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Was the Holocaust Inevitable? ( Patrick J. Buchanan )
townhall.com ^ | June 20, 2008 | Patrick J. Buchanan

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."


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Germany; Israel; Russia; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: 1914; 1918; 1942; agadircrisis; alsace; austria; belgium; boers; bookreview; britain; britishempire; buchanan; christopherhitchins; coughlinjunior; demagogue; denmark; fino; france; franzliebkind; germany; hitler; holocaust; idiotsonfr; israel; jawohlherrpatrick; kaiser; kanyewest; lorraine; mullahpat; nazism; patbuchanan; pitchforkpat; poland; prussia; revisionistnonsense; russia; southafrica; theholocaust; unitedkingdom; wilhelm2; william2; ww1; ww2; wwii
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To: Soliton
The idea that there wouldn't have been a Holocaust is ridiculous though. Hitler's justification for war was lebensraum. He wanted space for a Greater Germany. It always included genocide as a method to that end.

Very good point, that explains a lot. Genocide was on Hitler's mind for a long time.

But what we call the Holocaust took the form that it did because of specific circumstances. It resulted because Hitler controlled millions of Jews and couldn't use them as hostages.

Buchanan and his sources are concentrating on that smaller frame. In the big picture, I'd agree that what happened was the fruition of what Hitler had been talking about for a long time.

241 posted on 06/20/2008 11:44:53 AM PDT by x
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To: sobieski
He was right on Demaniuk. Come on, you can say it.

No he wasn't, John Demjanjuk was irrefutably an SS guard at several camps, but probably not Ivan the Terrible. He entered the US illegally, and was stripped of his citizenship a second time after being returned. He's currently awaiting deportation, if anyone will have him.

And Pat was wrong in his dalliance with pure Holocaust denial about diesel fumes, you can kill Jews with them. In fact the technique was pioneered on Polish military and political prisoners, who were majority Christian. Jews, Christians, you can kill them both with gas no matter what Pat says.

242 posted on 06/20/2008 11:48:30 AM PDT by SJackson (If we win Iowa, then we can move to the world as it should be, Michelle O)
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To: null and void
I accepted sobieski’s take on what happened after Demjanjuk fell off my radar.

He was a concentration camp guard at Sobibor named Ivan Demjanjuk.

Another concentration camp guard at Treblinka at the same time was named Ivan Marchenko and nicknamed "Ivan The Terrible."

Both were trained at the SS facility in Trawniki before being assigned to Sobibor and Treblinka respectively.

Ivan Demjanjuk's mother's maiden name was Marchenko.

When he was prosecuted in 1988, it was believed that Ivan Demjanjuk and Ivan Marchenko were the same man, Demjanjuk using his mother's maiden name as an alias.

In 1993, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the documentary picture revealed holes in the prosecution's case and Demjanjuk was freed.

However, subsequent research has revealed that Demjanjuk really was a concentration camp guard at Sobibor and a Trawniki trainee - this thanks to documents that were uncovered in the former Soviet Union and which had been unavailable to US and Israeli prosecutors in 1988.

Since both the US and Israel adhere to the principle of double jeopardy, Demjanjuk is free from prosecution in either jurisdiction. Demjanjuk is also immune from deportation, since up until now no other country has wanted to take him.

German prosecutors, armed with evidence unavailable before 1994, will now undertake the prosecution. Perhaps Demjanjuk's victims will finally be given some small justice.

243 posted on 06/20/2008 11:49:09 AM PDT by wideawake (Why is it that those who call themselves Constitutionalists know the least about the Constitution?)
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To: SJackson

Indeed. See post 243.


244 posted on 06/20/2008 11:50:26 AM PDT by wideawake (Why is it that those who call themselves Constitutionalists know the least about the Constitution?)
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To: Moose4
And yes, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been shot, or asphyxiated in gas trucks, by the SS Einsatzkommando groups in the months between June 1941 and the Wannsee conference

Corrected since Pat says you can't kill people with diesel fumes. No solace to the dead I'm afraid.

245 posted on 06/20/2008 11:53:38 AM PDT by SJackson (If we win Iowa, then we can move to the world as it should be, Michelle O)
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To: grellis

“I do not know if it’s actually possible to expunge someone from conservatism (do we make him turn in his passkey and then we change the secret codes?) but I hate like hell that this anti-Semite is seen by anyone as representing conservatives. I don’t give a damn how spot-on he is on any issue: His unabashed hatred of all things Hebrew negates everything about him. Everything. I would like to see him publicly denounced by every and all true conservatives, especially those with high profiles, whether they are talk show hosts, legislators, businessmen, CPAC members—all of ‘em. He needs to be shunned. “

Exactly. William F. Buckley did that himself personally. We should follow suit, and make it public.

