A War Worth Fighting

NEWSWEEK ^ | 23 Jun 08 | Christopher Hitchens

[elhombrelibre]

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan....

[BillyBonebrake]

bump for later reading. Hitch is a stitch.

[elhombrelibre]

Hitchens on WWII revisionism Buchanan ping.

[Sherman Logan]

The kaiser picked a fight with Britain by ... butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia.

A truly odd comment. I doubt the Brits cared all that much.

[elhombrelibre]

Full quote: "backing the white Dutch Afrikaner rebels in South Africa and by butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia."

Considering that the English navy ended the slave trade out in the Atlantic and that they sent missionaries to many parts of Africa, it's entirely likely that they were indeed shocked by German brutality.

[centurion316]

Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal, paranoid maniac

Even Hitchens falls for the completely false notion that Hitler was an ultra-rightist. He was nothing of the sort. Until he started killing the Jews that he had rounded up along with his political enemies, he would have been warmly welcomed into the inner intellectual circles of the American Left. They would welcome him today, after all Hitler offered change and he delivered in many of the same ways that are being advocated by the Democrat Party and the Obama campaign.

[Tennessean4Bush]

Buchanan is a mile wide and a millimeter thick. This kind of revisionism may end up being his legacy, instead of being a mere populist firebrand, he now will be known as an intellectual light-weight or worse.

[Sherman Logan]

I agree they were seriously ticked about German support for the Boers. I just find it odd linking the two.

BTW, the Brits were about as popular worldwide (outside their Empire) during the Boer War as America has been during the Iraq War.

[Sherman Logan]

Until he started killing the Jews that he had rounded up along with his political enemies, he would have been warmly welcomed into the inner intellectual circles of the American Left.

No he wouldn't have been. American Socialists were international socialists. The Nazis were national socialists. They were bitter competitors for the same base.

To most socialists fascists were heretics, and thus worse than their traditional opponents. The fascists hated socialists for exactly opposite reasons.

It was sort of a bitter family feud.

[centurion316]

Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and their ilk were definitely National Socialists. You’re right that the whole lot were competing for the same base.

[Marine_Uncle]

From Hitchen's article:
"Moreover, and never mentioned by Buchanan at all, the kaiser visited Damascus and paid for the rebuilding of the tomb of Saladin, announced himself a sympathizer of Islam and a friend of jihad, commissioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad for the projection of German arms into the Middle East and Asia and generally ranged himself on the side of an aggressive Ottoman imperialism, which later declared a "holy war" against Britain. To suggest that he felt unjustly hemmed in by the Royal Navy's domination of the North Sea while he was conducting such statecraft is absurd."

Pat is great at leaving facts hidden. And I never trust isolationist. The world does not work that way.

[elhombrelibre]

His dishonesty and what he chooses to ignore is astounding. He now has no underlying principle beyond his stubborn opposition to defending America. No dictator is too shabby to oppose. He stands only for reigning in American power so that evil men can triumph.

[elhombrelibre]

Hitchens’ socialist background is showing when he labelst Hitler a rightist. He crushed the right in Germany and made it subservient to him and his party.