jb6 has it right.
Posted on 05/20/2005 9:29:23 AM PDT by rdb3
Not very conducive to the world village concept that both parties buy into so much. Has our contributions to world welfare dropped off since we now have a Republican president? No, we still even send money to the Terrorist PLO Regime.
Quick reality, they had about 50 more divisions then the combined allied armies (oh the rest of the allies were in no shape to support us). They had air parity and they had supply lines one fourth the distance of ours. Oh and then there was that whole little Japanese war still going on. Remember one thing: as terrible as our losses were (for all of WW2), they were equal to one side's losses in Kursk. I don't think the American public was ready to start taking losses measured not in the thousands or ten thousands but in the quarter millions per battle.
The crime of WW2 was that it was ever allowed to start. That the British and French pandered to Hitler on the Rhine, in Austria and in Czech. That they gave no aid to Poland because they hoped they'd be spared the general war between Hitler and Stalin. If WW2 hadn't started, Stalin wouldn't have been able to invade and there would have been revolution in Russia by the late 40s (as most people in the 30s dispised Stalin, it was WW2 that made him popular).
How many of those divisions were fresh and fully staffed and equipped?
(oh the rest of the allies were in no shape to support us).
I never said they were. But the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians, if supplied with US arms, would have gladly joined the fray.
They had air parity and they had supply lines one fourth the distance of ours.
They didn't have nuclear parity and their supply lines would have been pretty scarce of supplies were it not for us.
Oh and then there was that whole little Japanese war still going on.
It ended within months of the European campaign and would have supplied us with more air power, naval power and manpower.
That's true. Russia had already lost much of its best troops.
I don't think the American public was ready to start taking losses measured not in the thousands or ten thousands but in the quarter millions per battle.
We would have been fighting not to capture and hold territory, but to defeat the Russian army. We wouldn't have been fighting a positional war like the Nazis.
The Russians were exhausted, undersupplied and overextended and the situation for them would only have worsened, not improved. The Pacific War was already in its final phase and we would have found enthusiastic allies in the Eastern European countries who would have been a source of fresh troops, since only small numbers of the Hungarians, Slovaks and Czechs served in any capacity during the war. Also a largely intact France, hungry for hard US currency, would have served as a nearby source of supplies.
What Bush said about Yalta was absolutely right, but then Buchanan's question is right, too.
Of course, the Nazis had to be stopped, but all that happened as a result was that much of the world got strapped with an even worse and even more imperialistic and aggressive tyranny. I think that's Pat's point, but hte neocons who have been trying to take the movement from the movement conservatives for years will spare no effort to try to make Buchanan look like an anti-Semite.
I idisagree with Pat on some issues, but I agree with him on a lot more.
The GOP remains the same, essentially a party far more interventionist than internationalist and not at all isolationist. If Pat cut off diplomatic relations with his shadow foreign minister, the despicable Justine the Lavender Queen Raimondo of antiwar.com (don't believe my evaluation of Justine? Check his/her/its website for yourself and you decide) fame, Pat might even return to his senses.
I don't agree with Pat's uber-isolationism, but he leans towards a crucial point. We defeated the Nazis, but promtly returned thousands of Russian, Poles, Czech, etc to the Soviet were they were promptly massacred. We liberated the French but condemned the Poles...who's invasion was the start of the war in the first place. Kinda ironic, huh?
Perhaps Buchanan could instead concentrate his time on saying "Was FDR as good of a President as his reputation?"
You need to read some biographies like Roll Me Over. Most US units had very high attrition rates and were quite tired by April of 1945. They'd been driving over the remenants of the Wehremacht but they were taking heavy casualties still. Difference was, the Wehremacht was out of men.
The writer in Roll Me Over (a guy who started out as a private and ended up as a lieutenant) had only 1 man in his platoon that he had started out with. He was part of a replacement team that made up half the platoon originally. Everyone was dead or wounded from his original crew and green troops were taking their place. He also didn't get a pair of boots (his first) until after Ardenze, before that he was in a pair of shoes through most of the winter.
Has Pat been overtaken by the spirit of Senator Robert Taft (1889-1953)? Or has he just been hanging around with Chris "I pee sitting down" Matthews too long?
jb6 has it right.
Isolationism on the right died a long-overdue deserved death as the Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. If you think that the conservative movement ought to be a bunch of unimaginative, money-obsessive Main Street bankers clipping coupons in the back room at the bank in Nowhereville, USA, bleating about how everything having to do with the well-being and safety of others is none of their business, then your program is to turn the US into a modern Sudetenland.
Buchanan is no anti-semite but he certainly does his best to look like one and when he calls his current eccentricities "conservative" to make the conservative movement seem anti-semitic so, yes, movement conservatives WILL react against him lest the perception he creates be regarded as reality. This is just one reason why he has become a political pariah.
