Pat Buchanan Defends Hitler

[z0sa]

But you can't adduce even a particle of textual support for this view. So much the worse for your belief.

You have come very close to the Wild Cobra-esque --

Hitler would have kept taking and taking as long as they were willing to appease him. Additionally, he was warned about the Polish corridor - that taking it by force would mean war.

[Nbadan]

Hitler was able to embark on his long-cherished ambition of destroying the Versailles peace settlement that ended WW1. Reparations payments had been suspended, but there was plenty more for Hitler to overturn. First he rearmed. Then, in 1936, he put troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Two years later he annexed Austria. All these steps violated the Versailles treaty, but neither Britain nor France did anything to stop Hitler. When he demanded the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia, they caved in once again, despite the fact that these territories had never previously belonged to Germany. However, when Hitler went a step further, occupying and par ioning the remainder of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, western resolve finally stiffened. Guarantees were given to other east European countries, including Poland. When Hitler nevertheless attacked Poland, war was inevitable.

[Winehole23]

To z0sa: You should read Buchanan's article this week arguing how Winston Churchill took Great Britain from disaster to disaster, and helped transform it from an world power of the first rank to a dependency of the USA. IMO his Anglophilia partly explains his aversion to Britain's declaration of war, as it led directly to Britain's demise as a world power and Soviet hegemony in half of Europe.

[Winehole23]

Hitler would have kept taking and taking as long as they were willing to appease him. Additionally, he was warned about the Polish corridor - that taking it by force would mean war.

Nobody disputes this. But why was England bound to fight in Poland? Buchanan argues, and history shows, that this decision led to 50 years of bondage to the USSR for Poland. And it led to England's demise as a world power. Bad for his country, bad for the Poland. Failure, in both the national interest and the strategic objective.

Arguendo, right?

Looking at WWII as being all about Hitler is unnecessarily restrictive, and it is also not accurate from the standpoint of historical analysis. Many peoples and many states were involved, before, during and after. Hitler was a sine qua non, but he is not the whole story. What you guys are really objecting to here is the amplitude of the historian. You seem to prefer the reductionism of the moralist. But history is not moral, and it is not simple.

[Nbadan]

Nobody disputes this. But why was England bound to fight in Poland? Buchanan argues, and history shows, that this decision led to 50 years of bondage to the USSR for Poland. And it led to England's demise as a world power. Bad for his country, bad for the Poland. Failure, in both the national interest and the strategic objective.

It's not like Stalin was waiting around for England to weaken fighting Germany...Russia was taking parts of Poland too while Germany attacked..And Russia simultaneously annexed the three Baltic states...

[Winehole23]

Without the fog of war, would the Soviets have had the opportunity?

[Winehole23]

It's not the 1940's.

In a way, this was my point. that Buchanan is a very old fashioned sort of "conservative". Of course, to be anything but au courant, and for sure to harken back to "outmoded" views and at udes, is considered a mortal sin against the inexorable march of progress and civilization. God forbid anyone should ever retain any out of date ideas, or anything that contradicts our own "modernity".

[doobs]

Defeating Nazism and German militarism was pretty cool. So was establishing NATO, rehabilitating Germany, promoting European economic integration, and containing and ultimately defeating the Soviet Union. In the final analysis, things turned out OK.

Who knows what would have happened if the Brits, the French, and the Americans had let Nazism fester and expand into all of Europe and most of North Africa? My hunch is that we would have ended up having two large authoritarian dictatorships to contend with for the rest of the 20th century, instead of just one.

[Winehole23]

Yes, Buchanan's thesis that WWII didn't have to happen the way it did seems very unlikely. And is rightly controversial. But the solution isn't to call PJB a Hitler lover, It's to take his argument apart.

Nobody has done that so far, and all you have done is work backward from the present to claim WWII as an inevitability. This is almost tautological. That because things worked out *well*, the authority of the way things happened in the past is unquestionable.

With all respect doobs, I disagree.

For my own part I do not follow PJB where he goes, but I defend his right to go there. I don't think his detractors in this thread have troubled themselves to understand his claims in the first place, but in fairness Buchanan merely insinuates them himself in the OP. And I will admit my own familiarity with the topic comes from no more than a couple of book reviews I read last year and barely remember.

Surely, we can do better than link Buchanan relentlessly to Hitler, or spew mindlessly about what a madman Hitler was, and about what a Hitler Buchanan must be, for suggesting things might have happened otherwise.

The John Lukacs rejoinder to PJB is pretty pungent. He compares Buchanan to David Irving. IMO, that's a pretty good place to start.

