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So welcome back to the Anglotopia Podcast. This week I have with me Justin Reash, who is the executive director of the International Churchill Society. The International Churchill Society was founded in 1968, shortly after the death of Churchill, to keep the memory and legacy of churchill alive. I've been a member myself for many years, and I'm heavily involved in my local chapter here in Chicago, and I'm excited to be attending the upcoming International Churchill Conference in London this October, and we're going to talk about that later in the episode. So welcome, Justin. Hey, thank you. I really appreciate it, Jonathan. Thanks for coming on. So can you go ahead and introduce yourself and the ICS and tell our readers the kind of work that it does. Yeah, sure. So I'm Justin Reash, the Executive Director
of the International Churchill Society. I've held this role for four years now, but I've been involved with the organization for 11 years. We are a 501c3 nonprofit here in the United States and a registered charity in the United Kingdom. We're a global membership organization, so we have about 3,000 plus members around the world. We have chapters everywhere from Brazil to Iceland to Australia, and of course, the United States. And the mission of the society is by celebrating the timeless values of Sir Winston Churchill, ICS will embolden all generations to understand the historical context of his life and defend, enhance, and promote the values that he embodied, which are freedom, democracy, and human rights.
And we do this through, you know, many ways. We have a publication, a quarterly publication called Finest Hour, which you receive as a member. We have a resource-filled website, winstonchurchill.org, which is easy to remember. And we host regional and national and international events, most, you know, culminating in the conference, which we'll get to. And as we are an educational, you know, 501c3, we take those duties and that mission very seriously. And where I am based in Washington, D.C. is at the National Churchill Leadership Center, which is housed at George Washington University. So we have a presence on a major American university campus.
Sounds awesome. Sounds like good work that you guys do. And I'm glad that there's an organization out there that's focused on, you know, keeping his words alive and keeping his mission alive and sort of educating the public on Churchill stuff, which is something we're going to get to. Now, so how did you get interested in Winston Churchill? What's your Churchill story?
Sure. So I studied history as an undergraduate, and I specified in British history. And when I graduated college in 2012, I moved to Chicago to go to graduate school, which was at night, and I needed a job. And I was looking around all of the, you know, trying to find a job online, and the university that I attended, DePaul University, had a job website. And I just so happened to stumble upon what was then called the Churchill Center, which was located in Chicago. And they were looking for, you know, a part, you know, a full time but junior, junior person. And I applied and I, you know, got the job.
So I worked at what was then known the Churchill Center from 2013, January 2013 until fall of 2015. And then I moved on to another role for five years. And I came back as executive director. But in that time, I still helped out with all of our conferences, various things. And so I think with my Churchill stories, like many people probably my age in the sense of you kind of come to it indirectly. I certainly knew of Winston Churchill when I was studying. And, you know, I've always had a fond love of history looking at my dad's bookshelf growing up, would study, you know, his books of World War II.
So I knew I knew of Winston Churchill as this, you know, kind of Tommy gun toting, cigar chomping person who, you know, was British and, you know, saved the war in many ways. But I didn't really get to it until, you know, until it became my profession, if you will.
Interesting. Now, I'm very excited about the upcoming conference. So can you tell the Anglotopia podcast listeners all about it and what they can expect to happen at this conference and what goes on?
Yes, of course. So we host an annual conference every year. Last year was in Edinburgh, Scotland. This year's in London. Next year will be in Washington, D.C. in the fall. And these conferences are the single most significant source of engagement for us. You know, we have roughly 300 people. When I say significant engagement, I mean, you know, sponsors, attendees. It's a three-day affair. So we begin this conference with a reception at Dartmouth House, which is in Mayfair and is the home of the English-Speaking Union. Winston Churchill was president of ESU in the 20s and 30s. So there's a strong Churchill connection there. The next day on Friday, we host lecture sessions all day at our host hotel, the JW Marriott on Park Lane.
And these sessions go from historical professors and authors to we have James Cleverly, the former foreign secretary and home secretary. He'll be speaking on the lunch keynote. And then we end with Lord Roberts of Belgravia, who wrote Churchill: Walking with Destiny. So we really go from let's focus on the history part and we bring him into the present. You know, what is why is he still so relevant today? How does he inform the actions taken by sitting politicians and others? And it's an important year because this year, 2024, is the 150th anniversary of his birth. And this conference is really aligned with to celebrate that momentous occasion.
