Winston Churchill, ”Iron Curtain,” March 5, 1946, Part 3

Churchill was no longer Prime Minister when he delivered this famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri on March 5th, 1946. Having been invited by the college's president, encouraged by President Truman with a promise to introduce him if he came, the newly deposed Prime Minister, as 'leader of the opposition' in Britain aptly defined the world stage for the next half-century:

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.... all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject ... not only to Soviet influence but to a very high ... measure of control from Moscow.... [T}his is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace."

Hope lay in the Western democracies and the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States.

His warnings were even more prophetic than he himself knew:

"However, in a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. These are somber facts for anyone to have to recite on the morrow of a victory gained by so much splendid comradeship in arms and in the cause of freedom and democracy; but we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains."

As Vergil said, fugit inreparabile tempus, and it is shorter now than it was then. Sleepers Awake!

 

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