"Canada is the linchpin of the English-speaking world. Canada, with those relations of friendly, affectionate intimacy with the United States on the one hand and with her unswerving fidelity to the British Commonwealth and the Motherland on the other, is the link which joins together these great branches of the human family, a link which, spanning the oceans, brings the continents into their true relation and will prevent in future generations any growth of division between the proud and the happy nations of Europe and the great countries which have come into existence in the New World."
Q. Mr. Churchill, you have been dead for over 40 years, and the quotation I have given you is in fact 70 years old, and followed soon after your meeting with FDR in Placentia Bay Newfoundland, where the foundations of the Atlantic Charter were laid. How do you see the Charter in retrospect?
A. I would unsay nothing that I have said.
Q. And yet, NATO is tottering on the brink in Afghanistan.
A. The folly has been imagining the Atlantic to lap the shores of Afghanistan which, as is widely known, has no shores at all.
Q. What would be your counsel?
A. If in the event that Afghanistan cannot be removed to the Atlantic, or the Atlantic to Afghanistan, the two should go their seperate ways, untroubled by interventions of the United Nations.
Q. The United Nations have intervened in Afghanistan for ten years.
A. So I have been told. My own experience of Afghanistan was a merry one, but I would not recommend it to others as a wise course for international relations.
Q. What advice would you now have for Canada?
A. Intimacy with the United States is no excuse for madness. Friends must speak frankly to one another. The Afghanistan intervention has been madness. If it is not so discussed, the madness will go on.
