The previous two threads involve novelist Dan Brown's linkage of Churchill to warnings about those arch-villains, the Illuminati, in WSC's 1920 essay, "Zionism Versus Bolshevism"--which had nothing to do with the Illuminati, but provided Brown with wonderful out-of-context quotations.
FINEST HOUR exploded this particular nonsense in "Angelic Demonology: Churchill as Fundamentalist Catholic?" in issue 128, Autumn 2005, p43. A .pdf of this issue can be downloaded from our website page http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=35 For those not needing to download an entire issue for this red herring, I have out the article below. There is nothing to any of Brown's conjectures. If we Churchillians were as good at making things up, we could be as rich as Dan. ===== "The Illuminati are well documented throughout history...You ever heard of a guy called Winston Churchill?....BBC did a historical a while back on Churchill's life. Staunch Catholic by the way. Did you know that in 1920 Churchill published a statement condemning the Illuminati and warning Brits of a worldwide conspiracy against morality?...London Herald. February 8, 1920." —Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown (New York: Atria, 2000, p. 255) Was Churchill a Roman Catholic? Graduate Churchillians snort at the notion, but we are asked this question often lately because Dan Brown's novels, led by The Da Vinci Code, have assumed cult status, and the Internet is full of his words by people who apparently think they have some basis in fact. Wise heads enjoy Brown's yarns but don't take them seriously. On the merits they are perhaps best described by John J. Reilly's blogsite (http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/23Feb04.htm): "The count of bloopers in this book [Angels and Demons] is so great that one begins to wonder whether they Mean Something. Mere ignorance could explain why the book translates 'Novus Ordo Seclorum' as 'New Secular Order.'* The assertion that Catholic Holy Communion 'comes from' Aztec ritual cannibalism might be just badly compressed comparative anthropology. But what are we to make of the assertion that Winston Churchill was a staunch Catholic?" *The correct translation is "New Order of the Ages": the motto on the Great Seal of the United States (see a dollar bill) that hints at the high-flown pretensions of the American Revolution. According to www.greatseal.com, "The motto has been traced to Virgil, the renowned Roman poet who lived in the first century B.C., to a line in his Eclogue IV, the pastoral poem that expresses the longing of the world for a new era of peace and happiness." ========== What indeed Mr. Reilly! Churchill was brought up in the Church of England, though in "The Dream," a short story written in 1947, he refers to himself curiously as "Episcopalian" (North American version of the Anglican Church). In any case, Churchill's "religion" might best be described as an "optimistic agnostic." He wrote once that he was "not a pillar of the Church a buttress—I support it from the outside." He also said that, having made so many deposits in the "Bank of Religion" as a boy, he had been "confidently withdrawing from it ever since," never pausing to wonder if there was an "overdraft." Churchill did write the article Brown cites ("Zionism versus Bolshevism" Illustrated Sunday Herald, 25 January 1920, Collected Essays IV, Churchill at Large, pp. 26-30, Woods C73). But it had nothing to do with the sinister group Brown calls the "Illuminati," a cult dating back to Galileo which challenge the teachings of the Catholic church. Churchill was not a Catholic, and did not express the sentiments ascribed to him in the novel. The threat to morality Churchill attacked was Bolshevism, and he went on to explain why he thought so. "Zionism versus Bolshevism" is sometimes produced as evidence that Churchill was an anti-semite, since the article notes the preponderance of Jews among Bolsheviks, whom WSC describes as "a sinister confederacy...mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race....down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envioius malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing....with the exception of Lenin, the majority of leading figures are Jews." But to quote this paragraph out of context of the rest of the article is to misrepresent the author. Churchill wrote that such figures comprise only a small portion of Jews, whom he calls "the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world." Prefiguring his later indictment of Nazi Germany, he writes: "Nothing is more wrong than to deny an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, and the resulting consequences are more decisive." There are Jews in every country, Churchill went on, who "identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life....Such a Jew living in England would say, 'I am an Englishman practising the Jewish faith.' This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. [During World War I] the influence of what may be called the 'National Jews' in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour." (All this is carefully extracted from out-of-context condemnations of Churchill's article.) No one but the most ardent Churchillophobe can use "Zionism versus Bolshevism" to indict Churchill of anti-semiticism. And no one but an imaginative novelist can use it to portray him as an fundamentalist churchman. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. 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