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."
What is the argument behind your inept sarcasm, exactly?
That the Soviet genocide of Ukrainians in the 1930s justifies the Nazi genocide of Jews in the 1940s?
Could your moral compass be that askew?
Lets use your “moral compass” then.
Not pretending to be a scholar of fifty year old vendettas, let me recap what little I know about Mr. Demjanjuk. After spending his adult life in Cleveland he was determined to be a killer called Ivan the Terrible. He was stripped of his US citizenship and sent to Israel where he was positively identified as the notorios beast and sentenced to death. At the 11th hour the highest court in the land determined that he was in fact not the person for whoms crimes he had been convicted.
Now You say, who the hell cares, he was defineitly (and this time there is no reasonable doubt of course) a Ukranian who collaborated with the Germans a prison guard etc. Remember now, the folks down there in the Ukraine were just coming off the greatest politically motivated mass murder the world has ever witnessed. The fellows who perpetrated this abomination were allied or at least at peace with every other major power on earth. If you were one of the Ukranians lucky enough to still be alive, wronged, would you not revenge? I believe Demjanuk is now what 90? He has spent the last what, twenty years in jails coutrooms and death row? He has not a pound of flesch left.
I thought we were sure, SURE, that he was Ivan the Terrible.
There were Slavs who did collaborate. They were ‘taken care of’ by the anti-collaborationist movements and post-war govermnets. If only Israel would have followed that example and extradited the Communist war criminal Solomon Morel to Poland.
To off-set collaborators, the Poles -specifically - also:
Were the first to fight Hitler.
Belong to the only country that did not have a collaborationist government.
Was the only country where is was a capital crime to give aid to Jews.
Formed the first organized group to help save the Jews - the Zegota.
Sent a soldier - Jan Karski - into the Ghetto (2x) to bring word to the West about what he had seen with his own eyes. He had an audience in 1943 w/ Pres. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Morgenthau
That’s a more balanced view; perhaps you didn’t know it?
The Poles were the first to fight Hitler because Poland was the first country that Hitler attempted to conquer. The Poles did not make a decision to fight Germany; rather, they attempted a last stand. This was over in a few weeks.
Poland didn’t have a collaboration government because the Germans didn’t give it one. Poland was part of “Greater Germany.” Had the Germans wanted a Polish puppet state, they would have made one. This had nothing to do with the desires of Poles.
There were more capital crimes for non-Jews in Poland generally than in occupied Western Europe or Scandinavia. Poland was under martial law. The Germans didn’t have a lot of sentimental feelings about the Poles, whom they regarded as slaves, beneath contempt, etc. That is why the occupation of Poland was particularly harsh.
The Polish Jews weren’t so afraid when the Germans came because they thought the Poles were much more dangerous to them than the Germans.
Most of the Jews (a few hundred) who escaped the Sobibor uprising were then murdered by Polish partisans. There were many other incidents like that.
As I said before, the people who actually worked the concentration camps and ghettos were mostly not German. In Poland, much of the Holocaust staff was naturally made up of Poles.
A large number of Jewish survivors who returned in 1945 and 1946 after the war was over were then murdered by Poles.
So no, I don’t think your views are so balanced.
That's going too far. Some Jews had good memories of Imperial Germany or of German treatment in the First World War. Those who were more informed about Hitler took a different view.
It was also the case that blackmailers and informants could identify Jews who the Germans couldn't find. But it's simply not the case that most Jews would think Poland more dangerous than the Third Reich.
As I said before, the people who actually worked the concentration camps and ghettos were mostly not German. In Poland, much of the Holocaust staff was naturally made up of Poles.
What do you mean by "Holocaust staff" anyway? There were German troops and police. There were Polish prisoners and police who participated. There were prisoners from other countries in the camps. There were also Jewish prisoners and police.
Collaborators played a role in virtually every occupied country. Jewish collaborators played an important role in Eastern Europe. But the Germans were the ones with the weapons and the power.
I just heard that the Nazi’s and the Communists were not true enemies. Now THAT is a NEWSFLASH!
Obviously Jews throughout Europe underestimated what the Germans would do.
