Posted on 06/20/2008 8:12:50 AM PDT by kellynla
So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all.
Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power.
That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks."
Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The Brits kicked away their empire. Through colossal blunders, Britain twice declared war on a Germany that had not attacked her and did not want war with her, fought for 10 bloody years and lost it all.
Unable to face the truth, Hitchens seeks solace in old myths.
We had to stop Prussian militarism in 1914, says Hitchens. "The Kaiser's policy shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe."
Nonsense. If the Kaiser were looking for a war he would have found it. But in 1914, he had been in power for 25 years, was deep into middle age but had never fought a war nor seen a battle.
From Waterloo to World War I, Prussia fought three wars, all in one seven-year period, 1864 to 1871. Out of these wars, she acquired two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, and two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. By 1914, Germany had not fought a war in two generations.
Does that sound like a nation out to conquer the world?
As for the Kaiser's bellicose support for the Boers, his igniting the Agadir crisis in 1905, his building of a great fleet, his seeking of colonies in Africa, he was only aping the British, whose approbation and friendship he desperately sought all his life and was ever denied.
In every crisis the Kaiser blundered into, including his foolish "blank cheque" to Austria after Serb assassins murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Kaiser backed down or was trying to back away when war erupted.
Even Churchill, who before 1914 was charging the Kaiser with seeking "the dominion of the world," conceded, "History should ... acquit William II of having plotted and planned the World War."
What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust.
Yet consider. Before Britain declared war on him, Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France.
Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.
If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.
Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France?
If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?
That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.
Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.
"Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime ... ?"
Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.
The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.
Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.
The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. No wonder Winston Churchill was so melancholy in old age. No wonder Christopher rails against the book. As T.S. Eliot observed, "Mankind cannot bear much reality."
Thanks, but isn’t that pretty much the same as other European surnames?
I repeat: Part of the indictment is Demaniuk. And he was right on that front.
It’s not ‘loopiness’; it’s paleo-conservatism that calls for a restoration of the constitution and a limited foreign policy. I’ll echo Pat: A Republic, not an Empire.
Then we decided we can’t let this old fellow go, so we (the Justice Dept) decided he actually was someone else. Go figure how this is important to America, especially since Israel harbors its own war criminals from prosecution like Solomon Morel, who was so vicious that the Soviets suspended him!
Some of the theories being floated on this thread makes Pat look rational.
“Clearly, he is not an anti-semite. He is not a raving supporter of Israel, I’ll give you that. But Israel is a foreign country.”
Bingo.
Scholoarly criticism? Fine.
Hysterical ad hominems? Worthless noise.
Ah.
I truly believe that the rise of China and India will see a return to old school balance of power politics. Folks should stop listening to fools like Hannity who talk about "World War IV" and a "new cold war" and instead brush up on their Metternich and Kissinger.
A mulipolar world will bring a greater degree of order than the "crusader state" envisioned by the neoconservatives, whose idiotic support of a unipolar world leads to them opposing such positive developments as a European Army (why the hell are we still in Germany?). Nevertheless, the US is already too involved in international polity and economics to advocate the passive neutrality supported by the Paleocons (although Pat himself does not even go that far, I was thinking more of the Chronicles crowd).
Yes, the ringing of an alarm bell is boring.
Always the same rhythm, always the same tone.
Maybe if we poke fun at the alarm bell the fire will go out?
Rabbi Antelman (the Chief Justice of the Supreme Rabbinic Court of America) is a bit "Birchy," though he has (so far as know) never been a member and disagrees with them on some issues (for example, he demolishes one of the JBS' favorite historians, Nesta Webster). Whatever he may be, he is most assuredly not a "self-hating Jew." He is a strong Zionist and admirer of Rabbi Me'ir Kahana' (zt"l; Hy"d). He was also one of the founders of the so-alled "Sanhedrion" in Jerusalem, though he later quit out of frustration with the direction it was taking. And he absolutely detests anti-Semites.
The problem with Rabbi Antelman's work is that, because he deals almost exclusively with subversive elements and movements within Judaism, that the careless reader could walk away with the idea that these subversive ideas originated from within Judaism. As a matter of fact he says that most of the subversion that took place was from subversive chr*stians, but he is not a chr*stian and he is not writing about chr*stianity. He is writing about subversive currents in the Jewish community. In his first book he also cautions the reader against reading and then thinking "see what these Jews did" because it was centuries of chr*stian persecution of Jews that opened the latter up to victimization and exploitation by subversive elements (just as moslem persecution of Arab chr*stians opened up the latter to influence by Communism and French Freemasonry).
Rabbi Antelman should have spent more time placing the subversion of Judaism within the context of the subversion of chr*stianity in the West at that time. But since he was writing for Jews about the subversion of Judaism almost everything he writes is about subversive non-Orthodox Jews. Unfortunately, the careless reader may conclude that subversive non-Orthodox Jews invented evil.