And then Saturday, we continue conference sessions at the Royal United Services Institute. And then we end with a phenomenal black tie gala dinner at the National Gallery. And if your listeners know the National Gallery, it's the colonnaded building in Trafalgar Square. We've rented that out privately. So it's going to be a phenomenal time. And it's a mixture of, you know, education, but also experience. And the people that go, so many have gone for many years. They actually meet up with each other. They plan their travel together. They go as couples. And ICS is a very big family. And so you get that very strong sense of camaraderie and friendship, which everybody – that's the bedrock of our organization for sure.
Yeah, that's one thing I'm really looking forward to kind of becoming part of the club because it's going to be my first Churchill conference. I know me and the Chicago contingent are already making plans and looking forward to coming because we try to get together every few months here.
Yeah, and I'll say if, you know, one thing to add is, you know, these conferences, you know, we for a long time up until probably when I started, the conferences were very history focused, which is, which is fine and understandable. I mean, that's the most natural thing, but what we realized was first time attendees or people who didn't really know much about Winston Churchill, but were intrigued and interested could kind of feel a little excluded because they hadn't read all of the books and they didn't know, you know, they didn't know the difference between this speaker and that speaker. And we want, we really wanted to get away from that sense of exclusivity.
And so when you call it a club, it definitely feels that way. But I feel like it's more of a large friend group because you have people who are coming just for like the social sessions, right? Who want to go to Lancaster House, which I didn't mention, which is on Friday night. Lancaster House is the setting for The Crown. So all of the internal palace scenes in The Crown, the Netflix show, are filmed at Lancaster House. So it's this beautiful, phenomenal space. And so we've really grown our audience to go from, hey, I know everything about Winston Churchill, you know, let me critique the speakers to more of a broader tent of I'm interested.
I like his leadership style. I really like champagne. I like getting dressed up and, you know, going back to identity. So we've really brought in our audience, which is it's paid off for us in many ways, you know, a in a sense of having a more diverse group of attendees. But B, it continues, you know, the conferences are major revenue generator. You know, we're a nonprofit. We we survive solely on individual contributions. We have no money from the government. We have very little money from, you know, large foundations. So individual donors, members and the people who attend the conference, that's 95 percent of our revenue. So it behooves us as an organization to be as broad as possible for sure.
Yeah, I know one thing I'm looking forward to is going to those special buildings that you can't normally go inside and seeing them. It's just going to be a treat. And I know that it's going to be an exciting, exciting weekend. And I like to say I know a lot about Churchill, but I'm also looking forward to learning a lot about Churchill. I'm also looking forward to meeting some of the eminent historians and speakers that are going to be speaking there. I think that's going to be worth the price of admission alone. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about some sort of fun Churchill-related topics.
And when I sent you the questions in advance, I asked you some interesting Churchill questions. So I wanted to get your answer, and maybe I can give my answer as well. So what is your favorite Churchill quote?
Yeah, so I will give you three. I'll give you a serious quote, a fun quote, and then quotes about him by his contemporaries. Yeah, the serious quote is, and this came from when he was giving Neville Chamberlain's eulogy in the fall of 1940. He said, quote, history with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. The reason I chose that quote is, you know, as somebody who is, you know, as a historian in various ways or somebody who loves history, reads history, you know, appreciates what it is.
I think anybody who identifies with the need to understand history identifies with that quote in the sense of it is not cut and dry. History is not a straight line. History is a continuum, but it's not a straight line of he said, she said, he did, she did. And what he's evoking in this in such in the most Churchillian fashion is this sense of. And remember, he himself was a historian, right? He was a journalist, but he also wrote history books, won the Nobel Peace Prize for history, or sorry, Nobel Prize in literature for his history books. He's evoking the, you know, the everyday historian's challenge of trying to understand the past, which with its different norms, different set of expectations, different languages, different people.
