John L. Perry
Saturday, July 9, 2005

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  The Brits will roger through this latest assault upon their oft-bombed, oft-burned capital city, as they have all its precursors. They will because, simply, that's who they are. Ask Adolf Hitler.

Victory, Not Appeasement

Had Hitler been of a mind to listen, and not just to hear, Winston Churchill could have told him, indeed as he told the whole world at the time England was in such mortal peril: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."

And when the turn-tail French generals, eager to appease Hitler, advised their government that "in three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken," Churchill grasped his sharpest weapon, ridicule, and delighted the English people: "Some chicken! Some neck!"

How the memories come rushing back over more than six decades, to the early times when Britain stood alone against fascism in Europe – while back here in America, packing up and shipping off to London the "bundles for Britain," smashing flat the tin cans and saving every drop of the bacon drippings for metal and glycerin to aid the War Effort, failing in an effort to join the Royal Air Force, being turned down by the Royal Canadian Air Force, still too young.

In Common Cause

All across America was the feeling then: "The British are we, and we are they. This is all our war – for mutual survival." It was good and it was right.

Thus it is now quite all right, after 7/7, just as it was quite so in the dark days and hellish nights of the Battle of Britain, for Americans – including those not of English descent – to take a measure of chauvinistic pride in the British cousins.

How can anyone not admire them, yes, love them dearly? They are most certainly their own role model, and the rest of civilization would do well to adopt them as theirs while the fateful War on Terror begins its decades-long unfolding.

America could do worse than adopt as its own byword the British ad slogan Varadarajan recalled so poignantly: "Take Courage." The faint-hearted, the summer soldiers, the sunshine patriots have already begun to spring up like ramp onions in the garden of the free and the home of the brave.

Worth Heeding

Yet another British-ism asks to be remembered, perhaps even more necessary today in America. It is one of those typically quaint, and yet-so-pertinent, English expressions.

Found throughout the kingdom printed on neat, little signs wherever there are passageways with low ceilings, it is, simply, "Mind Your Head."

Some members of the American Congress seem to have mislaid their senses of late. They are to be heard bleating about poor, misunderstood terrorists who've lost their way and ended up in durance vile. They take to the airways, whining about how it's time for America to cut and run, tails between legs, out of Iraq after having liberated it and lit the fires of freedom across the Muslim world.

So Soon Forgotten?

Americans were thinking straight right after 9/11 when they followed the lead of their president in going after terror hammer and tongs. But that was 9/11/2001. And this is just barely post-7/7/2005.

Time to take a lesson from what happened in London on 7/7 – and to reflect upon what happened here on 9/11. It's time, as football coaches admonish when the going gets tough, to suck it up and get back on offense.

Time to take courage again. Time to mind your head.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

Read John Perry's columns here.

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