May 1, 2013 - Mayday, Mayday: Oh, for Another Churchill!

As we hope to have made clear in our recent messages, America’s rude Tax Day wakeup call in Boston shows we need informed and engaged leadership to deal effectively with the Global Jihad that poses an existential threat to America—and all of Western Civilization. We again need leaders who not only understand, but who will speak the uncomfortable truths we don’t wish to hear and mobilize free peoples to stand firm during this perilous time.

In short, we need a modern Winston Churchill, who was without question one of the most important leaders of the 20^th Century. His clear articulation of threats to the freedoms for all of Western Civilization is among the reasons why—not to mention his leadership through Great Britain’s darkest hours during World War II. Most important were two warnings: The first was ignored until it was too late, and the second was roundly heard and heeded in time for free people to avert disaster for all we hold dear. Would that he were still with us to wake us up and respond to the existential threat we confront today!

Today’s Links to Churchill’s Unheeded Warning:

On the eve of Monday’s 20^th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, Israel’s International Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz reminded a New York Jerusalem Post Conference that eighty years ago, Winston Churchill “warned the world against the rearmament of Nazi Germany.” He recounted how people refused to listen to Churchill, and even mocked him. Listen, by clicking here, to a 2-3 minute YouTube excerpt of this important commentary by Minister Steinitz, with its reference to the 50-million who died in World War II, including 6-million Jews, because the then powers that be ignored Churchill’s prescient warning.

With this poignant reference in mind, he then warned that a nuclear Iran is the equivalent of 30 nuclear North Koreas and said we shouldn’t repeat the same mistake again—referring to the mistake made by those who ignored Churchill’s warning.

Hear, hear! But who today is playing Churchill’s critical role, as at least a backbencher, in the shadows of the councils of power?

And remember that Iran today calls for destroying not only the Jewish state in the Middle East, the “Little Satan,” but also the “Great Satan,” America. This time, we are in the crosshairs—Hitler perhaps thought America would continue to stay out of Europe’s war as many U.S. isolationists at the time advised. But the Japanese ended that dream when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

As discussed in a number of our past Weekly Updates and Flash Messages, Iran is near to having a nuclear weapon and the ballistic missile means to deliver it, not only to attack Israel but also America especially in a back door attack over the South Pole—an existential threat to both. Take a half hour to listen to Reza Khalili, a former CIA operative who was a spy in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and his “inside” information that Iran was involved in the Boston Marathon Jihadi attack—and that suggests more Jihad in America will follow. Could the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack we have discussed be in the cards for us? Anyway, Minister Steinitz is right in his assessment.

Another eerie parallel is worth recalling. On September 30, 1938, the German Fuehrer signed what Adolf Hitler a year later called a “scrap of paper,” but what then was heralded by Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as assuring “Peace in our time.” Hitler, of course, was planning a “final solution” for 6-million Jews along with other events that led to World War II.

And why not? Britain, Italy and France decided to yield the future of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to the Germans, as part of Chamberlain’s “big deal.” Why would he expect such docile folks to stop him afterward?

Slightly less than a year after Chamberlain’s claim of securing peace for all Europeans, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. So much for the policies of appeasement . . . and the British called on Winston Churchill, who had so presciently warned them, to lead them through the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” of World War II.

So, do we expect any different track from the evil we face today?

But I digress; Churchill’s warnings and challenges of great consequence were not finished.

Churchill’s 1946 Heeded Warning—and Today’s Challenge:

After VE Day, Western Europe was free from Nazi Fascism’s iron cross, but the 1945 Yalta meeting of the Big Three (President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin) set the stage for the makeup of the war-torn nations of Europe—which turned out not to be a pretty picture for those who love individual liberty.

Two of the three were soon no longer in power—President Roosevelt died shortly thereafter and his Vice President, Harry Truman, assumed the Presidency. The British changed ruling parties and turned Churchill out to pasture during the subsequent Potsdam Conference (July 17 to August 2, 1945)—again to become a backbencher in Parliament.

At Potsdam (during which Churchill was replaced by the Labour Party’s Clement Atlee), Truman informed Stalin of the successful Trinity Test of the atomic bomb design to be dropped on Nagasaki. (The first bomb dropped on Japan (Hiroshima) had never been tested; so confident were the U.S. scientists in its design.) And while he did not say so, we now know that Stalin already knew of the Los Alamos developments based on effective Soviet espionage from very early in the Top Secret Manhattan Project—though Truman did not before becoming President.