Another point as to what constitutes and constituted movement conservatism, bear in mind that Patrick was recruited from Columbia Journalism School through the St. Louis Globe Democrat which hired him as an editorial writer to Nixon's law firm payroll in New York. If you think Nixon was a "movement" conservative, then you weren't around in 1970-72 as the conservative movement people descended upon Washington Congressional offices trying to thwart the efforts of Pat's original sponsor to impose wage and price controls and to snuggle up to Chairman Mao, Chou En-Lai and the Chicoms. Wimpiness and butt-kissing foreign policy did no good then and will do no good now and never will do any good. That sort of foreign policy is NOT conservative. Deploying fast attack subs to take out the entire ChiCom navy if the Chicoms touch Taiwan IS conservative foreign policy.
Pat Buchanan has accomplished much that is worthwhile before he slipped but he was NEVER personally involved in the organizations (YAF, CRs, YRs, at al.) that were the conservatve movement. Don Feder was a YAF National Director then. He knows what he is talking about. He has repeatedly defended Catholic interests although Don is an Orthodox Jew. As a Catholic, I gladly return that service in kind. Don has always eloquently advanced and defended American interests. Americans should do likewise. Don, like Pat, is a very fine man. Unlike Pat, Don has not put his rationality in trust.
It is time for Pat Buchanan to retire. I voted for him on several occasions but he has become an embarassment to himself and to anyone who ever supported him. His shelf life has expired.
I explained the means in detail.
if you care to point out where I was wrong feel free.
What's damn silly is your dismissal.
As I understand it, Patton, MacArthur and the German and Japanese general staffs disagreed with the point you are making. The internationalist crowd gave us the mess we are in today when they rejected Patton, MacArthur, et al., as, based upon his track record as a cavalry officer, Nathan Bedford Forrest would have agreed with Patton and MacArthur. No surprise there!
"the Civil War was fought to free the slaves,"
Snore.
"Was it worth it? In a way, it was. By stopping the Communist advance
"In a way, it was." By stopping the communist advance..LOL!
"Buchanan owes a cosmic apology to the families of the Americans who fell at Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, and in the North African and Italian campaigns. To the survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen, there’s
Go Den Go AWAY
"Poland was the line drawn in the sand."
This guy has seen too many movies.
"Japan declared war on us, then sealed it with a kiss at Pearl Harbor"
Brian Hyland alert.
"But then what can we say of a utopian who won’t fight unless we can assure him the outcome of a perfect world?"
Anyone defending this drivel deserves all he/she gets.
Antisemitism is a spiritual disease that corrupts the soul.
No, most of those folks get what this argument is really all about: Buchanan is endeavoring to lay a historical foundation for his paleo-conservative or libertarian (take your pick) opposition to any projection of American military power specifically in Iraq and more generally in support of the interests of Israel. He is being clever in trying to establish this predicate without tipping his hand about where he is going: If we cannot judge that we accomplished our war aims in America's holy war, how can we justify war in Iraq? These wars always go awry and should not be mounted. If we cannot accomplish predictable results in a war where the moral issues were clear how can we hope to do so in Iraq? If we cannot achieve war aims on our own behalf, how can we justify a war on behalf of Israel?
Buchanan's critics know where the game is going and want to head him off at the pass. They cannot concede that war accomplishes nothing and is not worth waging if you believe America is under threat of mass murder by suicide dealt weapons of mass destruction. I am in this camp. Others want to deploy American power in behalf of Israel - or at least Buchanan thinks they do.
Neither side is ready to come clean with the reader and admit this argument is really a proxy for our policy in Afghanistan and Iraq as crafted by neo-conservatives and that Poland is a figure for Israel. As a result we get these kinds of discussions:
On what basis? Were gulags worse than Auschwitz? Was the Katyan Forest worse than the slaughter of 100,000 Kiev Jews at Bari Yar? Were the deaths of several million Ukrainians worse than the Holocaust? Admittedly, in the century past, the Communists racked up a higher body count. But they had 70 years to work on it (in the case of China, North Korea and Cuba, it’s an on-going project), compared to the 12-year Reich.
Perhaps Pat has a magical calculator for figuring the sum of oppression, torture, and mass murder. I don’t know how he reached his conclusion, unless – as I suspect – he cares about the victims of the Red terror but is blasé about graves dug by the Swastika.
Now we all know what we are arguing about and we can stop trying to jigger history to fit our respective templates.
Pat's venerating FDR? When did that start?
I couldn't agree more.
Buchanan has made the same case against our military presence in South Korea for years, so the notion that his views on World War II are a proxy for his views on Israel seems specious at best.
