Finest Hour

On June 18, 1940 Winston Churchill made his
most famous
speech in an effort to mobilize England against a powerful enemy. There is
one sentence often quoted. I will quote the previous two with it for context:

"Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island
or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life
of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then
the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known
and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister,
and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us
therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the
British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still
say, ‘This was their finest hour.’"

If they failed, Churchill predicted "a new Dark Age..
perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." No, I’m not taking
it out of context. He was not speaking of the atom bomb, because he was speaking
of after the war. He was speaking of a Dark Age of knowledge, just as the first
so-called "Dark Age" was supposedly a time of ignorance and controlled thought.
Hitler was using Darwinism as an ideological weapon to control the minds of
people into believing that his was the superior race, and no other had a right
to live and thrive. Science is a "light," and by it people find their way. If
the light is perverted, the people unwittingly and inevitably go the wrong way.

This entry was posted on September 14, 2007 at 9:10 am and is filed under Culture & society, Notable Quotes, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.