An amconmag in-house rejoinder to Lukac's review can be found here.

Peter Hitchen's "review", via takimag.

[Winehole23]

From the Hitchens review:

The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?"


The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?"

[Winehole23]

Americans may take or leave Mr Buchanan's views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting, while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits.

[Winehole23]

We went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken by Germany as the world's greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA.


We were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan, which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war.


This decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941.


After the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable.

[Winehole23]

Hitchens giving Buchanan's argument in precis:

But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain's guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it.


The Poles were crushed and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler's eventual defeat left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations.


We then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies.


As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence.


Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each other's bowels?

[Winehole23]

By Christmas 1940, Stalin had in fact murdered many more people than Hitler and had invaded nearly as many countries.


We almost declared war on him in 1940 and he ordered British communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain.


And, in alliance with Hitler, he was supplying the Luftwaffe with much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London.


Not so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly fighting Germany, at colossal expense.


No one can doubt the valour and sacrifice involved.


But at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA, has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war.

[Winehole23]

Mainly, I think people are pissed off that Buchanan refuses to kneel at the shrine of WWII tribal pieties and self-love, or make Hitler his pinyata. He focuses instead on men of state and power relations. Unforgiveable.

It's become obligatory to worship war and US militarism and especially WWII. The fetish graces the mantlepiece, and visitors are quick to bow to it.



Bow to my ancestors, dammit!

[doobs]

I don't doubt that Buchanan is making a sincere argument about whether WWII was a necessary war. And I think there is an unwarranted tendency towards reflexive hatred for everything Hitler.

But he's engaging in intellectual masturbation here. Even if he's arguing about "men of state and power relations," his argument is a difficult one to make. It's an interesting take, but it's easy to disagree with him without resorting to moralistic or emotional arguments.

[ChumpDumper]

Hitler invaded Russia.

That pretty much blows Buchanan's argument out of the water.

[Winehole23]

Hitler invaded Russia.

That pretty much blows Buchanan's argument out of the water.

What argument? Sounds like you know more about it than me.

[Winehole23]

But he's engaging in intellectual masturbation here. Even if he's arguing about "men of state and power relations," his argument is a difficult one to make. It's an interesting take, but it's easy to disagree with him without resorting to moralistic or emotional arguments.

Sure. Anybody can disagree. I do myself. But calling him an apologist for Hitler is not well founded in any way. It's just a dumb marker for people's hostility to his views.

[ChumpDumper]

What argument? Sounds like you know more about it than me.

His argument in the OP that Hitler really didn't want war and just wanted to bring the ethnic Germans under his control.

He had a nonaggression pact with Russia. He broke it. He wanted war. He certainly wanted it over quickly so they could go back to a peacetime economy, but he definitely wanted the natural resources available in parts of the Soviet Union.

[Winehole23]

His argument in the OP that Hitler really didn't want war and just wanted to bring the ethnic Germans under his control.

I thought the context of his remarks was Poland specifically and was not meant to be universal. I could be wrong, but it seems to me you're picking at a nit here.

[Winehole23]

In fact, that Hitler had Stalin and the USSR in the crosshairs informs this claim (Hitchens paraphrasing Buchanan, considering things from the standpoint of the interests of GB):

But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain's guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it.


The Poles were crushed and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler's eventual defeat left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations.


We then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies.


As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence.


Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each other's bowels?

[ChumpDumper]

Of course Hitchens is going to paint it from the interests of Great Britain's colonial empire, but that really has nothing to do with Buchanan's views on Hitler.

It's fun to think that all Britain had to do was appease Hitler more than they did and they could still rule the world, but Buchanan's argument itself was one of self-determination -- so that opens the door to all kinds of possibilities that someone like Newt Gingrich could novelize.

[z0sa]

In fact, that Hitler had Stalin and the USSR in the crosshairs informs this claim (Hitchens paraphrasing Buchanan, considering things from the standpoint of the interests of GB):

After the Soviets annexed the Baltic States, they invaded Finland - where they were embarrassed by the non-existent Finnish military and little trained militia.

The Soviets were weak from constantly purging their own officers in the struggle for power. Hitler believed this inexperience would allow he and his generals complete domination from a strategic standpoint. If not for the coldest winter in a century, they would probably have been right.

In other words, Stalin had no real intentions of attacking Germany.

[Winehole23]

Sure. This is at least on topic, ChumpD. That's refreshing. Gingrich is an apt comparison.