11 September 2015

War and Art – Memoirs of a Hungarian Childhood – Part IV (2)

Only humans are intimately associated with art and thought. What makes us unique in the great chain of being is our creative ability to interweave the literary and philosophical, the metaphysical and poetic impulses at their highest pitch. We humans don’t just exist and pass along genes. We think, we write, we make ethical judgements, we rejoice at the glory of sunrise, we savour the beauty of sunset and we experience the transcendent. Let there be art, founded on the wonder of you existing and my seeing you exist in dignity and freedom. Let there be art, poetry, philosophy. They open the doors of sympathy and empathy. They educate and instruct us of man’s capacity for humanity.

The body is material but transcends the material. It is spiritualised matter. And because the human body, as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci knew, is a transcendent temple, it is worthy of respect and dignity. It is a crime against life to humiliate and violate the human body. The tragedy of rape, whether classical, biblical or modern, is a sustained analogy, unifying time through an invariance of exemplum and moral meaning. The violation of my aunt was an outrage not only against humanity, but against moral order. More than anything, it magnified the collapse of masculine ideals and masculine domination in a world gone mad.

As George Steiner put it:

Only women could now rescue mankind from man. This is the burden of Rolland’s 1916 appeal À l’Antigone éternelle. Between the lines of Romain Rolland’s pamphlet flickers the fantastic possibility that women would invade the professional sanctum of the battlefields, that they would simply swarm between the barrages and the bayonets to bury their fathers, their husbands, and their sons and brothers. So far as we know, no women’s movement, however pacifist, however radical, ever contemplated this healing folly. But Antigone’s gesture is magnetic: “Be living peace in the midst of war – everlasting Antigone, who does not yield herself to hatred, who, when they suffer, no longer knows how to distinguish between her rival brothers.”(1)

There was Antigone in our home, my mother. Her gestures of civility, her love and peace were magnetic. But Antigone and Antigones were outnumbered by the Red Army. Those conquerors’ contribution to humanity and human ideals no more use shall have than a sundial in a grave. Sharing space with the Russians on our side of the street, we lived as if under a darkened sun. Across the street, facing our house, was the village church, the House of God.

War made us outcast from the human condition. To the unhoused, homeless, banned from the heart, the church is a symbolic guarantor of the freedom to be, to enter into or abstain from a commerce of the spirit within you, as in a poem, a painting, a piece of music. The stony muteness of the church across our street symbolised the alternative to war. Like love, metaphysics and the archaic torso in Rilke’s famous poem which says to us, “change your life”, the church bids us to change our lives. It also teaches us the most challenging of proposals: man is a question for God himself.

All this was true for my mother. I was too young to understand and share her private intimacy with God that yielded assurance of afterlife. I did not come to the church to pay homage to the Allseeing and Allknowing whose images on the wall looked at me like the sun at night. Nor did I sit in the empty church, hoping to have, as Machiavelli advised, God as a friend. Perhaps having God as a friend is helpful in times of trouble. The friend of the gods, Plato writes in The Republic, may be supposed to receive from them all things at their best.

But why is it important to have God for a friend? A lot hinges on who God is and what he can do. Apart from this, having God for a friend,

We have experienced extraordinary, unexampled leadings from God in this matter; the sea has divided, a cloud has shown the way, a stone has yielded water, manna has rained from heaven. All things point toward your greatness. The rest is up to you. God will not do everything, lest he deprives us of our free will and a part of that glory which belongs to us.(2)

When I sat in the empty, silent church, the “glory which belongs to us” was the sublimity of the lyric of peace, pictorial and musical in expression. Though I was young, the aesthetic experience of listening to Handel’s Messiah touched the inmost of my being. Art, thought and music teach us the power of discernment and judgement. At best, they make us wise and competent in matters of truth and goodness and beauty. Most important, they prepare us for the choices and the crucibles of private and public pursuits.

As a student of ideas, I learnt that no culture is philosophically monolithic, or promotes an exclusive conception of the human. A vibrant culture is an endless contest between alternative conceptions of the human and its ideals. No culture is free of the contest of ideals. The religious culture of my mother may be as soaked in ideals as the secular one of her son. A worldview, an ideal can be found in the Declaration of Independence as well as in a poem or philosophy. Humanism has been denounced by Hitler and Stalin, though it has also been advanced by a vast diversity of thinkers.

