep the myriad wheels of civilized
society on the move.
Let me look back-let me see. How did we spend our
summer holidays twenty-five years ago? Why, those were the very days when the
German advance guards were breaking into Belgium and trampling down its people
on their march towards Paris! Those were the days when Prussian militarism was
-to quote its own phrase-"hacking its way through the small, weak, neighbor
country" whose neutrality and independence they had sworn not merely to respect
but to defend.
But perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps our memory deceives us.
Dr. Goebbels and his Propaganda Machine have their own version of what happened
twenty-five years ago. To hear them talk, you would suppose that it was Belgium
that invaded Germany! There they were, these peaceful Prussians, gathering in
their harvests, when this wicked
Belgium - set on by England and the Jews
- fell upon them; and would no doubt have taken Berlin, if Corporal Adolf Hitler
had not come to the rescue and turned the tables. Indeed, the tale goes further.
After four years of war by land and sea, when Germany was about to win an
overwhelming victory, the Jews got at them again, this time from the rear. Armed
with President Wilson's Fourteen Points they stabbed, we are told, the German
armies in the back, and induced them to ask for an armistice, and even persuaded
them, in an unguarded moment, to sign a paper saying that it was they and not
the Belgians who had been the ones to begin the War. Such is history as it is
taught in topsy-turvydom. And now it is holiday again, and where are we now? Or,
as you sometimes ask in the United States - where do we go from
here?
There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world, broken
only by the dull thud of Japanese bombs falling on Chinese cities, on Chinese
Universities or near British and American ships. But then, China is a long way
off, so why worry? The Chinese are fighting for what the founders of the
American Constitution in their stately language called: "Life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness." And they seem to be fighting very well. Many good judges
think they are going to win. Anyhow, let's wish them luck! Let's give them a
wave of encouragement - as your President did last week, when he gave notice
about ending the commercial treaty. After all, the suffering Chinese are
fighting our battle, the battle of democracy. They are defending the soil, the
good earth, that has been theirs since the dawn of time against cruel and
unprovoked aggression. Give them a cheer across the ocean - no one knows whose
turn it may be next. If this habit of military dictatorships' breaking into
other people's lands with bomb and shell and bullet, stealing the property and
killing the proprietors, spreads too widely, we may none of us be able to think
of summer holidays for quite a while.
But to come back to the hush I said
was hanging over Europe. What kind of a hush is it? Alas! it is the hush of
suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen
carefully; I think I hear something-yes, there it was quite clear. Don't you
hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the parade- grounds,
splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers
and more than a million Italians- "going on maneuvers"-yes, only on maneuvers!
Of course it's only maneuvers just like last year. After all, the Dictators must
train their soldiers. They could scarcely do less in common prudence, when the
Danes, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Albanians and of course the Jews may leap out
upon them at any moment and rob them of their living-space, and make them sign
another paper to say who began it. Besides, these German and Italian armies may
have another work of Liberation to perform. It was only last year they liberated
Austria from the horrors of self-government. It was only in March they freed the
Czechoslovak Republic from the misery of independent existence. It is only two
years ago that Signor Mussolini gave the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia its Magna
Charta. It is only two months ago that little Albania got its writ of Habeas
Corpus, and Mussolini sent in his Bill of Rights for King Zog to pay. Why, even
at this moment, the mountaineers of the Tyrol, a German-speaking population who
have dwelt in their beautiful valleys for a thousand years, are being liberated,
that is to say, uprooted, from the land they love, from the soil which Andreas
Hofer died to defend. No wonder the armies are tramping on when there is so much
liberation to be done, and no wonder there is a hush among all the neighbors of
Germany and Italy while they are wondering which one is going to be "liberated"
next.
The Nazis say that they are being encircled. They have encircled
themselves with a ring of neighbors who have to keep on guessing who will be
struck down next. This kind of guesswork is a very tiring game. Countries,
especially small countries, have long ceased to find it amusing. Can you wonder
that the neighbors of Germany, both great and small, have begun to think of
stopping the game, by simply saying to the Nazis on the principle of the
Covenant of the League of Nations: "He who attacks any. Attacks all. He who
attacks the weakest will find he has attacked the strongest"? That is how we are
spending our holiday over here, in poor weather, in a lot of clouds. We hope it
is better with you.
One thing has struck me as very strange, and that is
the resurgence of the one-man power after all these centuries of experience and
progress. It is curious how the English-speaking peoples have always had this
horror of one-man power. They are quite ready to follow a leader for a time, as
long as he is serviceable to them; but the idea of handing themselves over,
lock, stock and barrel, body and soul, to one man, and worshiping him as if he
were an idol? That has always been odious to the whole theme and nature of our
civilization. The architects of the American Constitution were as careful as
those who shaped the British Constitution to guard against the whole life and
fortunes, and all the laws and freedom of the nation, being placed in the hands
of a tyrant. Checks and counter-checks in the body politic, large devolutions of
State government, instruments and processes of free debate, frequent recurrence
to first principles, the right of opposition to the most powerful governments,
and above all ceaseless vigilance, have preserved, and will preserve, the broad
characteristics of British and American institutions. But in Germany, on a
mountain peak, there sits one man who in a single day can release the world from
the fear which now oppresses it; or in a single day can plunge all that we have
and are into a volcano of smoke and flame.
If Herr Hitler does not make
war, there will be no war. No one else is going to make war. Britain and France
are determined to shed no blood except in self-defense or in defense of their
Allies. No one has ever dreamed of attacking Germany. If Germany desires to be
reassured against attack by her neighbors, she has only to say the word and we
will give her the fullest guarantees in accordance with the principles of the
Covenant of the League. We have said repeatedly we ask nothing for ourselves in
the way of security that we are not willing freely to share with the German
people.
Therefore, if war should come there can be no doubt upon whose
head the blood-guiltiness will fall. Thus lies the great issue at this moment,
and none can tell how itwill be settled.
It is not, believe me, my
American friends, from any ignoble shrinking from pain and death that the
British and French peoples pray for peace. It is not because we have any doubts
how a struggle between Nazi Germany and the civilized world would ultimately end
that we pray tonight and every night for peace. But whether it be peace or war,
peace with its broadening and brightening prosperity, now within our reach, or
war with its measureless carnage and destruction-we must strive to frame some
system of human relations in the future which will bring to an end this
prolonged hideous uncertainty, which will let the working and creative forces of
the world get on with their job, and which will no longer leave the whole life
of mankind dependent upon the virtues, the caprice, or the wickedness of a
single man.
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