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."
Yes it is. The Genocide was decided in 1942, though a brutal and murderous regime was installed earlier.
They declared and entered the fray after Germany invaded your homeland and fought the war to defeat the Nazis the best they could and died by the millions.
The fact that they could not invade Poland and toss out the Nazis disappoints you and makes you ungrateful for their sacrifices is ungracious, unrealistic and thankfully uncommon.
We freed Norway from Axis control without a lot of military operations there either except for sabotage and the rare raid...marginally more than how we actually operated in Poland yet I wonder if the Norwegians are as ungrateful Since we were unable to actually parachute into Poland or land on their rocky northern beachhead in German controlled and inhabited territory maybe we should have just let the Nazis have Poland and sued for peace. Lots of good men died for otherwise and they had no vested interest in Poland but they died just the same. while we are at it, let's just revisit the Treaty of Versailles, maybe Poland shoulda been less hungry.... history is full of monday morning quarterbacking, what ifs, and apparently ingrates
Every southern state except South Carolina sent troops/units to the north to fight on the side of the Union. And of course many northerners went south. Again, there’s no way of knowing but I think your speculation is a little overboard. Surely you’ve heard of General George Thomas. He was one of the better Union Generals. And he was from Virginia. John Gibbon was another southerner who remained loyal. He had brothers in the Confederate Army.
At the time he resigned his commission, Lee was an officer in the U.S. Army, sworn to uphold the constitution of the United States of America. To continue to do that would not be considered unusual, I wouldn’t think. Virginia seceded April 17, 1861. Lee resigned April 20. He was a Colonel at the time. It’s not like he turned down Lincoln to accept a similar position in the CSA. It took a while for that to happen.
Since his home was withing sight of Washington D.C. and the Union controlled that area virtually the entire war, I would not speculate that his property would have been destroyed, therefore.
I agree about John Adams/Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas was active in my neck of the woods, but from accounts he was influenced by his Northern wife and his relatives forever shunned him. That he died out in San Francisco without ever reconciling with them strikes me as sad.
"John Gibbon was another southerner who remained loyal. He had brothers in the Confederate Army."
Gibbon was not wholly Southern. He was born and raised in Philadelphia until the family moved to NC prior to his teens. But no denying many of these men had to make awful decisions as to where to stand. They didn't call it a Civil War for nothing.
"At the time he resigned his commission, Lee was an officer in the U.S. Army, sworn to uphold the constitution of the United States of America. To continue to do that would not be considered unusual, I wouldn’t think. Virginia seceded April 17, 1861. Lee resigned April 20. He was a Colonel at the time. It’s not like he turned down Lincoln to accept a similar position in the CSA. It took a while for that to happen."
Given that Lee was from a premier political family, which way he went was going to be of far higher profile than most others. Under other circumstances, had the Civil War not occurred when it did, Lee might very well have ended up as U.S. President. Had the South won, he most certainly would've succeeded Jefferson Davis as the C.S. President in 1867.
"Since his home was withing sight of Washington D.C. and the Union controlled that area virtually the entire war, I would not speculate that his property would have been destroyed, therefore. I agree about John Adams/Thomas Jefferson."
One thing I'll add in, having a perspective of growing up in the South (indeed, the armies marched a very short distance from my house, as I'm in a key location that was targeted early by the Union), you realize just how much more personal it is down here (only some in MD or the Gettysburg, PA area would have an idea of an "invasion force" -- and the Southerners weren't coming in to take them over permanently, otherwise most Northern locales never had the war brought to them -- not counting incidents like the NYC Draft Riots). It was additionally very hard to drum up a lot of support for the Union when they were indeed invading your state. That alone pushed Southern pro-Union moderates right off the fence. Lincoln also made a terrible miscalculation in presuming poor non-slaveowning Southerners would side with the Union against the rich slaveowners. Rich or poor, pro-slave or abolitionist, when an enemy army is marching in to toss out and imprison your duly elected government and law enforcement, install officials that are loyal not to the locals but to the invading government, suspending ones civil rights, taking your property, et al, you're not going to view that as a positive. Again, it's something a lot of Northerners don't quite grasp.
