Posted on 05/20/2008 12:59:30 PM PDT by EveningStar
"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.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
http://www.crusader.net/texts/mk/mkv2ch14.html
It is where I lift the following quotes:
"If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states."
"I should like to make the following preliminary remarks: The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime."
"There is the additional fact that between Germany and Russia there lies the Polish state, completely in French hands. In case of a war between Germany and Russia and Western Europe, Russia would first have to subdue Poland before the first soldier could be sent to the western front."
"Let no one argue that in concluding an alliance with Russia we need not immediately think of war, or, if we did, that we could thoroughly prepare for it. An alliance whose aim does not embrace a plan for war is senseless and worthless. Alliances are concluded only for struggle."
"Since for this we require strength, and since France, the mortal enemy of our nation, inexorably strangles us and robs us of our strength, we must take upon ourselves every sacrifice whose consequences are calculated to contribute to the annihilation of French efforts toward hegemony in Europe."
Hitler was not going to be stopped via negotiation...
Maybe Buchanan wants to be Obama's running mate?
read
Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.
Herr Buchanan is veering into David Irving / Ernst Zundel territory with this lie.
Yeah . . . that's why he signed a treaty with Stalin and divvied up Poland with him!
"Paleoconservatives" are essentially henotheists. This means people who believe in a separate, valid "gxd" for each people. To Pat and his colleagues J*sus is an "aryan" northwestern European tribal deity to be invoked against Black and Hispanic chr*stians (who have in turn made J*sus one of their own). Unfortunately, this is what happens when you incarnate G-d. He not only must become human, but your own particular kind of human.
One reason the "palaeos" detest the Jews is that their G-d is indeed universal. Therefore by insisting on a single G-d for all humanity they "subvert" localized traditions in favor of a "new world order." I honestly believe that much of the "palaeos'" rhetoric about a "one world government" is directed against Mashiach HaMelekh.
Besides that fact that Buchanan argues that if Hitler had been given everything he demanded — along with all the excuses about why Germany deserved Danzig and the Sudentenland — without a fight, Auschwitz wouldn’t have happened?
The man should know that Dachau opened in 1933. http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/TIMELINE/camps.htm Perhaps this is why the Poles and Czechs were not enthusiastic about German rule!!!
Per Buchanan: “”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.””
Why, with reasoning like this, we could forget KristalNacht, euthanasia of “life unworthy of life” and all those other useless mouths!
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.
That "Anti-Comintern Pact" was widely seen as an attempt to spread German influence.
Look at the agreements that Hitler made with other Eastern European states.
They were all written to Germany's advantage.
Negotiations with Hitler were pretty much impossible.
He'd been given the Sudetenland and took the rest of Czechoslovakia.
So if he'd been given Danzig, how long before he took other parts of Poland or the whole country?
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.
Wouldn't any country worth its salt fight back, rather than simply yield to a demand for its territory?
Having an alliance with Great Powers may not have been as good thing as it appeared at the time, but wasn't it natural that Britain and France would make guarantees for the peace that they'd established in 1919?
Moreover, what would have stopped Hitler from making a deal with Stalin even if the Poles had collapsed on Danzig and the Corridor?
Leave Hitler out of it and Pat may have a valid point.
We have negotiated on various occasions with hostile or inimical states.
Whether or not that's good or permissible in one particular situation, there's no blanket rule against it.
But Pat's unwillingness to leave Hitler out of it is definitely a problem.
Soon enough Pat and George will have all the time in the world to discuss this with each other and not bother the rest of us.
For his next article, Pat will inform us how the Brits should have accepted Rudolf Hess's offer of surrender.
Your analysis doesn't go far enough. It does not recognize the great value (to the enemy) of delaying the day of reckoning. Delay it long enough, and our presumed strengths turn into wasting assets.
Negotiations and diplomatic dances in and of themselves are tangible benefits to enemies such as Iran and North Korea. For example, Iran has been playing rope-a-dope with the West for years, with one diplomatic initiative after another that was doomed to failure from the start (from the West's view).
The picture looks completely different from the enemy's viewpoint - the years of dithering and delay were a great success for them. They have provided Iran with the breathing room that they needed to advance their nuclear plans. It isn't just the acts of a diplomat or leader entering into ignorant and/or naive agreements that can score an "own goal" - letting the enemy delay any meaningful action by the West is sufficient to hand the victory to them on a platter.