Prewar Poland was an extremely anti-Semitic country. During the Nazi occupation, Poles participated rather enthusiastically in the murder of Jews, for instance the Jewabne massacre and a lot of others like it. Polish collaboration is one major reason that only about 50,000 of the prewar Jewish population of 3 million survived.
Jews thought of Poles as being more anti-Semitic than Germans because of the long history of pogroms and other routine violence.
By Holocaust staff, I meant guards, who in fact were usually Ukrainians. So I shouldn’t have said that. When Poles participated in the Holocaust, it was usually outside of the camps.
I know that there were also various instances of Poles risking their lives to help Jews.
Back in the early 1930's communist and Nazis both used competing street gangs to attack liberals and true German nationalists.
I'll continue with yours - it's interesting how your rhetorical choices (both of form and content) illustrate your ideological intentions.
Not pretending to be a scholar of fifty year old vendettas,
And so it begins. "Vendetta" - as if the sytematized slaughter of millions of innocents, and the justice required for such an atrocity, were a feud between two urban crime families like the "Castellamarese War."
let me recap what little I know about Mr. Demjanjuk.
Ah, he's "Mr." Demjanjuk - deserving of respectful address.
After spending his adult life in Cleveland
He was a child before he arrived in Cleveland? His adult life was spent there? Because he was over 40 years of age when he arrived in Cleveland and over 30 years of age when he arrived in America.
he was determined to be a killer called Ivan the Terrible. He was stripped of his US citizenship
The Justice Department did not "determine" him to be Ivan "The Terrible" Marchenko. They accurately determined that he lied extensively on his application for US citizenship and therefore obtained that citizenship fraudulently.
He was then stripped of his citizenship and when israel requested extradition of the criminal alien, the US complied.
and sent to Israel where he was positively identified as the notorios beast and sentenced to death.
He was found to be Marchenko in an Israeli Court - which, like French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and other court systems - does not conduct its deliberations with a presumption of innocence, but a presumption of neither innocence or guilt.
At the 11th hour the highest court in the land determined that he was in fact not the person for whoms crimes he had been convicted.
He had more than a decade's worth of appeals left when new evidence was introduced that he was a different SS-trained camp guard than Ivan Marchenko. Although it was established as a fact during his trial that he was a concentration camp guard - he admitted in open court that he had been tattooed with a tattoo that the Nazis used only for identifying non-Nordic concentration camp guards - he was set free, because Israel like the USA does not permit a man to be tried twice for the same crimes.
Now You say, who the hell cares, he was defineitly (and this time there is no reasonable doubt of course) a Ukranian who collaborated with the Germans a prison guard etc.
No, what I say is that he should be held accountable for the crimes he committed.
There can be no doubt that he was a concentration camp guard at Sobibor because records which had been unavailable before 1993 are now available to prosecutors, and because Demjanjuk himself admitted in court that he bore a Nazi SS camp tattoo which he had inexpertly removed in order to conceal his status.
Remember now, the folks down there in the Ukraine were just coming off the greatest politically motivated mass murder the world has ever witnessed.
So you are arguing that because Russians starved Ukrainians, Ukrainians were justified in murdering Jews. Fascinating.
The fellows who perpetrated this abomination were allied or at least at peace with every other major power on earth.
What relevance has that to the question of Ivan Demjanjuk's crimes? Your argument is that if someone somewhere does something evil and manages to get away with it, then anyone should feel entitled to do something evil and get a free pass. Again, fascinating.
If you were one of the Ukranians lucky enough to still be alive, wronged, would you not revenge?
Now your choice of words becomes interesting again, using "revenge" as a non-modified verb in the style of Shakespeare - more specifically as in Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice and even more specifically from the famous soliloquy therein of Shylock, the grasping, greedy and bloodthirsty Jewish stereotype character.
Is this just a coincidence? We'll see in a moment.
That's the style of the question, but what's the rhetorical content?
You are arguing that Ivan Demjanjuk should be allowed to murder other people for fun and pay because other people did that around him when he was a teenager. He has no personal accountability for his actions - in fact his actions were laudable revenge.
Again, fascinating moral perspective.
I believe Demjanuk is now what 90?
So what is the proper statute of limitations on cold blooded murder of women and children?
