P E T E R M U R P H Y M O N A S H U N I V E R S I T Y

V I O L E N C E A N D T H E I M A G I N A T I O N C O L L O Q U I U M

W E D N E S D A Y 1 5 J U N E 2 0 1 1

M O N A S H U N I V E R S I T Y

A S O C I A L A E S T H E T I C S R E S E A R C H U N I T E V E N T

THE WARS OF METAPHORS

Peter Murphy

Associate Professor of Communications

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies

Monash University Clayton Campus

Wellington Road

Clayton Victoria 3800

AUSTRALIA

Peter.Murphy@arts.monash.edu.au

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/people/peter-murphy/

1. THE WARS OF METAPHORS

2. Imagination

Under certain conditions, i.e. in matters of imagination rather than reason, the law of excluded middle does not apply. Thus it is not the case that a thing is either something or not that thing, either A or not-A, and that there is no third option. Similarly in regard to acts of imagination though not of reason, the law of non-contradiction also is not true. Consequently, under some conditions, a thing can be both true and not true in the same instant, i.e. both A and not-A at the same time. It was Hegel’s 1812 Science of Logic that we see the first real challenge to the either/or of Aristotelian logic, though arguably rather than the ‘science of logic’ the framing of this kind of inquiry as the ‘art of imagination’ may have been more useful.

3. The Banality of the Evil Doers

‘[Eichmann] began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottglaubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live German, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick. He was “elated”; and he forgot that this was his own funeral. It was though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.’

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006 [1963]), p. 250.

4. Thou Shalt Not

Catalogues of these norms include “the ten commandments” (Exodus 20: 2-17).

For anyone who has forgotten them, the most instructive of that list of ten are 6-10, viz. that

“You shall not murder”, “You shall not commit adultery”, “You shall not steal”, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour”, and “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house or neighbour’s wife”.

A person can do a lot worse than obey these norms.

5. A superior wit supports rather than subverts social order

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, after a fashion, was correct in the observation that he made in his 1943 essay on George Bataille when he noted that ‘revolutionaries, who are the most convinced of the insufficiency of the commanding heights, are the most serious people in the world. Satire and pamphleteering come from on high. Conservatives excel at it; by contrast, it took years of labour to build up a semblance of revolutionary humour. And even then it looked less a direct insight into the ridiculous and more a painful translation of serious considerations.’

Sartre himself ended his life ignominiously supporting Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, a ruthless nihilistic movement that ruined the lives of millions of Chinese. Revolutionaries at the commanding heights, it would seem, are not only humourless but exceedingly dangerous people.

See Sartre, ‘A New Mystic’, Critical Essays (London: Seagull, 2010), p. 263.

6. Say, un-say, Say-un-say

This is akin to what Johannes Climacus does at the end of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Johannes retracts everything he has said. Yet he adds the teasing disclaimer that to say something and then to un-say it is not the same as not having said it in the first place.

7. Perverted Science

‘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.’

Churchill, ‘Their Finest Hour’, British House of Commons, June 18, 1940. See Winston S. Churchill (ed.) Never Give In: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, hereafter NGI, (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 218.

The Nazi ‘experiments’ were truly sickening and insane. Martin Small recounts one, the handiwork of the Nazi Security Service Dr. Wichtmann, who in 1942, experimented with hammer blows to the head: ‘When I realised what I was seeing through the window, my stomach turned inside-out. I put my hand to my mouth as if trying to muffle my own outburst. I nearly vomited. Now, more than sixty years later, I cannot erase the vivid terrible image from my mind. I felt like I was bursting inside and at the same time I wanted to run far away. But there was nowhere to run. Inside this structure, in a little room, sat a young boy of eleven or twelve, strapped to a chair so he could not move. Above him was suspended a mechanised hammer that every few second came down upon his head. The boy had been driven insane by the torture. Over and over and over this hammer came down upon his head; it was inhuman. Dr. Wichtmann, the tall, fair-haired family man who, not too many days before, generously saved us from an Aktion, kept this boy alive to be tortured, slowly, endlessly, mercilessly. Tears running down his cheeks, his face red and swollen, his eyes mere slits, his moaning was reduced to a dying, wounded animal’s whimper. I dropped to my knees in sickness and disgust and I trembled.’

