Topic: National Security
Churchill, Hitchens, and the Unnecessary Smarm I read Buchanan's book. I also read Hitchens critique. I recommend the book.by Michael Stahl
(Libertarian)
Monday, June 23, 2008
I actually read Pat Buchanan's book-Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War a unique thing to do before commenting on it, I realize. I claim to be no Historian, but I am a buff, and read the news of the past every chance that I get. I liked Buchanan's book, and must say I agree with the central point, that the unenforceable guarantee to Poland just before the War all but ensured its beginning. I will say, of the things that you will find in the book, you will not find any adulation for Nazism, Hitler, or the slightest whiff of antisemitism, implied or otherwise-it's not there. But this is not a book review.
I also read the review that Christopher Hitchens wrote in Newsweek and was, to be blunt, astonished. To begin with Hitchens asserts that the Holocaust excuses any and all moral qualms about things like "carpet bombing German cities" Even though when the doors opened to turn Dresden into an oven no one outside of the SS, and of course the victims of their fell work, knew the Holocaust was taking place.
Try that defense in a court room sometime.
I'm not as concerned with the bombings of civilians as I am with the callous nature of its dismissal by Hitchens these many years later, and the suggestion that it was moral. War is hell, and things are done in war that otherwise would never be acceptable, but to use such events to insinuate that somehow there is evil in not accepting that the evil done was in fact not only necessary but moral, and not then evil at all, decades after the fact is grotesque.
Hitchens did just that, and more.
Next on the list is what I can only suggest is evidence that either Hitchens did not read what he criticized, or read a poorly truncated version. Hitchens attempts to make the point that Hitler should have been stopped earlier on-such as in the Rhineland. To quote Hitchens:
"In this instance, it must be admitted, Hitler was being a rational actor. And his admission-which Buchanan in his haste to indict Anglo-French policy completely fails to notice is-that if he himself had been resisted earlier and more determinedly, he would have been compelled to give ground. Thus the whole and complete lesson is not that the second world war was an avoidable "war of choice." It is that the Nazis could and should have been confronted before they had fully rearmed"
Apparently Hitchens missed the entire chapter on the Rhineland where the question of why the French did not simply kick the Wehrmacht back across the river and be done with the whole thing(potentially causing the fall of Hitler in the process) is addressed at length. Buchanan's answer is essentially that the French would have faced pressure from the U.K. and the U.S. like they did when they advanced into the region in the twenties. He supported the French doing just that kicking out of the Wehrmacht in the book, it was a vital security interest to the French(life and death as it turned out)-not to the UK, or US at the time, they should have acted, the UK should have minded its own damned business.
Obviously, not only does the former Trotskyite Hitchens not understand the idea of non-intervention, but he needs a new crib sheet.
But the thing that truly bothered me, the reason that I'm writing this piece, and perhaps the most chilling example of collectivist, utilitarian, and viciously cynical thought that I've ever read is this:
"It is of course true that millions of other people lost their lives in this conflict, often in unprecedentedly horrible ways, and that new tyrannies were imposed on the countries-Poland, Czechoslovakia and China most notably-that had been the pretexts for a war against fascism. But is this not to think in the short term? Unless or until Nazism had been vanquished, millions of people were most certainly going to be either massacred or enslaved in any case. Whereas today, all the way from Portugal to the Urals, the principle of human rights and popular sovereignty is at least the norm, and the ideas of racism and totalitarianism have been fairly conclusively and historically discredited. Would a frightened compromise with racist totalitarianism have produced a better result? "
My God, Man, did you read what you wrote? The short term! Eastern Europe lived under communist dominion for entire lifetimes, decades of hell-but it's all better now? In this piece Hitchens shows not only his Trotskyite roots, where the end justifies the means and the suffering of a few(compared to the total population of the world of course) is permissible to promote "revolution" but a latent admiration of Hitler. No one can say(with sanity) that Stalin was not every bit as evil as was Hitler, and as such the only way this statement has any sense to it at all is if it is assumed that Hitler's Reich would never have fallen on its own, but that Stalin's monstrosity would have......otherwise how could the view be short term in any way?
