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Nov. 30, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
33:10
The Warning of the Iron Curtain
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
All right, everybody, we're back here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad to have you with us today.
I want to pick back up in our speech series, and I've got a lot of great comments.
Some of our best-watched episodes are when we've gone back over these speeches, but I have a unique one today because it's really set the framework for a lot of things going on right now.
Let's set the stage worldwide.
Worldwide, we have Iran, North Korea, we have China, we have Russia, we have the terrorist groups in the Middle East, we have war constantly in Ethiopia, some of the African nations.
We have a war in Ukraine right now with Russia.
A lot is unsettled on the world stage.
And a lot, for probably one of the first times since World War II, We're seeing this unsettledness leading us closer and closer to conflict.
When you look at what North Korea is doing with their nuclear testing, which they just tested at ICBM, which if given the right range and given the proper aerodynamic, could reach the United States.
Again, could they actually pull it off?
Still remains to be seen.
But they're testing on a much quicker and higher note.
You've got China, who is taking the South China Sea, being very aggressive toward Taiwan, being aggressive toward the neighbors around.
Again, just sort of seemingly pushing the envelope.
Xi, when met recently with President Biden, and also, frankly, it was interesting with Freer Trudeau, with Justin Trudeau, I'm sorry, with the The Canadian Prime Minister was very aggressive over what he believed was a leaking of their conversations to the media, and he was very abrupt in how he confronted that as you go forward.
So again, China flexing its muscles on the stage.
I think China feels like with the American pullback, which we saw again under Obama, we're seeing it again in the Biden administration, that there is an opening for China to assert its dominance.
Iran is just Iran.
And the human rights violations, they're still the greatest funder of terrorism in the Middle East.
And they have their outlets of regimes, Hezbollah, and others who carry out their wishes.
And this is, you know, just who Iran is.
It's been a destabilizing force in the Middle East for a long time.
That brings us then to Russia and Ukraine and the issue over the past few years that has been developing under Putin about the Ukraine.
Now, we're not going to deal with the Ukraine-Russian crisis, but I do believe it has what we are going to deal with today.
What we're dealing with is the speech by Winston Churchill, what is known as the Iron Curtain speech.
It was actually the title, Sinus of Peace, but it's known for the Iron Curtain by the very famous words that Winston Churchill used as showing the Iron Curtain had fallen across Eastern Europe, and that was under Russian control.
One of the things that is said in the speech, and I want to bring it up because if you fast forward from when the speech was given in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, to now, one of the things that he mentions in the speech is that Russia,
you know, would be is very concerned about its But that is the very same thing that Putin and many of the Russian leaders have been mimicking for years about NATO. Putin has decided, you know, to invade Ukraine.
He's decided to annex Crimea.
There's so many things.
And he did so with very much of the effect of saying we do not want to see NATO expanded because we, and for lack of a better term, we view NATO as a threat to our country.
And so what was happening now was very much mimicked right after World War II when we heard this speech to begin with.
Some things that I want to bring out in this speech also give us some indication that some things that have changed, some things that haven't changed as we go forward.
But first, a little background about the speech itself.
It was delivered by Winston Churchill after he was Prime Minister.
He was not Prime Minister at the time.
The main thrust of the speech itself was that the United States and Britain are to be the guardians of peace, and that they're to act in stability against the menace of the Soviet Communism, and talk about lowering the Iron Curtain across Europe.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, British and American leaders and political strategists were skeptical of the ambitions How many times now in Russia have we heard this?
You know, what is Russia actually wanting?
Are they just actually wanting a buffer against NATO?
Or is this a reliving from Putin's imagination of rebuilding a Soviet Union dominance across the world or taking revolution to all parts of the world?
Again, this was being discussed even back then.
And Churchill was very intimately involved in this.
The war was over in May of 1945 with Germany, but Churchill would be put out by the British electorate soon after that happened and replaced with Clement Attlee.
Amid the Potsdam Conference, it happened right after the conference.
And of many people, I mean, Churchill was one of the first to see the very evil of the Hitler Germany.
And he was rallying while he was out of power, was rallying England back from its sleep in stupor to say, hey, you can't keep...
You know, appeasing this problem in Germany.
It's just going to continue to get worse, and that's exactly what was happening, is Hitler began to continue to get stronger.
Others were letting him have a little bit here, a little bit there.
The appeasement factor wasn't working, and all the while Churchill, often by himself in the world voice, was saying this is a problem that has to be addressed.
He was always on Roosevelt's This is someone who also then began to see the problem of Russian dominance or Soviet Union dominance in what was the eastern part of Russia.
Europe and East Germany, the other parts, as we were finishing up the war.