Wherever mortal beings reflect on their mortality, and finite beings think of their finitude, there is art, there is thought, there is philosophy. Jefferson and Lincoln were right. Philosophy is ubiquitous and inalienable. Even the symposium about the end of philosophy is philosophy. Nietzsche’s obituary about the death of God is the birth of religious atheism. The American culture I live in and admire is a sum of all the philosophies, all the critical approaches to living a meaningful life that are manifestly or latently expressed in our society. Yes, it is a frustrating and yet gorgeous anarchy, even if it chases illusions and flounders in errors.

When young, I lived in a world where Hitler and Stalin hated man and their antihumanism, a hatred of the human, knew no bounds. My definition of tyranny is a hatred of the human. For me a tyrant is the incarnation of what I can never be. Humanism is the cheapest target of tyrants. Hitler and Stalin proclaimed themselves liberators. I think we should liberate ourselves from our liberators. I am convinced that ideas and thought can alter our world; that there is no greater force. Hence the minimal role of death in Humanism – where the centrality of death in Fascism and Bolshevism is paramount. As ivy grows on tree, strangling it, so did death grow in Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Russia.

And yet, despite all the tyrannies past and present, humanism has triumphed because its truth offers guidance for our soulful and sensitive existence. There is nothing dreamy or soft about the perennial quest for a significant, free and meaningful life. I felt its presence in the village church in Piliscsév. Here I could address my inner self in solitude and soliloquy. But the medium of that solitude-soliloquy is art, not war. That which comes to call upon us – that poem, that music connotes both spontaneous visitation and summons – will very often do so unbidden.

In the solitude of the church one could aspire to restore the lost dignity of man, made unspeakable by the truths of torture, of mass extermination, of the sadistic humiliation of women, the fate of men and children shrunken to the “walking dead”. Here I could remove myself from the slaughterhouse rhetoric of Stalinism. Sharing space with the Russians, we listen to the boast that whatever has not been created by God has been created by Stalin, the surrogate of the Almighty. In the church one listens to the libretto of Handel’s Messiah: “For unto a child is born, unto us a son is given, the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called… the Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). Still wearing his wartime generalissimo uniform, Stalin did not convey the image of the Prince of Peace.

Much as we tried we could not avoid the deadly spots of war. In church, I could listen to Psalms 46:9:

Come and see what the Lord has done,

… from end to end of the earth he stamps out war: He breaks the bow, he snaps the spear,

And burns the shield in the fire.

Innumerable passages in Isaiah and Handel of numbing prolixity expound this credo. The glory of caritas and love that moves all things, pervades the universe, its glow reflected more in one place, less in another. Our yearning in a war-torn world for truth and love anticipates landfall, throws hope as an anchor toward that shore.

One sunny winter afternoon, sitting by the church door, my aesthetic bonding with the prophet-poet Isaiah via Handel’s Messiah – “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low; the crooked straight and the rough places plain” (Isaiah, 40:7) – is interrupted by a plane flying overhead. Living with the deafening sounds and fury of war, I had experienced eyes and ears. I could distinguish between a German and Russian fighter plane, and tell from its rumble and roar whether it was in distress and about to crash.

Although I could not see the aircraft in the overcast sky, I knew from its ear- splitting rumble that it was in distress. I sprung to my feet. Leaving the prophet Isaiah and Handel behind, I took to my heels and followed the trail of the roaring sound. Fleet-footed, I flew over Isaiah’s “valley and hill” made rough by frost and snow patches. Suddenly, ahead of me, in the faint frost haze, the low flying airplane appeared. The wheels protruding under the fuselage, the plane, trying to land on the slope of a bare hill, lost its wheels on the landing gear. The carriage ploughed a deep trench from bottom to top on the hill.