And I just, and what he's doing is in that eulogy, the reason he brings in the eulogy is that he's referring judgment on an individual who was just trying to, you know, do what's best for his country. And he's saying like, hey, in 10, 50 years, historians are going to look back at Neville Chamberlain and they're going to go through this process that all historians do. And he just wants to make sure that he's getting his own contemporaneous thoughts of Neville Chamberlain in before the historians do. So it's such a wonderful eulogy. I encourage anyone to read it. It's not very long. And so, yeah, that was of many great Churchill quotes.
I thought of that for sure. Let me go to the fun. And this is short and sweet. And the fun is, quote, first things first, get the champagne. So Churchill, a lover of champagne, most certainly Pol Roger, which I have a box right here. That's a 2012 Churchill vintage. I was given as a present. I could never afford it my own. And I drank it, by the way. Of course, you know, that's such a Churchill thing to say. And, you know, even though he was a very verbose person, that quote is it cuts the heart of the man loved the finer things in life. And there's another quote, which I'm going to butcher, but it's essentially, you know, I'll come back to it, but it's about being easily satisfied with the best.
That's what Churchill was. He was easily satisfied with the best and, of course, with the best champagne. And I'll end this question with a quote about him. So there are great quotes about Winston Churchill, about his contemporaries. I'll give you two because I just thought of the second one. And the first one, which I just thought of, is Harold Macmillan, former prime minister, prime minister after Churchill, or after, excuse me, Anthony Eden, says of Churchill. And he's referring to him. He says, Winston is half English aristocrat, half American gambler. That's a phenomenal quote about Winston Churchill because it really encapsulates him in many ways. But then the other quote about Churchill, which I love, is from Pamela Plowden, probably his first girlfriend, if we'll use that term.
She said, quote, when you first meet Winston, you see all of his faults. Then you spend the rest of your life seeing all of his virtues. And that's that I feel like you could say that about Churchill dead or alive, because I'm sure we'll get to this. He Churchill led from the front foot. Right. He was, he, you know, FDR, the first time FDR met him in 1918, he said Winston Churchill was a stinker because he just lured over the conversation. Churchill dominated conversation. He dominated the room. And that put a lot of people off. A lot of people didn't like him for a long time.
But you would then see this side of him, this humanity, which comes through across the board, and that he would develop these very deep relationships with people because you see he really was phenomenal in many ways. Of course, not great in other ways, like all of us. So I thought that quote was a great encapsulation of him and how people experience him throughout life.
That is a great point. I've not seen that one before, so I'm going to add that to my roster. That's really good. excellent um now on the the topic of anecdotes what's your favorite churchill story or anecdote
that you know that's attributed to him sure so there's quite a few i'm sure you've many you know you somebody who's read about him or people who've just kind of googled him on the internet there's quite a few that are apocryphal never happened but you know that are funny um such as if i forget I think he was talking to Lady Asquith in the House of Commons where she said, you know, Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put some tea.
Yeah, Lady Astor and Asquith. And he replies, ma'am, if I was your husband, I would drink it. I'm not sure. I don't know if that happened. But one that I really love and amongst many is when he visited the White House in 1941 after Pearl Harbor, when he essentially invited himself in all of his military friends to stay at the White House for multiple weeks, annoying to the great annoyance of Eleanor Roosevelt. So him and FDR, they kick off and they're really going well and they're planning for the war and they're thinking about how to save Western civilization and what Europe's going to look like afterwards.
And FDR is writing down this document about nations coming together post-war to figure out the world. He says, oh, you know, I have this great name for this thing. I'm going to call it the United Nations. And I need to go tell Winston right now because it just came to me and I'm really excited. It's late in the evening. FDR gets rolled, you know, of course, in his wheelchair up to Churchill's room and he's told Winston's in the bath and Winston hears FDR and Winston comes out and comes out naked. And, you know, FDR is taken aback and Churchill says to him, you see, the prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States.
And actually, you know, people question the story, but FDR in his own diaries calls Churchill like a pink-skinned pig when he sees him naked. So it's, again, it's very indicative of his character and of who he was that, you know, he didn't, he was not, you know, he wasn't a prude in that sense.
I love that story. It was, I believe they dramatized it in Into the Storm, the HBO movie. Yes, they did, yeah. Yeah, it was, yeah. Now, if you had to recommend one book about Churchill or anyone interested in Churchill should read, what book should that be? And I know there's like a thousand books about Churchill, so that's hard to narrow down.
