MM#269--The Timeless Truths of Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, David Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. After our American Foreign Policy Trilogy of last week, which we capped off with our Liberty Minute on Sunday, I thought it most fitting and proper that we conclude with a Mojo Minute on possibly one of the very best statesmen in the history of the world, certainly one of the greatest leaders in world history, and that is of Sir Winston Churchill. Now for me, especially as a kid growing up with Ronald Reagan in the White House from my whole childhood, from 1981 to 1989, I mean I was seven years old when Reagan was elected, I was 15 years old when Reagan left office extremely formidable years. The United States was a unified, happy place during those years. The economy comes roaring back in 1982. It's morning in America again. You can even go back and look at the approval ratings. You can look at measures of GDP, of average wages for almost everybody. Everything was moving up in the world and Reagan made us feel good about our country again. Now Winston Churchill was grouped in the same class of people as Ronald Reagan. For me, reagan referred to Winston Churchill many speeches that I would listen to and hear and I guess it also helped that Reagan won two landslide elections in 1980 and 1984. So in my mind, the whole country loved Ronald Reagan, so they must love his good friend Winston Churchill. It was only when adolescence was drawn away and a maturing of the mind and body began to happen and I actually learned more about each person and how they became great leaders. And then you begin to understand the differences. And there were some similarities, sure, but one day I was captivated, while in history class, when we watched a video that highlighted Winston Churchill's speech of all places, in a place in America. My mind jerked up out of its slumber and it told me wait, wait. This guy spoke in the United States. He spoke right after that war was over. Where did he speak? When did he speak? Can I go there? All these questions began racing through my mind. Now, why the immediate reaction? I wasn't sure. Maybe it was because this guy Churchill, he could really speak. And when you listen to him, wow, maybe when I read about the history of Britain in World War II, when she was left all alone, when that country had no friends that would come to their aid against the Nazis, that made a big impression on me. I was often asking myself where did their friends go? Why don't they have friends? Why don't those friends help them fight the war? They had to fight this war alone, like fighting a bully on a playground. They had to fight the bully alone. And that made an impression on me. I wanted friends like that guy. That guy was going to be there. That guy was going to stay there, and he did. That guy stayed there. He led his country against the evil doers. Winston Churchill defied Adolf Hitler in his Nazi regime. Winston Churchill was like a ninth-century knight defending his homeland against the menacing evil invaders. I loved Churchill's courage and plus he could give some great speeches. Wow, he gave some doozies. Now back to my story. Like I mentioned before from this microphone, in August of 2021, I was outside Shiloh, tennessee, on vacation, having just toured the National Civil War battlefield there with friends, and my next stop I was going to be going to Vicksburg, mississippi, by myself, to tour that Civil War battlefield. But then nature got in the way Nature in the form of a, in fact, newly formed category five hurricane that was coming into Louisiana, mississippi, at the time. So then I made a choice. Now I remembered that small town in Missouri where Winston Churchill spoke and I sent my GPS coordinates there. It was time to fulfill a childhood dream. Now Fulton Missouri is a sleepy town in the 21st century and, frankly, by all accounts, it was a sleepy town in the 20th century and Winston Churchill came to town at the invitation of the then US president, harry Truman, and our book for today takes us on this journey back to Churchill's speech there. The book's title is our Supreme Task how Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance, by Philip White. It was written in 2012 and it's 289 pages. Now Philip White is a writer and a guest lecturer at Mid-American Nazarene University, and he's a regular contributor to the historical society's publications there. He's won several awards from his writing. He lives in Authy, kansas, with his wife and two sons. Now the book covers with great detail the eight months leading up to the speech, from the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II to this world changing event in Fulton, missouri on March 5th 1946. Now the speech was given in the college gymnasium in the Swoop Chapel, and you can still see these things today. There's a terrific museum there that I toured when I went and it walks you through all the history. It's fascinating, in fact. Let's do this. Are you ready to jump back to a time when there was a profound geopolitical change? Let's step into the shoes of Winston Churchill on March 5th 1946, as he delivered that historic Iron Curtain Speech. And this was more than just a speech. It was a wake up call to the world and a pivotal moment in American foreign policy. But why was it so important? Well, let's find out. Let's set the stage In the aftermath of World War II. The world was in flux, with the lines between allies and adversaries becoming increasingly blurred, and at a breakneck pace. Churchill, with his characteristic foresight, recognized the emerging divide very quickly. That divide was happening between the West and the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc. It was against this backdrop that he coined the term the Iron Curtain. Churchill's speech, officially titled the Sinus of Peace, was delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, missouri. Like we talked about, it would be a speech that would shock the world. He used the term Iron Curtain to describe the ideological divide separating Western democracies from Eastern communist countries. Isn't it fascinating how a single phrase can capture the essence of an era? In fact, let's read some excerpts from the speech. I'll put a link in the show notes so you can watch these excerpts on YouTube, because the Watch Winston Churchill Give a Speech is a great thing. Let's go to the book and read from our first excerpt. Now I come to the second danger of these two marauders which threatens the cottage, the home and the ordinary people, namely tyranny. We cannot be blind to the fact that the liberties enjoyed by individual citizens throughout the British Empire are not valid in a considerable number of countries, some of which are very powerful. And these states control is enforced upon the common people by various kinds of all-embracing police governments. Let's stop here real quick, because this book offers wonderful annotations. So when Churchill was talking about an all-embracing police government that we just mentioned here, churchill is contrasting the righteousness of liberal democratic values with the mevalent and all-consuming power of totalitarian rule. In the minds of some of the United States and in Britain in March 1946, the genial Uncle Joe Stalin was merely conducting an experiment