The American Spectator

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Another Perspective

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In their hearts, the presenters must know that an attack on structure is ultimately an attack on causality. Ironically, both Churchill's writing and rhetoric -- notably when he was out of power -- used a latticework of cause and effect to present his ideas and outline his grave concerns regarding the survival of the country. Funnily enough, moral causality operating within a time context is Western Civilization's great contribution to the human experience.

JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO, as Colonel in Chief of the Queen's Royal Hussars, the Duke of Edinburgh visited the Crimea to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Past and present Hussars visited the battlefields where, in 1854, over 200 British cavalrymen rode to their deaths, fighting bravely though grossly mismatched in armaments. While many of us today may not be able to find Crimea on a map, the saga has been transmitted and re-transmitted thanks to Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, "Half a league, Half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of death Rode the six hundred..."

The comparison is painful: come the year 2039, will Churchill's museum, with all its bells and whistles, be able to transmit even a whiff of the heroism of 1939? When tough times return, as they must to every nation, will the British people find in this basement a moral storehouse from which to draw inspiration? Will $12 million -- invested now -- stir the soul then as much as Tennyson did with mere ink and paper? And, in 2083, 150 years after the "end of the beginning," how will they remember the charge of Churchill (also a Hussar) as he led a nation?

History is full of surprises. But let's note that, up until now, no army has ever been stirred to battle by a plasma screen.

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Foreign Policy, Environment, Law, Russia, Communism