I'm kind of looking around. So, so, too, I mean, if you're going to read a biography, which I think some people unfairly judge biographies before they read them. If you're going to read a biography, like a comprehensive biography, certainly Andrew Roberts' Walking with Destiny. It's a thousand pages. It's really long. So you'd have to really dedicate yourself. There's two great books, many great books about Churchill. I'm trying to see if I have it here. I don't see it. But it's called, so if you're looking for like a really unique take on him, something unexpected. It's called No More Champagne. And this is about, I don't know if you've read this, but it's by David Lough.
And it's about his financial problems. And it is exceedingly interesting and funny and depressing. And, you know, I learned so much in that book. I read it when it came out, what, in 17 or 18. So I highly like, okay, biography, Church of Walking with Destiny, something unique and different, a different perspective. No more champagne.
Yeah, that's it is really interesting because it's, you know, he he was born into one of Britain's, you know, greatest historical families. But he was the second son. He was the first son of a second son. So there was no money for him. But yet he had aristocratic tastes and aristocratic expectations. And so he spent his whole life chasing basically, you know, financial success and to some varying degrees. And that's why he was a writer, which many people don't know that he was a writer. And that was his actual career because he weren't paid to be a politician back then. So he had to fall back on his words. And I feel like you said he won the Nobel Prize for it.
Yeah. Yeah, he definitely earned his income by writing, giving speeches, paid speeches. And he was very well compensated. But he lost all of his money, a majority of his money in the 29 stock market crash. like a lot of people. He had a lot of money invested in American stocks. He bought Chartwell and then he had to do major refreshments in the 20s. So it really was kind of like peaks and valleys for him, for sure. And I think he only really genuinely got financial security post-war when they sold Chartwell to the National Trust and guaranteed that they could live in it until they died um i think they sold it for like three million pounds at that time which was a lot of of course now um but yeah he was perpetually in debt perpetually it's just like he's made a lot of things but balancing a checkbook was certainly not his not that makes him even even more relatable
yeah right of course so um on the topic of of that what's your favorite churchill movie or tv drama
Yeah, you know, I gotta be honest with you. I don't love most of them. I think I'm just, you know, I think there's something about working for the International Churchill Society, knowing many of his family members and seeing the very stereotyped caricatures of Winston Churchill. However, I would probably say HBO's The Gathering Storm. That's my favorite.
It was, yeah, that's probably my favorite because it doesn't go, like, it goes beyond the, I don't know, the, like, you know, he drank a lot and he smoked a lot and he, you know, had this gravelly voice. But in actuality, he actually had quite a high-pitched voice. If you listen to his speeches that he recorded, fight them in the fields and on the beaches and the streets and blood, toilet, tears and sweat, those are recorded post-war. They were not recorded in the moment because there was no recording in Parliament. Those are speeches he gave to Parliament. And of course, he acted for them and played them up. But yeah, I would probably say HBO, I think it was early 2000s, Gathering Storm is definitely my favorite.
that's actually my favorite too um and i i think it's it's not particularly accurate but i love that they shot it at chartwell and yeah that's right do you you get a sense of him as a person that is accurate i think and whenever i'm at a low point i just throw the gathering storm on and my my mood is immediately improved um i have less nice things to say about the follow-up they made
yeah that was brendan gleason who played yeah yeah i wasn't i didn't love that i didn't love
that one either he was i think he was wrong for churchill um i think church an irishman playing churchill would have made churchill laugh hilariously um but it just it's a weaker story but um yeah the gathering storm is it's top telly for me and it's it's getting harder and harder to find these days but if you've got hbo max it's on hbo max that's right that's right so So shifting gears a little bit, this is the part of the discussion I've really been looking forward to, because I know you probably have to deal with this on a daily basis, having to bat away Churchill myths and misinformation. So in the current political and historiographical environment, what are some Churchill myths that keep persisting that drive you crazy?
Sure. And, you know, there's quite a few. I'll start with the quick ones. Like he was an alcoholic. Churchill was not an alcoholic. He, you know, drank a lot. He had a very large capacity to drink alcohol, but he wasn't dependent on it in any way. You know, there's always He's English. Yeah. And, you know, people say, well, he would drink whiskey in the morning. He would drink exceptionally watered down whiskey because it was a habit he picked up when he was a soldier in India to, you know, clear their drinking water of typhoid and any other sort of nasty illnesses, they would put whiskey in it.