You are arguing that once someone lives a certain number of years they are no longer responsible for their actions. Again, fascinating moral perspective.
He has spent the last what, twenty years in jails coutrooms and death row?
Rightfully so. He is an accomplice to the murder of thousands of people. He has spent 20 years of sitting around in air conditioned prison cells and courtrooms with family visits, three square meals a day, free medical care, plenty of leisure time for reading, listening to music, watching TV, etc. His innocent victims - who did not have the luxury of individual rooms, or AC, or family time, or leisure, or medical care or even one decent meal a day - have not spent twenty years in boring earthly environs. They have spent the last 65 years dead.
Ivan Demjanjuk has never and can never pay the full price of his crimes. Justice demands that he should pay as much as he can.
He has not a pound of flesch left.
So, it was not a coincidence. We are back to the words of Shylock, a stock character to inhabit the wet dreams of every anti-Semite. And here, interestingly, nkycincinnatikid - usually a good speller - misspells the word "flesh" as "flesch". Or does he misspell? Is it not a variant of the Yiddish "fleisch"?
So we have a lot of easily exploded special pleading for a murderer couched in belittling and codedly anti-Semitic rhetoric.
I hope your hero Pat Buchanan is reading this thread, for your sake. He may have just found his new personal assistant.
No, we were sure that he had lied on his citizenship application and we were sure that he had been a concentration camp guard.
And we were absolutely correct.
We also suspected that he was Ivan Marchenko and therefore allowed him to be extradited to stand trial to determine if he was.
I agree with you. This column by Buchanan is ridiculous. He is distorting history to try and reform the image of Hitler and the Nazis.
Why?
I don’t know and I really don’t care. Hitler and the Nazi Party initiated the holocaust and plunged the world into the costliest war history.
Buchanan has lost his mind.
There was always (often violent and deadly) anti-semitism among the peasantry, and the intra-war situation was perilous for the Jewish population in Poland. Nevertheless, one must look at the history of Jews in Poland over a longer period than 20 years. Again, why else would such a large concentration of "hated" people live in a place like Poland? Why wasn't there a Nazi-allied puppet government a la Croatia and Vichy (I don't care what Laval defenders say, that was a puppet government), and why were the only sizeable fascist movement in Poland (the Phalange) actually persecuted by the Nazis?
If it makes you feel any better, 3.5 million Polish gentiles died from 1939-1945.
Of course it doesn’t “make me feel better” that Poles also died in large numbers during the war. But several individuals here seem to be arguing that: (1) the Poles were not particularly anti-Semitic and have a relatively honorable record with regard to the German occupation; (2) the treatment of Polish Catholics is similar to the fate of Polish Jews. Both of those claims are clearly untrue. The latter is borderline denial.
The tolerance of some medieval kings is irrelevant to this discussion. In many European countries, royalty protected Jews from commoners because Jewish taxation was such important sources of crown revenue.
Also, the Jagiello were not exactly Polish. Except for its last members, the Jagiello dynasty spoke Lithuanian and thought of itself as culturally Lithuanian, while ruling Poland.
Three million is what was left after a substantial exodus. Those Jews who didn’t leave before it was too late, because of their various ties to the country and to Polish culture, were very sorry.
As I said before, there wasn’t a Nazi puppet government because the Nazis didn’t allow the Poles to self-govern. If they had, there would have been a German-controlled puppet government.
The Nazis persecuted all Polish political organizations because they considered all Polish politics subversive. The General Government was ruled entirely by the German military.
While they killed millions of Poles, Germans were not attempting to annihilate them. Their intentions were eventual enslavement and exile for the majority of Poles, not death to all of them. Operation Tannenberg was directed against the intellegentsia and the politically active, not against the general Polish populace. The Nazis did not commit genocide against Poles as they did against Jews.
Poland has a long history of major anti-Jewish pogroms.
Jews were expelled from England and France before much of the area that is now Poland was Christianized.
It isn't proper to resign one's commission as soon as one's brothers-in-arms are about to enter into battle - in order to join their enemy.
We forget today that the concept of loyalty to the country as a whole was one that didn’t come into being until post-war, and even that evolved over time. One’s loyalty was to that of their home state.