Breathless, I raced up the hill. The Russian fighter plane belly-landed in an acacia grove. It was a hellish sight: black smoke rose from the engines and flashes of flames engulfed the pilot cockpit, made of Plexiglas. Reddish tongue of light would lick the bare boughs of the acacia and instantly vanish. I saw the pilot slumped against the instrument panel. Suddenly he raised his hand and reached for the cockpit hatch. He stumbled to the ground. His leather jacket steaming, he crawled to a snow patch, and rolled in it. As I stood there, transfixed by the fire and smoke that flared redly from the fuselage, the head of a horse appeared in the circle of light. On the foaming horse there appeared a Russian officer. He looked at the dark figure still smouldering in the circle of light. Flung the reins over the horse’s head, he sprang agilely from its back. The officer leapt into the circle of light and gave a loud cry, “Brother!” The pilot was his brother-in-arms comrade. They fell into each other’s arms, hugging and crying. The officer put his comrade in the saddle, and, sitting behind him, rode off.

I knew the place where the Russian fighter plane crash landed. The plough fields and the meadows were known in our region as Tatárszállás [Tatar Plain]. During the hot summer days it was customary in our region to drive the horses out at night to graze on the hills and in the meadows. We village boys, bareheaded, wearing only shorts and riding the frisky horses, we raced out with whoops and shouts, our arms and legs flopping as we bobbed up and down on the horses’ back and roared with laughter.

But how different was our ride from the ride of the Russian officer and his death- touched brother. We rode the horses in peacetime. The starlit immaculate dark skyrose solemnly and infinitely high above us in all its magic and mystery. My lungs melted with the honeyed pleasure of inhaling that special, languorous and dewy air which is the scent of Hungarian summer night at Kesztölc. But now, watching the Russian officer ride off with his brother, the sky is overcast and the life of man, caught in the violent crucible of war, is often on leave from death.

Gone is the silence of days and nights. What remains is an image to illustrate. The first month of spring, April arrived in 1944. In his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer writes:

As soon as April pierces to the root

The drought of March, and bathes each bud and shoot

Through every vein of sap with gentle showers

From whose engendering liquor spring the flowers…

I was sitting on a grassy knoll one April day. The blue sky was lucid and smiling, like a beautiful eye. I sat and looked around and listened. The wild flowers softly swayed in the wind. It was the happy, laughing tremolo of spring. A faint wind ever so lightly moved through the treetops. Suddenly a distant droning sound interrupted my reveries. Surprised and intrigued, I got up, looked in the direction of the noise. In the vast expanse of blue sky, waves of American heavy bombers flew in perfect combat wing formation. It was a sight I shall never forget.

I was awed and transfixed by the high flying Allies’ bombers. These flying marvels in the sky cast a spell on me. I was seized by the dramatic contrast between the barren spaces stretching endlessly below – the blasted country of hell, and the majesty of high flying Allies’ bombers. It was a form of destructive magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.

It is said that love is a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating the soul: winnowing it from the chaff of existence. That is and always has been the core of lyric poetry. Watching the American heavy bombers overhead gave me winged emotion upward, its soaring into a mystic realm beyond language, the soul’s flight into the wordless. Wordless I was when I saw that the anti-aircraft guns, firing from a quarry in Dorog, proved ineffective against the bombers. Underneath the bombers were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light – anti-aircraft shells bursting. It seemed like throwing twinkling stars for aesthetic effect at the Allies’ might.

As the sun ends its journey in orange glow and sinks into the Danube at Esztergom, night descends. As darkness gathers, the sky above the Pilis hills is seethed in red. As waves of American bombers flew over Budapest, they dropped batches of incendiary bombs, nicknamed Churchill chandeliers. From Kesztölc, I watched, against the dark silhouette of the Pilis hills, rippling curtains or shooting rays that lit up the sky with an eerie glow. Unlike the green hued aurora borealis, or the Northern lights, named after the Roman goddess, Aurora, the American wartime aurora borealis, that lighted up the sky at Kesztölc, was red hued, named after the Roman god of war, Mars.

But why were the Americans bombing Budapest? The answer is Winston Churchill. I am an unapologetic admirer of Churchill. His singular brilliance made him one of the most important leaders of the twentieth century. Let me also add that I agree with Orwell who said that the monarchy was one of the things that saved Britain from Fascism.