Now, the two thoughts were, is number one, is what's being talked about today, is that Russia simply wanted to, you know, cause revolution all across the globe, and that was their, you know, expansion was their ultimate goal, no matter what.
And then there was a second opinion.
And this is where, remember, Harry Truman, the President of the United States, was the one who invited Churchill over for this speech.
And with encouragement, because I think what it seems in historians, and I've read several things and watched some videos, that meant very much that Truman was wanting Churchill to be the mouthpiece that he couldn't be as a world leader, but Churchill could say it in a way that would begin to spring people to action.
And the other one, you know, the first one was, like I said, prevailed that the USSR was just wanting to take over everything.
The second opinion was that Stalin, at the time, would be amenable to a structure of peace, but it could not be expected to loosen its hold on Eastern Europe as long as the United States excluded him, for example, from Japan.
We did not allow Russia any influence in Japan after the war.
So there was this discussion on Russia's involvement in Japan, whereas Truman and the United States had kept them out of that.
So the question was, is could America in some ways appease Stalin by maybe involving them more in Japan, maybe some other issues around the world, and that they would then ease up and have a more peaceful solution to those in Eastern Europe?
What was happening was that just wasn't coming true.
Churchill understood that.
And in his view, Soviet policies offered little chance for successful establishment of peace coming forward.
In fact, the American diplomat George Keenan came to a similar conclusion, and that's how we came up with the containment policy that basically became the United States' go-to in the discussions of The world as it revolved around the USSR and the role of communism and its places throughout The, throughout the world.
So in looking at this, you know, let's take a look at this speech.
And the one thing that is interesting, and I'm going off of part of my interpretation of this, and also this, the real world implication of this, is that when Truman had Churchill come to Missouri to make this speech, it was almost the, in many ways, Truman using Churchill to sound the warning that He was not either able to make or wanted to make to the world about the current condition with the Soviet Union.
So Churchill, who was very good at speech making, very good at coming forward and making positions very well known, all you gotta do is look at the great war speeches, we'll fight them in the land and on the sea and on the home.
I mean, this was a man who got England ready for war and helped win the war and almost at times did so just by the sheer force of his will.
In coming at this, I want to just take a look at some of the issues that he brought up, how much are still true today, and how much we may need to reevaluate.
First off in this speech was done at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.
I think this is interesting because he made light of Westminster College when he got there.
It made light like, yep, I've heard of this before.
Of course, being Westminster, being the seat of Again, it goes to the fact of him saying, and I just like the way he put it, that he learned a lot about life in the parliament.
He learned it in the trenches.
And how many times do we think that Some of it just can be learned from the books and learned from think tanks.
And some of it just has to be lived out.
And Churchill was one who had lived it out.
He had known power, and he had known defeat, and he had known both, and he had overcome it.
A few years later, he would be called back into service as the Prime Minister of England.
But for right now, he was doing what he does best, and that is making Sure that people understood the problem that we were experiencing and getting ready to experience even further in Eastern Europe.
He talks about really the prominent approach to keeping people safe.
He goes into the issue of here in the United States that You know, we as a country have a policy of making sure that those who live in our country are safe, that they have prosperity, that they have the chance of prosperity.
And he lays the foundation for this freedom aspect of the United States and this freedom aspect around the world as just opposed to what was happening, what he would get to later is what was happening in Eastern Europe and then through this USSR, the Soviet Union's influence.
Now, As he goes on here, the practical proposals and the way that governments are set out, it's interesting how he laid this out.
He laid it out in talking about the governmental structures Of our two countries, and that is the legislative branch and executive branch, the judicial, which was independent from the other two branches.
He looked at these as all fundamental values and rights that we should be promoting, and then doing so in the defense of peace.
And that peace should be our utmost form.
And he talks a great deal about the United States, Great Britain.
He includes Canada in that.
He mentions the World Organization, which we now know is the United Nations, being in its infancy at that point, and how really the trust of the world sat with the United States and Great Britain for the most part.
And what was interesting was he also sort of organizes this thought that the UN, as we know it today, which I'm glad it doesn't, in many ways needed its own mechanism for enforcing this.
Something we would not even agree to, come close to agreeing to today, is having an armed, you know, the UN having its own military force in and of its own self.
That is still where, you know, the rest of the world, the member nations, provide UN troops.
Of course, in bigger battles, it's always going to come down to the bigger entities like the United States, China.
No, not China in some ways, but it's going to come down to Great Britain, France, others who are, Germany, who are willing to send Troops such as into Afghanistan and we've seen it in Iraq and other places.
His thought, though, was that this organization had to have the authority or the power to actually make real change.
This was the concern coming out of the World War II. It was a concern about how much world organization do we want and the realization of what can it mean for countries like the USSR who are basically pushing into their other countries.
