Nazi Apologists and Revisionist History

I challenged conservative historian Niall Ferguson’s misinterpretation of World War II’s cost below; Robin Burk added a great precis of Walzer on war afterwards.

But it takes one of the original idiotarians, Pat Buchanan, to misinterpret the end of that war.

Stephen Green shows Buchanan for the fool his arguments make him. My favorite line:

It took 40 years, but today Pat Buchanan hit bottom on the slippery slope from Young Turk conservative columnist to Nazi Apologist troglodyte.

14 thoughts on “Nazi Apologists and Revisionist History”

  1. Buchanan: why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

    It’s amazing insights like this that have made Pat Buchanan the leading theoretician of the anti-war movement. I submit that he surpasses even Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand. If he’d lived in the 1860s, we could have avoided the Civil War.

  2. The argument Buchanan makes is that if the UK and France hadn’t supported Poland than Germany would have attacked the USSR. Problem with that is that the West would than have supported Hitler and not Stalin with weapons and such as the communists were tought to be a much greater treat. Also Japan would never have entered the war under those circumstances and everything would have looked totally different. But if you make such an argument that you should atleast name the correct 11 countries that the Sovjets liberated. (they include Norway, Austria, Greece and Albania)

  3. Likely result: Hitlers wins from Stalin and “liberates” the USSR (of its people) and than turns around to attack/treat the West. In this situation the war would have cost even more people

  4. a: Pat really doesn’t predict what would have happened after Poland; he leaves the impression (to me at least) that maybe nothing would have happened. Certainly, he feels nothing of strategic significance had occurred once the Sudetenland and Poland had been invaded.

    Would you agree ’38 looks like a better year to start WWII in retrospect?

  5. PD,

    In 1935 appeasement was cowardice.

    In 1938 it was a stall for time.

    In 1941 America was hoping that Japan would not attack because America needed more time. For all of 1940 and most of 1941 American forces were repeatedly warned not to provoke Japan. A mind set was created.

    We had a similar mind set problem in America in the 90s. Every time Clinton said “Osama” the Republicans said “wag the dog” and then proceeded to “wag the dick”. The danger with the theocons is that they are very easily distracted.

  6. PD Shaw: Would you agree ’38 looks like a better year to start WWII in retrospect?

    One of the factors influencing Britain’s delay was the impending introduction of the Spitfire and the completion of coastal radar installations.

    If the Battle of Britain had been lost, we might have wound up fighting a decades-long Cold War against the Nazis.

    I wonder what side old Pat would have been on.

  7. Assume that the WWII was won in two movements, the first ended in 1945, the second in 1989. As Truman wisely pointed out, a Democracy can’t survive a seven years long (total) war. It is just too demanding to the capitalist system, it causes too many economic disturbances. Britain lost its Empire and slipped into Socialism after the war.

    Therefore the war had to be won in two legs, the first against the brown Nationalsocialism, the second against the red Socialism. As WWII ended there was a free Western Europe to be used as platform and model against the Soviet Union. Its grip over Eastern Europe wouldn’t be firm in front of these prosperous and free peoples. I think this was the strategic aim of the Normandy landing, preserve freedom in half Europe.

    Churchill and FDR were brave enough to tackle the problem.

  8. WWII will be won in three movements, the first ended in 1945, the second in 1991 but with still some unfinished business and the third will end around 2008 when the last American bases are closed in Europe and East Asia.

  9. a (#10), you are right, as I wrote my previous post I was thinking on a third movement: the fighting against Totalitarism, that lasted all the 20th century, will be over when Socialism is finally swept away from Europe, the continent that concieved it and fed its sons, Hitler and Stalin.

    On the issue about the bases I feel happy, as a Spaniard taxpayer, that we share the cost of huge facilities, such as Moron AFB and Rota, with the Americans. I think the Navy also enjoys Rota because its Fleet and Air Wing are based there, and it seems that they like the Americans because they bought all its equipment, from AEGIS systems to SH-60 helicopters from them.

    I know, it is insulting, isn’t it?

  10. Funny the take on Buchanan I see here.

    The core thing I think Buchanan misses is Hitlers second book, his Mien Kamph part two as it were.

    But never the less, its true, Yalta was a disgrace.

    A Disgrace we might not have been able to do much about, our tanks was not even a match for the german ones, much less the Russian tank that tore up Germanys ,, often times by running into them.

    (The Russians would litterally disable German tanks by ramming the rear quarter at an angle, breaking the rear drive wheel and peeling its track off.)

    As for the Bomb, yeah we had it, but also had a Uranium shortage, we only had the one more at the time, and without the German Uranium was captured on the way to Japan, would not have had that one.

    But let there be no doubt, With Communist Spy Alger Hiss in FDR’s ear, Churchill perhaps not in the best barganing position, Never the less, Yalta signed off some 30 Million to their doom, and the survior populations to leftist hell on earth.

    bq. only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest:
    Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.
    the railway-yards Were asylums of the mad;
    Short were the locomotives? Farewell songs.
    Stars of death stood Above us,
    and innocent Russia Writhed under bloodstained boots,
    and Under the tires of Black Marias.
    — Anna Akhmatova

  11. btw, good synopis of the book “here”:http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/hsb.htm

    Basically, PJB is wrong we would not be in war with Germany eventually, a much stronger Germany, with Russian and Romanian Oil and war factories out of reach of bombs, but perhaps not the USA

    The ICBM Nuke, that only Germany (and Japan) would have Had. Both Russia and the USA got all our rocket tech From Germany, Remember ? the space race was our Germans, against Theirs.

    So, sorry Pat, But your wrong.

  12. Raymond:
    There was a uranium shortage, but at that point the Hanford plutonium production reactors were coming on line. It seems v. likely to me that one of the reasons for pursuing the plutonium fuelled bomb was that it could be deployed faster in numbers if required for an extended bombing campaign and tactical use against Japan (or Germany, a little earlier).

    If it had been certain that only one or two bombs would be needed to win the war, it is possible that the uranium fuelled design alone would have been pursued. And no Trinity test: that was needed to proove the plutonium design; the uranium design was never tested because it did not need to be, it was always certain to work.

    Problem was, even with atomic bombs, in the 1940’s the US would have had little chance of short-term military success in E. Europe, and trouble holding the West. And the UK was close to economic collapse.

    Buchanan, beside any moral misperception, misses the strategic point that post-1945 US faced a threat whose leadership was more rational about self-preservation than the Nazis and which did not control the idustrial/technical potential of W. Europe or have an Atlantic seaboard.
    And for the people of Eastern Europe, the crucial difference that Stalin and his sucessors wanted, at base, to rule them. Hitler wanted to exterminate them.
    In any case, if we are talking alternative history, would Hitler have ever engaged in war with the USSR without securing his western flank one way or another? This was one of the calculations made by Britain and France in 1939 (and missed at points before then): if war is unavoidable, best start now.

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