Winston on the Iron Curtain

(To the melody of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band")

Well it was sixty years ago today/That Winston Churchill he began to say/Joseph Stalin was going out of style/And he's never going to raise a smile/So may I introduce to you/The act you've known for all these years/The Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri!


Well it was actually sixty years ago yesterday that Churchill made his famous speech that gave a name to the Soviet Union's swallowing up of Eastern and Central Europe and that dominated global politics for the next four decades. On the BBC International News website, Willian Horsley has a great article discussing it in its original context of post-war 1946 and for today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4776444.stm)

It was a heroic but troubled time. The world was in turmoil after the most terrible conflict in human history.
On 5 March 1946 Churchill was no longer the UK's prime minister but he still enjoyed a giant reputation around the world.
So US President Harry Truman himself travelled 1,000 miles to Fulton, Missouri, to hear Churchill give a speech after receiving an honorary degree at Westminster College there.
It would become one of the most famous speeches of the century.
Churchill had been mocked in Britain in the 1930s for warning of the menace of war from Nazi Germany, but had been proved right in the end. Now he was about to do it again.
After expressing his admiration for the valiant Russian people and "my wartime comrade, Marshall Stalin", he spoke the words which came to define the oppression, fear and confrontation of the Cold War era:
"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. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia - 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 some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."
It was vintage Churchill - grave, eloquent and ruthlessly honest.
It was a plea to America, already the world's greatest superpower, to acknowledge the harsh reality about Stalin - that on his orders the Russians were in the process of imposing totalitarian rule by communist governments in all the countries under their military control.
America had long been reluctant to accept this conclusion. But by the following year President Truman had decided on a policy of containment of Soviet power.
In 1948 any remaining doubts were removed by the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, when the Russians tried but failed to starve West Berlin into submission.

Churchill was indeed prescient of the two great totalitarian dangers of the 20th century: Nazism in the lead-up to World War II from Hitler's accession to power in 1933 and Stalinist Communism's - and what survived of it even after Stalin's death in 1953 and Krushchev's 1956 famous "Cult of Personality" speech - engorgement of so many countries in Europe after the war. Though George W. Bush sometimes pretends to such insight, the paucity of his historical understanding, combined with rhetorical skills of the most insufferable kind and a now-proven fundamental lack of seriousness when dealing with issues of global importance make a politician - no statesmen - of Churchill's calibre that much more missed today. If only there was someone in the USA, still the world's superpower whether anyone likes it or not, who had even a glimmer of Churchill's character I would feel much more hopeful about the future of this world.