Posted on 05/11/2005 9:08:36 AM PDT by EveningStar
If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.
If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.
Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
Handily???? Ummm ... you have an exceptionally rosy view of the latter half of the XX Century. You might also want to refresh you memory regarding the government of the Peoples' Republic of China.
They never were very democratic there, and historically they had no large mercantile class anyway.
If anything, China has adopted far more of the Western democratic model than anyone could have ever really have anticipated.
Hey, regarding "rosey views", anyone who thinks life would have been better with the Nazis in charge of Russia is definitely sucking on some strange stuff!
Buchanan is an idiot. I'm glad this nut left the GOP.
He ain't ignorant. He's a nazi.
More Buchanan idiotic rant that makes absolutely no sense.
I've "sucked" my share of "strange stuff", but I never suggested that anybody would have been better off with the Nazis running Russia (or anything else). Reread my post.
Yep. Too bad the truth is so elusive for some people. Buchanan is wrong on the details of Hitler's rise to power, and ignorant in asserting that Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe was "worse" than millions of eastern Europeans getting gassed and shot by the einstatzgruppen, but he is essentially right about Churchill and Roosevelt's short-sightedness in jumping eagerly into a fight with Germany.
Germany didn't give a damn about either of us. And it had been raped both territorially and economically at Versailles. But Hitler was a bastard, so there must be war. Stalin, of course, invaded Poland along with Hitler, his ally, but let's not worry about the communists.
The communists, by the way, DID give a damn about us. They wanted to destroy us. As Churchill said after the war, "I fear we may have stuck the wrong pig."
I'm not "barfing" at Buchanan's column at all.
Look, I contrasted 40 years against an indefinitely and longer period of time. That's hardly a "rosey view", but it beats the heck out of the alternative!
Obviously the commies didn't particular care one way or the other about us. Once we figured out how to bankrupt them, they accepted defeat quite gracefully.
But I think Pat Buchanan is trying to justify his position on the Iraq war by re-framing World War II. Sure we got rid of Hitler, but what we got was even worse is the same as sure we got rid of Saddam, but what we are going to get is even worse.
What he does not include in this equation is that in WWII the Russians went from an aristocracy to a dictatorship. The Iraqis are going from a dictatorship to some semblance of a democracy. The devil may be in the details in that regard.
I'm having trouble believing that an intelligent person who actually lived through the Cold War could possibly think that proposition should be taken seriously.
Thank you for the tables and other information. So can we conclude by the documents we found (so far) that Germany was democratic (in the general sense) until the NSDAP was in power, and that democracy was essentially abolished by the NSDAP?
The connection between the contraception/abortion/eugenics movement in the USA, and the Nazi eugenicists in Europe is one of the many dirty little secrets of th XX Century. You certainly will hear no mention of it an public school 'Social Studies' classes.
Pat actually has always had conservative Democrat leanings.
That's just not factual. You are actually describing all of the neo-cons that hate Pat: Bennett, Kemp, Kristol, etc.
At one time Pat was an ardent free-trader (which is a more "modern" conservative position; once communism fell, Pat was able to re-examine free trade and adopt a more traditionalist conservative position). He has always quoted seminal conservative thinkers like Burke and Goldwater while the neo-cons were more comfortable quoting FDR. It is they who joined the cause to fight communism and that as their only reason. Most are big-government conservatives (except for tax cuts).
This is not to say that I am on board with Buchanan with all of his positions (especially that of Israel) but he is certainly more in line with traditional conservatism than the direction the Republican party has taken over the last 16 years.
I would be satisfied if this administration would govern like "conservative" Democrats when it came to domestic spending; that would be a giant leap to the right.
This is a great post and one of the reasons I love FR. Pat might not be correct, but at least some posters are addressing his points rather than just reflexively calling him an moron or an idiot.
We are conditioned here in the states to automatically think of WW II in such black and white terms. It doesn't hurt to delve deeper into the matter though and get a deeper understanding. Our public schools would never touch this with a 10 foot pole.
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