Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on the ‘Terrible’ First Two Decades of the 20th Century)

“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 20 years. We have seen in every country a dissolution, a weakening of those bonds, a challenge to those principles, a decay of faith, an abridgement of hope on whose structure and ultimate existence of civilised 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 civilised society, relapsing in hideous succession into bankruptcy, barbarism or anarchy.”—Future British Prime Minister—and Nobel Literature laureate—Winston Churchill (1874-1965), addressing his constituents on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1922, quoted in Winston Churchill, Churchill:The Power of Words, edited by Martin Gilbert (2012)

I have not rendered this address in the “Speech Form” or “Psalm Form” in which Winston Churchill redder his thoughts—i.e., with abbreviations and short phrases broken out on separate lines, the better to catch them at a glance and emphasize their cadence. But I thought it was worthwhile to convey to my readers these thoughts, which echoed so strongly my own on this 21^st century.

Churchill spoke four years to the day of the armistice that ended the most destructive war to that point in European history. “The Great War” spawned additional unrest, with the future Prime Minister already taking note of the terror unleased by the new Communist regime in Russia.

If the USSR symbolized Churchill’s worst fears about the descent into “bankruptcy, barbarism or anarchy,” then Putin’s Russia has given rise to much of the same dismay today. Hope that the suffering people of that country would totter toward a greater degree of freedom has faded as the country has come under the grip of a new nationalistic, kleptocratic group of masters.

A chaotic war gave Lenin and the Bolsheviks the opening they needed. In our time, the chaos came courtesy of the Global Financial Crisis resulting from unfettered, unbound global capitalism that took as little notice of rules or norms as borders. 

As well as anyone in this millennium, Putin has understood the truth expressed by perhaps the most articulate intriguer in Game of Thrones, Littlefinger: “Chaos isn’t a pit. It’s a ladder.”