I don't give Hitler that much credit.
But even so, there were 100 million people with names and lives and houses turned over to slavery and murder for decades. Not to mention the hundreds of millions still shouldering the yolk of Communism-they are conveniently left out of the "short term" solution. By Hitchens reasoning, if not his words, the allies should have advanced on Russia as well....perhaps vengeance for that ice-pick? But the Soviets were allies-how is that possible in a "good" war?
Unless, of course, to Hitchens the evil of Stalin is indeed less than that of Hitler-I've no way to measure evil, and so accept none of it.
If questioning that "good war" that killed so many makes my some sort of totalitarian sympathizer in the eyes of the Christopher Hitchens's of the world, so be it. I sleep well at night.
There are many areas where I disagree with Pat Buchanan, but virtually none of them are in this book.
By the way, those of us that read the book before spouting know that the title comes from Churchill's own words, replying to FDR in a telegram concerning what the war should be called, published in his memoirs. Churchill, apparently, was a Nazi sympathizer.
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2008 Michael Stahl, all rights reserved.
Published: Monday, June 23, 2008
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I agree with most calls on nonintervention and for the most part the call of Libertarianism has been the cool drink of water to the the crazyness of big goverment that I never knew could be fixed just a year ago. However, the whole concept of this book and the reviews I have read, pro and negative, sound insane. I can't really understaind why every single libertarian is gushing over it. I can't understand why the detractors sound so moronic.
I see it in terms of self defence. France and Britain see that Hitler is growing. Has a large army, they want to halt that growth because they fear being attacked or otherwise controlled of they don't and draw a line on Poland. If a stand was not made at Poland, what reason is there to think Hitler would have stopped and not annexed another country and kept growing until he would be able to dictate terms to them or even attack?
He was aggresive, he wanted to grow his empire. He had a dislike of France. That's all they needed to insure an invasion was inevitable. He wanted the proper races to thrive and the inferior ones to wilt. All the countries of Europe, at the very least, should have taken this threat to their sovereignty seriously and banded to thwart him.
You agree with the assertion that Hitler only attacked the USSR because he wanted to show Britian how powerful he was and have them surrender? That just doesn't even begin to make sense to me. It's also the first I've ever heard of such a thought. Why wasn't this ever mentioned in any of the history books I've read on teh subject? There's nothing to be gained by hiding it.
Sure, there were better ways to handle things before it came to Poland but at that point, it was war then or war later for most of the countries Europe and Northern Africa and western Asia. Britain may not have been attacked itself (due to Hitler's admeration for them I suppose) but Hitler would have kept expanding. He wanted to attack Russia (with their inferior Slav race) and I just can't believe he wouldn't have done so. Even those he didn't attack he would influance to adopt more Nazi friendly policies (like the Swiss did).
In the end, Europe would have become a bastion for tyranny instead of on the front line against Communism and lord help us all if Hitler had ever gotten his hands on a Nuke. Stalin was evil but at least he acted out of intelligent self interest. Something Hitler never really grasped. I trust Iran more with a nuke then Hitler.
Ummm, when did I suggest that I thought Hitler would ever make Britain surrender? And, indeed, more importantly, when did Buchanan? Neither happened.
Indeed Europe did become the fell playground of tyranny, just not your postcard Western Europe....it was the East...where they took no postcards.
Your assertion that Britain would not have been attacked because Hitler liked them makes little sense as well.....and honestly is depressing. The teaching of D-day must be truly pathetic anymore. The full weight of the United States industrial power, in a three year build up, coupled with the British, could but barely get across the English Channel, and indeed were Rommel on the scene to take command of the panzers at Calais, may have suffered a stunning, potentially catastrophic, defeat. But for Rommel's health, the iron curtain may have fallen across the west coast of France.
And you suggest that Germany, in the heat of total War, on two fronts, with a quarter of the population of her enemies, would invade Britain..D-day in reverse, with no bombers.
