This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen Pat write. Good Lord, what's gotten into him? Is he crazy? Geez.
Pat needs to go into a home.
Pat makes some good points, and as the junior senator from MA, John F...king Kerry would say, 'it's complicated'. Hitler and the horrors of Nazi Germany needed obliteration, otherwise we'd all be dead or speaking German/Japanese, but it's a lasting shame (euphemism), that FDR and Churchill didn't stand up to Stalin at Yalta.
His idea that France, Holland, and Belgium would never have been invaded by Germany without a British/French D.O.W. on behalf of Poland is ludicrous. It would have happened later, but it still would have happened.
This piece is a nice bookend to Buchanan's piece from a few years ago claiming (laughably) that the Pacific War was the fault of Britain and the US because they'd somehow screwed Japan over in the peace settlement of World War I (a war in which Japan suffered a couple hundred killed and acquired dozens of islands and millions of square miles of ocean by gobbling up Germany's Pacific Islands.)
Pat's apparently gone round the bend. What a loser!
bumppity
You should get and read a recently released book titled "Wilsons War". Yes, it is talking about President Wilson but no, it is not talking about WWI. The author is Jim Powell. He writes extremely well, uses a ton of very good research and his arguments are very well thought out.
Today's discussions of Germany at war in the 1930s tend to ignore that WWI was not only a military defeat for Germany, the WWI treaties turned it into an economic basket case for decades; they carved up German territory to the benefit of the Poles, the Czecks, the Russians, Hungary and others; they prohibited Germany from having "overseas" territories (like both France and Britain continued to have) and they required Germany not only to disarm but to help France rearm. On top of that, it seems, from Mr. Powell's point of view, that without U.S. intervention in the 11th hour of the war, it simply would have stopped with a stalemate, with no one having gained or lost much territory, without massive and disproportionate economic burdens on Germany alone, with a healthier democracy and economy in Germany and less carving up of Eastern Europe. Mr. Powell goes on to demonstrate many other critical events that, possibly, may not have grown out of a western Europe where no one won WWI.
I am not at the point of agreeing here with Buchanan, on how we should or should not have gone to war against Hitler, but Jim Powell's book does make one question whether or not WWII was inevitable, as an outcome of our helping end WWI, at the time and in the way we did. I can see, carrying Mr. Powell's arguments a step further, that there might be room for an argument that Germany may have been at war with France and England, by the late 1930s, without Hitler or the Nazis or the Holocaust, simply due to how WWI ended. We have constantly tended to view both wars through the prism of France and Britain; while their views gloss over their own contributions to what Germany became.
Get Mr. Powell's book. It may not bring you to agree with Buchanan, but it should change how you view Europe and particularly our "allies" of two wars over there.
He ends his book with some broad conclusions about what he sees as parallels in our time. I disagree with him over how much today's circumstances differ from the 1940s, in kind and in substance. His book is still a good read; especially now when the configuration of Europe is changing so much as is our choices of allies and partners over there.
As to whether a Thousand-Year Reich would have been easier to live with than communism turned out to be, I have no particular desire to judge - it's sort of like deciding whether you want to put up with AIDS or the Black Plague. "Neither" is a perfectly acceptable answer, and "neither" is what we ended up with, no thanks at all to the isolationists such as Buchanan who would have had us put up with both.
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, German declared war on the United States, I guess we could have surrendered and made Pat happy.
I wonder how many people complaining actually took the time to read the article?
I suppose you all are great fans of the Soviets and were so glad they dominated Poland, but I agree with Mr. Buchanan that WWII started out to help Poland, but it's a shame that Poland got lost in the whole deal.
Once we were in, we had to fight it, but there were many mistakes that took us in...he asks interesting questions.
This guy has got to be the stupidest, most ignorant, assinine piece of garbage on the planet.
This is the same thought process that liberals follow. It is "fun" to debate but do we really believe what we are saying?
I doubt he really believes it considering the consequences of not stopping the Japanese and Germans.
Pinging for later reading. The web site is not responding.
Why no, Pat, better that Nazism and the Japanese Empire have taken over the planet.
Moron.
Just sickening.
It's easy to look back in hindsight at history, but it's lazy to use specious reasoning and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacious. Fighting Hitler didn't turn Eastern Europe into Communist dictatorships, the naivety of FDR at Yalta did. Fighting Hitler didn't give the USSR the nuclear bomb (which is what turned the USSR into a more dangerous opponent in the 50s than Nazi Germany was in the 40s), poor homeland security of our energy research labs did. Fighting Hitler might not have saved the Poles from 40 years of Communism, but it saved them from 6 years of gas chambers that led to roughly 4 million Poles killed. And if Nazi Germany had been allowed to stay in power, there might not have been a Poland able to rise from the ashes in the late 80s and early 90s. Oh, and that little thing about 6 million Jews dead.
Why Buchanan thinks that it would have been good to have two anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-American dictatorships swallowing the whole of continental Europe--and both on the path to owning nukes--instead of only one w/ half of Europe (and the poorer half mind you) dominated, I won't understand, except to suggest that he really wanted one of those Governments to survive and finish what it started.
Pat: if you really want to wear your arm band to the Bund meetings, you're free to do so. But I'd suggest wearing a coat if you want to walk through my neighborhood. By the way, are those your birds up on the roof?
I used to defend Buchanan against the claims that he was a closet Nazi.
But it turns out he really is.
Yes, WWII was very much worth it.
Buchanan isn't worth it either. Just a washed up old Alz candidate.