Get Off My Lawn Podcast #19 | Good Day I’m Winston Churchill
Very excited to have dead Prime Minister Winston Churchill guest host this week’s podcast. He’s been awoken from the slumber of death by all this recent Hollywood attention but it’s not making the egomaniac more proud. It’s actually making him doubt his legacy. Churchill goes back to the Boer War of 1900 to re-examine his life and consider the possibility that he wasn’t, in fact, a hero who saved millions of lives. He may have been the opposite.
There has been much talk of my life and legacy, and I would be remiss if I were not to volunteer my own, let's say, commiserations.
Because after a half a century in the grave, it's occurred to me that I may not be the hero I perceive me to be.
I recently endured The Darkest Hour, a film starring a young man, tiny man, named Gary Oldman.
You may know him as Sid Vicious, where he was wearing a funny shirt that had a hammer and a sickle on it instead of a Nazi swastika, which I found confusing.
I mean, it was the communists, it was the Russians that helped us in World War II destroy the Jerrys.
And at any rate, very talented boy.
But I watched that and I took in a film that displays unmitigated fortitude entitled Dunkirk.
Named, of course, after the coastal city, where our boys saved our boys.
Incredible, really.
But, as I observed these two films, I went back over my life, my mother's life, my father's life, and I considered the possibility that I may have allowed my own hubris to jeopardize the lives of millions of men.
You know?
Because when one has time to pontificate in the grave, which is difficult to convey to those of the still living, but you're allowed more layers, if you will.
And within these layers, I researched my life, And I saw many more foibles than I had originally discovered through the first draft.
And one thing I thought when I saw Dunkirk, not just the film obviously, but reliving it every day, it does seem a somewhat Grandiose victory, does it not?
To a young man, and I do consider myself young at the time, to a young man it was just, it was more of the same.
It was standing up to the enemy.
England being England.
And it was that way for many years, to the day I died I believed that.
Now I look back and I think, did Hitler let us win?
Were we allowed to escape because he didn't want a war?
What a horrific thought.
For if that was true, we could have saved millions of lives.
What if Adolf Hitler didn't want to conquer Europe at all and just wanted a small piece of Poland?
What if it was my anger and my rage, my inability to negotiate, That caused World War II, and caused the numbers, and caused the suffering, and caused the Holocaust!
How's that for a thought?
So, one must examine oneself in these scenarios and say, well, who is this man?
Who is the man?
Who am I?
And, of course, World War II was, you know, a classic example.
The easy example.
We shall go on to the end.
We shall fight in France.
We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength.
Whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches.
We shall fight on the landing.
You remember it all.
That's all fresh.
And simple.
And I appreciate, in a world of Western self-hatred, in a world of this, not just ethno-masochism, but cultural masochism, where we tend to avoid self-praise, we tend to avoid our victories.
We blame ourselves for any other suffering that we may have endured.
And I guess that's what I'm doing now, while I go back over my life!
And analyze these potential mistakes.
But I would be remiss if I did not praise this recent trend in the interest in my life in Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour.
But it does garner a deeper look.
And to that I go back to the beginning of my life as a young man.
I was born an aristocrat.
I was born a statesman.
I was born a leader.
My father was...
A great man.
I actually come from a long line of great men and warriors who had fought to expand Great Britain's powers across the world and when I was born there was a bit of a lull in our victories in that we would become somewhat sedentary and I desperately Wanted to have a similar legacy, a similar victory, and I think that is what affected me as a young man.
And I bring that up because that relates to World War II.
I was a difficult boy in school and I was often confrontational.
I was also unloved as a young man, I think.
I took to my books as a way to escape.
And I think I became a writer just out of practice, truly, the spoken word.
At any rate, the reason that I've chosen to focus, the reason I've chosen to do this podcast is to focus on not World War II, not my childhood, but on the Boer War.
This happened many years before World War II.
I was a young man in my early 20s.
This is 1900.
I was a war correspondent who was sent there.
I had a bidding war with many papers.
The Times was one of the most interested and lucrative.
I went over there, unfortunately not as a soldier, but as a war correspondent.
And as per usual, the English had decided they would just show up.
Destroy the Boers and reclaim South Africa for their own.
This is around Cape Town.
And it would be a matter of formality, a matter of paperwork.
We're the greatest empire that had ever been seen.
We went there as a call of duty, as a matter of fact, and without real consideration of the consequences.