Pat is right about a lot of things: border, language, and culture among them —— but Hitler liked dogs, was a fairly decent painter, and was spot on about VW, and promoted the genius of Ferdinan Porsche. So what? Being right on some things does not excuse others.

Most importantly, Pat makes conservatives look like Nazis.

Not a brush we should be pained with.


246 posted on 06/20/2008 11:55:38 AM PDT by MeanWestTexan (Kol Hakavod Mossad!)
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To: Moose4
Thank you. The Jews were persecuted and driven into ghettos within months of the surrender of Poland. The Nazis were content to let them die of starvation and disease at first. But it was about death, nonetheless. When they invaded Russia, there were so many Jews living in that region that they couldn't die fast enough to clear living space for their superior Aryan master race. But the Nazis tried everything from mass shootings at Babi Yar to portable gas vans.
247 posted on 06/20/2008 11:55:52 AM PDT by Luke21
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To: fieldmarshaldj

Enjoy your time at The Cemetery.


248 posted on 06/20/2008 11:58:26 AM PDT by Past Your Eyes (You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.)
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To: kellynla

By the way, Churchill’s biggest failing I have never seen discussed except by me:

I am reminded watching Croatia vs. Turkey on TV right now that Turkey is in the “Euro 2008” contest.

Why? Because the Ottomans, who had taken Constantinople from the Byzantines, were allowed to hold onto it, and to their toe-hold into Europe.

The Ottomans had no ability whatsoever to hold the European part of Turkey, and we should have Conquered it. Churchill was cool with letting them keep it.


249 posted on 06/20/2008 11:59:42 AM PDT by Ron Jeremy (sonic)
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To: Ron Jeremy

“Would you be offended if someone said that same thing, only replacing the words with Aryan, European, or white?”

Chosen People does not mean “better.” It means “chosen,” as in God picked said people, for better or for worse.

Indeed, I was taught (in Hebrew school) that God picked the Jewish people because they were the least of His peoples, and He picked the least of the peoples to show just how powerful He is.

Chosen is just chosen.


250 posted on 06/20/2008 12:04:13 PM PDT by MeanWestTexan (Kol Hakavod Mossad!)
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Comment #251 Removed by Moderator

To: fieldmarshaldj
And had Lee taken that offer, he’d have been a traitor to his home state and the South.

He swore an oath as an officer in the Federal Army and reneged on that oath.

He had no obligation to "the South" (Lee thought the Confederacy ridiculous and criminal until Virginia seceded) and any obligation he had to Virginia would have been to ensure that it not continue to be led by demagogues down a path to its own destruction.

Lee is a cogent example of how sentimental attachments to myths and to prejudices (and I'm not talking about racial prejudices) can cloud an otherwise fine mind.

252 posted on 06/20/2008 12:07:49 PM PDT by wideawake (Why is it that those who call themselves Constitutionalists know the least about the Constitution?)
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To: buck jarret

There are many parallels between what the National Socialists and the Soviet Socialists did. The USSR “Russified” its subject nationalities (esp. the Baltic states), deporting much of their populations to remote areas and replacing them with Russians. They operated slave labor camps long before the Nazis did, and filled them with millions of Balts, Ukrainians, and other groups. Just like the Nazis, the Soviets killed more in their camps during the war than before it. For Buchanan to pretend that the National Socialists didn’t plan their evil deeds until the nasty imperialist Brits provoked them is just as ridiculous as saying that the West provoked Stalin. Conquest, mass murder, torture, and enslavement are what socialism is all about. If the people around Hussein Obama are given free rein, we will have them in America also.


253 posted on 06/20/2008 12:08:15 PM PDT by hellbender
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To: Thorin
The mass extermination of Jews did not begin until after the invasion of Russia. There were all sorts of anti-Semitic measures in place before then, but the extermination did not begin until after Germany invaded Russia.

So what? That does not mean that the war was the causal effect for the mass externation. Hitler's writings and the steady rise of persecution of Jews shows he was heading there anyway.

254 posted on 06/20/2008 12:09:25 PM PDT by dirtboy
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To: null and void
I'd like to see evidence that Einstein was an insult name assigned by anti-semitic authorities. All I could find was this, which contradicts what you say.
255 posted on 06/20/2008 12:09:30 PM PDT by Yaelle
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To: MeanWestTexan
Chosen People does not mean ...

I can live with that, whether I agree with it or not, but saying that they have different souls sounds a lot to me like what people used to say re: whites vs. blacks.

256 posted on 06/20/2008 12:09:57 PM PDT by Ron Jeremy (sonic)
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For the thread, since it seems to be an issue, and Bill Buckley's explanation is too long, 135 pages or so, to post. And Joson Maoz doesn't get into his support for Demjanjuk, or his contention that you can't kill with diesel fumes, or his American kids dying for Israeli kids in Gulf War I

==================

Buchanan Revisited
Jason Maoz, Senior Editor
June 12, 2008

The Monitor requests some forbearance from readers; with preparations in high gear for an extended 10th anniversary column which, barring catastrophe, will appear as the front-page essay in the July 4 issue, this week’s offering is a reprint of a piece that garnered significant reader feedback when it first appeared several years ago.

