WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT

摘要

IN SEPTEMBER 1946, much of Europe had been reduced to smoking rabble. Bitter hardship and gnawing hunger were the lot of millions. The curtain had come down on one monstrous theater of violence and cruelty only to have it rise on others. Unnumbered multitudes languished in displaced-persons camps, with millions more living as refugees from their ancestral lands and homes. An immense Soviet Army had brought liberation, but along with it a contagion of rape and the sinister prospect of new Stalinist tyranny lurking like a predator in the shadows, waiting to pounce on the wasted, fragile democracies. It was against this bleak backdrop that Winston Churchill, no longer British prime minister but nonetheless assuming the mantle of the prophet, addressed the University of Zurich. In a speech not much remembered today but packed with visionary power, Churchill addressed a continent in agonized distress. "I wish to speak to you today on the tragedy of Europe," he began, summoning from his rumbling baritone the deepest notes of grandeur.