Replies

“But Pat is an exception among conservatives.”

One would certainly hope so. Be that as it may, the liberals and democrats will use any excuse to cast Conservatives and Republicans as racists and anti-Semites, and Buchanan is a useful foil.

“And I’m sure there were some Nazis he didn’t like.”

Let’s see.....
In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was “an individual of great courage...Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness
masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.” (The Guardian, 1/14/92)

Writing of “group fantasies of martyrdom,” Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: “Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.” (New Republic, 10/22/90)

Buchanan’s columns have run in the Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter
and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction. Does Buchanan have no control over where his columns are printed?

Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals, because it was “running down 70-year-old camp guards.” (New York Times, 4/21/87)

Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan — despite protests — to visit Germany’s Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were buried. So he also likes dead Nazis.

At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish leaders that they were “Americans first” — and repeatedly scrawled the phrase “Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews” in his notebook. Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald Reagan’s line that the SS troops buried at
Bitburg were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” (New York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)

He certainly has engaged in the constitutionally protected perversion of championing the cause of a succession of Nazi war criminals, from John Demjanjuk to Karl Linnas to Arthur Rudolph.

Pat Buchanan appeared on a neo-Nazi radio program to promote his new revisionist history of the Second World War, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. James Edwards is the host of the program “Political Cesspool,” the stated mission of which is to “represent a philosophy that is pro-White.”

In his book Buchanan argues that it was wrong for American to have intervened on the side of the allies in World War II, and that it would have been better if the Germans had won the war. The show on which he appeared is not just pro-white but anti-Semitic and pro-Holocaust denial.

“And remember Bill Buckley’s reaction when Gore Vidal called him a crypto-Nazi?”

Bill Buckley wrote in his book, “In Search of anti-Semitism”, that “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination, the military build-up for the Gulf War, amounted to anti-Semitism.”

Buchanan’s attitudes towards Jews, Israel, the Holocaust, etc., are well-represented among his followers including those on freerepublic. Frequently, and with some justification, I have seen posts here condemning “the Jews” for being such die-hard liberals, especially in the face of Obama’s obvious attitudes and conduct towards Israel. Buchanan’s attitudes and those of his followers are useful for the enemies of the Conservative movement.