Posted on 06/03/2008 7:57:46 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
When President Bush, before the Knesset, used the word "appeasement" to label those who would negotiate with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he invoked the most powerful analogy in any debate over war and peace.
No man wishes to be regarded as an "appeaser."
But, as this writer has discovered since my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World" was launched Memorial Day, there is a deep well of ignorance about what happened that September, 70 years ago.
Why did Neville Chamberlain go to Munich? How did Munich lead to World War II?
The seeds of the crisis were planted at the Paris peace conference of 1919. There, the victorious Allies carved the new nation of Czechoslovakia out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
But instead of following their principle of self-determination, the Allies placed under the rule of 7 million Czechs 3 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 150,000 Poles and 500,000 Ruthenians. These foolish decisions spat upon Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, under the terms of which the Germans, Austrians and Hungarians had laid down their arms.
By 1938, Germany had arisen, re-armed and brought Austria into the Reich, and was demanding the right of self-determination now be granted to the 3 million Germans in Czechoslovakia, who were clamoring to be free of Prague to rejoin their kinsmen.
Britain had no alliance with, and no obligation to fight for, the Czechs. But France did. And Britain feared that if Adolf Hitler used force to bring the Sudeten Germans back to German rule, France might fight. And if France declared war, Britain would be drawn in, and a second bloodbath would ensue as it had in 1914.
Chamberlain went to Munich because he did not believe that keeping 3 million Germans inside...
(Excerpt) Read more at postchronicle.com ...
A book that is so completely inaccurate from a Historian's point of view that it qualifies Pat as a revisionist fantasist rather then a revisionist historian.
Pat's book was a pathetic attempt to justify his hyper ignorant modern Isolationist political dogmas. He failed to get even the simplest facts correct in his desperation to write an apology for his current political cowardice about confronting Radical Islam.
Yes. Hitler was awfully misunderstood. He had no designs on any other country, he was forced into whatever he did.
Or not.
Pat needs a vacation from something.
Western Europe has (fairly) sharp lines of distinction between ethnies. Central and Eastern Europe do not.
Any possible boundary line drawn would have left significant minority populations under the rule of other nation-states.
A purely Czech state (if such a line had been possible to draw, which it wasn't) would have had a population of 7M surrounded on three sides by 80M Germans, and without even any defensible borders.
The ethnic mixing in Europe today is a lot less than in 1919, but that's due to extensive ethnic cleansing of Germans, especially at the end of and following WWII.
If at Versailles all Germans were to have been included in the German nation-state, it would have had to extend from the Rhine to the Urals.
Pat has become such an idiot.
Pat Buchanan, apologist for Adolf Hitler
Who knew that Hitler was just the misunderstood champion of justice, freedom, and the Germanic Way?
Revisionist History PING.
Sure. Like Hitler wouldn’t have gone to war to get what he wanted at some point. He just wouldn’t have gone for open war till he thought he had more loose ends tied up if he hadn’t been forced. Probably forcing him to go to war before he was ready economically was the right thing, looking back.
It’s certainly not what this guy says.
Granted that Czechoslovakia was not a model democracy, that the Versailles conference created a mess. But the point is Hitler. He knew what he wanted.
As to war, it turned like many wars, on certain events, such as the Allies finding out the original German plan for war. Like the boldness of the new plan which sent armor into the Ardennes.
PS. And the time to stop Hitler would have been before the forced joining of Germany and Austria, when Italy would have joined England and France and Germany was still weak.
Look for Buchanan to endorse Obama. Pat may dislike various things about Hussein, but antisemitism is the drug that unites them.
Buchanan has long ago ceased to be even interesting.
Buchanan tries to re-write the run-up to WWII, and he draws some silly conclusions. The war was going to be inevitable at some point. We could have acted early, and maybe it would have been over more quickly, with less loss of life.
Fast-forward to the Iraq situation - and early action was taken rather than risk Saddam developing WMDs and giving them to terrorists. He already had a reputation for developing and using WMDs - against Iran and his own people. Had President Bush not acted in 2003, perhaps we would have lost a city or two, and had a far more serious problem.
It sounds like Pat Buchanan would have preferred that Pres. Bush had done a “Chamberlain” and kicked the can down the road til it got worse! That’s not what he said, but that is the proper inference that can be drawn.
Buchanan is making a preposterous historical argument.
It is clear from history that successful conquests are made by those who are determined to pull them off and have the vision and sheer audacity to dominate the weak totally. Almost always, it is driven by one or few leaders with this vision.
He doesn't have to take OUR word for what Hitler was thinking. He can read the guy's own words.
Historically Pat's analysis of both WW 1 what caused WW 2 is trite simplistic nonsense.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/hitler-obersalzberg.html
Guess Pat figures Hitler did not mean any of this huh?
Colonel-General von Brauchitsch has promised me to bring the war against Poland to a close within a few weeks. Had he reported to me that he needs two years or even only one year, I should not have given the command to march and should have allied myself temporarily with England instead of Russia for we cannot conduct a long war. To be sure a new situation has arisen. I experienced those poor worms Daladier and Chamberlain in Munich. They will be too cowardly to attack. They won't go beyond a blockade. Against that we have our autarchy and the Russian raw materials.
Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans. My pact with the Poles was merely conceived of as a gaining of time. As for the rest, gentlemen, the fate of Russia will be exactly the same as 1 am now going through with in the case of Poland. After Stalin's death-he is a very sick man-we will break the Soviet Union. Then there will begin the dawn of the German rule of the earth.
The little States cannot scare me. After Kemal’s [i.e. Ataturk] death Turkey is governed by cretins and half idiots. Carol of Roumania is through and through the corrupt slave of his sexual instincts. The King of Belgium and the Nordic kings are soft jumping jacks who are dependent upon the good digestions of their over-eating and tired peoples.
” the Allies placed under the rule of 7 million Czechs 3 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 150,000 Poles and 500,000 Ruthenians. These foolish decisions spat upon Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points”
This is plain stupid. These regions were, like all Eastern Europe, inextricably mixed up. There are (or in many cases, were) minority populations everywhere. There were lots of Germans in Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, etc., along with Czechoslovakia. They couldn’t be extracted from the local majority nationalities without “ethnic cleansing”.
Wilsons 14 points did not require ethnic purity or ethnic cleansing, merely the self-determination by majority rule.
Buchanan is a twit.
Didn’t Mein Kampf outline Hitlers plans back in the 1920’s?
The folklore is that the allies “created” Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia at Versailles.
The reality is that the Paris Peace conference merely gave official recognition to states that had already come into being on their own.
Also only the treaty with Germany was “The Versailles Treaty”. All the others did not get this appellation.
To my mind, the issue in deciding whether to go into Iraq when we did was whether continued delay would be to our advantage or disadvantage. It's quite possible that we could have put off war for another ten years, but I don't think we could have put it off indefinitely. Suppose we had perfect information that if left alone, Iraq would cause us no problems for fifteen years, but in the sixteenth year it would nuke one of our cities. Even knowing that Iraq would leave us alone for 15 years, I could still see reasons for going in now if there was no indication that any future time would be better.
Buchanan has been partaking of the magic mushrooms. His assertion is asinine on its face. He would have us believe that the only reason Hitler began to round up and murder Jews was because the UK made a war pact with Poland?
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