Was It 'The Good War'?

Human Events ^ | 04/04/08 | Pat Buchanan

[Borges]

Pat's at it again.

[stylin19a]

where to begin. In some parts (mostly Stalin) pat confuses the war with the peace agreements/spoils of war.

[Russ]

This is so over the top and beyond belief I don’t know where to start. Therefore, I will say nothing and let the article speak for itself...

[LRoggy]

Cohen contends that the evil of the Holocaust makes it a “good war.” But the destruction of the Jews of Europe was a consequence of this war, not a cause.

Come on Pat, Hitler planned the Final Solution in the 30’s for crying out loud. It was going to be put in place regardless of whether WWII was fought or not.

[goldstategop]

It was the "Good War." World War II, more than any other conflict, dramatically framed the conflict between freedom and tyranny. It was not certain the democracies would win. They did at an enormous cost. And that cost that was paid has been fully justified by the verdict of history.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Hoplite]

Methinks Pat jumped the shark some time ago.

[goldstategop]

Pat Buchanan is a fool of course. His isolationist bilge would certainly have led to the extinction of freedom in our world. If the United States had not entered World War II, we would be living today in an oppressive dictatorship. One can get an idea from Robert Harris' novel Fatherland what a Nazi dominated world would look like. Running away from the rest of the world didn't make us safe in the 1930s and it won't make us safer today if we follow the paleos and Left's advice to abandon the Middle East to the tender mercies of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Redleg Duke]

Off his meds again, I see.

[agrace]

But when one declares a war that produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust a "Good War," it raises a question: good for whom?

"The war" did NOT create the holocaust, you incredible idiot. Hitler opened Dachau and Ravensbruck and Buchenwald in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 and Kristallnacht was in 1938.

But the destruction of the Jews of Europe was a consequence of this war, not a cause.

True. Hitler didn't do a single evil thing to the Jews of Europe until he was attacked. (Way to display your antisemitism, again, Pat. Sounds like he's dancing a little on the edge of holocaust denial to me.) And there was no Lenin before Stalin; the Soviet Union in all its magnificent destruction just appeared - POOF - when the first American troops showed up in theatre. And Mao decided to be the murderous marxist he was simply because the US bombed Hiroshima.

What on earth is wrong with him?

[Argus]

No war is “good”. Some are necessary. WWII certainly was for the US, and the war we’re in now against the updated Islamist version of Nazis is too.

In fact, Buchanan puts the end date of WWII too soon. The issues that arose from the Hitler/Stalin pact to divide Europe were not fully resolved until 1989-91, with the fall of the Soviet empire that was the successor to the Third Reich. So in reality, what we call WWII lasted for fifty years.

Puts our present situation in somewhat more realistic perspective.

[goldstategop]

Excellent point. The Cold War was really a continuation of World War II and it ended only when the Soviet Bloc collapsed at the end of the 1980s. As Pat Buchanan knows full well, that didn't happen because the U.S ran away from confronting the Soviet Union. President Reagan engaged it with all of America's resources and helped anti-communist freedom fighters abroad. That's the exact opposite of isolationism. Its no more a sound policy today than it was at any earlier time in American history. When we have adversaries of the open society, we will come into conflict with them. Both our ideals and interests demand we do so and while it may be possible to put if off for awhile, sooner or later it will result in an inevitable clash of men and arms.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[quadrant]

World War II, a good war? I doubt it. If you were a soldier stuck in the boiling heat of Guadalcanal or the freezing mud of Bastogne, I doubt if you considered the war “good”. In PATTON, Gen Omar Bradley tells George Patton that the ordinary foot soldier is stuck there, living one day at a time, with death tugging at his elbow. Good war, that doesn't sound good to me.

[denydenydeny]

Britain declared war on Sept. 3, 1939, to preserve Poland. For six years, Poland was occupied by Nazi and Soviet armies and SS and NKVD killers. At war's end, the Polish dead were estimated at 6 million. A third of Poland had been torn away by Stalin, and Nazis had used the country for the infamous camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz. Fifteen thousand Polish officers had been massacred at places like Katyn. The Home Army that rose in Warsaw at the urging of the Red Army in 1944 had been annihilated, as the Red Army watched from the other side of the Vistula. When the British celebrated V-E day in May 1945, Poland began 44 years of tyranny under the satraps of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Was World War II "a good war" for the Poles?

Pat is such a nitwit. The terminology "Good War" is a leftist formulation which by implication views Korea and Vietnam (to say nothing of Iraq) as "bad" wars. In a broad sense, no war is "good"--the serious term should be "necessary," some more than others.

And the above bit about Poland is mealy-mouthing at its finest. Most of the Polish population losses were not in the "war"--they were genocidal killings committed by bureaucrats far from the battlefield. These types of killings were why the war was necessary.

and Nazis had used the country for the infamous camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.

On the positive side, this is as close as Pat's come to repudiating his occasional flirtation with Holocaust denial.

[Rummyfan]

Let me answer Pat Buchanan plainly and simply:

YES IT WAS A GOOD (NECESSARY) WAR!

Two monstrous tyrannies, the German Third Reich and the Japanese Miltarist dictatorship, were swept away, much to the benefit of the people who had been subjugated by them and subject to, in some cases, evils beyond description. Pat should go vist Dachau, or Madjanek, or Auschwitz - maybe he would get a better appreciation for 20TH century industrialized murder.

That the Soviet Union survived intact and we had to parry with them for another fifty years is a separate question.

The benefits of the war to us and Western Civilization are almost innumerable.

[PzLdr]

Hitler was going to attack the USSR. Sooner or later. No matter what. And he was going to colonize it. That left the Slavs as potential slave labor. Bot the Jews in occupied Russia? Buchanan’s an ass.

[Constitution Day]

Sorry your boys lost, Patrick.

[PzLdr]

They used Poland for Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidjanek, and one other. Auschwitz-Birkenau was in Upper Silesia. Buchanan can’t even get that straight.

[dfwgator]

Hitler also had plans to totally get rid of the Polish race by 1975, through forced sterilization, starvation and other means.

[agrace]

On the positive side, this is as close as Pat's come to repudiating his occasional flirtation with Holocaust denial.

You're too kind. :) It's just a different kind of holocaust denial. Pat's got two functioning brain cells and they're both antisemitic.

And about those camps - sounds like Pat is suggesting that Poland should have just shut up and taken the occupation, and Britain shouldn't have honored their treaty (is he related to Chamberlain, or just an avid student?), and if they had, the horror of Treblinka and Auschwitz wouldn't have happened. What is he smoking? Hitler opened up 4 concentration camps - IN GERMANY - six years before he ever invaded Poland. The camps in Poland just made the other ones a little less crowded.

Pat Buchanan is the right's Jimmy Carter.

[ex-snook]

The good was we lived to fight another day. Just how many more such ‘days’ can Western Civilization take? Rivals are standing by.