So it's a habit he picked up, just like a habit he picked up smoking cigars in Cuba as a young war correspondent. And, you know, another thing, another easy one for me is that he had depression. You know, Churchill referred to his black dog. He referred to it once, one time he referred to his black dog. And, you know, he was going through a period of exceptional stress. And like any of us who are stable minded, we all have ups and downs. And he was going through an exceptionally hard period. And he was, you know, depressed about it. However, that does not mean that he was a depressive, you know, clinically depressive person.
So I think, you know, that, you know, also people when they when they talk about his depression, they point to one of his paintings, I don't know if you've seen this, but a chart well, and it's one of his only self portraits. And it is of him holding his paintbrush and his easel. And but the background is black. People say, Oh, like, you know, that's indicative of how he felt about the world. And, you know, very, you know, my point of view is very contrarian to that in the sense of Winston Churchill was an eternal optimist. He saw the humanity in people. He saw, you know, the light at the end of the tunnel was whatever phrase you want to use.
He saw the good side of life. Um, and he lived that way as well. Um, and now the more complicated issues are, you know, Winston Churchill, like many historical figures recently, uh, you know, are perceived as being racist and it is an exceptionally um reductive conversation in my opinion yeah i agree you know winston church when you read his writings he uses the term so people will point to well he uses the term race the indian race uh the african race we also called the german race the british race the French race. He used the word race as we would use the word nation or peoples, French peoples, British nation.
And he really, so that's, that's the semantic distinction. Right. But he also saw, I mean, Winston Churchill, this is my, you know, of course, my individual opinion, but it's, it's shared by many others, including David Reynolds, who wrote a great recent book called Churchill, Mirrors of Greatness, which is right here. Mirrors of Greatness, Winston Churchill. This came out earlier this year. I highly recommend it. So it's about him and his contemporaries. And the chapter by far, longest by far is him and Churchill and Gandhi. Churchill's worldview is not, you know, skin focused. It was barbarism or civilization. That's it. Barbarism or civilization. And guess what?
Any person could be in either camp. You know, he referred many times to German barbarism. Germans are predominantly white. Right. So that's this sort of for me, this sort of, you know, reducing a historical individual to their worst comments or their or trying to place the way that society has evolved from their time, rightfully, in many ways, trying to put that sort of evolution onto somebody who was not who has not been part of that evolution, if you see what I mean. Yeah. But what they said, what they did, what they wrote, oftentimes doesn't translate into our evolved society. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't, you know, refer to them in many ways, revere them in some ways, you know, criticize them in other ways.
So I think I get frustrated when, you know, I hope, let me put it this way. I hope in 100 years, somebody doesn't judge me on the worst thing that I've said. or a point of view that I held when I was 15 or 20, which I clearly don't hold anymore when I was 70. And it's that sort of like cherry picking quotes, actions and saying, oh, no, no, no. Everything else he is reduced to this one quote. And I'll give you, you know, there are plenty of examples. Winston Churchill, the great thing about Winston Churchill, he lived his life in the public domain. Pretty much everything he wrote and said, he didn't keep a diary.
All of his letters are in the Churchill archives, So you can research them for free. He lived his life in the public eye. And the quotes that people criticize him for, you know, there's this quote about, you know, the American race will triumph over the Indian race, referring to Native Americans. Or he advocated for using gas against Iraqis. And he was referring to mustard gas, not noxious gas or whatever. But, of course, those little nuances are flattened out. And it's just this binary said equals bad, which not only is doing the dead person injustice, but it's doing the like, for me, the important essential work of historiography in injustice, because you're not giving yourself the opportunity to accept some certain things, check those out the door, and then really get into the primary sources. It's really just this reductive, reductive conversation.
Yeah, and most of that conversation is happening on social media, and there's no room for nuance on social media at all whatsoever. And I've been in the social media trenches for 15 years. Our Facebook page is 200,000 people on it, and managing that amount of comments at least is a challenge because you've got 200.