in a new form of governance, and communism was very little from the domestic form of socialism with which they were familiar. However, they knew little of the purges, the gulag or the famine caused by forced agricultural collectivization which, all told, had claimed more than five million lives. This was not the right form for discussing these horrors, yet Churchill wanted to make it clear that communism was not benign. Rather, he knew it to be a brutal system under which freedom of the individual, the ballot and the press was forbidden. Let's keep going with the speech. The power of the state is exercised without restraint, either by dictators or by compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police. It is not our duty at this time, when difficulties are so numerous, to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries which we have not conquered in war, but we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man, which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which, through the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the habeas corpus, trial by jury and the English common law, find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence. Ride on, ride on Winston's on a roll. It's always good when you're invoking the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the habeas corpus, along with trial by jury and the English common law, all spiraling upwards to the American Declaration of Independence. This is a good thing. Okay, so he's set the stage right now. Now we're going to turn later in the speech for those famous words that will codify the words the Iron Curtain speech. Going back to the speech From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent, and here we have an annotation. The use of iron made the curtain appear all the more impenetrable, implying that Stalin had something to hide in Eastern and Central Europe and wanted no outside light to illuminate the darkness. The choice of metal iron also alludes to military equipment, which is fitting, given the Soviet munitions first saved the city's Churchill referenced from the German army and then imposed Moscow's controlling will on the citizen. Going back to the speech, behind that line lies all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe Warsaw, berlin, prague, vienna, budapest, belgrade, bucharest, sophie. All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in many cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone, greece, with its immortal glories, is free to decide its future at an election under British, american and French observation. The Russian dominated Polish government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all of these Eastern states of Europe, have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy. Another annotation Bulgaria was a prime example of Stalin's misdeeds in Eastern Europe. On September 5th, the Kremlin declared war on Bulgaria and, due to the Bulgarian Communist power grab, marched into Sophie almost unopposed. The following February, with Red Army troops still bolstering the new regime, the Communist sentence Prince Karel and former Prime Minister Bogdan Filatov to more than 70 and more than 70 other leading military officials and members of parliament to death by so called People's Tribunals, for which there was no defense, council or jury, only prosecutors. That night, the Red Army soldiers frog march Karel Filatov and the rest of the to the cemetery, shot them and threw their bodies in mass graves. Let's go back to the speech. Turkey and Persia are both profoundly alarmed and disturbed at the claims which are being made upon them and at the pressure being exerted by the Moscow government. So one of the most effective speakers and leaders in all of human history. Winston Churchill demonstrates in this speech the vital word picture of a curtain, and iron curtain closing on these countries and these most famous of European capitals. And the natural question people were asking themselves at the time was there are many people in these European capitals. They have just survived a world war that ended just a year ago, in April of 1945. This speech is given in March of 1946, less than a year later. There are many, many people in those capitals. What will happen to them? The analogy was most effective, so effective that it impacted American foreign policy very profoundly. Churchill's iron curtain speech was a clarion call for the United States to take a stand against the spread of communism. It marked a turning point in American foreign policy, setting the stage for the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment Strategies aimed at preventing the spread of communism. Can you imagine how different our world might have been without this shift in policy? How long would it have taken us, the Americans, to understand the true horror of communism? Would we have ever grasped it? Maybe years, maybe decades later, who knows? And what is the legacy of the speech? And today, churchill's speech serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of vigilance in the face of threats to democracy. It underscores America's role in promoting peace and freedom and democratic values across the globe. Isn't it inspiring to see how words can influence actions and shape history. Now here is an interesting tidbit and a connection to this speech about the city I grew up in, columbus, ohio, and Churchill's reaction to his own speech. Let's go back to the book for this final quote. Back, they went to the furred Nan Magellan, which was idling at the Jefferson City Station, the train's engine humming like a great beehive. From there the locomotive began retracing the route back to St Louis and on to Columbus, ohio, where Truman was to address the Federal Council of Churches of Christ of America on, quote, the place of religion and democracy. The next day, churchill would continue on to Washington before speaking to the Virginia General Assembly, and then would spend the remainder of his trip with Sarah, clementine and Randolph in New York. As the train got underway, churchill, truman and others resumed their poker rivalry, which predictably ended with another Churchill defeat. At this point the President left the group for a brief snooze, eager to recover from the rigors of the trip. Before his Columbus appearance, churchill continued his conversation with Clark Clifford and Charles Ross. Ross was a high school friend of Truman and his wife Bess, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. And the question arose as to where the sinews of peace would fit in Churchill's oratory canon. Without hesitation, churchill dubbed it the most important speech of my career. And there you have it, his most important speech of his career. The Eying-Kirton speech did in fact shape American foreign policy from 1946 until the end of the Cold War in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So in today's mojo minute, studying the great speeches of history, we can find the great nuggets of wisdom and of how the great statesman handled the great and difficult questions of their time. When Churchill gave the world a great testimony in Fulton, missouri in 1946, and it should be studied even more so today as perhaps an iron curtain is falling upon the United States now.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.