One of the great points here is that The values, and he talks about this, and I want you to just, one of the, there's a very interesting sentence here that says, but we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man, which are in the joint inheritance of all the English-speaking world, and which through the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the habeas corpus, trial by jury, the English common law, find their most famous expression in the American's Declaration of Independence.
I thought that was an interesting, uh, Hat tip from Churchill to the Declaration of Independence incorporating all these English ideas, as he would say.
But remember, Churchill's half American.
But he was hat tipping to the fact that the American Declaration of Independence encompassed all of these vast ideals that need to be protected.
He goes on to say, all this means that the people of any country have the right and should have the right by power of constitutional action, by free and unfettered elections with secret ballot to choose or change the character or form of government under which they dwell, that freedom of speech and thought should reign, that courts of justice, that freedom of speech and thought should reign, that courts of justice, independent of executive, unbiased by any party should administer laws which have been received the broadest sin of large majorities or are consecrated by time
Here are the title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home.
Here's the message of the British and American peoples to mankind.
Let us preach what we practice and practice what we preach.
The one thing you can never say about Winston Churchill is he was not a person of action.
He didn't simply talk about issues.
He actually got out and intended to do things about those.
And this is what he's doing here.
He's using every bit of leash, so to speak, that Truman allowed for him to have at this speech to make this very poignant Right and wrong, democracy, non-democracy, freedom against evil in this speech.
Now, he goes on then to talk about He stated that there are two, and this was coming out of war and tyranny.
These were the two first topics of the first speech, you know, avoiding war and avoiding tyranny, where people are free to be who they are called to be inside their own governments and avoidance of war.
He then continues on into a discussion of how this plays out, and he's spoken of poverty and provision.
This is the things that we need to be in partnership as a whole in the world.
Churchill was building off of this idea that the world was interconnected, that World War II and what had happened through what was the emergence of the United Nations and what was discussed and what we saw coming out of World War II was that the world was far more interconnected than we had believed or had encouraged before World War II. Churchill was then going on to say,
look, the needs and the problems of the world can be solved if countries come together, and especially the countries who hold out freedom and governance and law and order as being the main contributor to that.
Where would that come?
Of course, it would come from Great Britain and the United States.
Interestingly enough, France was not mentioned here.
I think it's still interesting that he was still basing His position on what he had seen happen in the Second World War, and that was the natural alliance and natural condition of the Brits and the Americans coming together to cause this to happen.
Now, he then, after he makes this discussion, discusses the fact that there have to be cooperation between not only England and the United States, he then makes his turn into What is the problem highlighted in this speech?
And that was the elephant in the room, whatever you want to call it, and that was the actions of the USSR. I'm going to read a little bit of this to you because I want you to get the feel of what the discussion was.
And I want you to then hear the echoes into today.
When you have these discussions of Russia and its annexation, you know, many believe the illegal annexation of Crimea.
It's just...
Move into Ukraine and the war that it started.
All coming out of what a lot of what Churchill talked about here was, is that there's one point that they have this need to protect, and this is one of the things you'll hear in just a second, protect their Western border.
But there has to be a balance in there from both sides.
Listen to what he says.
He says, I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshall Stalin.
There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain, and I no doubt here also towards the people of all Russians and have revolved to persevere through the many differences and rebuffs in the establishment of lasting friendships.
We understand the Russian need to be secure on her Western front tiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression.
We welcome Russia into her rightful place among the leading nations of the world.
We welcome her flag upon the sea.
Above all, we welcome constant, frequent, and growing contacts between Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is my duty, however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you to place before you certain facts about the present position of Europe.
Again, at one point, acknowledging the Soviet Union, USSR, and its place and what they're doing and acknowledging, look, we're trying to avoid war here.
You have got to play your part.
Then he goes on.
From Staten in the Baltic to Tristus in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
Behind that line lies all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia.
All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all subject in one form or another to not only Soviet influence, but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Athens alone, Greece with its immortal glories, is free to decide its future in an election under British, American, and French observation.
The Russian-dominated Polish government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous And undreamed of now taking place.
The communist parties, which were very small in these eastern states in Europe, have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control.
Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far except Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.
This is...
He's laying it out there.
And in a very forceful and overwhelming turn, he's saying, look, he said, I want it to be a world in which we have differences of opinion, we're not going to agree, but that countries can...
Solved their issues in diplomatic fashion and not in this totalitarian way that the Soviet Union has sort of blanketed this eastern and central part of Europe with its influence, domination, and control of totalitarianism, in which Churchill says is antithesis toward the very freedoms that come out of Britain and America.
He continues this and lays this out In great detail of the issues that have been coming forth and what lies in front of this Iron Curtain and behind this Iron Curtain.
And to get this visual idea of a curtain coming down, when this speech came out, this was a thought that had been around, that you used many, that separated the two sides.