You know, sometimes on some posts, we have to turn them off, especially if it's about the royal family. And I know people are going to be mad about it. I just turn the comments off because people, they just, it gets out of hand because it's not so much that people have bad opinions. People can have whatever opinions they want, but it's the, what happens is in the comments, people start attacking each other.
This is supposed to be entertaining, you know? And I like what you say about it being reductive because, you know, somebody born 150 years ago has a fundamental alien view of the world and geography and history than somebody born even 50 years ago. And it's so incredibly difficult to broadcast backwards our views and make them acceptable to somebody who was born 150 years ago. You know, and that's one of the things I would encourage people to do is to read biographies like Roberts has written because you have to fundamentally understand this person before you can criticize them and just bash them away as, oh, they were a racist. Well, it's a lot more nuanced than that. There's a lot more history there. There's a lot more there there, you know?
Yeah. And, you know, something in what I would say in his positive column is, you know, in a time when the British aristocracy was overwhelmingly anti-Semitic, Winston Churchill was not. And, you know, unashamedly so. And but then, of course, people criticize him because he was a Zionist in in. I mean, I would certainly say I mean, he I think he did say he was in favor of Zionism in the sense of creation of the Israeli state. And so, of course, it's like, well, let's applaud him for being not, you know, a friend of the Jews in 1900. Oh, but now we're going to throw him over the coals in 1948 because Israel is now a country.
I mean, it's like that sense of, you know, where do the shape shifting of of excuse me, the shape shift shape shifting of, you know, your of morals put onto individuals in the past. It's just, it's not just tedious. It's just like, it also distracts from the general sense of history, which I have, which is history is actually subjective. And it's about humans. It's about individuals. It's about, you know, relationships. And so it sucks all that up in a vacuum and just says, no, he's bad because he wanted the empire to remain. Well, Winston Churchill definitely wanted India to remain and was working towards dominion status to give them independence.
And what was he afraid of? Oh, he was afraid that the Muslims and Hindus would kill each other. And what did they do in 1946? They had an awful civil war. and and and so like it's you know and of course the bengal famine which i'm sure you know all about and the criticism of that i mean there are primary sources in the churchill archive center people would just google and and spend 10 minutes on this there are primary sources of him stating as the prime minister in the war cabinet every action must be taken to alleviate the suffering of these people redirecting ships he appealed to fdr for ships fdr turned him down so like you know it's like you know and then you'll see on social media what you know winston churchill was was uh responsible for the deaths of three million people and then first you're like well first off how does one person kill three million people that's strange a strange argument to make and then second what are the mitigating factors and everything leading up to that point you know it was a natural famine number one number two japan had u-boats all over the bay of bengal that would sink any ship that got close to it so that's number two and number three japan was invading burma from the east and and there was also also a world war going on so it's like all of those like yes ands yes buts are removed from the conversation but i will i will tell your readers or your listeners, do yourself a favor as I did, get off social media.
Your life will be much improved and realize that there are people out there who share the way that you view the world and want to have, you know, fact-based discussions on history. There's many of them. You will not find them on social media.
Well, an interesting point there you made is that I'm a big fan of the Rest is History podcast.
Yeah. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. And Dominic Sandberg made a really good point a few months ago on one other podcast. I don't remember what it was about, but he said that the people in the past that we study, they don't have all the information that we do looking back. Right. And, you know, if you think about World War Two, well, in 1940, 1941, the Holocaust hadn't even started. So you can't, you know, things like that. They don't, the historical figures, they don't have all the information that we do. And yet, and we also have a tendency to not avail ourselves of all that information and to understand, you know, why they would have taken actions that they did.
Well, I think it's like, I always say to, you know, we engage with students, you know, periodically. And I always say to them, like, think of history as the actions taken by people as there today. Like, you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Think of September 10th, 2001. You know, nobody knew what was going to happen the next day except for a handful of people. And so all of these massive historical points in history, you only operate with the knowledge and information you have at hand. And you're right, you don't know. You know, you know, FDR is going to die in April 45. and Harry Truman's going to take on.