And, you know, it was in many ways similar to the American Revolution.
You'd think we would have learned our lesson from 1776, where, you know, the traditional warfare is a formidable force when everyone plays by the same rules.
Unfortunately, the Boers, they had their own plan.
These were men with nothing.
We traveled in packs.
We had cooks and kitchens and even a gym we would bring for exercise.
Massive.
It was a portable village.
Whereas the Boers we were up against, Boater and his boys, were farmers.
They were dirty scrubbers.
My father was very harsh to the Boers.
Saw them as subhumans, but he was very harsh of everyone.
I believe he once said that women are derived from apes, and men come from God.
And that made me quite unpopular in South Africa with the Boers, when they discovered who I was, but I digress.
So when we arrived there, we immediately discovered that destroying the Boers was physically quite painful.
They destroyed it.
You see, the thing about the Boar was he was his own race in many ways, his own ethnicity, a strange combination of Dutch and Scots and British and Irish.
They had been planning this for some time.
They'd been fighting the Zulus for many years.
In brutal, savage wars.
I had no idea that Botha had actually fought with the Zulus.
On their side.
And he spoke, I don't know, Swahili.
And much like the American myth is that they came to America and obliterated the Indians, they actually worked with the Indians in many cases.
And that was the case of the South Africans, at least at the beginning.
So these men knew the land, they knew the locals, they knew the language, and they knew how to survive.
The intense heat.
The nights were cold in South Africa, the days stiflingly hot.
I believe you used Fahrenheit, 110, 120 degrees.
And the other thing unique about the Boers was they had focused their attention on military weapons.
They had been going back and forth to Germany for many years and buying the latest guns, the latest machine guns, artillery.
So though we were the most equipped army in the world, these were the most equipped mercenaries in the world.
And as they hid behind mudslides and rocks and trees in the darkness, set up fake cannons out of tree stumps so we couldn't even see where the anger was coming from, we met incredible pain and suffering, incredible loss.
Hundreds of men.
I saw it before my very eyes.
And I was captured.
It was an armored train we were taking.
An armored train sounds safe to the common vernacular, but it is a box, an iron box, that was attacked to the degree where we tried to escape.
I mean, into gunfire, because the bullets were coming through the actual walls I escaped within an inch of my life.
I was armed at the time, and I was sent to a POW camp.
I don't know if you've ever been Subjected to any kind of limitations with your immediate freedom, whether you're in a wood box or a home under house arrest, but it is something that strips a man to his core.
To be unable to leave is deeply and utterly humiliating, and that is why I have always fought tooth and nail for individual liberty among men.
Because I understand it to be That that is closest to the Lord.
I'm not a particularly religious man, but I do believe the most natural state is the most free state.
And to suffer the indignity of arrest was acutely painful.
I keep bringing up that word, pain, but I believe that it is what has driven my career my entire life, and it is why I have been conjoined to war and inexorably linked to massacre my entire life.
I believe that pain and I have been allies, and though I never got to marry the love of my life, I do believe that I endured a matrimony with suffering that got to the point where I thoroughly enjoyed Pain.
People, I recall the King of England asking me how I can be drunk or drink a bottle of champagne at lunch and start in the morning with sherry and brandies.
And I said to him, it takes practice.
But what I think I enjoyed more than the booze was the hangover, the pain the next day.
I think I'm, I'm, was built to atone.
At any rate, The POW camp was an existence I could not bear.
I wrote Mother.
I tried to... I pleaded with the authorities to understand that I was a war correspondent.
Of course, I was lying.
I was heavily armed, and I was not an innocent man by any means, but all's fair in love and war, correct?
So... I escaped.
That's correct.
Ah!
I climbed a fence, quite simply.
Ran, and there was so much serendipity on this escape.
So many uncanny strokes of sheer luck that it makes one wonder if the big guy upstairs does sweat the small stuff.
You understand?
First of all, we had tried to scale this fence many times in the past.
It was rarely left alone.
I had a brief window.
I was with two other men.
And as they turned their backs and missed this brief window, I seized the opportunity, jumped over the fence, hid in some bushes for a while.
I was instantly in someone's backyard when I climbed over the fence.
And you have to understand, this is during a time of war, extreme animosity against the English.
And to see me would be instant death.
And it would be a feather in their cap, because I was a well-known statesman.
I was Winston Churchill.
I was somewhat of a celebrity.
I'd already run for office.