False. The concept of loyalty to the country as a whole was present from the very beginning, and was an essential attitude for the pursuit of the War Of Independence in the first place. It was not until the pernicious notion of oxymoronic "states' rights" became an artificial political ideology following the nullification crisis that this idea took root.
There was always local pride and an insistence on local prerogative, but the concept of the state before the union did not take shape until the drawing of hard sectional lines from 1820 onward.
My main point was what I said to the other fella, Lee alone couldn’t have stopped the Civil War had he accepted Lincoln’s offer.
He could have ended it quite quickly and relatively bloodlessly.
A general of his skill and impetuousness provided with McClellan's vast resources would have taken Richmond in the fall of 1861. The close of hostilities in the east would have crippled the western Confederacy.
If he had turned against Virginia, he would’ve been considered the biggest traitor to the South, bar none, and his name would’ve been forever associated with the likes of Benedict Arnold.
George Thomas, a Virginia regular army officer who remained loyal to the Union, defeated the South's last great army in the West - the Army of the Tennessee commanded by archetypal Rebel John Bell Hood.
Thomas basically destroyed Hood's command and paved the path Sherman took to the sea.
Thomas was not and is not reviled in Virginia, not even among the scattered deadenders still living there, and he certainly is not likened to Benedict Arnold.
He knew that and that’s why he did what he did.
In other words, concern for his reputation was paramount.
More than a few men whom would’ve preferred a different course of action were forced to have to choose sides.
Some, like Thomas, made the morally right decision. Some, like Lee, made the morally wrong one.
Moral superiority was not a province exclusive to the North as both sides had their fair share of wrong-headedness.
The cause of war was the question whether or not slavery should be extended to the federal territories. There is only one moral answer to that question and the GOP was in the right.
The North, too, had demogogues, such as Massachusetts’ Charles Sumner.
The cowardly assault on Sumner - whose only crime was speaking words that the cowards involved didn't like - illustrates the difference between the two sections' rhetoric at that point.
Unfortunately, in two diametrically opposed viewpoints, war is the only solution to reach its ultimate settlement.
A solution to the issue had been proposed. One side was willing to compromise, to sacrifice part of what it wanted in order to reach an accomodation.
One side wasn't and took a calculatedly belligerent stance.
Forgive me, Mr. Wideawake, sir, I just remembered who you are and I already previously stated I would NOT redebate the Civil War in this thread. I should not have bothered engaging you in discussion in the first place, especially upon recalling your hyper-demogoguery and laughably revisionist and morally dubious historical stances in this and many other threads. You remind me exactly of the types of elitist, arrogant, and ungentlemenly hard-liners that pushed border-state Southern Unionist moderates completely and absolutely into the secessionist camp and why there could never be a peaceful settlement.
Probably, but that has more to do with human nature than with anything else. Tyrannies and genocides find collaborators where deprivation is great enough. That the Nazis found collaborators happened in France, Austria, the Netherlands, and the rest of occupied Europe indicates that this wasn't an East European phenomenon.
The Nazis persecuted all Polish political organizations because they considered all Polish politics subversive. The General Government was ruled entirely by the German military.
Maybe this doesn't have the significance some people attribute to it, but it's not wholly without meaning either. The fact that the Germans relied so much on outsiders to do their work in Poland shouldn't simply be ignored or attributed entirely to German, rather than also Polish unwillingness.
During the Nazi occupation, Poles participated rather enthusiastically in the murder of Jews, for instance the Jewabne massacre and a lot of others like it. Polish collaboration is one major reason that only about 50,000 of the prewar Jewish population of 3 million survived.
Clearly there were incidents like that, but I don't know that you can take Jedwabne as a representative event. Saying there was "enthusiastic participation" or "rather enthusiastic participation" based on events that involved only a small part of the population is going too far.
Also, that collaboration was one reason for the low survival rate doesn't mean it was the only reason. Harboring Jews wasn't punishable by death in the West, and even a country as hospitable to Jews as Holland had quite a low survival rate.
It's harder to hide 3 million people than a smaller number, especially if many people need to keep the secret to save someone and only one person has to reveal it to send someone to their death.
That there was anti-Jewish feeling in Poland is hard to deny, but survival rates may not have been that much higher even had relations been better.
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