I think the main question of Buchanan's essay was lost in the subsequent railings against him. The main thing he did was to ask what the real outcome of WWII really was, how the fundamental geopolitical alignment of the world changed.
That's an important question to consider on many levels. The typical answer that fascism was defeated doesn't do justice to how much the world really changed.
Go back to World War I. What was the most significant change in Europe? The practical end of empires, monarchies and European adventurism elsewhere in the world. However the failure of the US to join the League of Nations doomed us to to participate in another European conflagration.
Pat's article rejects the end of fascism as the end result of WWII. The war established the three trilateral zones for global economic integration. The rebuilding of German and Japan created economic axes around which the current-day EU has formed and the emerging ASEAN organization will eventually coalesce.
The War on Terror will ultimately "tame" and de-radicalize the Muslim world so they can be effectively absorbed into world federal governance.
If you consider world government to be a worthwhile goal, World War II was especially effective in moving the world towards that goal. If the expansion of human freedom was the objective, it failed miserably. I don't think Buchanan's remarks should be interpreted as anti-Semitic or pro-Hitler. He just declares that Stalin wasn't much of an improvement for those we relegated to his dominion at Yalta.
For those who lived under Soviet oppression throughout the Warsaw Pact, the liberation of Europe didn't come until around 1990. That's the point I took from reading Pat Buchanan's article.
Good God, man, the Ruskies had inflicted something approaching 7 Million dead on the Germans and had themselves sustained something approaching 20 Million dead. We lost 500,000 in both theatres. They set up machine guns and murdered their own troops who broke and ran. We were a democracy where your (and mine) beloved Patton was nearly cashiered for striking a private. Do you really expect any reader of this thread to believe that the mothers of America would stand for their sons being attrited in such a bloodbath for the sake of eastern Europe? Do you really think a democracy can muster the will to sacrifice millions of lives to wage war on a country which had been described in the most glowing terms as our ally for years? Please!
I never said they were. But the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians, if supplied with US arms, would have gladly joined the fray.
One hardly knows how to respond to this. These nations were behind Soviet lines and we had no way of supplying them after the fall of Germany anymore than we did before the fall of Germany.
They didn't have nuclear parity and their supply lines would have been pretty scarce of supplies were it not for us.
It doesn't do to play leap frog with dates in this sort of a discussion. At the time of Yalta, no one had nuclear air power, that did not come until Potsdam. If you want to charge Truman with failing to rescue the eastern Europeans when he had monopoly of the atom bomb for 3 years, I will provide you with the cite to my comments to that effect. But that is not what we are arguing here. It is just intellectually silly to mix the conventional age with the atomic age in this discussion which is at the time of Yalta. It makes no sense.
Oh and then there was that whole little Japanese war still going on. It ended within months of the European campaign and would have supplied us with more air power, naval power and manpower.
It ended with the first use of the atomic bomb instead of a million American casualties. I point out to you that we were very eager to get the Soviets to enter the war against Japan to relieve us of some of those casualties until we got the bomb. Lets see, mothers of America, I know they were going to save your sons by helping us in Japan but now we decided to absorb a million casualties and and also attack them and absorb millions more. Or, maybe we will wait until they help us in Japan, and then we will attack them? Do you see how absurd your position is?
I don't think the American public was ready to start taking losses measured not in the thousands or ten thousands but in the quarter millions per battle. We would have been fighting not to capture and hold territory, but to defeat the Russian army. We wouldn't have been fighting a positional war like the Nazis. The Russians were exhausted, undersupplied and overextended and the situation for them would only have worsened, not improved. The Pacific War was already in its final phase and we would have found enthusiastic allies in the Eastern European countries who would have been a source of fresh troops, since only small numbers of the Hungarians, Slovaks and Czechs served in any capacity during the war. Also a largely intact France, hungry for hard US currency, would have served as a nearby source of supplies.
There is not one concept in the immediately quoted paragraphs which is true. To review them all would prove to tedious to me and to the intrepid reader who might have ventured this far. You simply have no idea of the devastation and exhaustion of the countries you so easily count as ready to die for your ideas. You are also obviously unaware of the huge numbers of eastern Europeans who were drafted and forced to serve on both sides and died for their captors' ideas.
A decent respect for History is a precious birthright vouchsafed to Americans. We conservatives have a moral obligation to honor the truth of it wherever it leads. We dare not rewrite it as we think it could have been or ought to have been. Churchill said he thought history would treat him fairly because he was going to write it. Well, we are not Churchill. We do not have a grant as to a genius to take liberties. Even Churchill said at the beginning of the war that he wanted to be judged on the contemporaneous written record - such was his respect for history.
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