That being said, it must be stressed that because the Jewish People are different from all other nations, because there is a difference between the Jewish and non-Jewish soul, Jews who do not pursue the Jewish purpose of learning and observing Torah are especially destructive in their influence on the world. This in no sense excuses anti-Semitism of any level, but it is a simple spiritual fact. Can you imagine how different the world would be if all those non-Orthodox Jews who have so influenced the world (for good or ill) in so many non-Torah ways had been pious and observant Jews? We might be living in the Kingdom of G-d on earth by this point. As Rabbi Lapin has said, deep within every Jew is a thirst for G-d and a desire to do something more than just merely exist. The correct answer to this yearning is Torah, but when Torah is rejected other philosophies are turned to, and the effect is much more acute than when subversive ideas are accepted by gentiles. After all, the purpose of the Jewish soul is to channel holiness into the world while non-Jewish souls then spread it about. Small wonder that Jews who reject Torah can be terribly destructive. This is based on mystical realities and has nothing to do with anti-Semitism whatsoever.
All that being said, I was very disappointed in the second volume. For one thing, he refers to Maurice Malkin many times as "Maurice Malcolm." Why? Is this an error? Is it carelessness? Or did Maurice Malkin use the name "Malcolm?" For another is the simple outlandishness of some of his claims, the most outlandish being that Adolf Hitler (mach shemo!) was conceived as part of a Sabbatian ritual on the night of Tish`ah Be'Av of 5648 (which was exactly nine months before 4/20/1889). I suppose such a thing is theoretically possible, but I doubt it. Also it seems to blame Nazism itself on those awful Jews, the source of all the evils in history (though granted, heretical Jews).
It is not for me to comment on Rabbi Antelman's Orthodoxy. So far as I know he is certainly a real Orthodox Rabbi (yadin yadin), a disciple of the late Rabbi Hutner (zt"l), and highly, if not universally, respected.
The guys sounds nuttier than squirrel poop, and nearly as nutty as Pukannon
By “in earnest”, I meant extermination of Jews by the thousands.
Do you get all your epithets from the N.Y. Times (10/10/2004 ny times review):
[This long history of residing on the fringe ended suddenly with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In 1992, Buchanan ran a surprisingly strong campaign in the Republican presidential primaries on an explicitly ‘’anti-imperialist’’ platform — a platform that he further developed in his revisionist history, ‘’A Republic, Not an Empire.’’ ‘’When we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers,’’ he wrote in one of his newspaper columns. Even if his party ultimately rejected him, it co-opted much of his program, and in 1995, a year after Republicans ascended to the majority in the House of Representatives, 190 of them voted to deny funds for American troops stationed in Bosnia. By the end of the decade, condemnations of ‘’foreign policy as social work’’ and ‘’nation building’’ had become standard in conservative boilerplate.
Buchananite foreign policy has an intellectual wing, paleoconservatism. Long before French protesters and liberal bloggers had even heard of the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in mortal combat with them. Paleocons fought neocons over whom Ronald Reagan should appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, angrily denouncing them as closet liberals — or worse, crypto-Trotskyists. Even their self-selected name, paleocon, suggests disdain for the neocons and their muscular interventionism.
Clustered around journals like Chronicles and Southern Partisan, the paleocon ranks included the syndicated columnist Sam Francis and the political theorist Paul Gottfried. Their writings have been anthologized in ‘’The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right,’’ edited by Joseph Scotchie. The paleocons explicitly hark back to Garrett, Nock and the Remnant, what they lovingly call the ‘’Old Right.’’ Like their mentor, Russell Kirk, the paleocons venerate traditional society, celebrating hierarchy, patriarchy and even the virtues of the antebellum South. They bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism. A foreign policy naturally follows from these domestic views. The dismal state of American civilization so depresses them that they see no point in exporting its values abroad. Kirk announced in a 1990 lecture to the Heritage Foundation that America’s contribution to the world will be ‘’cheapness — the cheapest music, the cheapest comic books and the cheapest morality that can be provided.’’
Counterattacking, the neocons often accused the paleocons of anti-Semitism. David Frum, for instance, built this case in his 1994 book, ‘’Dead Right.’’ Indeed, this is a charge that has dogged isolationists — from Nock to Charles Lindbergh (who is elected president in Philip Roth’s new counterfactual novel, ‘’The Plot Against America’’) to Buchanan. With their pleas for ‘’America first’’ and their rejection of cosmopolitan foreign policy, they have occasionally vilified the oldest symbol of cosmopolitanism — the Jew.]
Tired? More like tiresome.
Canard? Nope.
It’s tiresome to keep pointing out the man’s anti-Semitic instincts, but it is not false.
There have been various theories in some Orthodox Jewish circles that Shoah was a divine punishment of European Jews for assimilating. Is that what Antelman suggests?
Give him that!
Too bad he's not a J W Rowling, then at least his books would be entertaining and not harmful.
There actually were almost 8 times as many Jews living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire than there were in Germany.
Almost 3 times as many Jews lived in Poland as did in Germany.
On a percentage basis, as many Jews lived in the UK as in Germany.
Only 5% of Europe's Jewish population lived in Germany, a country which comprised about 15% of the European population.
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