Martin Small and Vic Shayne, Remember Us: My Journey from the Shtetl through the Holocaust (New York: Skyhorse, 2009), pp. 134-135.

8. The despotism of liberty

Robespierre (1794): ‘If the strength of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the strength of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror; terror without virtue is disastrous, virtue without terror is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of of democracy applied to the most urgent needs of the fatherland. It is said that terror is the strength of despotic government. Does ours then resemble the one with which the satellites of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern his brutalized subjects through terror; he is right as a despot. Subdue the enemies of liberty through terror and you will be right as founders of the Republic. The government of revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.’

George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four (1948): ‘Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the party stood out in bold capitals:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

9. The Intellectuals

Martin Heidegger (1935): ‘The violent one, the creative one who sets forth in to the unsaid, who breaks into the unthought, who compels what has never happened and makes appear what is unseen—the violent one stands at all time in daring... the violence-doer knows no kindness and conciliation (in the ordinary sense), no appeasement and mollification by success or prestige and by their confirmation.... For such a one, disaster is the deepest and broadest Yes to the Overwhelming... Essential de-cision, when it is carried out and when it resists the constantly pressing ensnarement in the everyday and the customary, has to use violence. This act of violence, this decided setting out upon the way to the Being of beings, moves humanity out of the hominess of what is most directly nearby and what is usual.'

Jean-Paul Sartre (1974): ‘Solzhenitsyn represents someone who has nineteenth-century ideas, he has no ideas adapted to current society; so he’s an element harmful to development... He experienced the camps and so he was completely immersed in Soviet ideology.’

Michel Foucault (1978): ‘During my entire stay in Iran, I did not hear even once the word “revolution,” but four out of five times, someone would answer, “An Islamic government.”... One thing must be clear. By “Islamic government,” nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control. To me, the phrase “Islamic government” seemed to point to two orders of things.”A utopia,” some told me without any pejorative implication. “An ideal,” most of them said to me. ..With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others; minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not injure the majority; between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is a natural difference. With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority, the leaders should be responsible to the people, and each person, as it is laid out in the Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs.’

Baron Giddens (2007): ‘As one-party states go, Libya is not especially repressive. Gadafy seems genuinely popular.’

Slavoj Žižek (2008): ‘...crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not “essential” enough. Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to invent and focus on destroying an external enemy, Jews).’

10. The good, the bad and the ugly of the imagination

The Greek-Western imagination, Castoradis suggested, ‘while it has produced democracy and philosophy, both the American and the French Revolutions, the Paris Commune and the Hungarian Workers’ Councils, the Parthenon and Macbeth, it has produced as well the massacre of the Melians by the Athenians, the Inquisition, Auschwitz, the Gulag and the H-bomb. It created reason, freedom, and beauty—and it also created massive monstrosity.’

‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 273

11. Brothel Kitsch (where you can now book holiday accommodation...)

The palaces, courts, offices, residences and ante-chambers of dictators and their bestial broods habitually evoke the lurid style of brothel kitsch. See for instance Saddam Hussein’s palace architecture:

12. Richard III

The epitome of seductive evil is Richard of Gloucester’s courting of Lady Anne, Anne Neville, whose husband, Edward of Westminster, has been murdered by Richard. Richard’s explanation is that murder is exculpated by his love for Anne. Seduction is a play upon such perversity. Wickedness (murder) is justified by goodness (love).

GLOUCESTER

I know so. But, gentle Lady Anne,

To leave this keen encounter of our wits,

And fall somewhat into a slower method,

Is not the causer of the timeless deaths

Of these Plantagenets, Henry and Edward,

As blameful as the executioner?

LADY ANNE

Thou art the cause, and most accursed effect.

GLOUCESTER

Your beauty was the cause of that effect;

Your beauty: which did haunt me in my sleep

To undertake the death of all the world,

So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.