And it was quite conceivable that being killed would not only be an imminent inevitability, but also a massive victory for the Boers.
At a time when they needed it.
I hid in the bushes.
Intense crippling fear.
Dogs came by.
People came by with cigars.
All of it.
Within inches of my nose.
And eventually after I was abandoned by the previous intrusions and they returned to their home and the dogs were left, I picked myself up and quite simply strutted out of the backyard Of this stranger house.
This is a man on the run, you understand.
This is a prisoner.
I walked in a very inconspicuous way with my hat over my head.
You have to understand, for a prisoner to have a hat is a rare gift!
That I, Mr. D'Souza, had facilitated and it helped distinguish me as a typical local in South Africa.
I marched very far.
I made it to a train.
I had no idea in the direction with which it was headed, but I knew that it would be advantageous to board it.
and after a minor struggle that was quite dangerous, I boarded the plane and the train, excuse me, and took it all night long to...
I had to dismount when it daybreak, and I stayed in a tree. .
For the course of the day, brutally hot, suffering, men, hunters were down, farmers were well a hundred feet below me.
I'll never forget a vulture staring at me, desperately waiting for me to die so he could devour my girth.
That day was one of the longest days I've ever had.
I'll never forget it till I die.
Then, I was unable to board the train the following night.
I walked and walked.
And eventually, I met a man named John Howard.
Extraordinary luck!
I was meant to be shot on sight.
Word had escaped along with me, following me like a shadow.
John Howard arrives, I mean I arrive, sorry, at John Howard's home and I make up a ridiculous story about being stranded by my group and I'm facing death because he can tell I'm lying.
Eventually, I decide to tell the truth and I come clean that I am in fact Winston Churchill, I am an escaped POW, and I assume you're a bore, B-O-E-R by the way, and you're going to kill me.
But John was a Brit.
What are the odds?
So he manages to steal me some food.
He is running a mine at the time, one of the few qualified men.
The Boers are not known for their sophistication and their understanding of engineering.
Unfortunately, the English are.
So despite being essentially Japanese in America in 1942, He is left to run the mine, or at least keep it safe.
I stayed down there.
Deep, deep down.
Many miles down, where my only friends in the darkness were rats.
And they would pick away at my newspaper and my cigars and anything that was remotely perishable.
But besides that, we were good friends.
I stayed down there for many days.
Until John hatched a plan that I had absolutely nothing to do with.
And again, what luck!
Is this serendipity or is it divine intervention?
That's what one asks oneself.
And so, John procured a local wool manufacturer named Charles Burnham.
Mr. Burnham facilitated a train car wherein he built a tiny stowaway sleeping area where I would sit amongst these large crates of wool on a train car.
And for 16 hours I would go to the border, Portuguese Africa, which was an ally of England, no fan of the Boers.
And there I would be safe.
I did.
And it worked.
Again, against all odds, how unfathomably tiny are the chances that I would survive that?
Shocking.
Again with Dunkirk.
Shocking odds.
And as time goes on, you look back and you say, why?
Did these shocking coincidences happen in my wake?
Was I chosen?
Or am I an extraordinary person?
Is this just bravery?
At any rate, when we returned to the British Embassy, I immediately demanded that I return to battle.
Recidivism at this time, as far as the war goes, was remarkably low.
Morale was at death's door.
In fact, the man leading the war down there decided that he would no longer fight, and he suggested that Queen Victoria, at the time, begin negotiations with the Boers to minimize the damage.
This is...
Profoundly un-British way to handle it, but they did.
And he was immediately fired.
And Queen Victoria decided to double down.
She rallied the troops.
I remember there were these chocolate tins that she had in her... She knitted scarves for us, if you can believe that.
And she made these tiny tins that said, you know, Queen Victoria, 1900, war with South Africa, and they had chocolate in them.
Of course, by the time they arrived in South Africa, it was just chocolate milk.
She hadn't accounted for the heat.
I was told in World War II, Frank Mars created M&Ms for the soldiers where they could have chocolate and they'd be encased in a shell where it would not melt.
I'm sure they appreciate it.
I've heard it said that the number one choice of conversation for a soldier at war is chocolate.
Number two, of course, a woman's breasts.
Number three, her nipples.
And number four, her arse.
At any rate, a second wave of patriotism overtook England at the time, this is now 1901, 1900, and we won the war in South Africa.
Now, one from afar could say that was bravery, that was hubris, that was morale, that was patriotism.