Running the column again is more than apropos, as Patrick Buchanan is back in the news with the release of his new book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, which argues that World War II and all its death and destruction was ultimately the fault of the Allies, particularly Winston Churchill. When considering Buchanan’s thesis, it’s important to recall his previous statements and writings.

Pat Buchanan’s strange concern for former Nazis (Alan A. Ryan, Jr., a former Justice Department prosecutor, once characterized Buchanan as “the spokesman for Nazi war criminals in America”) is coupled with a disdain for Holocaust survivors, whom he’s described as suffering from “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.”

A constant critic of the late Kurt Waldheim during the latter’s tenure as UN secretary general, Buchanan suddenly became supportive when the nature of Waldheim’s wartime activities was made public. The ostracism of Waldheim by the U.S. and other countries, wrote Buchanan, had to it “an aspect of moral bullying and the singular stench of selective indignation.”

Buchanan actively lobbied then-Attorney General Edwin Meese on behalf of Karl Linnas, who had headed a Nazi concentration camp in Estonia (Meese ignored Buchanan’s entreaties and Linnas was deported to the Soviet Union), and made his unhappiness known when the U.S. apologized to France for having sheltered the “Butcher of Lyons,” Klaus Barbie. (“To what end,” Buchanan asked rhetorically in a column on the Barbie matter, “all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime...”)

Buchanan, who in his autobiography describes being brought up in a milieu of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism by a father whose “sympathies had been with the isolationists, with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee,” seems always to be spoiling for a religious war, particularly when he feels that his church has been slighted or trumped by Jews or Jewish interests.

His deep-seated resentments are perhaps best summed up in his complaint about what he calls “the caustic, cutting cracks about my church and my popes from both Israel and its amen corner in the United States.”

The controversy that erupted in the late 1980’s over the desire of some Carmelite nuns to erect a permanent convent at Auschwitz was made to order for Buchanan. Upset with conciliatory statements made by the late Cardinal John O’Connor and other church leaders, he sneered: “If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken.

“When Cardinal O’Connor of New York ... declares this ‘is not a fight between Catholics and Jews,’ he speaks for himself. Be not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith.”

Although he likes to say that he was at one time an “uncritical apologist for Israel,” Buchanan was already on record as early as the mid-1970’s imploring Congress not to listen “to the counsel of the Jewish lobby” and criticizing legislation designed to counter the Arab boycott of Israel.

In 1982, Buchanan referred to the mass killing of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as the “Rosh Hashanah massacre,” and opined that “the Israeli army is looking toward a blackening of its name to rival what happened to the French army in the Dreyfus Affair.”

And so Buchanan already had a history when he gained notoriety, shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, by describing the U.S. Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory” and claiming that “There are only two groups that are beating the drums...for war in the Middle East: the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

As international-affairs scholar Joshua Muravchik wrote some years ago in Commentary, Buchanan “is hostile to Israel....sprinkles his columns with taunting remarks about things Jewish...rallies to the defense of Nazi war criminals, not only those who protest their innocence but also those who confess their guilt ... [and] implies that the generally accepted interpretation of the Holocaust might be a serious exaggeration.”

When confronted with a man who does all these things, suggested Muravchik, a fair conclusion would be that his actions are consistent with the succinct definition of anti-Semitism – “an embedded hatred of Jewish people, manifest in writing and conduct” – given, in a 1990 column, by none other than Patrick J. Buchanan himself.

257 posted on 06/20/2008 12:14:04 PM PDT by SJackson (If we win Iowa, then we can move to the world as it should be, Michelle O)
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To: Ron Jeremy
Would you be offended if someone said that same thing, only replacing the words with Aryan, European, or white?

You misunderstand. I'm not Jewish at all. I just believe in the Jewish G-d. And to believe in the Jewish G-d is to believe that the Jews are the center of everything that happens.

It is simply a fact of Torah that the Jewish soul is different from the non-Jewish soul. Both are immortal, but they have different assignments in this lower world.

I reject the claim of any other people to chosenness because I believe in the Jewish G-d, not that of "aryans," whites or Europeans.

258 posted on 06/20/2008 12:16:02 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator (Vayiqra' Mosheh leHoshea` Bin-Nun Yehoshu`a.)
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Comment #259 Removed by Moderator

To: MeanWestTexan

Right on!


260 posted on 06/20/2008 12:21:27 PM PDT by Convert from ECUSA ("When I was a boy, America was a better place" - Dennis Prager)
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