Hitler could not attack the UK, on the ground, not in reality, ever. Lookup "operation Sealion"
Unless you are suggesting the UK waged a "war of aggression" by attacking a country that had not attacked it? That would be a position I would not take, Britain had just cause, certainly, with the fall of France.
That's real History, go read it.
The idea that Stalin was more rational than Hitler is daft. Stalin, and his antecedents did have nukes, and we are all damned lucky to survive that madness, on all sides. Oh, and so does Kim Jung Ill, and Mushariff, and God only knows who the Soviets sold one to.
I would have cheerfully, gladly, permitted Hitler hundreds of Nukes before I allowed Stalin thirty thousand...30,000. Enough to kill......everything, most of them in control of a Kleptocracy for the last fifteen years. And Churchill dealt with that madman instead of the other.
Read History for the facts, not the thoughts.....the thoughts are for you, or for commentators, but for what its worth, the idea that Hitler was hoping for peace with Britain was presented to me in lecture in the mid nineties by a quite conventional History Prof at BGSU.
But again, the thoughts are meaningless, the facts are important.....do you read the thoughts of current events without criticism? Why then would you read History any differently.?
I would suggest you read the book, but sadly, I rather doubt you have sufficient background for it.
Posted By: Charles James
Date: 2008-07-04 23:41:59
The basic problem with most reviewers of Mr. Buchanan's book is that they are completely ignorant of the revisionist scholarship on which it is implicitly based. This does not mean the authors listed in the bibliography but the ones he has read but dare not mention in order to get his book published. I will mention Charles Tansill, Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, George Morgenstern, James J. Martin and, yes, that Holocaust Denier, David Irving, to mention only a few. Now a few more inconvenient truths. No one wants to mention why Adolf Hitler went after the Jews. The reason is well known to competent students of the subject. Communism in Russia and Europe generally was a Jewish creation. Yes, it is true. Get Yuri Slezkine's Princton University Press title "The Jewish Century" and read it for irrefutable confirmation. Hitler went after the right people for the right reasons. That was the unforgiveable sin-not ripping off a little territory in Central Europe.
Now for some other inconvenient truths. According to David Lloyd George, England's Prime Minister in the second half of World War One, the British Empire made a "contract with Jewry" to bring the US into the First World War. The quid pro quo was that if the British promised a "national homeland" to the Jews in Palestine, the Jews would use their influence over Woodrow Wilson to get the US into war on the English side. At the Peace Conference in Paris, the Jews demanded and got "minorities treaties" in Eastern Europe to protect the Jewish "state within the state". They also got the British mandate over Palestine to prepare the embryonic Zionist state at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs. The Germans under Hitler were aware of all these facts. The Germans also experienced their own communist revolutions at home where the communists had names like Paul Levi, Leo Jogisches, Rosa Luxemberg, Gustave Landauer, Eric Musham, Karl Radek, etc. They weren't Germans, obviously. In nearby Hungary the non-Hungarian, Bela Kun, headed a short-lived communist dictatorship where 160 out of 200 commissars were Jews. The basis for the Jewish communist charge is therefore abundantly clear.
Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 just as Stalin was preparing his own attack against Europe. Had the Germans not struck when they did, Europe would have been part of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin by the end of 1941. Hitler was the good guy. He literally saved western civilization in World War Two. The claim that the Nazis killed six million Jews in "gas chambers" is a hoax. Those who doubt it should read Arthur Butz's book "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" for confirmation. Many hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot by the Germans in Russia. The Jew communist bastards richly deserved it. No one should shed a tear. The Arabs of Palestine, invaded after the war, would be grateful if the Germans had killed more Jews. Then the Palestinians would not be sitting in the Jordanian desert,robbed of their homeland.
Patrick Buchanan knows all these things but cannot write them and get his books published. I can say them and will. Buchanan's book is a good guide to deeper mysteries but it is only a starting point. Learn some real hard core historical facts. It will not necessarily make you a Nazi, but it will make you understand where the Nazis were coming from and why they did what they did.
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2008 Michael Stahl, all rights reserved.