April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 12

The Opteron micro-processor will bring PC economics to even the most expensive servers, AMD Chairman Jerry Sanders says: “never in the history of Microsoft compatible microprocessors will so few do so much for so many.”

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In “Gentle in Victory: The changing image of the American Soldier” (National Review Online), Peter Gibbon quotes Churchill’s “The story of the human race is War….long before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” Gibbon adds: “Churchill may be right, but the good news out of Iraq is not only that America won, but that war is far less bloody than in the past and that many Americans once again consider their soldiers heroes.” The quotation, from The Aftermath (London: Butterworth, 1929, page 451), is accurate, but Gibbon abbreviated. After the first sentence it read: “Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and before history began murderous strife was universal and unending. But the modern developments surely require severe and active attention.”

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In The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (NewYork: Holt, $35), CC honorary member Sir Martin Gilbert recounts stories of hundreds of non-Jews during World War II who “risked their lives and those around them to save Jews. These courageous people remind the author of the Jewish saying, ‘Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world.'” Followers of Sir Martin’s rich and copious writings may wish to acquire this latest title.

French President Jacques Chirac sent six bottles of Chateau Mouton Rothschild ’89 as a 50th birthday present to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The claret sells for up to £200 the bottle. Last November in Prague, Mr. Blair gave M. Chirac a £300 Winston Churchill fountain pen for his 70th birthday, to banish the memory of disagreements over the European Common Agricultural Policy. The Churchill Centre gives the same pen to its Number Ten Club supporters. Will someone please send us some Mouton Rothschild…

David Frum in The Times (London) about his recent visit to Britain: “British bookstores are daunting places for a North American writer. In the prime spots near the cash register stand great piles of books with titles such as Why Do People Hate America?, Stupid White Men, and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. When the British public want to read about the United States, it seems, they want to read about a rapacious country governed by a moronic president…. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, customers are queuing up to buy coffee-table books about Cotswold cottages and defiantly unapologetic histories of the British Empire….The simplest explanation of these transatlantic differences is that we love you—but you don’t love us back. I’m not sure, though, that this explanation quite gets to the truth of the matter. I very much doubt that it placates readers of Why Do People Hate America? to hear that Americans love Winston Churchill, the reconstructed Globe Theater and English country houses. Don’t misunderstand: I love Britain and I love the British—and I love them just the way they are: blunt, expressive, emotional, highly sexed, indifferent to rules and protocol….I only wish the British would overcome their prejudices and learn to value Americans as they are: polite, formal, stiff upper-lipped, sexually restrained, and imbued with the idealistic spirit of reform.”

The precedents for George W. Bush’s dropping in on troops aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln are abundant, writes Wesley Pruden, editor of The Washington Times: “Lyndon Johnson flew to Vietnam to rally his troops, urging them to ‘nail that ol’ coonskin to the wall.’ FDR joined Churchill and assembled sailors in a spirited chorus of’Onward, Christian Soldiers’ aboard a warship in the North Atlantic in 1941. Lincoln visited Union troops on the battlefield, just as James Madison did during the War of 1812….George Washington, who insisted on being addressed as ‘General Washington’ even at the White House, once put on his sword to address Congress, and was no doubt tempted to use it.”