Winston Churchill on Democracy & Tyranny

More 1939 quotes for today

From a Winston Churchill speech dated 19 May 1939:

There is the Nazi-Fascist ideology, and the Communist ideology. Britain and France are equally opposed to both. The Parliamentary States think that small peoples, acting within their rights, should not be trampled down by stronger ones. They think that civilisation implies, in any society, the freedom to criticize the government of the day; free speech; free press; free thought; free religious observance; no racial persecution; fair treatment of minorities; andcourts of law and justice which have an authority independent of the executive and untainted by party bias…They are well worth defending all over Europe as long it is possible to defend them.

From a Churchill speech on 8 August 1939, just on the brink of Hitler invading Poland and launching World War II:

One thing that has struck me as very strange, and that is the resurgence of the one-man power after all these centuries of experience and progress. It is curious how the English-speaking peoples have always had this horror of one-man power. They are quite ready to follow a leader for a time, as long as he is serviceable to them, but the idea of handing themselves over, lock, stock, and barrel, body and soul, to one man, and worshipping him as if he were an idol; that has always been odious to the whole theme and nature of our civilisation. The architects of the American Constitution were as careful as those who shaped the British Constitution, to guard against the whole life and fortunes, and all the laws and freedom of the nation, being placed in the hands of a tyrant. Checks and counter-checks in the body politic, large devolutions of State government, instruments and processes of free debate, frequent recurrence to first principles, the right of opposition to the most powerful governments, and above all ceaseless vigilance, have preserved, and will preserve, the broad characteristics of British and American institutions.

Churchill was saying that the Anglo-American democratic tradition is sturdy, and that its commitments deeply shape both how the citizens of these two countries rule themselves and also how they assess and relate to the governments of other countries. We have a natural revulsion against tyrants and bullies whether domestic or foreign.

Churchill argued repeatedly that the deep values-affinity between these two countries keeps us in natural and lasting friendship, not just in an alliance of expedience. He also said that this affinity was felt among all countries committed to these principles and steeped in these values. This is why it is so easy and natural for liberal democracies to find friends and engage in joint ventures of all kinds.

In the face of the Fascist threat, Churchill did not emphasize the many ways in which the democracies had failed to fulfill the full measure of these values. He wanted to emphasize the values themselves.

The question we face today is whether these values still hold.