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."
I take the liberty of trying to put things in their fairly true perspective. I was in a workshop as a helper and another helper was a Polish emmigrant called Gruza. I said in a friendly manner , to curry favour with him- "We British helped you in the war". He laughed and shouted something to the effect that "they never came, where where they?"
Now for the facts. Hitler had annexed territories four times. He had given his word that "the last territorial claim I shall make etc." Chamberlain was a gentleman. He thought that any leader of a nation would thus have principles. Hitler was a liar, of course.
What must be stated is the ultimatum given to Hitler by Chamberlain. He had his arm twisted by the now powerful figure of Churchill, with his pals, Cadogan and Vansittart et al.
Had Hitler had obeyed the ultimatum, we would not be discussing this war presumably. Since Hitler, like most bullies, had grown bolder and contemptuous, he did not even consider negotiations. Logistically, it was impossible for Britain to do anything. They had neutral countries in between them and Poland.
Where was from in England, the Polish airmen flew sorties out of Northolt. There is an impressive war memorial to them. A Polish manned bomber crashed next to my school, but it was on a Sunday. One little chap found a cap badge- all that was left. Cordially. PL.
real quick:
Nazis invade Poland 1939.
Two days later France and England and others declare war on Germany for that very reason and the greater war begins.....England after all had a fresh protection treaty with Poland.
Meanwhile Soviets sensing an opportunity and a necessity enter Poland and subsequently split it with Germany for the time being....a very short time being.
The Pre-US Allies are busy with Germany in the west. Britain was hardly in a position to invade Poland from the Polish Corridor on the Baltic to attack the German occupiers. The logistics would have been Godawful, the overall strategy unwise and the north coast corridor of Poland was ethnic German bordered by Germany on one side and Prussia on the other....how would you have had England invade Poland to throw out the Nazis? It was impossible.
The war progresses through it's various twists and turns and the US enters and Polish government in exile set up in England and Polish troops fight in Normandy invasion and elsewhere admirably.....and in the air.
As the war draws to a close the Soviets are entrenched in Poland, and Poland ostensibly gets some big chunks of former Germany albeit under now the Communist yoke.
The only thing different folks coulda done is to have attacked Stalin after the war with nukes and freed Poland and others in the east bloc.....woulda suited me. Coulda spared us the Cold War but I was born 12 years after WWII ended. they were a number of nations freed from the Axis occupation where it was impossible to attack the Axis on that particular soil for the Allies....and Poland was one of them but when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he doomed his dreams right there, he brought the West into his war.
BUCKLEY (1999): So Pat Buchanan comes along and argues that Great Britain would have been better off, in 1939, letting Hitler take Poland—and go on to take Moscow. Critics are justified in disagreeing, but it hardly follows from the conjecture that Mr. Buchanan is moved by the anti-Semitic energumenTo travel from Mr. Buchanan's provocative and irresponsible impetuosities of 10 years ago to the implied thesis that he didn't want to hurt Hitler because he admired him so, is intellectually embarrassing.
I completely agree.
I saw what you wrote in the post and I took it to mean a very sarcastic statement. How else did you intend it ?
Ah, OK. What did they have Lindbergh in the alt-history book as in 1940 ? Governor of New Jersey mounting the challenge to FDR ? Or just as a private citizen whom had never held office (a la Willkie) ?
Now, the usual bigot baiting crowd here uses the term like they are referring to the klan.
Morris Dees would be proud. Sad, these crybabies have taken over and wish to shout down anyone who has an eccentric view.
Given our current climate, if Buchanan right or wrong is so dastardly then why in hell is he treated reasonably on almost any media org one can find him on?
many in the media know him and given the intense scrutiny over anything even with a whiff of bucking PC views on anything minority in race or religion, one would think he would be ostracized by the media who knows him were he the Jew hater some here like to think.
Why is it that Jews and their collateral history cannot be critiqued even by association with regards to WII?
It grants exclusiveness which in the long run will end with resentment...mark my words. We have intellectually overcompensated in our collective culture over the horrors that happened in WWII to the point it could backfire and like anything else when terms like anti-semite, bigot or racist are used so casually, it diminishes the true effectiveness. That's not good.
Actually I think part of Pat’s willingness to butt heads with Jews is his Catholicism.
Catholics and Jews at times to me seem like pissed off sisters.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1592639/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/566879/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1011360/posts
http://sitelevel.whatuseek.com/query.go?crid=37ea11aa0a7ab219&query=talmud
http://www.sobran.com/jewid.shtml
Here’s the history:
The USSR and Germany sign a pact; on Sep 1 the Nazis invade from the West. The Brits declare war but do nothing.
On Sep 17 the Soviets invade from the East, as previously agreed to and not from ‘sensing opportunity’. The Brits do nothing.
So Britain’s guarantee meant -as Patrick Buchanan pointed out - nothing. I wouldn’t have had the Brits invade Germany. That is, I would not have given the Polish gvt any guarantees, either. After all, they knew in advance that the “logistics would have been Godawful, the overall strategy unwise and the north coast corridor of Poland was ethnic German bordered by Germany on one side and Prussia on the other” So why the guarantee? What was the point? How did it change the Polish government’s behavior, except for the worse in that they assumed they had an ally.
So the declaration of war was a sham.
He’s Ivan the Terrible, no wait, he’s someone else. How the heck can you be so sure who this guy is when our government spent a lot of money to say he’s Person X but changes and now says he’s Person Y?
I though Demaniuk was ‘irrefutably’ Ivan the Terrible.
Where does he say Hitler was misunderstood. He said he was an anti-semite. There is nothing wrong with trying to understand history, and looking around the ‘official version’ often leads to new insights.
Pat’s apologize for Hitler are like those who excused Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin for their crimes because the US and England supported the Whites in the Russian Civil War. Pat’s like those who excuse Castro’s murders and prisons because we don’t trade with Castro. Need I go on?
Yes, because Pat does not excuse Hitler, nor does he say that he was right, nor does he say that the Holocaust was right. He does not apologize for him in any way. Rather, he points out how the Western ‘statesmen’ misplayed their hands, did not contain the Germans and that led to an awful war, not a ‘good’ war. As Pat said, how ‘good’ could it have been to have so many of Poland’s Jews destroyed and Poland consigned to Soviet domination, in part due to a pledge by the British that could not and would not be honored. Isn’t that the point of history, to see what mistakes were made and to see how to avoid them in the future
The US dealt with Stalin and the USSR differently. Even though there was the genocide of the Ukrainians, as well as millions consigned to the Gulag, the West chose to avoid war. (Probably b/c the Democrat party was allied with the Communists at some level in this country). We can question which approach was correct. The mistake is taking questions off the table.
What do you see that was sarcastic about this post?
Pat is to Hitler what those Democrats you mention are to Stalin.
that is blatantly false and it goes downhill from there.
Hell, the RAF attacked the German navy just days after declaring war which was just days after Germany attacked Poland....can you imagine the US being able to get moving that quick?
Within a month Brit troops were in Belgium and later France...and so forth. There was simply no way for Britian attack Germany directly in Poland and it would have made little sense anyhow.
That wasn’t the post I said was sarcastic. I said you were mistaken that the war would’ve been over sooner had Lee accepted Lincoln’s offer. It’s revisionist history. What I took your comment that followed to mean was that because Lee didn’t, all those folks now buried on his estate at Arlington wouldn’t have been killed in the CW. If you meant it differently, something got lost in the translation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.