In the world of nickcarraway ...
(1) It is irrelevant that millions of Poles lost their lives and that two countries, not one, ravaged Poland, and that Poland lost its independence for fifty years, and that the British war guarantee that was the occasion of the whole conflict was worthless, and that FDR and Churchill acknowledged the demise of Poland at the Yalta conference.
(2) Buchanan never argues anywhere in the book that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were “just.”
(3) Buchanan argues that it was the British war guarantee, which happened to be worthless, that caused the war.
(4) As Buchanan points out, it was the British war guarantee that inspired Hitler’s alliance with Stalin.
(5) A rather unfortunate position! Quite an understatement, don’t you think?
Once again, the worst case scenario unfolded in Poland - the death of millions, the annihilation of its cities, the murder of its elite, the loss of independence for half a century - because of the foolishness of its own leaders and the foolishness of the British government.
(6) No one is trying to “vindicate” Hitler or Stalin except in your own imagination. Winston Churchill was a warmongering fool who destroyed the British Empire. That’s the argument.
Poland would have been better off if it had never taken that stupid war guarantee and if it had ceded Danzig to Germany. How many millions of Poles would be alive today if Poland’s leaders had chartered a wiser course? How many Germans? How many Europeans?
Danzig was a free city, not part of Poland, and it was undemocratically controlled by Nazis after 1933. You might as well asked why Poland didn't cede control of Jupiter.
Since Nazis already controlled Danzig in 1939, when they invaded Poland, it was obviously a nonsensical pretext to invade Poland. Don't you get that? They were taking Danzig, which was already controlled by an nonDemocratic Nazi government, they were taking Poland.