Posted on 05/21/2008 6:49:34 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Last week we noted the bizarre arguments of Seattle Times editorial writer Bruce Ramsey, who tried so hard to defend Barack Obama against President Bush’s “appeasement” speech that he actually ended up defending Hitler for annexing Austria. His exact words were: “What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable.”
If you think that’s an ahistorical pretzel of monumental proportions, though, you ain’t seen nothin’ — because here comes Pat Buchanan. According to old Pat, not only was the Anchluss not a problem, Hitler’s invasion of Poland was also perfectly understandable, given the Poles’ refusal to negotiate.
Those darned stubborn Poles were responsible for starting World War II, according to Pat: Bush Plays the Hitler Card.
German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson’s 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.
Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.
But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.
From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.
The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.
I’m glad you’re not one of the Buchanites and I’m sorry I subsumed you into that group. My bad.
wrt your last couple of paragraphs, the only point I was trying to make about the neutral countries to the west had to do with Buchanan’s worship of ‘negotiations’ as though the Poles could have benefitted from more or better negotiations — I was only trying to point out that maybe the Poles were correct to distrust Hitler’s promises, that by the spring of 1939 it was hardly irrational to believe that Hitler was an untrustworthy SOB. It was not easy in 1939 to be confident that he’d be regarding any treaties or alliances as sacrosanct. The example of how he did not exactly respect neutrality in 1940 was just another set of instances in which Hitler trashed international norms.
A lot of your statements seem to try to rationalize Hitler’s actions as if they were acceptable. I hope you don’t mean them that way and are simply describing how things appeared justifiable to Hitler or his officers. For instance, you seem to justify the invasions of Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands as though they were legally and morally acceptable. I do know very well what happened in Belgium on May 10, 1940 because I have close relatives who woke up to the Nazi bombardment that morning, thank you. My family members survived but many of their friends did not. I do not regard Hitler’s rationalizations for the invasions of the neutral countries as in any way adequate, although I can certainly see how powerful the military justifications were.
I don’t quarrel with factual historical points you make, but I still have a lot more sympathy for the plight of the Poles and the truly awful dilemmas they faced than I detect in your comments. For instance, I do not think the “junior partner” alliance with Hitler to allow him to pursue Lebensraum further east could have been trusted by any Polish leader of sanity, and it wasn’t. How could they have acceded to a huge German army occupying their territory in order to attack the USSR? They could very well have become a permanent part of the Lebensraum that way. Why would they ever willingly choose to be part of Hitler’s grand expansion plan, trusting their fate in his hands? At the very least, it’s not the sort of thing that any sovereign state usually wants to allow, absent the most desperate circumstances. Yes, their situation did turn out to be even more desperate than they realized, but they did not expect to be overrun in 3-4 weeks or to have the USSR attack them from behind at the same time.
What is your excuse for Denmark and Norway?
I think Hitler was a pretty decent fellow and would have come around if we had only gotten to know him better. We should have put more effort into understanding him
Pat has lost his mind. I have always defended him and thought he was a great guy. I met him once.
He is defending Neville Chamberlain and the barbaric invasion of Poland? What next? The Warsaw Ghetto?
Not only did the Jerries start WWII and lose it, nearly destroying themselves, they also destroyed the centuries old German presence in Eastern Europe — Germans had been in places right into Russia since the Roman period, but post WWII, they all fled, fearing repercussions, into Germany.
you’re right — should have invited him over for tea and crumpets :)
“Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany...”
Yeah, that was it exactly, and Hitler was such a trustworthy guy. /s
[He (Hitler) gave his word that he would respect the Locarno Treaty; he broke it. He gave his word that he neither wished nor intended to annex Austria; he broke it. He declared that he would not incorporate the Czechs in the Reich; he did so. He gave his word after Munich that he had no further territorial demands in Europe; he broke it. He gave his word that he wanted no Polish provinces; he broke it. He has sworn to you for years that he was the mortal enemy of Bolshevism; he is now its ally. Can you wonder his word is, for us, not worth the paper it is written on? ]
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/bluebook/blbk144.htm
I am going to try to explain this nicely. 1. George Bush made a statement to the effect that one does not negotiate with mortal enemies, i.e. terrorists, citing the Nazis and WWII as an example. 2. Pat responded in an article warning folks not to learn lessons of history that are not in fact lessons of history. 3. Pat pointed out that the refusal to negotiate with Hitler was fatal to Poland. Very very fatal indeed.
