Transcript
Narrator (0:04)
Every week, Hillsdale College president Larry Arne joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you find your audio.
Hugh Hewitt (0:29)
Morning Glory and Evening Grace America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. That music means the Hillsdale Dialogue is upon us. The last radio hour of the week. I'm joined by Dr. Larry Arn, President of Hillsdale College. And today we are doing part 16 in our series on this volume of Winston Churchill's six volume World War II history, the one called the Gathering Storm. Dr. Arne, we introduced you and me to the audience last week, the new audience and all the affiliates. We picked up a word before we dive into chapter 19 and 20 of this book, which concludes book one of the first volume. Why are we spending so much time on Winston Churchill's memoirs?
Dr. Larry Arnn (1:09)
Well, they're great. Churchill himself is, in my opinion, the greatest statesman in our time. And what's different about our time from previous history, eras of human history, is that we live in a time dominated by technology, by government forms that intensify because of that. And the most extreme form is called totalitarianism. That's tyranny. Scientifically armed tyranny is an ancient phenomenon. As long as there have been people, there have been tyrants. And now it can be much more comprehensive because technology makes it possible. Surveillance, the gathering of power, and the milder form of that is the administrative, bureaucratic form which dominates the Western world. Now, China itself has a form of it, too. And that means that everything is regulated and everything can be regulated, everything can be watched, everything can be monitored all the time. And then, and that's in domestic politics, that change, which Churchill saw as a massive change, that change also comes to war because war has always been destructive, but now with modern weapons, it can be comprehensively destructive. Churchill writes a tremendous essay worth reading called Shall We All Commit Suicide? I think we read it on the show and he says in there that, you know, when we fought with clubs and swords, there was a limit to the damage we can use. Do what about the nuclear bomb. The last big speech he gave in his career in 1955 was called the Deterrent Nuclear Warfare. And it concerns what are we going to do about the hydrogen bomb? And. And he says that with the explosion of the hydrogen bomb, a bigger bomb than the more simple atomic bomb, same kind of thing, we enter a period both measureless and laden with doom. So one of the travesties that's good to correct on this show is that there's a bunch of claims that have grown up and become rather famous that Churchill was a warm. In truth, he spent his life trying to prevent these big wars and trying to limit the damage they did on all his life and wrote about it incessantly. And so if you read this book, this book is Churchill's history of the biggest war in history, the Second World War, in which he was the leader and a decisively important leader. And you will see that he, in this volume that we're reading, he worked like a man for a decade to try to avoid that war as he did the First World War before it. He failed, and then he tried to win it in the cheapest way possible. And that's a lesson we can learn today. How do you make judgments about this grave thing of war, which are just as grave and more sudden and intense than the grave things that arise in politics all the time? How do you think about whether Donald Trump made a good deal going down to Venezuela? Well, it depends in part on how it works it out, works out the manner of thinking about it. The pattern is set in many places. But this book is very great and you can see how you have to think about things like this. How do you make the judgments? And the judgments depend on the circumstances. There's no universal rule for making them. But this shows you how to look at the circumstances and how to think about them.