Posted on 05/21/2008 6:49:34 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Last week we noted the bizarre arguments of Seattle Times editorial writer Bruce Ramsey, who tried so hard to defend Barack Obama against President Bush’s “appeasement” speech that he actually ended up defending Hitler for annexing Austria. His exact words were: “What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable.”
If you think that’s an ahistorical pretzel of monumental proportions, though, you ain’t seen nothin’ — because here comes Pat Buchanan. According to old Pat, not only was the Anchluss not a problem, Hitler’s invasion of Poland was also perfectly understandable, given the Poles’ refusal to negotiate.
Those darned stubborn Poles were responsible for starting World War II, according to Pat: Bush Plays the Hitler Card.
German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson’s 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.
Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.
But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.
From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.
The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.
i never did like pat pukannan
and this substantiates it.
Ping.
Give Pat a break, someone has to defend Hitler’s attack on Poland. Poles were a little better than Jews, deserving of enslavement rather than death, but that’s about it.
Amazing. So, Pat thinks that if only the Poles had given up Danzig, Herr Hitler would have tended his garden quietly, painted some water colors, and stood as a bulwark against Bolshevism? Just as Barry is thinking, “If only those stubborn Israelis would go back to the 1967 borders.” Troublesome Poles, stubborn Israelis, darn those people who refuse to negotiate at gunpoint.
GAS BAG PAT ALERT!
Pat is impossible to defend when he says things like this. He still thinks Hitler would have been no problem to the US if he had taken Russia. Never the mind their planes would have been in striking distance of North American cities.
Don't tempt me. I could end up doing time. ;)
Hmmmmm.... Pat makes Hitler look like a good guy.
Of course, by his logic, we should give LA back to Mexico.
Pat Buchanan is a not so crypto-nazi.
Der fuhrer never called anybody baby bump
Pat Buchanan is a discruntled pedant who never recovered from the collapse of his brief flicker of fame as another “maverick” presidential candidate.
Unbelieveable revisionist history, to say that the Polish refusal to negotiate with Hitler caused World War 2 and the loss of millions of lives and destruction of much of Europe.
History shows us that Hitler had made many other demands and moves previous to that. Among those were:
militarization of the Rhineland
occupation of Austria
occupation of the Sudetenland(sp) in Czechoslovakia(sp)
occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia
By the time Hitler wanted Danzig, it appeared that there was no end to his demands, and that a line had to be drawn somewhere. His invasion of Poland confirmed that he would simply use force if anyone tried to stop him.
Granted, at the time, some thought negotiations with Hitler could avoid war. Neville Chamberlain thought so. But in the hindsight of the history of World War 2, it seems laughable for someone to say, if only Poland had done this or that, the war and bloodshed and disaster would have been averted. In dealing with a madman such as Hitler, it’s doubtful that the war could have been avoided. If Poland had indeed given up Danzig, the war would simply have started over another territory.
Why of course not. It would be silly to assume that just because he invaded Poland meant he wanted war. We all know how much Hitler loved peace and hated war. < /s>
Honestly, I think both Jimmy Carter and Pat Buchanan are suffering from age-related dementia, and that certain sinister operatives are shrewdly taking advantage of this.
Theoretically, the Poles could have jumped in bed with AH, joined in the attack on USSR and been OK. In reality, this was not an option.
The Polish nation was too large and powerful to allow an independent existence, given Nazi racial obsessions. This can readily be seen by the fact that Poland was the only conquered country where no puppet regime was allowed to exist.
In the Nazi mind, Poland had to be destroyed, not subjugated.
Pat lost all his marbles.
We haven't? I've not been there in a while.
Second point to make is that I recall when the Liberals called Buch a secret Hitler admirer. I and others defended him at the time. The Libs were right for once, the verdict is in now.
This hit my email yesterday, and all I could think was that the anti-semite Pat was baaaacckkkkk!
He’ll have a couple of good articles, and then he’ll have another that sounds like a throwback to him and Dick Nixon griping in the oval office about the jooooos
Exactly, because the Poles were to be enslaved rather than killed. And Albert Speer had some wonderful plans for housing developments in Poland.
"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
A little learning is a dangerous thing," wrote Alexander Pope.
Daily, our 43rd president testifies to Pope's point.
Addressing the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's birth, Bush said those who say we should negotiate with Iran or Hamas are like the fools who said we should negotiate with Adolf Hitler.
"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement. ..."
Appeasement is the name given to what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in September 1938. Rather than fight Germany in another great war -- to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised -- he agreed to their peaceful transfer to German rule. With these Germans went the lands their ancestors had lived upon for centuries, German Bohemia, or the Sudetenland.
Chamberlain's negotiated deal with Hitler averted a European war -- at the expense of the Czech nation. That was appeasement.
German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson's 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.
Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.
But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.
From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.
The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.
In that same speech to the Knesset, Bush dismissed the idea we could ever successfully negotiate with Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran:
"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them that they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before."
But did not Ronald Reagan's negotiations with the Evil Empire, as he rebuilt America's military might, bear fruit in a reversal of Moscow's imperial policy and an end to the Cold War?
Richard Nixon went to China and toasted the greatest mass murderer of them all, Mao Zedong, when Maoists were conducting a nationwide purge: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Yet, Nixon ended a quarter century of implacable U.S.-Chinese hostility. Was Nixon's trip to China useless?
Three years after Nikita Khrushchev drowned the Hungarian revolution in blood, Ike had him up to Camp David. John Kennedy ended the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, by negotiating with that same Butcher of Budapest.
Were Ike, JFK and Nixon all deluded fools? For the dictators they negotiated with -- Khrushchev and Mao -- were far greater mass murderers and enemies of America than is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Bush's father negotiated with Syria's Hafez al-Assad, the Butcher of Hama, and made him an American ally in the Gulf War.
