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."
Quite true. I don’t know who could have made them “supreme” except the organization itself.
And the past. Slav is where the very word 'slave' came from in the first place.
Perhaps, but from Pat's perspective you have to erase lend-lease, to Russia and the Brits, from the equation. Stalin might have been defeated without US support, and Hitler's belief that England could have been starved into submission could well have come to be.
Ah, now I know why the Arabs call the founding of Israel the "Nakba", which also means disaster - another way of calling Jews nazis. [My opinion of Arabs censored as I really don't want my account suspended.]
Practically, the Nazis could not have liquidated all of the Slavs. I am not aware that they planned to. They planned “Germanize” many Slavic lands, to deport their populations to Siberia and to use Slavs as slave labor. I do not deny that millions of Slavs died in the Holocaust. However, at the end of the war; Eastern Europe remained largely Slavic but was almost devoid of Jews. Slavs were not exterminated. Jews were, and as it happens they were often killed by Poles, Ukrainians, etc., rather than by Germans.
The Byzantine and Ottoman empires used to get the bulk of their slaves - both were run with and by slave labor - from Eastern Europe.
Technically—only technically—Buchanan is right on that one point. In WWI, Britain was quite willing to stay out of the initial move that Germany made into Alsace and Lorraine, but when Germany invaded Belgium as part of the Schliffen plan, Britain was obligated by an 1839 treaty (which Prussia was also a part of) to defend Belgium.
In World War II, Hitler tried every diplomatic subterfuge he could think of to detach Britain from France and Poland in 1939, but Chamberlain had been finally pushed too far by the Rhineland, the Anschluss of Austria, the Sudetenland, and the absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Hitler didn’t want a war with Britain—not at that moment—but he was willing to risk it.
}:-)4
He was wrong on Demjanjuk.
Currently Demjanjuk is awaiting extradition to Germany to stand trial for his crimes as a concentration camp guard at Sobibor.
Demjanjuk is a war criminal and an illegal immigrant.
Lindbergh running for President in 1932 is news to me, too. Nevermind he was only 30, too young to run, and add to that, I never heard that he was a Democrat. His father, Swedish-born Charles August Lindbergh, was an Isolationist Republican Congressman from MN (although he later became an early leader of the fledgling Farmer-Laborite party) and his father-in-law was the NJ Republican Senator Dwight Whitney Morrow (who served until his death in 1931).
Oh! That's certainly reasonable. No offense was intended by my comment; I have a hard time resisting the opportunity to be a wiseacre.
OK, I was wrong when I said he was right.
I accepted sobieski’s take on what happened after Demjanjuk fell off my radar.
Shoulda known better...
Me too. The kids say it’s going to get me killed one of these days.
They’re probably right.
Yes, but all those sites would warn people never to accept the word of a Jew on these things. These are secret organizations, after all.
Interestingly google has only 5 hits for "Supreme Rabbinical Court of the United States", and they're all on Freerepublic.
Moderate ? As in wait until the barbarians are at the gate ? His own writings and bizarre historical revisionism give him away. He went ‘round the bend a long time ago.
He wasn't about to become President anywhere, and his reputation was soiled by his admiration for and close association with the Reich.
We’ll die happy. Or at least smug.
I would have suggested 1933, with the newly created Dachau, which housed German political "dissidents", soon followed by the Nuremberg laws.
I was planning on dying laughing...
Pat is out of his mind with his Jew hating, and I'm one of his ex-defenders. Hitler was a madman. Does a normative diplomatic state enact the Einsatzgruppen, Auschwitz, and Treblinka? This is madness.
Even earlier than that. They were shooting Jews in Poland in late 1939, the ones that weren’t being walled up in the ghettos in places like Lodz and Warsaw. And yes, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been shot, or asphyxiated in gas trucks, by the SS Einsatzkommando groups in the months between June 1941 and the Wannsee conference.
Pat has this either/or thing going...he’s acting like he is totally forgetting what life must have been like in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 or 1941, even before the trains were rolling for Treblinka. By 1937, Jews in Germany were no longer citizens, but “subjects.” 50% were unemployed. Most professions were verboten to them. Yes, the Nazis were more interested in exporting Jews than they were killing them before the start of the war, but only because it was easier to just kick them out of the Reich after stealing all their property.
}:-)4
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