And, you know, it's just all of these things. And so like once you take that out of the equation, I think that's when history starts becoming fun and interesting because it's almost a game of mystery of what did these people know? Like let's determine what they did and what they didn't know and talk about that aspect of it versus let's determine why they didn't do this. Well, it's like you can't answer that question without answering the former question what did they know? What did they not know? And that's where I think it's a very fun, very fun, you know, thing to pursue. Yeah. And that kind of dovetails into my next question I
had for you. What is most frustrating to you about coverage of Churchill in this day and age? And I know we kind of already touched on a little bit, but, um, you know, what, what is, you know, do you dread reading a headline like Churchill said this or Churchill's creates controversy,
You know, it's funny. So I used to get a little annoyed by misquotes of Churchill. But I'll give you an example. So this after this weekend, I got an email from the Daily Mail saying, hey, would you like to comment on Eric Trump comparing his father? I was like, that's not even I'm just going to delete this email right now. No, no upside to responding to the Daily Mail about this. I think the most frustrating thing, setting aside the historical conversations, is the International Churchill Society is proudly a nonpartisan organization. We think Churchill transcends partisan politics, and his record shows they transcends partisan politics.
Multiple difficult – yeah, exactly. Represented many places. And so what's frustrating to me is when one side or the other tries to capture Winston Churchill for their own. This happened frequently in the Brexit debate, right? Winston Churchill, the great thing about Winston Churchill, which I think frustrates people, what I actually find fascinating is that his point of view – he said so many contradictory things about so many topics that it's like trying to sift through and figure out what he actually felt about something. And you could say that everything from the House of Lords, when he was a young liberal MP, said the House of Lords should be abolished.
I don't think he felt that way in the 50s. So – but it's frustrating when somebody gloms on. So just like we were talking about, somebody gloms on to the worst thing he said or something they disagree with, Churchill and the suffragettes. They glom on to him and they say, oh, that was him. Still, that's how he felt about. That was his worldview. Same thing is frustrating when, you know, somebody from political party gloms on to something that he he said, which resonates with them today. And they say and they say, oh, this quote is indicative Churchill support for X of what I'm pushing. That is a very frustrating thing for me and for the society.
And I think, you know, I was quoted. I don't know if you remember, but Ron DeSantis, you know, got out of the presidential race and unfortunately used a fake Churchill quote. And, you know, I gave a few interviews and I wasn't in any way attacking Ron DeSantis. It was more of like, let's talk about why people in Ron DeSantis's position of power reference Winston Churchill. That's the important part for us, is that he's maintaining relevance, you know. But, of course, the narrative goes from, you know, Ron DeSantis uses the wrong quote to he's an idiot. Oh, why is he comparing himself to Churchill? on since isn't church on blah blah blah blah blah blah blah in the society is like no no we're just telling you it's the quote's inaccurate and thanks for going to our website please join his members you know i mean that's where we stop um but it's that sense of churchill being grabbed by left and
right which which is frustrating yeah it does frustrate me um i'm i'm a left-wing kind of person sure and i'm the last person that should love all things churchill when when you look at the record But I actually think Churchill belongs to both sides of political spectrum because there's good and evil in the world. And he is a beacon of standing against evil and not just Nazi Germany, but against the evils of communism and other evils in the world. And I think that he belongs to all of us. And for any political party to try and claim him, it really annoys me. And as you said, it annoys you too as well.
So I'm glad to hear that. I think when it comes to – Churchill was genuinely liberal, genuinely so. And I think it's frustrating when – Winston Churchill with Ernest Bevin, they were the ones who conceived of the NHS. You know, if you read Churchill's earliest speeches, you know, in Dundee in the early 1900s about universal health care, paying for workers to work on the weekend, you know, giving them a five day week. I mean, these are things where you're like, wait, is this an American labor lawyer saying these things? And no, it was Winston Churchill because he was responding to – you know, Winston Churchill for me is one of the most iconic political – specifically politician in the sense of he responded to his people, to his constituency.
You know, he represented a very poor Oldham, near Manchester and then Dundee in Scotland, very working class, you know, aristocrat. But he was he was listening to them. He was responding to them and he was trying to advocate for them. And then they threw him out multiple times because he wasn't doing so. I mean, that was in church's political life is a very interesting story because he was both the beneficiary and also, you know, the tragedy of politics, of democracy. And so I think he's a great case study in that sense. And yeah, I just think, you know, you could go to Winston Churchill and find that quote, which, you know, certifies your worldview and says, man, me and Churchill were like buds because, you know, he advocated for the gold standard.