Modern people can’t, apparently, get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades, and it is better that they should tie their leader-worship on to some figure who has no real power. In dictatorship the power and the glory belong to the same person. In England the real power belongs to unprepossessing men in bowler hats: the creature who rides in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breast-plates is really a waxwork. It is at any rate possible that while this division of function exists a Hitler or a Stalin cannot come to power. On the whole the European countries which have most successfully avoided Fascism have been constitutional monarchies.(3)

Why do I see Churchill such a towering figure? Because it was Churchill, and only Churchill, who defined the resistance to Hitler’s Third Reich as his political mission. For Churchill there could be no peaceful co-existence between the British Empire and the Nazi Reich. Never! True, Hitler felt that the English across the Channel were also members of the Aryan race, although not as pure blooded or as genetically special as the Teutonic variant. We know that in Hitler’s grandiose scheme, Britain and its empire could survive, remain shopkeepers, as a sort of junior partners. Oh, yes. Keep its vaunted historical values but under Nazi supremacy. As Hitler saw it, what Athens was to Rome, London was to be to Berlin: the enslaved Greeks to the Nazi Rome, called Berlin.

As Boris Johnson put it,

Hitler’s Operation Sea Lion was a project not just of invasion but of subjugation. He was going to carry off Nelson’s column from Trafalgar Square, and install it in Berlin. Goering had plans to pillage the entire collection from the National Gallery. They were even going – infamy of infamies – to send the Elgin Marbles back to Nazi-controlled Athens.(4)

In 1941 the Nazi flag was flying on the Acropolis in conquered Athens. Manolis Glezos, then 18, crept into a cave beneath the Acropolis. Armed with only a lantern and a knife, “silently made his way to the flagpole while unsuspecting German officials drank toasts near the Parthenon to celebrate Hitler’s takeover of Crete”.(5) In his New Year’s order to the Wehrmacht, Hitler declared: “The year 1941 will bring about the completion of the greatest victory in our history.”(6)

On 22 June 1941, Churchill answered Hitler.(7) “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us – nothing.”

Churchill had good reasons why Hitler had to be destroyed. In a conversation with Hitler about the “Jewish question”, Himmler stated on 18 December 1941:

The complete sentence, “The Jews must be exterminated”, is easily spoken… The question arose for us: What about the women and children? I have decided to find an entirely clear solution here too. The fact is, I did not feel entitled to exterminate the men – that is, to kill them or have them killed – and to allow the avengers in the shape of their children to grow up with our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people vanish from the earth… It was carried out without – as I believe I am able to say – our men and our leaders suffering injury to spirit or soul… With this I should like to conclude the Jewish question.(8)

He ended his thoughts on the “Jewish question” with the words:

You know the facts, and you will keep them to yourselves. Perhaps at some later date one will be able to consider whether the German people should be told more about it. I believe it is better that we – all of us – have born this for our nation, we have taken the responsibility on ourselves… and we will take our secret with us to our graves.

There was nothing emotional in Himmler’s speech, nothing that pointed to inner struggle. When Himmler finished, there was deadly silence in the room. Then Bormann rose and closed the meeting with the words: “Party comrades, may I now invite you to the room next door for a meal?” There was harmony in Nazi voices. Consider Hitler’s statement: “If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war, without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious German blood, then surely I have a right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”(9) Or this statement of his: “The Slavs are a mass of born slaves who feel the need of a master.” On my maternal side, I was a Slav. But I never felt the need of a master.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take purity of race for an ideal. Beauty, genius, goodness, even power radiate their virtue in diversity and make the world in which they exist a better place and more joyful to live in. There is something diabolically twisted in Hitler’s brain in proclaiming his own race superior, as if origin and not result were of moral value. “I believe”, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “that I am acting with the will of God by defending myself against the Jews. I am fighting for the work of the Lord… For the genius-race, the true culture founders of this earth, for the formation of higher cultures, the existence of lower human types was the precondition. For the conquering warrior, the lower human drew the plough.”

