On 30 November Britons and Australians alike celebrate the 150th birthday of a great, but largely forgotten man: Winston S. Churchill.

To the extent that Churchill is remembered today, it’s as the wartime prime minister of Britain who stood up to Nazi Germany. Some of his famous speeches, like ‘We will fight them on the beaches’ linger in our cultural memory, assisted by films including Darkest Hour (2017). But it’s notable that this film commences with Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister in May 1940, in which he offered his ‘blood, tears, toil and sweat’ to the nation.

Churchill was 65 years old when he gave this speech. He had been an MP (with only a very short break) for four decades. He had been a minister multiple times, and an important writer, thinker and soldier. We have forgotten all this. And in doing so, we have forgotten not necessarily that Churchill stood up to the Nazi threat, but the more important point of why he did so.

During the years prior to Churchill becoming prime minister (on 10 May, 1940), the majority of accepted elite opinion had been to appease Hitler. It was not widely believed that Britain should fight the Germans. Perhaps the desire to maintain peace was an understandable position because of the horrors the first world war had inflicted. No one wanted another deadly and destructive conflict, and this justified the policy of appeasement.

But Churchill had a deeper insight than this. He saw that the risk was not just that the British at home and across the Empire would lose family members to a physical conflict. He saw that it was a fight for the preservation of the British way of life, and for the Western civilisation of which it was the custodian.

When he became prime minister, it was not obvious that Britain could emerge victorious. Germany had swallowed up Austria, and crushed Czechoslovakia and Poland. Norway had fallen. Holland had surrendered. Belgium, too. France was on the verge of collapse, and Hitler would soon be in Paris. The alliances with Russia and America were a long, lonely way off. And hardly anyone in the political class or in the media was keen for a fight. The BBC had banned Churchill and his constant warnings about the Nazi threat from the airwaves. He had last spoken about German rearmament on the BBC in 1934.

Churchill immediately set to convincing his cabinet, the parliament and the British people that they should fight. On 28 May he spoke to his cabinet, telling them that he had considered carefully whether Britain should negotiate with Hitler, as many around the room had been agitating they should. After warning that the inevitable outcome from such negotiations would be to end up as ‘a slave state’, Churchill finished with stirring words: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’

During his ‘finest hour’ speech, delivered on 18 June 1940, Churchill said, ‘I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. 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…. 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.’

Unlike some political leaders today, these words were not born of self-importance (or worse, a ghost-writer). They were the result of a serious and deep study of history, and a lifelong effort to draw upon it.

‘There was the same peril that the supremacy of one race and culture would be imposed by military force upon all others. There was the impotence of Europe without British aid; the slow but sure acceptance by England of the challenge and the call; and the same tremendous, increasing development of British effort during the struggle…. They were in essentials a struggle for the life and liberty not only of England, but of Protestant Europe.’

These words are from Churchill’s biography of his great ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill wrote them in the late 1920s and early 1930s (it was a two-volume biography published in the early 1930s), and he used them to compare the British experience of the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) with the first world war.

Although no one was to know it yet, a decade later they could be fairly compared with the second world war, too.

Later in the Marlborough biography, Churchill reflects on Britain’s efforts during the Nine Years’ War and later the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714): ‘Aye, and carry forward with her, intact and enshrined, all that peculiar structure of law and liberty, all her own inheritance of learning and letters, which are to-day the treasure of the most powerful family in the human race.’

When Churchill broadcast his message of defiance and hope to the British people in 1940, he knew that a civilisation simply cannot be preserved if people are not willing to fight for it. He was reminding his countrymen their situation was not unique in history, that Britain had before stood its ground, fought for the unique way of life and system of government it had slowly created over time, and passed it on to future generations. It was a message he had refined over the decades of his ‘preparation’.

Our forgetting of Churchill serves as a metaphor for a broader cultural malaise not only in Britain and Europe but here in Australia as well. Like we have forgotten Churchill, we have forgotten that Western civilisation is not embodied in a language or a location, but in values and ideals held dearly by its people. It is fundamentally based on individual freedom and a belief in individual dignity, not in technocratic managerialism and expert rule (which we are increasingly bringing upon ourselves).

If we Aussies want to remember this and reignite a belief in our civilisation, remembering Churchill is not a bad place to start.