Patrick J. Buchanan recently published “Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” in an attempt to rewrite the history behind World War II… an unnecessary war?? In this book Buchanan put the blame of the human tragedy squarely where it belonged– on the Brits(?)
Historian Victor Davis Hanson read the book and wrote a scathing review on Buchanan’s scary revisionism- “The Bad War?”
Buchanan should have taken the licking and quit then but he didn’t. He responded with a hit piece on VDH- “PJB: The ‘Good War’ and the Terrible Peace.“
This weekend, Victor Davis Hanson rebutted Buchanan’s rebuttal with– “Patrick J. Buchanan—Pseudo-Historian, Very Real Dissimulator.” Hanson produced Buchanan’s column and then commented on each paragraph.
Here is part of the discussion:
Victor Davis Hanson: Britain declared war because for years Hitler had serially violated all of its WWI and international agreements, dismembered Czechoslovakia, and revealed the true nature of Nazi global aggrandizement as outlined years before in Mein Kampf.
Patrick J. Buchanan: What were the consequences for Poland of trusting in Britain? Crucifixion on a Nazi-Soviet cross, the Katyn massacre of the Polish officer corps, Treblinka and Auschwitz, annihilation of the Home Army, millions of brave Polish dead, half a century of Bolshevik terror.
Victor Davis Hanson:This is reprehensible. Now British military weakness is blamed for Auschwitz, rather than the innate sinister nature of Nazism? Does Buchanan believe that had Britain not tried to stop Hitler, the death camps would have never occurred? Does he know of the prewar Nazi precursors to the Final Solution, the geneses of which were clear from Germany’s own treatment of its chronically ill and mentally disturbed?
Patrick J. Buchanan: And how did Churchill honor Britain’s commitment to Poland? During trips to Moscow, Churchill bullied the Polish prime minister into ceding to Stalin that half of his country Stalin had gotten from his devil’s pact with Hitler, and yielded to Stalin’s demand for annexation of the Baltic republics and Bolshevik rule of a dozen nations of Eastern and Central Europe.
Victor Davis Hanson: Churchill distrusted Stalin, but by 1943 understood that a weak British Empire had no leverage at all against Stalin’s 400 divisions. Again in hindsight Churchill can be made to look illiberal, but given the realities of the times, there was no one more suspicious of the ally Stalin, or more sympathetic to the Poles.
Patrick J. Buchanan: Was it worth 50 million dead, Hanson, so Stalin, whose victims, as of Sept. 1, 1939, were 1,000 times Hitler’s, could occupy not only Poland, for which Britain went to war, but all of Christian Europe to the Elbe?
Victor Davis Hanson: How odd that the allies are indirectly blamed for the Holocaust, as if its seeds were not innate to Nazism.
Buchanan is getting scary.
The fact that he is still paraded around as a legitimate conservative voice is outrageous.
If he wants to sympathize with the Nazis– fine.
But, conservatives need to stay away from him.
Ed Morrissey wrote more on Buchanan’s latest book.