Was President Bush's father a deluded fool?
The president's own diplomats negotiated an end to the nuclear program of Col. Gadhafi, who was responsible for the air massacre of American school kids over Lockerbie.
Bush's own diplomats are negotiating with Kim Jong-il's North Korea, a state sponsor of terror. Ambassador Ryan Crocker is negotiating with Iranians in Baghdad. Egypt is negotiating on behalf of Israel with Hamas to retrieve a captured Israeli soldier. Are they all deluded fools?
Bush refused to talk to Yasser Arafat because he was a terrorist. But four Israeli prime ministers negotiated with Arafat. Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin shared a Nobel Prize with him. "Bibi" Netanyahu ceded Hebron to him. Ehud Olmert offered him 95 percent of the West Bank.
Were all four Israeli leaders deluded fools?
True, the Chamberlain-Hitler summit at Munich proved a disaster, as did the FDR-Churchill-Stalin summits at Tehran and Yalta, and the JFK-Khrushchev summit in Vienna. But JFK's diplomacy in the missile crisis may have averted a nuclear war. And Eisenhower, Nixon, Gerald Ford and Reagan all met with foreign dictators with blood on their hands, without loss to America, and sometimes with impressive gains.
What has Bush's refusal to talk to Hamas, Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran done to make either Israel or America more secure?
Here is your hero.
You're historical reminders are spot on. WWII started long before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. Here's a few other facts to add to those you already posted:
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931.
Italy invaded Ethopia in 1935.
Japan invaded China in 1937.
That is a thought provoking list you have created.
Just imagine, those poor unfortunate Rhinelanders Sudeteners, Austrians and Danzigers being ripped from the decade old bosom of the League of Nations.
Only to be repatriated to the nation in which they had spent the last two millenia..
Is Buchanan going nuts?? (or maybe I just didn’t know him all along)
Everything Buchanan says is a justification of Hitler’s actions. So Hitler was reasonable, and everyone else was mean and nasty to him? Buchanan is an idiot with no real knowledge of history. He just makes things up as he goes along. There is no question that Hitler wanted to conquer Poland for the benefit of the German nation. That is an historical fact. For Buchanan to say that Hitler was a rational man who would have been happy over negotiations over Danzig is ludicrous. Buchanan certainly has a unique view of history.
The Sudetenland and Austria had never been part of the German nation. Germany itself was not created until the 1870’s. And the League of Nations had nothing to do with it. Both Austria and the Sudetenland were part of the Hapsburg possessions.
No one should be surprised that Pat forgets his usual slippery rhetorical methods and comes halfway out of his closet once in a while. It’s really interesting to me, though, that his propaganda support continues to come from globalist import business: self-perceived citizens of the world. For so long, he’s pretended to be a protectionist in order to fool readers about his service to fascists (who prefer business with communist nations).
This is nothing new. I remember Pat making the same convoluted justifications for Hitler in the ‘80s.
“But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.”
Sounds like Pat simply made the point that Poland was emboldened because of Chamberlain's war guarantee. Much ado about nothing. Now let's turn it into a 200 post thread.
I am not here to defend Buchanan, but you are a lying scoundrel.
Let us start from definitions.
v. jus·ti·fied, jus·ti·fy·ing, jus·ti·fies v.tr.
1. To demonstrate or prove to be just, right, or valid;
2. To declare free of blame; absolve.
Where does Buchanen "justify" Hitler? His article is about negotiation. He explains the disasterous consequence to Poland of thinking that it was negotiating (or refusing to negotiate) from a position of strength which it did not have.
Just to be clear what explain means:
ex·plain (k-spln) v. ex·plained, ex·plain·ing, ex·plains v.tr.
1. To make plain or comprehensible.
2. To define; expound: We explained our plan to the committee.
3.
a. To offer reasons for or a cause of; justify: explain an error.
b. To offer reasons for the actions, beliefs, or remarks of (oneself).
It seems that we are the two trying to hold out for some basic standards of intellectual honesty on this thread. Is the problem that folks can’t read, that they can’t think, or that they are just swindlers and cheats? How do they claim to distinguish themselves from liberals if this is what passes for discrimination on this forum?
I think what Pat points out is that the sole "honorable" act was distinguished by being the most foolish thing that Chamberlain ever could have done, the promise being so far removed from what he was capable of delivering. Even Plato distinguishes between a brave and noble tactical retreat and a foolhardy standing one's ground against overwhelming force.
Since when did FReepers put knee-jerk emotion over facts and logic?
When you lose a war the winner get to decide what territory you get to keep.
Pat’s wrong, by his standard every country that was ever punished by lost territory should wage war to get it back if the new owners of said property don’t negotiate to get it back.
It has been going on for quite a while. It is very very sad to watch. The vanguard of conservatism is slipping into some very sloppy habits.
Pat states this prescription exactly where?
btt
Maybe the Poles saw what happen to Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement. That is the reason Chamberlain gave up appeasement and GB along with France backed Poland
There was no two millenia Germany
That part of Europe was a bunch of petty dukedoms and minor Kingdoms until first Napoleon, then Prussia "unified" it.
Second, while it is all well and good to point out that Charberlain changed is view of the effectiveness of appeasement, his policy towards Poland was irrelevant, since he lacked the means to back up his policies and promises. This irresponsible act merely encouraged Poland to commit political suicide.
Furthermore, learning from history requires a clear-eyed, honest understanding of the facts as they actually happened. That is often nearly impossible in and of itself. Wishful thinking, moralizing and other kinds of factual distortions lead to misapprehension and error. We have enormous problems that are vital to our survival. Getting our facts straight is essential. It is a fundamental moral obligation of those who would wish to guide our policy.
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