How anyone can ignore all of the evidence that Hitler was planning for war from the beginning is beyond me...
The British Empire had already been in decline for a long while before Churchill.
Frankly I suspect Pat believes he is initiating an argument by analogy against the West and its fight against Islam. I expect him to side with Islam. Nothing would surprise me these days.
It is not true that Prussia only acquired those provinces from Denmark and France in the period 1864-1871. Much more significantly, Prussia also absorbed much of the rest of Germany when Bismarck created the German Empire.
Obviously, Buchanan ignores everything that happened to Jews in the 1930s.
Also, the Holocaust was begun in earnest in 1941 by the Einsatzkommando before Wannsee took place.
What does Pat say about Lucky Lindy?
Pat Buchanan is a piece of excrement.
Pat is insane.
Through the looking glass of Hitler, WW1 is seen as a righteous war, just like WW2. That is a colossal error. WW1 was a massive waste of life that nobody should have been involved in except the AH Empire and the Serbs.
That is, without question, the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Hitler spelled out his whole like that he thought the Germans needed lebensraum in the east.
It is true, Hitler didn't want war with France and GB, but only because he didn't want to fight a two front war. Maybe at the time he thought he'd be happy never fighting France and GB, but, could France and GB possibly have taken that chance?
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.
By the way, Churchill’s biggest failing I have never seen discussed except by me:
I am reminded watching Croatia vs. Turkey on TV right now that Turkey is in the “Euro 2008” contest.
Why? Because the Ottomans, who had taken Constantinople from the Byzantines, were allowed to hold onto it, and to their toe-hold into Europe.
The Ottomans had no ability whatsoever to hold the European part of Turkey, and we should have Conquered it. Churchill was cool with letting them keep it.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
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Pure lies. The Einsatzgruppen were actively slaughtering Jews in Russia and Poland from the beginning. The only issue was that shooting them was too slow. The camps were just an effort at efficiencies.
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.
Say what you will about Pat’s theory, it is more reasonable than the common schoolbook notion that Hitler started WWII out of irrational hatred for the Jews.
But more -- for second guessing history is very close to second guessing G-d.
After all, every thing happened for a reason.
But more -- say you hire an expert. The expert gives you explicit and clear advice. I do not mean any yokel expert. I mean a real true-blue, salt-of-the-earth, wise, learned, caring and careful, well-spoken, incredibly experienced expert. You then second guess him. That's foolish! Why did you waste your money hiring an expert in the first place?
Yet History is a guidebook prepared by such an expert. Second-guessing it is NOT learning from it.