This Iron Curtain is a movable object that is coming down in which the East and the West were separate.
If you read deeply into the speech, you can see that Churchill's desire is there not to be a separation.
I think he believed inherently that if there'd be more cooperation, there'd be more influence, there'd be more contact, there'd be more of the freedom contacting the non-freedom, that the freedom would win out.
Of course, the USSR did not want that freedom.
They did not want their influence, the people influenced by freedom.
Thus, you saw this Iron Curtain, as Churchill so poetically put, crossing the continent of Europe and taking what was free on one side, as he talks about, and then what was not free on the other.
If you look at this today, the concern that is out there among many Is that we are seeing communist states, totalitarian states, who are seeing more and more of an opportunity to expand their sphere of influence and expand opportunities.
We're seeing them become more closed in.
You see North Korea that is one of the most backward Small countries in the world that terrorizes its own people for its living.
And its existence.
You have China, who's spreading more and more and putting pressure on its neighbors.
You see Russia, who has taken armed aggression into those to provide a, quote, buffer, real or imagined in Putin's head, to keep the Soviet Union, or Russia, in its protection.
This is seen...
In 1945 or 1946 in this speech by, I believe, Winston Churchill laying out the facts that in a world in which you have divisions of beliefs in freedom and expansion for people,
that the governments of the world are going to have to be able to cooperate with each other And experience the benefits of freedom, the benefits of a government in which you have a legislative executive, you have a judiciary that is on its own and not try to keep people in the dark or behind the curtain of freedom.
This is going to be the battle as we go forward.
It was the battle then.
And it's something now that you hear a great deal of spoken of, whether it's in the Ukrainian, President Zelensky, you hear it with the other countries surrounding them, is that if this happens in Ukraine, what is next?
Is it simply going to stop here?
That's all left to be determined.
The Ukrainian people are getting attention from the world.
There's a battle going on.
Russia is not doing very well in that battle.
But the question will come.
It's just happened recently in the possibility that there was a strike into a NATO country.
What happens if this thing expands?
It all goes back down to the contacts and connections that Churchill lays out here, and he believes that the shadow of this curtain needs to be lifted and that they can come together in these years.
but you cannot ignore what is happening.
He goes on to discuss the fact that you can talk about Russia but you can't ignore what's going on.
Let me read the last part of this speech about what is going on here.
In part of the speech he says, For I have seen our Russian friends and allies during the war.
I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect for than weakness, especially military weakness.
For that reason, the old doctrine of balance of power is unsound.
We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on the narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength.
If the Western democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the UN Charter, then their influence for furthering those principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them.
If, however, they become divided or falter in their duty, and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.
Then he goes back to history.
This is what I love about Churchill.
He takes all of this speech, and then he brings it back to his own history.
Since last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my home fellow countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention.
Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and might have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.
There never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.
It could have been prevented, in my belief, without firing a single shot, and Germany might be powerful and prosperous and honored today.
But no one would listen, and by one by one, we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.
We surely must not let this happen again.
This can only achieve by reaching now, in 1946, a good understanding on all points with Russia under general authority of the United Nations organization and by maintenance of that good and understanding through the many peaceful years by the world instrument.
Supported by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its connection, there is a solution which I respectfully offer to you in this address in which he had entitled the Sanus of Peace.
Let no man underrate the abiding power of the British Empire and the Commonwealth.
Because you see the 46 million in our island have asked about their food supply of which they only grow one half even in wartime and are because we have difficulty in restarting our industries or export trade after six years of passionate war effort.
Do not suppose that we shall not come through these dark years of deprivation as we come through these glorious years of agony or That half a century from now, you will not see 70 to 80 million Britons spread about the world united in defense of our traditions, our way of life, and the world causes which you and we espouse.
This is Winston Churchill and his finest.
This is him saying that no matter where we are now, no matter what we are in the process of doing, that if we come together as a world to face the problems that we have, we can overcome them.
That is my hope in this administration.
That is my hope for the world.
It is America.
Notice what he said here.
And the enemies, and he used Russia here as an example.
The enemies only recognize strength.
We have to negotiate from strength.
We have to negotiate from a position of strength.
And then when they see it, then they will respond in kind.
The curtain speech, the iron curtain speech, one that people hear about.
Maybe you hadn't heard about all of the things that went on in the background and what he was actually trying to say.
And what he was doing as being a mouthpiece for Truman in this was saying, look, We're good to go.
There's you another look into history, another look into a speech.
Winston Churchill's the Iron Curtain speech.
Hope you take some of these lessons, apply.
Maybe you've got a better idea of where we came from so that we can all look ahead to where we can go.
This is Doug Collins to add you with us on the podcast.
We'll see you next time.
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