The British agreed to help defend Poland if the Germans invaded. The Nazi’s and the Communists both did. The Brits passed on sending real help. The Poles wound up helping Britain. The story is as PJB said: the guarantee was not helpful but actually hurt Poland and the West. Deal with it.
Don’t care about Norway. Where were the British and French, who signed a pact on 3/31/39? No Brit or Frog died for Poland! But a lot of Poles died for Britain and France.
Formerly in the Red Army, John Demjanjuk volunteered for the German SS and became a Wachman at Sobibor concentration camp. He somehow managed to emigrate to and live in the US since 1951, and in Cleveland since 1958. On 25 June 1981 a Federal count stripped Demjanjuk of his US Citizenship because he obtained it under false pretenses, namely, hiding the fact that he worked in German concentration camps. In 1986 he was extradited to Israel, and was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death there in 1988. Things thus seemed fairly tidy, the matter settled.
But Demjanjuk was freed of his death sentence several years later when evidence surfaced that he was the victim of mistaken identity. Apparently instead of volunteering for the SS, he was held prisoner in a forced labor camp by the Nazis in Poland. The guard, "Ivan the Terrible", was in fact some other individual. Demjanjuk regained his U.S. citizenship in 1998.
And the judge who ruled that Demjanjuk was Ivan, Gilbert Merritt, now feels that Demjanjuk was conspiratorially deprived of his constitutional rights by the Federal Government's deliberate withholding of evidence in his favor.
One of the individuals primarily responsible for the original prosecution of Demjanjuk, OSI attorney Neal Sher, was disbarred after he was found embezzling from a Holocaust foundation.
Would you define anything short of calls for murdering all Jews as antisemitic?
No, its like saying we caught a member of Al Qaeda who killed Americans, just not OBL.
But more -- for second guessing history is very close to second guessing G-d.
After all, every thing happened for a reason.
But more -- say you hire an expert. The expert gives you explicit and clear advice. I do not mean any yokel expert. I mean a real true-blue, salt-of-the-earth, wise, learned, caring and careful, well-spoken, incredibly experienced expert. You then second guess him. That's foolish! Why did you waste your money hiring an expert in the first place?
Yet History is a guidebook prepared by such an expert. Second-guessing it is NOT learning from it.
unusual perspectives you have..
Sure.
If we thought he was this Ivan, and it was not right, then how are we so sure he’s this other fellow after 60 years and all that money?
BTW I am an Irish American. Sobieski was the victor over the Turks at Vienna on 9/11, 1683 That victory marked the Muslim high tide in Eastern Europe.
And I should be succint. I don’t care about Norway in the context of the British (and French) pact w/ Poland against Germany of 3/31/39. The British did not live up to their mutual self-defense obligations. So they emboldened the Polish goverment and left them holding the bag. As you noted, sending troops to Belgium after a month is hardly coming to your ally’s defense.
I was up your way a few years ago during a summer vacation at Charlevoi, Mi. Bought several nice antiques and a great pastel work at the number of shops in your town, which I would enjoy visiting again. Thank you for the “New Dealers War”. I intend to get it and read it very soon.
We can be sure because the documentary evidence recovered from Soviet archives is corroborated by the documentary evidence gathered by Western law enforcement agencies and by the inconsistencies in Demjanjuk's own account of his wartime whereabouts.
Our government spent a moderate amount of money to prove that a man who fraudulently entered our country was in fact a war criminal. And, guess what? It turns out that he was actually a war criminal.
He's considered a Jew-hater because he hates Jews.
Glad you came up to this area.
Mail for you.
I guess the Communists knew there would be a lot of war criminals from the Ukraine and so they executed ten million or so of them in advance. Who could have a problem with that?
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