Act1, Scene 2, Richard III.

13. Stalin and the useful idiots

A generation or two of intellectuals was charmed by the perversity of Stalin. Stalin engineered the genocide famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Between seven and eleven million people were killed by it. The pioneering study of this contrived famine was Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). One of the side-stories in Conquest’s mournful excavation was about the role played by Western intellectuals both conniving in and covering up Stalin’s handiwork. In such cases, the motivation of the intellectuals is tediously consistent: extreme wickedness in their eyes is perversely sanctified by some ethereal good. It seems to take very little to seduce them. The journalist Askold Krushelnycky in 2003 summed up the events of the 1930s writing that:

...the most influential role in the cover-up was The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime. Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had travelled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia. The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy... Duranty died in 1957 an impoverished drunk... when details about the famine finally came into the open, Duranty was credited with coining the famously callous phrase, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

Askold Krushelnycky, ‘Stalin’s Starvation of Ukraine – Seventy Years Later, World Still Largely Unaware Of Tragedy’

http://www.ukemonde.com/news/rferl.html accessed May 28, 2011. Conquest relates the saga of the egregious Duranty in Harvest of Sorrow on pp. 304, 309, 318-320.

14. The norm: The worthlessness of forecasts

The Victorian-era Conservative politician Lord Salisbury remarked thus on ‘the proved futility of theorists to whatever school they might belong; the worthlessness of forecasts based on logical calculation; the evil which has repeatedly been wrought by the best intended policies; the hopeless incongruity between aim and result which dominates history.’

Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury Volume III ( London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), reproduced at:

http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofrobertmarq03ceciuoft/lifeofrobertmarq03ceciuoft_djvu.txt

15. The exception: The veracity of forecasts I

Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1899), II, pp. 240-250.

‘I have frequently been astonished since I have been in this House to hear with what composure and how glibly Members, and even Ministers, talk of a European war. I will not expatiate on the horrors of war, but there has been a great change which the House should not omit to notice. In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury—a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.’ ‘Army Reform’, May 13, 1901, British House of Commons.

On November 26, 1918, in a speech to his constituents in Dundee, Churchill declared that ‘Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism….Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while the Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.’ (Marin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, volume IV: 1917-1922 (London: Heinemann, 1990 [1975], p. 227.)

On 11 November, 1922, speaking to his constituents, Churchill observed:

What a disappointment the Twentieth Century has been.

How terrible and how melancholy

is the long series of disastrous events

which have darkened its first twenty years.

We have seen in every country a dissolution,

a weakening of those bonds,

a challenge to those principles

a decay of faith

an abridgment of hope

on which the structure and ultimate existence

of civilized society depends.

We have seen in every part of the globe

one great country after another

which had erected an orderly, a peaceful,

a prosperous structure of civilized society,

relapsing in hideous succession

into bankruptcy, barbarism or anarchy. ...

Can you doubt, my faithful friends

as you survey this sombre panorama,

that mankind is passing through a period marked

not only by an enormous destruction

& abridgement of human species,

not only by a vast impoverishment

& reduction in means of existence

but also that destructive tendencies

have not yet run their course?

And only intense, concerted & prolonged efforts

among all nations

can avert further & perhaps even greater calamities.

Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, volume 4 (London: Heineman, 1975), p. 915.

16. The exception: The veracity of forecasts II

‘Now the demand is that Germany should be allowed to rearm... Do not let His Majesty’s Government believe that all that Germany is asking for is equal status... That is not what Germany is seeking. All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons, and, when they have the weapons, believe me they will ask for the return of lost territories and lost colonies, and when that demand is made it cannot fail to shake and possibly shatter to their foundations very one of the countries I have mentioned, and some other countries I have not mentioned.’

Winston Churchill, ‘Bands of Sturdy Teutonic Youths’, 23 November 1932, British House of Commons.

In Quebec in August 1943, Churchill warned the Americans of ‘bloody consequences in the future. Stalin is an unnatural man. There will be grave troubles.’

Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45 (London: HarperPress, 2009), p. 388.

17. A quick lesson in how to be right when you are wrong

‘Side by side with this Brahmin theocracy and the immense Hindi population—angelic and untouchable castes alike—there dwell in India seventy millions of Muslims, a race of far greater physical vigor and fierceness, armed with a religion which lends itself only too readily to war and conquest While the Hindu elaborates his argument, the Muslim sharpens his sword. Between these two races and creeds, containing as they do so many gifted and charming beings in all the glory of youth, there is no intermarriage. The gulf is impassable. If you look at the antagonisms of France and Germany, and the antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants, and compounded them and multiplied them ten-fold, you would not equal the division which separates these two races intermingled by scores of millions in the cities and plains of India’.

Churchill, ‘Abandoning India’, Royal Albert Hall, London, 23 February, 1931, NGI, p. 98.

18. Where the crime is the punishment: The perverse state of Pakistan

Pakistan is a perverse state. Its perverseness has a variety of Orwellian expressions. Amongst the most repulsive is that way in which, in this society, crime is punishment.

As Christopher Hitchens observes: ‘Salman Rushdie’s upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanization of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan, too. Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter. If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. A man so lacking in pride—indeed lacking in manliness—will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan’s holy “sovereignty.” This puffery and posing might perhaps possess a rag of credibility if he and his fellow middlemen were not avidly ingesting $3 billion worth of American subsidies every year.’

Hitchens, ‘From Abbottabad to Worse’, Vanity Fair, July 2011. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/07/osama-bin-laden-201107

19. Anton-synonymic (apologies for the barbaric locution)

20. Relation, not Isolation, or the non synthesis of two concepts in another

Hegel was one of those who pointed out that there is nothing really in isolation. One of his analogies for this, in the 1812 Science of Logic, was the idea of mathematical ratio: A ratio holds two distinct things in contrast, and yet a ratio is a single thing that binds two quantities into one.

In 1918 Walter Benjamin produced a non-Hegelian formulation of this. In a then unpublished critique of Kant’s separation of freedom and experience, he suggested the idea of ‘a certain non synthesis of two concepts in another’. See Walter Benjamin, ‘On The Program of the Coming Philosophy’, Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 106. He elaborates thus: ‘…besides the concept of synthesis, another concept, that of a certain non synthesis of two concepts in another, will become very important systematically, since another relation between thesis and antithesis is possible besides synthesis.’

21. The past is the future

Churchill once remarked: ‘You have no doubt noticed in your reading of British history and I hope you will take pains to read it, for it is only from the past that one can judge the future... that we have had to hold out from time to time all alone, or to be the mainspring of coalitions, against a continental tyrant or dictator, and we have had to hold out for quite a long time: against the Spanish Armada, against the might of Louis XIV, when we led Europe for nearly twenty-five years under William III and Marlborough, and I50 years ago, when Nelson, Pitt and Wellington broke Napoleon, not without assistance from the heroic Russians of I811. In all these world wars our Island kept the lead of Europe or else held out alone.’

See ‘Forward till the whole task is done’, Broadcast, London, 13 May, 1945, NGI, p. 392.

22. The Uncanny

Kierkegaard observed that ambiguity results from contraries that do not coincide. In a society of reflection, there is no real opposition, there is just ambiguity. We can say then that in contrast to ambiguity, the uncanny results from contraries that do coincide. Sigmund Freud wrote a very interesting essay on the concept of ‘the uncanny’ or, in German, the unheimlich. What gives the unheimlich its character is what is latent in the word heimlich. As Freud explains, ‘...heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.’

Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919), An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 226.

