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Next up, PB denies the Holocaust.
Holy accommodator!
Did Hitler Want War?
Patrick J. Buchanan
US DailyOn Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.
Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.
By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.
What cause could justify such sacrifices?
The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.
Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue.
But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn't want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.
Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative "to stop Hitler" after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.
If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet's, or Fidel Castro's, was out to conquer the world?
After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.
The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary's ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate.
Now one may despise what was done, but how did this par ion of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?
Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland's turn, then Russia's, then France's, then Britain's, then the United States.
We would all be speaking German now.
But if Hitler was out to conquer the world -- Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia -- why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can't get out of the Baltic Sea?
If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?
Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia.
Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.
As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?
Next week, Buchanan defends Satan himself....the lost brother
Next up, PB denies the Holocaust.
We would all be dead.
Buchanan often makes sense.
In this?
Not so much.
buchanan is still relevant?
That's what I was thinking.
QFT
This might be one of the most asinine things I've ever read.
These anti-war freaks are all the same.
Yeah, they're sane.
just curious. Can you point to something specific that Buchanan is wrong about?
What I think people really object to here is looking at Hitler as a man in his historical context, rather than as the abstract exemplar of evil par excellence he has become to us.
There is much one might disagree with as to Buchanan's conclusion -- one he borrows from Churchill -- that WWII might not have been necessary and led directly to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but I see very little to object to factually in the history he cites. The strategic picture he paints is well founded in my opinion. The conclusions he draws are something else altogether, but his brief does make sense.
World War Two was not a mythic struggle between good and evil, but a historical fight pitting nations and people against each other, with good and bad men on both sides, and ample atrocities on both sides. I'm as glad as anyone that the good guys won, but we aren't as good -- nor were the Germans as evil and insane -- as advertised. Our adversaries (and even Hitler) were flesh and blood, like us. They were not crazy, and they were not demon indwelt.
At least, not very much more than ourselves.
War hype lives on in people's minds, only we call it history. Pat Buchanan puts the propaganda aside to look at the historical situation. You may not like the conclusions he draws -- they make me pretty uneasy -- but as far as I can tell the facts he cites are more or less correct.
Last edited by Winehole23; 09-04-2009 at 11:33 PM.
Also, I'd be grateful if someone could say with what particular words Buchanan "defends" Hitler in the article.
IMHO the banner is argumentative. I find no support for it in the OP.
Seriously?
Use your own words, Dan. Defend the banner. It's not self evident, as you seem to think.
You seriously want to debate whether Hilter would have been happy just invading The Czec Rep. and Poland if Britian just left him alone like Pat claims?
Winston Churchill was in no way a defender of Hitler, but he reached a conclusion very much like Buchanan's. Though it is more nearly true to put it the other way around.
Last edited by Winehole23; 09-05-2009 at 12:10 AM.
No. I want you to point to particular words that defend Hitler.
Nor do I think Buchanan suggests that Britain ought to have left Germany alone. On the contrary, he suggests there might have been alternatives (to the immediate occasion of the war). Not so outrageous, IMO.
Last edited by Winehole23; 09-07-2009 at 04:10 PM.
So, Hitler was just being humane.....right?Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet?
Strawman. The inference is your own. In no way is it a necessary conclusion from Buchanan's words.
It only makes sense that in order to install the Vichy regime, it might not have been expedient for Hitler to pursue the military humiliation of France to the utmost, as happened to Germany after WWI. No ascription of mercy or humanity is necessary in this case. Strategic calculation accommodates it easily.
Winehole23, one question. How many Jews were killed by Hitler's master plan?
Hitler was murdering little Germans with 'unworthy' disabilities long before he started systematically killing off the jews and other holocaust victims.
In other words, he was ing insane. why defend that piece of ? the only people with hotter lakes of fire than him are stalin and satan himself.
Six million or so. But that doesn't make Buchanan's argument that Hitler was seeking an end to the war in 1940 -- well before the final solution was implemented in earnest -- wrong.
The intense -- I won't say unparalleled -- evil of the holocaust or the Nazi regime isn't at issue here, and I must say, it wasn't much of an issue for us until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
No doubt about it. Buchanan doesn't defend it. nor do I.
When it comes right down to it, we didn't care very much about the moral depravity of Hitler until we were attacked. Only then did the war become "morally" imperative.
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