Hitler’s language of annihilation. In his rhetoric the Jews were “bacilli”, “bacteria” and “vermin”. It expressed the radical dehumanisation of the subhuman victims. The problem for Hitler was that the Jews were part of history, written into history, not out of it. It was not from the past but from the future that the Jews were to be removed. He saw a future world in which time was ruptured, cleansed of Jews, but not abolished. The Nazis treated Jews with sadistic ferocity seldom vented on “Slavs” or on others. Jews were deliberately humiliated, cruelly stripped of their human attributes. They were herded naked into specially designed gas chambers. Humiliate, degrade, defame, dethrone and destroy the Jews!

I cannot resist noting here that the 11-year-old Anne Frank often had ink stains on her slender Jewish fingers. Her diary and death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at 15 made her perhaps the Holocaust’s foremost symbol of slaughtered innocence. Her story, innocence, ink-stained fingers, diary helped cheat Hitler of his delusion of erasing Jews from the world’s collective conscience. Now listen to the lover’s voice, to Himmler writing to his wife Margarete: “I am off to Auschwitz. Kisses. Your Heini.”

As the world’s preeminent biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson put it,

Most scientists have long recognised that it is futile exercise to try to define discrete human races. Such entities do not in fact exist… Given that mankind is a biological species, it should come as no shock to find that populations are to some extent genetically diverse in the physical and mental properties underlying social behaviour. A discovery of this nature does not vitiate the ideals of Western civilisation. We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom or dignity.(10)

Had Churchill accepted the theory of racial supremacy, he would have bowed to Hitler and reduced Britain to a slave state. He saw the confrontation with Hitler as a matter of national life or death. Lion-hearted, Churchill’s refusal to be Hitler’s puppet reached a Shakespearean climax (King Richard II, Act 2, scene 1):

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars

This other Eden, demi-paradise;

This fortress built by nature for herself, Against infection and the hand of war; This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea,

… This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…

Churchill knew that no offer or olive branch would be acceptable to “this happy breed of men”.

And I am convinced that everyone of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.(11)

There is an unforgettable story told by Churchill’s son Randolph. On 18 May 1940 he went into his father’s bedroom at the Admiralty House. He found the Prime Minister standing at his basin and shaving with an old-fashioned razor.

“Sit down, dear boy, and read the paper while I finish shaving.” I did as I was told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and said: “I think I can see my way through.” I was astounded and said: “Do you mean that we can avoid defeat? (which seemed credible) or beat the bastards? (which seemed incredible).” He flung his razor into the basin, swung around and said: – “Of course I mean we can beat them.” Me: “Well, I am all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.” By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me, said with great intensity: “I shall drag the United States in.”(12)

If you want to understand how Churchill dragged the United States in, how he won the war, how he marshalled the English language and set it to battle Hitler, look at the way he wangled and wheedled his way to Washington, and his subtle but unmistakably Machiavellian manipulation of the priorities of the United States. Nothing deterred Churchill. He was a Titan, unstoppable. For three weeks he was the charismatic, irrepressible house guest of President Roosevelt and Mrs Roosevelt. On one occasion, Churchill contrived – great actor as he was – to exhibit himself naked to FDR: “The British Prime Minister has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.”

It is Shakespearean stuff. Churchill invokes the memory of his American-born mother; he quotes the Psalms; he recites Shakespeare; he discourses on the unity of the English speaking peoples; he appeals to God; he parodies and mocks Hitler; he hams himself up with glorious archaic phrasing, culled from Milton and Shakespeare. He acts, he performs, he mesmerises. “He hammers the air, he clasps his lapels, and he glowers and scowls and clenches his jaw in exactly the manner they [Americans] have been hoping for.”

There might be superman in Germany and Aryan blood flowing in the veins of goose- stepping Nazi fanatics. No matter, Churchill would say. What mattered was that America and England were free and powerful and bestrided the world as a colossus, that the Allied soldiers fought their way into the Third Reich, leaving there memories of their actions as sons of a proud and free republic and constitutional monarchy.

