I said recently about Darkest Hour  that

despite Gary Oldman’s deservedly acclaimed, Oscar-winning impersonation of Winston Churchill, earned a rating of 7 from me. It was an entertaining film, but a rather trite offering of Hollywoodized history.

There was a subtle aspect of the film which led me to believe that Churchill’s firm stance against a negotiated peace with Hitler had more support from the Labour Party than from Churchill’s Conservative colleagues. So I went to Wikipedia, which says this (among many things) in a discussion of the film’s historical accuracy:

In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote: “…in late May of 1940, when the Conservative grandee Lord Halifax challenged Churchill, insisting that it was still possible to negotiate a deal with Hitler, through the good offices of Mussolini, it was the steadfast anti-Nazism of Attlee and his Labour colleagues that saved the day – a vital truth badly underdramatized in the current Churchill-centric film, Darkest Hour“. This criticism was echoed by Adrian Smith, emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Southampton, who wrote in the New Statesman that the film was “yet again overlooking Labour’s key role at the most dangerous moment in this country’s history … in May 1940 its leaders gave Churchill the unequivocal support he needed when refusing to surrender. Ignoring Attlee’s vital role is just one more failing in a deeply flawed film”.

I thought that, if anything, the film did portray Labour as more steadfast than the Tories. First, the Conservatives (especially Halifax and Neville Chamberlain) were made to seem derisive of Churchill and all-too-willing to compromise with Hitler. Second — and here’s the subtlety — at the end of Churcill’s speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, which is made the climactic scene in Darkest Hour, the Labour side of the House erupts in enthusiastic applause, while the Conservative side is subdued until it follows Labour’s suit.

The final lines of Churchill’s speech are always worth repeating:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. 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 in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

If G.W. Bush could have been as adamant in his opposition to the enemy (instead of pandering to the “religion of peace”), and as eloquent in his speech to Congress after 9/11 and at subsequent points in the ill-executed “war on terror”, there might now be a Pax Americana in the Middle East.

(See also “September 20, 2001: Hillary Clinton Signals the End of ‘Unity’“, “The War on Terror As It Should Have Been Fought“, and “A Rearview Look at the Invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror“.)