23. The Wars of the Painters: Churchill v. Hitler

24. Deist and Stoic

Deist: ‘The unexpected came to the aid of design and multiplied the result’, NGI, p. 351; ‘the long arm of destiny’, NGI, p. 356; ‘the House... desired to offer thanks to Almighty God, to the Great Power which seems to shape and design the fortunes of nations and the destiny of man...’, NGI, p. 390; ‘Do not let us be led away by any fair-seeming appearances of fortune; let us rather put our trust in those deep, slow-moving tides that have borne us thus far already, and will surely bear us forward, if we know how to use them, until we reach the harbor where we would be’, NGI, p. 345; ‘Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened’, NGI, p. 235; ‘When one beholds how many currents of extraordinary and terrible events have flowed together to make this harmony, even the most skeptical person must have the feeling that we all have the chance to play our part and do our duty in some great design, the end of which no mortal can foresee’, NGI, p. 298.

Stoic: ‘fortitude in suffering’, NGI, p. 184; ‘that ever-fresh resilience which renews the strength and energy of people in long, doubtful and dark days’, NGI, p. 197; ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, NGI, p. 206; ‘we are ready to face it; to endure it; and to retaliate against it’, NGI, p. 208; ‘to call forth from our people the last ounce and last inch of effort of which they are capable’, NGI, p. 209; ‘Olympian fortitude’, NGI, p. 317; ‘Upon that rock, all stood unshakeable’, NGI, p.295; ‘enduring, resilient strength’, NGI, p. 256; ‘uplifted in spirit, fortified in resolve’, NGI, p. 304; ‘stranding steadfastly together’, NGI, p. 260; ‘when we face with a steady eye the difficulties that lie before us’, NGI, p. 274; ‘common resolve’, NGI, p. 321; ‘a new scene opens upon which a steady light will glow and brighten’, NGI, p 321; ‘consistency of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision’, NGI, p. 415.

25. Not Either/Or

This is the contrary of a Kierkegaardian world-view. Kierkegaard argued that Hegel’s philosophy alienated life on the grounds that it denied individual choice and personal freedom, not in virtue of a tyrannical impulse but because it eliminated the either/or of things.

26. The Politics of Painting

The nature of Churchill’s vision is best, in the sense of most unselfconsciously, expounded by Churchill in his essay ‘Painting As A Pastime’, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Odhams, 1932), pp. 232-246. Churchill was not writing about the vocation of politics, but rather about his avocation of painting, and what this does is allow him the freedom to talk in a festive and profound way about exultant images that also recur, echo, and are mirrored throughout his vast life’s work.

On colour: ‘I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours, which will delight the celestial eye.’

On relation and proportion: ‘In painting, the reserves consist in Proportion or Relation. And it is here that the art of the painter marches along the road which is traversed by all the greatest harmonies in thought. At one side of the palette there is white, at the other black; and neither is ever used ‘neat’. Between these two rigid limits, all the action must lie, all the power required must be generated. Black and white themselves placed in juxtaposition make no great impression; and yet they are the most you can do in pure contrast. It is wonderful--after one has tried and failed often--to see how easily and surely the true artist is able to produce every effect of light and shade, sunshine and shadow, of distance or nearness, simply by expressing justly the relations between the different plains and surfaces with which he is dealing. We think that this is founded upon a sense of proportion, trained no doubt by practice, but which in its essence is a frigid manifestation of mental power and size. We think that the same mind's eye that can justly survey and appraise and prescribe beforehand the values of a truly great picture in one all-embracing regard, in one flash of simultaneous and homogeneous comprehension, would also with a certain acquaintance with the special technique be able to pronounce with sureness upon any other high activity of the human intellect. This was certainly true of the great Italians.’

On light: ‘Chance led me one autumn to a secluded nook on the Cȏte d’Azur, between Marseilles and Toulon, and there I fell in with one or two painters who revelled in the methods of the modern French school. These were disciples of Cézanne. They view Nature as a mass of shimmering light in which forms and surfaces are comparatively unimportant, indeed, hardly visible, but which gleams and glows with beautiful harmonies and contrasts of colour.’