In the enemy's view, the West is foolish and weak for letting them get away with their games and delaying tactics, because their game plan is visible for all to see. Maybe they are correct in that view. Once they become a nuclear power, the game will have changed dramatically - they become an even greater threat to us just as our workable options dwindle.
Certainly Buchanan understands that (and undoubtedly you do as well), but it tends to undercut his argument...
I guess Pat's copy of Mein Kampf reads different than mine. Hitler never did anything he didn't want to do. The only two choices Poland ever had in Hitler's mind was conquest or annexation--regardless of their stance on Danzig (they chose resistance to surrender). That whole Hitler-Stalin invasion was Hitlers idea.
Exactly.... We need to avoid the Chamberlin trap in the WOT.
LMAO, one of my favorite Nazi jokes.
Buchanan is a good political writer but is a lousy historian and a borderline anti-semite. Other than that, he’s a good guy.
His rewriting of pre-WW2 history has been ably discussed by FRpers in these comments. I want to deal with other periods in history which he screws up.
Re: ..Nixon went to China ... when Maoists were conductiong 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?”
The Cultural Revolution started in a Shanghai high school in late 1965/early 1966 and raged full-fledged as a Jacobian rein of terror for most of the 60’s, but it was spent by 1971 when Nixon announced that he was going to Red China.
I was in the Republic of China/Taiwan/Taipei when this announcement was being made, and helped to lead the U.S. student demonstration against it. I also interviewed one of Mao’s former bodyguards who, as a Red Guard member, saw the slaughter that the RG wreaked on China. That is why he defected and I interviewed him in July, 1971 in Taipei, as well as several other defecting RGs. They all told the same of the “red madness” that they had witnessed in the 60’s. In the 70’s, the Cultural Revolution was in its dying phase, not when Nixon went to Peking.
Red China provided Hanoi with 340,000 combat troops and engineers during the Vietnam war, shot down US planes (including some over international waters), and supplied heroin to our soldiers, all during the war (much of this is still classified but I was privy to some of it because of something I learned from No. Vietnamese senior defectors, and this led to deeper intelligence studies of what Red China and No. Vietnam were doing in No. Vietnam during the war).
The war did not end for America in 1971, or 1972, or 1973. It ended in 1975 and the Red Chinese never stopped aiding Hanoi, the Pathet Lao (there were 10,000 Red Chinese troops in Laos), and the Khmer Rouge (who imitated Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the “Killing Fields” genocide, of which I testified on before Congression, 1974 & 1975).
Buchanan is mean-spirited isolationist who twists history to serve his own failed “Fortress America” beliefs, beliefs which went down in flames on Sept. 11, 2001, just like the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93.
Some people just never learn, and that is the “shame and the pity.”
You shouldn't leave great ideas like that laying around where an evil SOB like me can gank them.
Next P.B. thread...
At one time I favored Pat Buchanan over Bob Dole. What he was saying sounded good, and Dole was a poor candidate. I happened to have lunch with one of the editors of First Things shortly after the New Hampshire primary and mentioned that. He told me that Fr. Neuhaus had asked his Jewish associates what they thought about Pat, and if they were willing to endorse him, and not one of them was.
These are not ADL type Jews, who yell “antisemitism” at the drop of a hat. Indeed, they had come out in defense of a couple of Catholics earlier, who were smeared as antisemitic by the ADL. But they smelled something wrong with Pat Buchanan, and IMHO, time has proved them right, many times over. Although he’s smart enough to try to hide it, Pat really is antisemitic, I think.
Pat, do you really want to argue with the suggestion that Neville Chamberlain’s sitting down with Hitler was...um...unwise and unhelpful to Britain’s interests? I mean, I think even Chamberlain came around to that position eventually.
There is all the difference in the world between COMMUNICATING with an adversary such as Iran - as through third parties or other diplomatic channels - and NEGOTIATING with that adversary.
Negotiating implies that the adversary has both legitimacy and legitimate claims. And that there is to be give and take with a result that is somewhere between the positions held by the negotiators.
Tyrants love negotiations with emissaries from the democracies. They understand so very well the weaknesses of democracies and the propensities of elected leaders who seek to mollify their constituents - through a temporary and, often fatal, respite..
Buchanan can go to Hell. I get the impression Hitler was the one leader Buchanan really liked.
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