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."
Charming
A year or so more of war and the Holocaust would have “never happened”.
Ever read “Fatherland”?
You have no idea...
Expect a Pat Buchanan Article called “The Really, Really Unnecessary War”, in which he blames Churchill for getting all those poor German and Russian soldiers killed. The British swine.
This was WFB's conclusion in that epic issue of NR (it was Joe Sobran he determined to be truly anti-semetic). However, I think his tendency to be controversial where this topic is concerned stems as much from a compulsion to stick his thumb in his critics eyes. And of course make a few bucks in the process.
Too bad 'cause he undermines his own positions on other topics where his powers of persuation might do some good.
PAt is either extremely ignorant or a revisionist liar who assumes his readers to be ignorant. He also forgot the Austro-Prussian war.
I am not going to deny that there were self-hating former Jews in the Communist movement. There were far to meany, and I hope taht they are all buring in hell. However the point is taht they hated Jews and Judaism and their purported Jewishness was only an excuse from the Antisemites.
I remember when Sobran was writing for NR. He was a great writer. I understand, sadly, he’s a very bad lush. I’m not sure why he’s an anti-semite. I wonder if guys like him and Buchanan just think they’re so smart they can prove anything controversial. And, maybe, because the number of Paleocon Jews is so small they’re just mad at all Jews. I don’t know. But the bottom line for me on Pat is it this. Indifference to anti-semitism is unacceptable, and Pat surely is willing to cause a lot of pain with his crazy theories about Hitler. It’s hardly a Christian feeling he has for the Jews any time he discuss them and their suffering. In fact, he seems to think Holocaust has all been a hoot he can profit from.
You overlooked Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against our ships. But Pat probably didn’t mind that they were killing Americans on ships and sink our cargo. After all, the Kaiser had to defend himself. And President Wilson, Pat would reason, was a Democrat, and in Pat’s mind possibly a Jew.
Why should we want a European Army? The EU/Eurabia is the instrument of destroying European cultures.
What? Lieberman is talking about the non-Israeli Arabs of the disputed territories, not Israel-Arab citizens of Israel. Get some knowledge.
Ooh, a "palaeo" troll got banned.
Sounded like he thought Yassir Arafat and the PLO were the most anti-Soviet forces in the entire universe, didn't he?
This fact is so often overlooked in all the "Jewish international banker" nonsense one reads and hears. It should be shouted from the housetops!
The Germans put Lenin in Russia so he could take power and pull Russia out of the war, enabling Germany to fight a one front war in the west. Strange that so many "anti-Communists" are Germanolators.
Joe Sobran makes Pat Buchanan sound like Abe Foxman (granted, that's not a good thing). And he's another one of those American "palaeos" who have latched on to anarcho-libertarianism despite the fact that his European counterparts were very, very statist.
And, maybe, because the number of Paleocon Jews is so small they’re just mad at all Jews.
Actually, there are two kinds of Jewish "palaeos" and there are lots of both of them. Unfortunately, since these two groups are Orthodox Jews and rightwing Zionists, our "palaeos" don't like them.
All we can do is look at the spirit of the times and say things like, perhaps, "What is the proper treatment of the loser by the victor? Punishment, rehabilitation, or something else?" "Was the Shoah inevitable, since anti-Semitism is an old and deeply rooted hatred, or could Germany have been so treated during the interregnum that a Hitler never would have arisen?"
I have read this book twice, and I see not an iota of anti-Semitism in it. Buchanan seems, rather, to mourn the Holocaust and to be looking for ways we could have avoided it. The review I read in the New York Sun seemed to be dragging in anti-Semitism from his other writings and his views on immigration to make him out to be a racist. I have seen plenty of anti-Semitic quotes from Buchanan, but nothing in this book.
It is the historical might-have-been nature of the argument that is all wrong, the lack of any stepping back and looking at the larger questions. Mistakes of the past can be used to learn from in the present, but reconstructing what could have been is nothing but a game that can never have a definitive answer and so tells us nothing.
Rabbi Antelman sounds like a whackjob, and I have never heard of anyone else who shares these bizarre opinions. BTW is he the same guy who registered patents and claims to have a cure for AIDS?
I do not know.
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