[Borges]

Pat's at it again.

[stylin19a]

where to begin. In some parts (mostly Stalin) pat confuses the war with the peace agreements/spoils of war.

[Russ]

This is so over the top and beyond belief I don’t know where to start. Therefore, I will say nothing and let the article speak for itself...

[LRoggy]

Cohen contends that the evil of the Holocaust makes it a “good war.” But the destruction of the Jews of Europe was a consequence of this war, not a cause.

Come on Pat, Hitler planned the Final Solution in the 30’s for crying out loud. It was going to be put in place regardless of whether WWII was fought or not.

[goldstategop]

It was the "Good War." World War II, more than any other conflict, dramatically framed the conflict between freedom and tyranny. It was not certain the democracies would win. They did at an enormous cost. And that cost that was paid has been fully justified by the verdict of history.

"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

[Hoplite]

Methinks Pat jumped the shark some time ago.

[goldstategop]

Pat Buchanan is a fool of course. His isolationist bilge would certainly have led to the extinction of freedom in our world. If the United States had not entered World War II, we would be living today in an oppressive dictatorship. One can get an idea from Robert Harris' novel Fatherland what a Nazi dominated world would look like. Running away from the rest of the world didn't make us safe in the 1930s and it won't make us safer today if we follow the paleos and Left's advice to abandon the Middle East to the tender mercies of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran.

"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

[Redleg Duke]

Off his meds again, I see.

[agrace]

But when one declares a war that produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust a "Good War," it raises a question: good for whom?

"The war" did NOT create the holocaust, you incredible idiot. Hitler opened Dachau and Ravensbruck and Buchenwald in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 and Kristallnacht was in 1938.

But the destruction of the Jews of Europe was a consequence of this war, not a cause.

True. Hitler didn't do a single evil thing to the Jews of Europe until he was attacked. (Way to display your antisemitism, again, Pat. Sounds like he's dancing a little on the edge of holocaust denial to me.) And there was no Lenin before Stalin; the Soviet Union in all its magnificent destruction just appeared - POOF - when the first American troops showed up in theatre. And Mao decided to be the murderous marxist he was simply because the US bombed Hiroshima.

What on earth is wrong with him?

[Argus]

No war is “good”. Some are necessary. WWII certainly was for the US, and the war we’re in now against the updated Islamist version of Nazis is too.

In fact, Buchanan puts the end date of WWII too soon. The issues that arose from the Hitler/Stalin pact to divide Europe were not fully resolved until 1989-91, with the fall of the Soviet empire that was the successor to the Third Reich. So in reality, what we call WWII lasted for fifty years.

Puts our present situation in somewhat more realistic perspective.

[quadrant]

World War II, a good war? I doubt it. If you were a soldier stuck in the boiling heat of Guadalcanal or the freezing mud of Bastogne, I doubt if you considered the war “good”. In PATTON, Gen Omar Bradley tells George Patton that the ordinary foot soldier is stuck there, living one day at a time, with death tugging at his elbow. Good war, that doesn't sound good to me.

[denydenydeny]

Britain declared war on Sept. 3, 1939, to preserve Poland. For six years, Poland was occupied by Nazi and Soviet armies and SS and NKVD killers. At war's end, the Polish dead were estimated at 6 million. A third of Poland had been torn away by Stalin, and Nazis had used the country for the infamous camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz. Fifteen thousand Polish officers had been massacred at places like Katyn. The Home Army that rose in Warsaw at the urging of the Red Army in 1944 had been annihilated, as the Red Army watched from the other side of the Vistula. When the British celebrated V-E day in May 1945, Poland began 44 years of tyranny under the satraps of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Was World War II "a good war" for the Poles?

Pat is such a nitwit. The terminology "Good War" is a leftist formulation which by implication views Korea and Vietnam (to say nothing of Iraq) as "bad" wars. In a broad sense, no war is "good"--the serious term should be "necessary," some more than others.

And the above bit about Poland is mealy-mouthing at its finest. Most of the Polish population losses were not in the "war"--they were genocidal killings committed by bureaucrats far from the battlefield. These types of killings were why the war was necessary.

and Nazis had used the country for the infamous camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.

On the positive side, this is as close as Pat's come to repudiating his occasional flirtation with Holocaust denial.

[Rummyfan]

Let me answer Pat Buchanan plainly and simply:

YES IT WAS A GOOD (NECESSARY) WAR!

Two monstrous tyrannies, the German Third Reich and the Japanese Miltarist dictatorship, were swept away, much to the benefit of the people who had been subjugated by them and subject to, in some cases, evils beyond description. Pat should go vist Dachau, or Madjanek, or Auschwitz - maybe he would get a better appreciation for 20TH century industrialized murder.

That the Soviet Union survived intact and we had to parry with them for another fifty years is a separate question.

The benefits of the war to us and Western Civilization are almost innumerable.

[Constitution Day]

Sorry your boys lost, Patrick.

[ex-snook]

The good was we lived to fight another day. Just how many more such ‘days’ can Western Civilization take? Rivals are standing by.

[mc5cents]

Oh my. Pat you are such an ass. Wars are never, ever good, but they are sometimes not only inevitable but necessary. Only those that prefer slavery over death would think otherwise. People die in wars, and they die in peace. Do they die free or as slaves. That is the eternal question.

[weegee]

The question posed by Pat is “was WWII “Good” vs. “Unnecessary””?

It was necessary because there was no lasting negotiation with Hitler’s tyranny. It was necessary because even the USSR and US Communists were against war with Hitler until he betrayed Uncle Joe Stalin.

[woofie]

Its not a bad question from Pat ...as so many are saying all wars are bad ...but Pat has the wrong answer

[woofie]

Its not a bad question from Pat ...as so many are saying all wars are bad ...but Pat has the wrong answer

[Borges]

You saw this right?

[rockrr]

Can a war in which 50 million perished and the Christian continent was destroyed, half of it enslaved, a war that has advanced the death of Western civilization, be truly celebrated as a "good war"?

Yes.