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Churchill, A Great Man WIth a Very Humanity Side

Winston Churchill was the saviour of his nation. He saved the nation during World War II from Hitler and his military machines.

Looking back to the history, few days just after becoming prime minister, Churchill was facing calls from some to make peace with Hitler, as the loss of so many men in World War I was still a recent memory. However, in front of House of Commons (UK Parliament) on 13 May 1940 he said, “I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’"

His speech intended to make clear to everyone that the only option to face Hitler was to “wage war”, not make a peace.

Again, when German troops had taken-down Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg while 338,000 of British and French troops cornered at port of Dunkirk, in front of House of Commons on 4 June 1940, Churchill delivered his explosive speech. He roared, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!”

There is no doubt the speech will be remembered as one of the most powerful political oratories of all time. “A miracle of deliverance” was the popular jargon to mark the event when imminent military defeat turned into a victory.

In this biography book, the writer, Ashley Jackson –a professor of imperial and military history at King’s College London and a visiting fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford- told the story of Churchill from very beginning of Churchill’s birth at Blenheim Palace in 1874 until Churchill’s final journey in Oxfordshire where his body was buried in the small churchyard in 1965.

Churchill, besides his elite attributes as a soldier, politician and historian, he was also a journalist, painter and homemaker. He had rich characters of which people like to made Churchill caricature depicted him as bulldog, Pooh Bear or Mr. Toad, but, on the other hand dubbed him as the Last Lion.

Anyhow Churchill was praised as high reputable international leader, he was a human being with a very natural behaviour such as his popular “bathing habit” which often encounter him in a state of near or abject nakedness no matter who were around him in the spot.

His evident humanity, which could so frustrate and anger his peers -even his wife- only adds to his appeal as a biographical subject apart of his remarkable life and career.

Churchill was a genius, a great man, a statesman who dominated British politics in an age shaped by industrial war and totalitarianism which probably would never be reproduced in Britain today and tomorrow.

However, the unlikeliness of having a man like Churchill again is not only because of his achievements, talents and attributes, but also his very humanity, his failures as well as triumphs, his weaknesses as well as his strengths, that make him so fascinating and no way to be duplicated.

He already become a symbol of nation, and the British people is not wrong to make him so.

***

Serpong, July 2021

Titus J.

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