Language as Spitfire : A critical appreciation of Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat : The Great speeches

                                        

                                                  Selective : part 1 ( Before the WW II )

   It is difficult to like Churchill, the politician but it is more difficult to dismiss Churchill’s  speeches  and his war time contribution to defeat fascism. Churchill harnessed English language for   victory. He played his role in the sustenance and  the  celebration of the Empire.

Churchill  (1874-1965) prepared hard to become a successful  political leader and writer. He joined conservative party in 1900 and left it in 1904 to join Liberals. He rejoined conservative party in 1925.  In his career he became MP, Minister of munitions, minister of State for War and Air and Prime minister twice  during 1940-1945 and 1951-55. He published many works , The Story of Malakand Field Force (1898), The River War and Savrola (1899), The World Crisis (1923-31), My Early Life (1930), Thoughts and Adventures ( 1932), Marlborough: His Life and Times  1933-38) , Great Contemporaries (1937), Step by Step (1939), The Second World War (1948-54), A History of The English -Speaking Peoples (1956-58). He won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1953.

In his speech  “I Have done My Best” in 1925 he writes regarding the role of national government as follows:

“Action-action, not hesitation; action, not words; action, not agitation. The nation waits its orders. “ The French Revolution could not defend the soil of France without compulsion. The American commonwealth could not maintain the integrity of its State without compulsion, but modern Britain has found millions of citizens who all of their own free will have eagerly or soberly resolved to fight and die for the principles at stake and to fight and die in the hardest , the cruellest, and the least rewarded of all the wars that men have fought.” (68)

He refers to  the deadly enemy Germany which stops  at nothing  for victory, he writes, To fail is to be enslaved , or, at the very best, to be destroyed.” (69) He paints  vividly through his rhetorical flourish the nature of enemy. Churchill ‘s remarkable skill in unearthing motivation of enemy is laudable.

.. we are confronted with a foe  who would without the slightest scruple extirpate us,  man, woman, and child , by any method open to him if he had the opportunity. We are fighting a foe who  would not hesitate one moment to obliterate every single soul in this great country this afternoon if it could be done by pressing a button.   

Here the premonition of weapon of mass destruction. In the first World War    

“As many as 74,187 Indian soldiers died during the war and a comparable number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, have long been omitted from popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes.”   ( https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33317368)

We Indians do not take kindly to the disparaging remark on Gandhi by Churchill. In his speech made in 1931, Churchill  criticizes socialist administration and remarks   “It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi , a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace . while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of  civil disobedience , to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.“ (103)

 This negative description of Gandhi  dented  the image of Churchill in Indian mind and later his opposition to grant independence to India .  

Churchill was concerned about stronger German Air force and in his speech ‘The Locust Years’(1936)  which means lost criticized govt. as follows in powerful language which expresses ambiguous attitude of the government.

 “So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity , all-powerful to be impotent. ‘ (121)

When Czechoslovakia was sacrificed to Germany he gave a speech criticizing the appeasement policy  or five  lost years for Britain and France  in  “ A Total and Unmitigated Defeat’(1938) as follows:

 We have been reduced from a position where the word ‘war’  was considered one which could be used only by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum. We have been reduced from a position of safety and power -power to do good, power to be generous to a beaten foe , power to make terms with Germany, power to give her proper  redress for her grievances, power to stop her arming if we chose, power to take any step in strength or mercy or justice which we thought right -reduced in five years from a position safe and unchallenged to where we stand now.  (136)

By repeating the same phrase ‘ we have been reduced’ he emphasises what has been lost and this certainly is an impassioned and  impressive speech though at the time it was considered alarmist.

While referring to the Prime minister’s desire for cordiality between Britain and Germany he supports relations between people of both the countries  but not with German government. His speech reveals a clarity of mind unclouded by  the hostility between two nations.  

 You must have  diplomatic and correct relations , but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength  and perverted pleasure from persecution,  and uses, as we have seen , with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force . That power cannot ever be the  trusted friend of the British democracy. (141)

Primary  source :

 Ed. Cannadine, David.  Winston S. Churchill    Blood,, Toil, Tears and  Sweat :the Great Speeches . 

       London: Penguin Books, 2007.