Posted on 06/23/2008 6:37:50 PM PDT by mnehring
Ravine at Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine - September, 1941
That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. “Mein Kampf” is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
The quote above is from Patrick J. Buchanan arguing the case for his new book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. Buchanan’s revisionism is startling regarding The Final Solution, the Wansee Conference of 1942 and the intent of Hitler and the Third Reich to murder every last Jew within their grasp.
He now contends Hitler and the Nazi high command never intended to murder Jews, Gypsies, Polish Catholics, homosexuals, physically handicapped people and others until the meeting at Wansee in 1942 and insinuates it was Churchill’s strategic blunders that forced poor Adolph into drastic measures. But there are problems, big problems with the truth in this book because even the chronology is uncooperative with Buchanan’s thesis.
The photo above, depicting Nazi SS soldiers waist-deep in corpses, is of a ravine into which 34,000 Jews were herded and shot point blank with machine guns over a 48 hour period many months before the Wansee Conference at Berlin was held to discuss The Final Solution in late January of 1942. There were an additional 66,000 Gypsies, Communists and Soviet POWs murdered in and around Kiev in the same month. Additionally, a report from a senior officer dated December 1, 1941 details the annihilation of all Jews in Lithuania among other places. The total to that date: 137,346 murdered Jewish men, women, children and infants.
Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.
I point out the above facts and glaring deliberate misinformation peddled by Buchanan as only an example of the the dangerous and willful distortion of history by those who desire to alter the record and obfuscate factual evidence which has been documented time after time regarding the Holocaust. Somehow, all these facts are inconvenient to Buchanan’s little shop of errors and his dissumulations and denials in the aftermath. Whatever shred of tolerance existed for Buchanan in this writer’s mind is no longer there and has been replaced with utter and unqualified contempt.
Buchanan found time, between his daily appearances as the resident and token, caricature conservative on MSNBC, to provide the holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers with new ammunition for their cause. He has been retailing this nonsense his entire life. When, in 1991, Buchanan made bald anti-Semitic comments on the McLaughlin Report, Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times and major Jewish organizations rose up in arms about his statements. There ensued a battle which culminated in William F. Buckley penning an essay, 35 pages in length and published as a special edition of National Review, discussing anti-Semitism among writers and intellectuals in America and Buchanan in particular. Mr. Buckley ended his long and rambling discourse thus:
And we are left with the question of how to train the moral faculties to distinguish between those whose anti-Israel positions evolve (whether or not they know it) from anti-Semitic impulses, and those anti-Israelis unaffected by the Jewishness of the Israeli nation. I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.
The eminent historian, classicist and author, Victor Davis Hanson, criticized Buchanan’s new book only to be met with the author’s bilious hostility. Hanson responded here. Last Friday, Buchanan published the column I cite in the beggining of this post. Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, found the column to be so offensive he has banned Townhall.com from being quoted or linked on his website.
I knew we would miss Bill Buckley and this reprehensible episode only confirms just how valuable he was when it came to muting or banishing the thugs, the racists and the prevaricators from the Conservative movement in America.
ping
Pat needs to spend more time on the Islamists, and quit trying to rewrite history ...
Buchanon is the Nazi the left always said he was. What a stinkin’ creep.
You know he lost an uncle at Auschwitz.
Yep, he fell out of the guard tower!
Pat Buchanan does well these days because anti-Semitism is back in fashion, particularly on the left. American Jews fight anti-Semitism on the right a lot harder than they do on the left. They are largely left friendly and that will work, right up to the time they start loading the cattle cars again.
Citing the historical fact on the atrocities on a mass scale is sufficient in dissembling Buchanan’s thesis. His proposal that the war itself gave an air of permission for the slaughter is a theory that will never measure up to the reality of the actions taken by the Nazis prior to the timeline he’s suggesting.
Branding him for bad historical recounting is fine but making a suggestion that he is somehow formenting bigotry is another. It doesn’t seem necessary to disagree with the premise of his book.
He was correct on the emotionalism surrounding the hunt for anyone who had been affiliated with the Nazis in the US Justice Department. The Demjanjuk case comes to mine where people in the 80s could point at someone and condemn them for being somewhere they had never been.
Just a declaration of their having murderous eyes was enough.
But Buchanan may have been correct on the zealousness of those cases. But his book doesn’t hold up on its prima facie case.
The butchery by the Nazis when they invaded the Soviet Union and their designation of Jews, Slavs, Negroes, etc. as inferior is more than enough of a warning in retrospect to see what they had in mind.
There was a good movie taking the documentation of the Final Solution action that rendered the officers involved but the title escapes me.
If the date of Babi Yar preceded Pat’s timeline, his book is a failure of simple fact checking and destroys its very premise.
Just for clarification, you are implying prior to 42, right?
I read Pat’s book and then read the tone of this post and the contributers to this thread and just based on that I’d say the chances of Pat being much more right are very high.
The anti-Paters sound hysterical.
How so?
Cute, but stupid too, that post. Antipater, eh?
Correct.
The mass killings began as soon as the Nazis invaded Poland, but the intent - if even subconscious - was implicit all along.
Correct.
The mass killings began as soon as the Nazis invaded Poland, but the intent - if even subconscious - was implicit all along.
LOL!!!!
Pat Buchanan also claims Hitler did not plan on attacking Great Britain because he did not build a surface fleet to take on the British fleet.
However, in Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich, Shirer talks about German memos documenting plans to have a fleet of some sort (may be subs) ready to go in 1941 to attack England. Hitler jumped the gun in August 1939 because he did not believe England and France would fight for the Poles.
He was right too! The Phony War was called that for a reason.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Years later I discovered that Pat Buchanan had things to say along the same lines.
It's enough that Buchanan doesn't hold a candle to Hitler when it comes to anti-semitic intent and tone, but he's in there trying eh!
Mein Kampf was written a terribly long time before the Final Solution got really pumped up, but once the Nazi party got in charge of Germany they started executing the handicapped, mentally retarded, et al ~ those they described as having "lives not worth living". It only got worse.
The accepted standard is that the Weimar Republic set the stage for the pre-war Nazi atrocities. Experience there made it all the more easy for the Nazis to murder the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles and anybody else who got in their way, or that they thought got in their way, or whose existence called into question the Nazi idea of the Aryan "superman".
I think the accepted standard is still in play. Buchanan's deviations from that standard suggest he has some antipathy toward Jews.
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