As an incarnation of the union of the English speaking peoples,(13) Churchill proposed a common citizenship, suggested that the pound and the dollar should be merged into a single currency. He was aware that Britain declined in relative importance. But that decline was arrested and righted by the rise of those Transatlantic cousins, those fellow-English speakers who read the King James Bible and Shakespeare, who shared, as he never tired of pointing out, the same values: the language, democracy, free speech, constitution, independent judiciary and so on. He felt this keenly with his whole being.

My bookshelves contain all of Churchill’s works and I have read them. I accept the view that the epic story of Churchill’s life was in some measure the translatio imperii – the passing of one empire to another. Let history speak. As the Persians gave way to the Greeks, and the Greeks to the Romans,

So the British had handed the imperial torch on to the Americans. It was A. J. P. Taylor who once said that the Second World War was “the war of British succession” – and if you accept that analysis it is obvious who won; seventy years later it is astonishing to see that America, militarily, politically, economically, is still the most powerful nation on earth.(14)

We can safely guess that Churchill’s titanic ego was not ecstatic about the passing of empire from the sceptred isle to the New World. But that ego is schooled in literature, philosophy, art, and, like that of Lincoln, is tempered by humour and irony, and by genuine humanity and sympathy for other people. I have always thought that if the intellect of man must choose perfection of the life, or of the work, than Churchill embodies both. His love of freedom, of freedom in her royal seat of England. He left us a great legacy. The soul of freedom is deathless; it cannot, it must not, and will not perish. The arc of the human universe is long but it bends toward freedom and truth. His dazzling variety of accomplishment is astonishing. A great intellect, with force and skill, to strive, to defy, to fulfil.

On the vast tides of political-social history and in the long generations of men, Churchill stands out. He is God-gifted organ-voice of England, the glory of the sum of England, the name to resound for ages. He served human liberty; he personally tilted the scales of history and fate in the direction of democracy and hope. If you have doubt about it, compare Churchill and Hitler. Again like Lincoln, Churchill liked his own jokes, because laughter gave release from the gloom and fear of death. He was not above displaying the irreverent spirit of Machiavelli. In March 1944, Churchill inspected the Siegfried Line – the huge dragon teeth of concrete that were to symbolise the impenetrable might of Hitler’s Fatherland. Unceremoniously, Churchill unzipped his flies and pissed on Hitler’s defences, and so did his colleagues. A childish grin of glee spread over his face as he looked down at the arc of his piss.

As for Machiavelli, in his dreams he is on the deathbed. Then he laughs and says that on earth his friends have composed an epitaph of him.

Niccolo Machiavegli, For love of country “Pissed in many a snow”

Churchill deflated the megalomania of Hitler by calling the Nazis “Narzis” and the Fuhrer “Herr Schicklgruber”. Raise your hand, salute “Hail Schicklgruber” and see the result. Here is Churchill’s inimitable mastery of the language. The winning formula is the combination of great flights of oratory and imagination with sudden swoops into the intimate, ordinary and grotesque. Contrast it with Hitler: “Look at my school records – I got bad marks in German! My disgusting teacher had succeeded in giving mean intense dislike for my mothertongue. He asserted that I would never be capable of writing a decent letter.”(15)

Hitler was fascinated by only one subject, and that was the Fuhrer. Like all egomaniacs, Hitler ends up by boring people. Churchill had what Plato called megalopsychia – magnanimity and greatness of soul. Read Churchill and you learn the language and value of humanism and civilisation. Read Hitler and you descend into an otherworldly embodiment of evil: a dreadful minister of hell; the son of hell.

1 George Steiner, Antigones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 141–42.

2 Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 73–74.

3 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 volumes, edited by Sonia Orwell & Ian

Angus (Penguin Books, 1984), 3:102.

4 Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014), 29.

5 The New York Times, 6 September 2014, A4.

6 Max Domarus, Hitler. Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, 4 vols. (Bolchazy–Carducci Publishers, 2004), 4:2341.

7 Ibid., 4:2343.

8 Joachim Fest, Speer: The Final Verdict (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 184–85.

9 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), 71.

10 Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 2004), 48, 50.

11 The Churchill Factor, 19.

12 Ibid., 232.

13 Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1964).

14 The Churchill Factor, 300.

15 Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1945, introduced by Hugh Trevor-Roper (New York: Enigma Books,

2000), 676.