And I actually really think we should go back to the gold standard, even though it destroyed their economy. You know what I mean? And so like everything that he did, you could. So again, I just don't, I think that's, it's fun up into a point and then it becomes, it becomes, you know, detrimental.
Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, we look back and we think of, of him as this great defender of democracy. We think of him as he saved Western civilization. He saved Britain's democracy in World War II. And when you think about the world he was born in, it was not democratic or free in any way. And that's the world he evolved into as his political career developed, as the franchise was increased, as women got the vote and became more democratic. And so now you have – and people often don't think – don't realize that when he achieved power and greatness, he was already at retirement age. Yeah. And yeah.
Yeah. And that's – this was his third act as a career. And, you know, a lot of people don't realize that, that he represents how your life changes, how your country changes over time and how people have to change and, and, and how that can benefit everybody really.
Yeah. It's a very astute point. I completely agree with you. His lifetime, you know, his like life trajectory is, it overlaps with so many exceptionally amazing things. You know, the atomic bomb, you know, television, radio, all of these things. Airplanes, you know. Airplanes. And he's like, he had this strange, uncanny ability to be kind of involved in a lot of things like petrol. I mean, he switched the British Navy fleet from coal to petrol. So, you know what? If you were looking for something to criticize him for, you could blame him for climate change. because it was the largest change from coal to gasoline or oil.
And yeah, I mean, he just had this uncanny. I mean, the tank, you know, Winston Churchill was the one who he didn't, you know, specifically create the tank, but it was his idea to say, hey, what if we put a bunch of people into an armored vehicle and send it over no man's land? That was his idea. And then other people came around and, you know, and actually put it into action. So he had this incredible ability to be curious and thinking outside of the box. Oftentimes his ideas were nonsensical, not nonsensical, but impractical. But other times they really hit the mark. You know what I mean?
But he both benefited and suffered from that. The Dardanelles campaign was his idea. And if executed better, it probably would have significantly changed in World War I, but it was poorly executed and he fell on his sword. But he was trying to think outside of the box. Like, how do we – we're running into a brick wall every single time we send troops over the trenches. What can we do to circumvent this absolute killer of humanity of the Western Front? And again, it's that spirit of curiosity and endeavor, which to me separates Winston Churchill from others. His personal courage, both in trying things intellectually, but also what does he do after the Dardanelles?
He goes to the front line for seven months, and he almost gets killed many times. Could you imagine a current politician going to the front line of a war right now after having some sort of fall from grace? That is like that separates Churchill from me.
Well, and the way I like to look at it, he was born in the world of the horse and buggy and he died in the world of the rocket ship. Like, I mean. Yeah, the jet engine for sure. Such a massive amount of change in one period of time. we can't it's so we we are not justified in going back to criticizing little things he did or said right during that amazing period of time of change when the people who were living through it probably couldn't grapple with the changes that were happening yeah so uh okay i so i think my i think we'll wrap it up with one last question um so this year is an important year for churchill remembrance it's the 150th year since he was born that that will be marked in november um so what's ahead for the ics other than the conference and the task of celebrating all things churchill yeah
so we have the conference we have you know quite a few chapter events going on around the world um we are putting out a special issue of finest hour later this year 150th anniversary it's going to be larger in you know than a normal issue um and we just continue to host to do what we've always done which is, you know, we do fellowships for undergraduate and graduate researchers run out of George Washington. And, you know, we could just continue to say, you know, I mean, it doesn't it doesn't end after this year. Right. It continues. So I'm actually already started to focus on 2025 just from a strategic point of view. But, yeah, look out for that special issue of finest hour. Again, it'll be larger in size, a little better design. So that'll be a collectible for sure.
I read it cover to cover every time it comes. Great. So, well, thank you so much, Justin, for taking the time to speak to us. It's been a great conversation about Churchill. And I hope that I look forward to meeting you in person in October. And I hope we can have you on the podcast again.
Yeah. Jonathan, see you then. See you in October. Take care, everyone. Thanks for hosting me. Thank you.
