Posted on 06/20/2008 8:12:50 AM PDT by kellynla
So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all.
Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power.
That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks."
Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The Brits kicked away their empire. Through colossal blunders, Britain twice declared war on a Germany that had not attacked her and did not want war with her, fought for 10 bloody years and lost it all.
Unable to face the truth, Hitchens seeks solace in old myths.
We had to stop Prussian militarism in 1914, says Hitchens. "The Kaiser's policy shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe."
Nonsense. If the Kaiser were looking for a war he would have found it. But in 1914, he had been in power for 25 years, was deep into middle age but had never fought a war nor seen a battle.
From Waterloo to World War I, Prussia fought three wars, all in one seven-year period, 1864 to 1871. Out of these wars, she acquired two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, and two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. By 1914, Germany had not fought a war in two generations.
Does that sound like a nation out to conquer the world?
As for the Kaiser's bellicose support for the Boers, his igniting the Agadir crisis in 1905, his building of a great fleet, his seeking of colonies in Africa, he was only aping the British, whose approbation and friendship he desperately sought all his life and was ever denied.
In every crisis the Kaiser blundered into, including his foolish "blank cheque" to Austria after Serb assassins murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Kaiser backed down or was trying to back away when war erupted.
Even Churchill, who before 1914 was charging the Kaiser with seeking "the dominion of the world," conceded, "History should ... acquit William II of having plotted and planned the World War."
What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust.
Yet consider. Before Britain declared war on him, Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France.
Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.
If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.
Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France?
If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?
That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.
Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.
"Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime ... ?"
Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.
The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.
Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.
The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. No wonder Winston Churchill was so melancholy in old age. No wonder Christopher rails against the book. As T.S. Eliot observed, "Mankind cannot bear much reality."
Would you be offended if someone said that same thing, only replacing the words with Aryan, European, or white?
Yep. Like the Demaniuk defense.
Yes, he was. What's that saying? Oh yeah, "Even a blind sow will occasionally find an acorn"
Hitler wasn't all bad either. He liked dogs.
LoL! Two cliches in one post! Genius.
He was right on Demaniuk. Come on, you can say it.
There is no significant oil in the conquests of the Third Reich except in Romania, which was an ally (and in the North Sea, which hadn’t been discovered yet). The blitzkreig was running out of gas. Hitler preferred the idea of making for the Caucusus to the idea of attempting to get to Iraq.
And had Lee taken that offer, he’d have been a traitor to his home state and the South.
"A holy and accepted burnt offering" might be a usage of the word, but "holokaustos" comes from "holo" meaning whole and "kaustos" meaning burned.
The word's literal meaning is "complete destruction by fire."
Greek semantics aside, whatever meaning "holokaustos" has, The Holocaust does NOT mean "a holy and accepted burnt offering." It refers to the Nazi German effort to destroy the Jewish people through complete destruction by fire.
Isn’t it Holocaust Denial to ignore what happened to the Slavs? More Slavic non-combatants than Jews were exterminated by the Germans, after all.
Ya learn something new everyday. It’s hard to believe we took this asshat seriously at one point...
I am familiar with many Rabbinic associations, but I do not know of any "supreme" rabbinic authority in the U.S. Unlike Israel and Britain, the U.S. does not have a Chief Rabbinate.
I have the greatest respect for Israeli intelligence, but I don't think that their assets include time machines. ;^)
[The state of Israel was founded in 1948.]
History has two parts - a recording of factual events and the construction of a narrative to tie them together. One is, as the saying goes, entitled to one's own narrative but not to one's own facts.
Whether an alternate set of events might have avoided WWII is academic (in several senses). The real ones did not. Whether that alternate set of events would have led ineluctably to another alternate set of events - no Holocaust - is still more derivative and still more academic. In fact they did not.
The real difficulty with the "would have, could have, should have" treatment to such narratives as Buchanan's is that they depend entirely on events that didn't happen. Was WWII "necessary"? Was the Holocaust? Well, the discussion of such things as "necessary" in this regard is one of narrative, not of fact. These are questions only an academic could love. Both happened.
The real danger here is that clinging to any one narrative can lead one to deny facts that do not support it. One may be so enamored of the Jew As Enemy narrative that one blames both WWII and the Holocaust on Jewish perfidy, or worse, needs to deny the reality of the latter and at some point even the former. Certain radical Muslim narratives of the period do that. It is an astounding and frustrating thing for those who lived through such factual events to see their very reality denied by those who prefer to believe narratives to which they are inconvenient.
Without going into any particularly detailed analysis, I have in mind a few facts that might be regarded as inconvenient for this particular narrative - Hitler's clear intentions toward the Jews as expressed far earlier even than Mein Kampf but easiest to locate in that rather dull volume, the acts of organized anti-Semitism that preceded the events of the war, the detailed planning of population movements that happened quite to the detriment of the war effort. There are more, too many in my opinion to allow for Buchanan's narrative to carry much more weight than the purely hypothetical.
So if one supports a moderate foreign policy of defending America only (ending Nato, bringing troops home from Korea, Bosnia, etc) he’s an anti-semite b/c David Frum says so?
Eastern Europe is majority Slav. Jews were a small minority. Naturally more Slavs than Jews were killed in absolute numbers. But the Nazis were not trying to exterminate Slavs, who were to be the slaves of the future. They were trying to completely exterminate Jews. Look at it in percentages.
One should also remember that the Holocaust was largely carried out by Eastern Europeans, with only a thin layer of German staff.
*blush* Thank yew. You should see me when I really get rolling...
He was right on Demaniuk. Come on, you can say it.
Yes I can and I did. What were my first words in that post? I said "Yes, he was."
Yeah. Thank God my ancestor emigrated in 1914.
Beats the hell out of ‘Pukeannon’s nuts’. Thanks.
I think he meant after the war, the way the State of Israel pursued (is still pursuing?) Nazi war criminals.
If Churchill had not taken over in 1940, we might all be speaking German and Japanese. He was not perfect, but he showed great spine and courage despite the apparent odds in 1940. If Britain had given in in 1940, Hitler might well have been able to force Stalin to surrender and had the vast resources of much of Russia at his disposal. That would have been even worse for the USA, Britain, and civlization. Note: Stalin was just as wicked and evil as Hitler; as a mass murderer, Stalin killed far more people than even Hitler - he had more time to do so. Hitler and his demonic compatriots planned from way before WW2 to get rid of the Jewish people in Europe one way or another, and have their muzzie allies (the mufti if Jersualem - may he be forever blotted out) in the middle east take care of the Jewish people there. Pat’s dreamworld seems to be one that has no Jewish people. If he’d been alive in 1939, he’d likely have been a super isolationist apologist for that lowlife Hitler. Pat can kindly go stuff a potato in his mouth, go sit on an air hose, and turn it on full blast!
That is pure Holocaust Denial. Hitler intended to liquidate the Slavs, and 9 million souls weigh no less than six million. And some Slavs collaborated. As Hans Frank said, we will make mincemeat of the Poles and Ukranians. It’s a shame you can make such statements, which would be condemned if said about the Jews
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