Maybe.
Maybe that was what Dunkirk was.
Maybe our determination To conquer the enemy is what leads to victory.
Or, and this is the possibility I'm facing as a dead man, or what we've discovered is that war is merely a test to see who can be more cruel.
Because, in the case of South Africa, What did we do?
Did we fight with more nobility?
Did we fight stronger?
Were we more tactful during our battles?
Were we more honorable?
No, in fact, it was the opposite.
It was much like the American Civil War.
Burning the farmlands.
And that's what we did.
We burnt the farms of these soldiers.
20,000 poor women and children left homeless.
We put them in POW camps.
Not unlike the POW camps of World War II.
And because it was war, because we were low on supplies, obviously, these emaciated children died in the tens of thousands.
And the soldiers said, the Boers said, we will fight to the end!
And the common Boer reply was, is this not the end?
For what we did to the Boers, what we did to the South Africans was shocking, even to the soldiers, the British soldiers ourselves, they were shocking to me.
And that's 20,000 Boers, 20,000 South African women and children murdered, essentially, in POW camps.
But that's also 20,000 additional black Africans and Indians, you know, There was a large indigenous population in South Africa, and they also were conscripted to fight in these wars by the Boers, then slaughtered by the English.
One man who refused to pick up a gun, of course, is Mahatma Gandhi, who went on to be a huge pain in England's ass.
A pacifist.
I must say one thing about Gandhi that was profoundly impressive.
Was while the battles were at their worst, while the bullets soared through the sky, and it was impossible not to hear them come within inches of your own ears, to see that young Indian man with a gurney And stretches and medical supplies run through these bullets, run through these bombs to rescue these people was an absolutely fascinating endeavor.
And much to behold, Mr. Gandhi was, if anything, he was a brave man.
I often wonder if his love of guns came from being shot at so much.
At any rate, it was a slaughter.
50,000 people needlessly died, and the Boers surrendered, and we negotiated our claims.
Now, we had this in America with the guerrilla soldiers.
Only they took the brunt of the suffering.
They allowed their homes to be burned, and they still refused to surrender.
But then you look at Canada.
Well, there was no surrender, and instead of B-O-E-R, it was B-O-R-E, where they poured the English out, and there were no deaths.
I mean, the Queen is still on the currency in Canada, but was it really that much less victorious than the American Revolution?
It makes for a less interesting film, of course, which is why I sat down here today, was to analyze this.
Now, in South Africa, I demanded we return to battle while negotiations were being made to settle the fight.
And 20,000 women and children died.
20,000 Boers.
20,000 African Aboriginals.
50,000 innocent people died.
Because England refused to negotiate.
Was that advantageous?
Was that a victory?
Was the Boer War victorious for England?
Is that what victory means?
One killed more women and children than the other?
That's how we define victory in this day?
Who can be more savage?
Is this the mark of a victorious empire?
The one who kills the most children?
We had similar offers for negotiations from Germany, from Mussolini, In World War II, and we refused.
And of course, history is written by the victors, and the victors claim that it was their patriotism, their bravery, and their determination to win that brought them to the forefront.
That brought them the gold medal in war.
That's the accepted narrative.
But looking back, I have my doubts.
One of the most chilling possibilities is that I was just determined to prove myself to my father and to my beautiful mother, Jenny, that I was not a pampered sophisticant, but I was a warrior just like John Churchill, just like all my ancestors.
I had not let down the cause.
And it's completely conceivable that that determination, which is nothing more than simple daddy issues with power, these empowered daddy issues led to countless deaths.
So, while I'm admonished and treated as a hero, while people garner awards for repeating my speeches, While films are made and books are written of my incredible exploits, it's entirely possible that the entire thing is false.
And I am a reckless egomaniac who has driven millions of people to deaths, needless deaths, in the name of irrelevant, ethereal concepts like the Union Jack.
It's not something that I'm particularly proud of, and I don't think that mainstream Americans are in desperate need of some more self-flagellation, so this is perhaps not the best time to be considering this.
But it's something that I'm forced to ponder here in this strange... What is it called again?
Libido?
This strange holding pattern.
Sorry.
It's around this time of night I begin mumbling, and my train of thought isn't as great as it was.
Luckily, I'm dead now, so when I go off on a tangent, no one dies.
However, the few times I've been the most powerful man in the Western world, it's quite possible that the Black Dog took over.