We do not know what might have happened if Churchill had remained at Britain’s helm. He better understood Soviet intentions than Roosevelt who held the high cards at Yalta—and as noted above Truman was new on the job at Potsdam. Notably, Roosevelt had brushed off warnings about Stalin’s intentions, saying: “I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man . . . I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”

Sound familiar?

In any case, both Churchill and Truman shortly made clear their perceptions of a dire future that was developing in Europe—and the need for a different approach to the policies of the Free World.

At Fulton (population 7000), Missouri’s Westminster College on March 5, 1946—and at Truman’s invitation, Churchill again warned the western democracies of a great menace growing in the wake of World War II—a war that could have been prevented if the Western Powers had listened to Churchill’s warnings in the late 1930s, as he noted in his Fulton speech. This became known as the “Iron Curtain” speech, because of its memorable phrase: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill’s speech to a crowd of 40,000 changed the way the Democratic West viewed the Communist East. Click here to see a YouTube presentation of this important segment of that speech.

This time, the western democracies heeded Churchill’s warning. Major geopolitical innovations followed that changed the entire U.S. approach to its foreign and defense policies. Historians may debate the details, but History places beyond dispute the success derived from major policy changes and reorganizations, most notably beginning in 1948. Our enemies during World War II, Germany and Japan, are among our closest allies; millions in Eastern Europe then behind the iron curtain are free; and while we continue to differ with Russia on important matters traceable to Cold War thinking, there are potential areas where we can carefully build on common interests without returning to the Cold War ways—or such naivety as expressed by Roosevelt quoted above.

Throughout those years, periods of peace were most secured and preserved when America was unquestionably strong and engaged with our allies in countering the ways of a common enemy and its ideology—Communism. Hopefully, we are done with that adversary—but now we confront another. It also is an ideological adversary of liberty: What some naively call “radical Islam” but is more accurately identified as a Global Jihad fueled by strict adherence to the tenants of Islam.

So What?

Churchill again assumed the Prime Minister’s role from 1951 to 1955, after which he again served as a “back bencher” in Parliament until he finally retired in 1964 and lived another year to age 90. It would be wonderful if his advice were still available in this time when, as noted in our last Weekly Message, we seem not to know either our enemy or ourselves.

We must get beyond this stage—with or without such a senior statesman who would be invaluable. We must do the best we can to define the evil ideology now descending across the Western World, not unlike Communism of just over a half century ago. Since no such individual seems present, we must do the best we can to understand the problem and act appropriately.

Some things are relatively easy—like building the needed missile defenses to protect us from the existential threat potentially posed by Iran if they mate a miniaturized nuclear weapon (which they claim to have) to a satellite and launch it over the South Pole to detonate it over the United States (or anywhere else they choose) to create a wide area EMP. Or hardening the electric power grid to assure we can restore essential electrical and related critical infrastructure after such an attack—or after a natural EMP event, as discussed in our previous messages.

As a first step in understanding the nature of the Global Jihad threat, and in particular how it likely manifested itself in the recent Boston Marathon events, I strongly suggest that you invest an hour to follow this link and view Stephen Coughlin’s excellent lecture on the nature of the problem in the context of the Boston “Individual Jihadi” attack and the misunderstanding of that threat by most of the press today. It in turn is linked to a full course intended to inform the interested and concerned public of the comprehensive nature of this deadly threat.

MAJ Coughlin is one of our nation’s most astute and objective analysts on all aspects of the Jihadi threat. He is an expert in the connections between Islamic law, terrorism and the Jihadist movement around the globe, and has briefed widely on these issues in the Pentagon, the law enforcement community and the intelligence community, when they are are permitted to listen. (As noted in our last email, political correctness decrees that even our elite service academies no longer be permitted to discuss critical issues associated with the Jihadi threat.) Through his knowledge of published Islamic law, Steve has provided forecasts of events in the Middle East and domestic, and accurately assessed future threat posture of Jihadist activities before they happen.

Steve also has briefed intelligence agencies and on Capitol Hill for Members of Congress. He has adapted his briefings to make available to the general public information that has behind it a professional standard of intelligence training. This is well worth an hour of your time.

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage, www.highfrontier.org for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

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