Winston Churchill is one of those secular saints that everyone is taught to love. Everyone knows that Winston Churchill was one of the good guys of World War II. And almost nobody has read the speeches that made him famous.
There is absolutely no excuse for this state of affairs. The speeches of Churchill were given only 70 odd years ago and they are perfectly understandable today. When you read them, you understand something about the man and his times that you could not get from reading a dozen chapters in various history books on his time period.
Take Churchill’s speech on the Munich Agreement for example. It is one thing to read in the history books about how Churchill opposed the Munich Agreement and it is quite another to read the actual speech in which he opposed that appeasement. In the history books, Churchill comes across as a man who was on the right side of the argument. But when you read the man’s actual speech he comes off as eerily prophetic (appropriately enough, it ends with a quote from the book of Daniel). If you had infallible prophetic vision of what the future would hold, you could have hardly come up with a better speech then the one Churchill gave.
Why does this matter? Because hearing the prophetic nature of Churchill’s speech and contrasting it with the speech that Neville Chamberlain gave is receive a lesson on the human nature that is far more powerful than any text book recap. Especially when you listen to the cheers that greeted his speech.