Your added lesson that France and England could have invaded Germany is lunacy, and shear madness. First, it would have been military suicide, as events so amply demonstrated in the early years of the ground war, where France proved incapable of defending its own turf, and England, separated by the English channel barely held on to a very secure defensive position. Another general lesson of warfare is that a successful offensive war requires about 3 times the number of troops as the force you are attacking. In other words France and England would have required minimally 3 times the number of forces they actually had, as an absolute minimum, just to start thinking about it. There would have been the enormous logistics requirements to get forces in place. The preparations for such a war would have been, certainly, detected by Germany, giving Germany a legitimate causus belli (preparation to attack is always causus belli) and the consequences would have been about the same. France and England had no clue about the ruthless efficiency of the military innovations in equipment tactics and strategy of the Germans until they witnessed it. Finally, after the devestating consequences of WWI on both France and England, their populations would not have stood for starting a war of aggression against Germany. Russia, who ended up on our side, might have thought differently as well.
Last and most especially, you have to take your lessons of history from history as it actually happened. You have no idea how things might have turned out in your make believe fantasy of history as it might have been - might have been all in the imaginings of the brain of one soul imagined in one night in a reckless FR post and not actually played out over years and years in diplomatic halls and battlefields across the world by the billions of individuals that took part in affect or were affected by that war. You have no way of knowing how that might have turned out differently.
I am not here to defend Pat. I am here to defend objectivity and reason, casting to the winds of which is a mortal defect in the soul of post-modern American-style conservatism. I am here on the principle that when you attack a man for what he said, you attack him for what he actually said, after trying to understand what he actually said, and not based on some fantasy of what he might have said. If you believe Pat's correction of Bush's truncation of history is, in fact, wrong, cite where his facts are wrong. But don't tell us that you can counter Pat's real historical facts with some make believe fantasy about how it all would have been better in your own imaginings.
I did not realize that I was arguing with a moral midget. Tell that to the millions who were overwhelmed. Were they just puny weaklings. Were our relatives and friends of relatives who died being overwhelmed fighting the Germans, and very unsuccessfully for a couple of years just weak spineless saps. Stop playing war with your toy soldiers and grow up.
How did it work out for the rest of us? Frankly I would rather have my uncle, who died as a spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, alive, all else being equal. I would prefer to have all the souls who died in that war alive, all else being equal. But I am not a nihilist.
Germany hasn't invaded their neighbors in over 60 years.
Pat says none of these things. He merely says that refusal to negotiate was fatal to Poland. Period. It does not try to argue that history would have turned out better all around if Poland had negotiated. He only points out that they didn't and things turned out as badly as the possibly could have.
Hard to believe someone as bright as Buchanan could think this way.
Why is this so hard to get? Why do folks have so much difficulty reading the actual words written and not reading words that were not written?
First, I don't see that anyone here is a "Buchananite" per se. Second, I think we all have sympathy for the plight of the poles and what happened to them. Really bad things happen to people, sometimes because they are foolish, sometimes they are brave, and sometimes they don't know what is actually coming down the road. The object is to examine what happened and try to learn from it. All Pat points out is that you shouldn't learn foolish lessons that aren't there in the record as it actually happened. That's all.
He is not.
He is merely quoting Goebbels' propaganda of the time. The "negotiations" were about establishing a pretext for invasion of Poland. Hitler was privately livid over that "Schweinehund" Chamberlain for depriving him of his war with the appeasement at Munich.
The plan for Poland was to demand so much that Poland could not possibly comply.
Kennedy negotiated with Kruschev in the Cuban missile crisis, and thank God. The best alternative to a negotiated settlement was either Russian missiles in Cuba, or nuclear war then and there. It turned out that there was a better alternative for both parties, which was achieved through negotiation.
Now you could argue that for England and the US, Poland's implacability was the best outcome because we had early warning of Hitlers intentions, he got somewhat bogged down in other things giving us time to prepare and we did not have to deal with creeping incrementalism, against which we would never have been prepared. But that does not mean it was necessarily best for the Poles who got the worst outcome they could have gotten.
Pat makes a very simple point. That is all, and to make him a Nazi propagandist or mouthpiece for Goebbels you need to find something else he said and not this, that refusal to negotiate can be fatal.
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