When dawn broke on June 18, 1940 it was two weeks after the end of Dunkirk. Two weeks after the British Army retreated from France to Britain. Two weeks after the German Army had gone from victory to victory in France, two weeks during which the German Army continued its conquest of Britain's one major ally, France.
June 18, 1940 was two days after the French capitulated to the Germans.
On June 18, 1940 Britain and its Commonwealth stood to fight what would become World War Two alone.
It was a very dark time. But rather than curse the darkness, the people and their leader lit a candle of hope that ignited the whole world. In a war that truly ranged across the world, the enemies of light were no longer victorious when it ended. But there would have been no victory if the people and their leader had surrendered to the darkness. There would have been no victory without the kind of conduct that showed up on June 18, 1940 and every day thereafter until the fight was won.
On June 18, 1940 the Prime Minister delivered a speech to the House of Commons in London. The Prime Minister was Winston Churchill. The speech would become forever known as the "finest hour" speech. Part of it is reprinted here with a pair of paragraphs added to separate some of the text:
Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
When dawn breaks on this Fourth of July, it will be three days since six people voted to make crimes not be crimes any longer, so long as the crimes were "official." But, they said, the president was the one who could not be charged with an official crime. They had not yet said that the president's band could not be charged. Perhaps they knew then, that there may be a president who would pardon the criminals the president ordered to commit official crimes. Whatever, they said that the president's official crimes are not crimes and that the president cannot be convicted of any official crimes.
July 4, 2024 will be nearly three and a-half years to the day after the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. Then the sitting president ordered a crowd to storm the Capitol and stop the counting of electoral votes, knowing that he would lose the count and knowing that the crowd was armed.
On this Fourth of July, as on every day since then, there are more of us than there are of them. There will always be more of us than there are of them. They have not won a single nationwide election in the last three and a-half years. They know that they cannot be victorious without our consent.
We will not consent. We will not agree. We will not capitulate.
It is appropriate, I think, to remember the words of the leader of Britain. He turned the darkness of seeming defeat into his people's finest hour. His speech seems like a good fit for a Fourth of July speech today.
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!
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