27. The light gleaming behind the clouds

See for example ‘peace with its broadening and brightening prosperity’, NGI, p. 194; ‘breadth of view and sense of proportion’, NGI, p. 317; ‘Our qualities and deeds must burn and glow through the gloom of Europe until they become the veritable beacon of its salvation’, NGI, p.256; ‘Westward look, the land is bright’, NGI, p. 266, ‘This is... no war to shut any country out of its sunlight’, NGI, p. 198; ‘The tunnel may be dark and long but at the end there is light’, NGI, p. 302; ‘For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days’, NGI, p. 248; ‘broad highroad of freedom and justice’, NGI, p. 298; ‘that joyous serenity that we think belongs to a better world’, NGI, p. 267; ‘a new scene opens upon which a steady light will glow and brighten’, NGI, p. 321; ‘I turn for one moment from the turmoil and convulsions of the present to the broader basis of the future’, NGI, p. 322; ‘I feel the broadening swell of victory and liberation bearing us and all the tortured peoples onwards safely to the final goal’, NGI, p. 329; ‘I see the light gleaming behind the clouds and broadening on our path’, NGI, p. 329.

28. History pivots

Churchill, ‘Wars come very suddenly’, NGI, p. 105; ‘Therefore, Mr Winant, you come to us at a grand turning point in the world’s history’, NGI, p. 264; ‘I have taken occasion to speak to you tonight because we have reached one of the climacterics of the war. In the first of these intense turning points, a year ago, France fell prostrate under the German hammer and we had to face the storm alone. The second was when the Royal Air Force beat the Hun raiders out of the daylight air raid and thus warded off the Nazi invasion of our islands while we were still ill-armed and ill-prepared. The third turning point was when the President and Congress of the United States passed the lease and lend enactment, devoting nearly 2,000,000,000 sterling of the wealth of the New World to help us defend our liberties and their own. Those were the three climacterics. The fourth is now upon us’, NGI, p. 289.

29. Corporal Hitler

‘I am free to admit that in North Africa we builded better than we knew. The unexpected came to the aid of design and multiplied the result. For this we have to think the military intuition of Corporal Hitler. We may notice, as I predicted in the House of Commons three months ago, the touch of the master hand. The same insensate obstinacy which condemned Field-Marshall von Paulus and his army to destruction at Stalingrad has brought this new catastrophe upon our enemies in Tunisia. Churchill, ‘Heavier Work Lies Ahead’, Joint Session of Congress, Washington, D.C., 19 May, 1943, NGI, p. 351.

30. The Absurd Impostor

He satirized Mussolini as ‘an absurd impostor’, NGI, p. 270, a ‘tattered lackey’ of Hitler, NGI, p. 284, and as a ‘jackal’, NGI, p. 290. On the other hand, he was mortified when he heard the faux-Churchilian jokes that made the rounds at the expense of his war-time partner in government, Labour leader Clement Atlee. Churchill was well-acquainted with Atlee’s limitations, but he came to respect him as a loyal deputy in war-time. Pseudo-Churchill has Atlee as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’ and ‘a modest man, who has much to be modest about’.

31. The Iron Curtain

‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’

Churchill, ‘An Iron Curtain Has Descended’, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March, 1946, NGI, p. 420.

In his ‘An Iron Curtain Has Descended’ speech in March 1946, Churchill spoke on the one hand in sunny terms about the planetarian ‘brotherhood of man’, ‘the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the join inheritance of the English-speaking world’, and in the coming new few years and decades ‘an expansion of material well-being beyond anything that has yet occurred in human experience’. On the other hand he observed the shadow that had fallen on scenes so recently lighted by the allies. The Soviet sphere, Soviet influence and Soviet control were growing. He didn’t think a new conventional war was inevitable or immanent but to forestall it would require the united strength of the English-speaking world. Twelve months before Churchill had been more catastrophic in his outlook. ‘Sombre indeed would be the fortunes of mankind if some awful schism arose between the Western democracies and the Russian people, if all future world organizations were rent asunder, and a new cataclysmic upheaval of inconceivable violence destroyed what is left.’

Churchill, ‘The Yalta Conference’, British House of Commons, 14 February, 1945, NGI, p. 372.

32. Metaphor

33. AN END TO THE WARS OF METAPHORS: PETER’S PERPETUAL PEACE