Posted on 06/04/2008 9:34:52 PM PDT by rmlew
NORMANDY, France -- Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.
Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.” Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.
Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich!
On the left, the novelist Nicholson Baker in a book of nonfiction, "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization," builds the case that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime.
Apparently there was no need to, in blanket fashion, attack German urban centers and the industry, transportation and communications concentrated inside them. From Baker's comfortable vantage point, either the war was amoral or unnecessary -- or there must have been more humane ways to stop the flow of fuel, crews and equipment for the Waffen SS divisions that invaded Europe and Russia.
In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence -- and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war -- Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.
Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.
Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 -- or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis' pain and anguish.
The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never "stabbed in the back" at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II -- and 60 years without war have followed.
Had Nicholson Baker been alive in 1942, I doubt he would have had better ideas of how to stop the Nazi and Japanese juggernauts that had ruined Eastern Europe, Russia and large parts of China and southeast Asia other than using the same clumsy tools our grandfathers were forced to employ to end fascist aggression.
A Nazi armored division or death camp stopped its murderous work not through reasoned appeal or self-reflection, but only when its fuel, supplies and manpower were cut off.
I am currently visiting military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, some of the most beautiful, solemn acres in Europe. The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German rail yard.
Instead, our soldiers were more worried that they had few options available to stop Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- other than their own innate courage. The dead in our cemeteries over here in Europe never bragged that they were eagerly fighting the "good" war, but rather only reluctantly finishing a necessary one that someone else had started.
They and those who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II while ignoring -- or faulting -- the intelligence and resolve that won it.
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once scoffed at the peacetime wisdom of postwar critics that came across as mass-produced, feel-good "bottled piety." Others might call it ingratitude.
Pat Buchanan has lost what little mind he had.
VDH loses some credibility by calling Buchanan “conservative.”
That’s a small portion of VDH’s likely response - he’s on the road. Buchanan isn’t just taking on the “neocons,” whoever you mean by that. He’s taking on most of established history from a God’s-eye vantage. The war was inevitable, on the Sudetenland or the Polish or the Austrian pretext or whatever else would have served. Hitler said so himself.
I have never cared for Buchanan. I will probably not read this book. I will trust the review to you. He is absurd.
Never heard of him.
PING
This reminds me of an editorial written by Larry Elder after 9/11:
"Terrorism in America - retracing our steps"
I don't think Elder was saying the U.S. was morally wrong or a bully in any way. He only was asking, "What if...?" There's nothing wrong with wondering, "What if...?"
But it sounds like Buchanan went too far in his book. (I didn't read it, but I wouldn't be surprised, having read "Death of the West".)
He is the more attractive sibling of Bay Buchanon
If it were really just a case of bungling by the Allied forces would this be the case?
The proof, is in the pudding (Mmm pudding... excuse me).
We know too much about the goals of the Germans in 1914 to listen to Pat. The only thing new about Hitler’s policy was the virulent hatred of the Jews, which sometimes distorted his strategic thinking.
Incredibly Buchanan wants to propagate the if-we-had-just-understood-Hitler myth that has been so thorougly discredited. I’m really beginning to wonder if that joke about one Buchanan’s relatives dying in WWII from falling out of concentration camp guard tower wasn’t based on reality. One of the best things the Pubbies did in the nineties was to boot Pat out of the party. He sounds more and more like a racist fool.
He remains an interesting, if pathetic, study for providing an insight into the thinking of those who have carried out, and still do, the theory and practice of hell - they, too, could be genial at times.
1. The U.S. did not wage World War II on moral grounds. In fact, the U.S. was very comfortable with the ideas promulgated by Nazi Germany and demonstrated -- through our relations with the Soviet Union from the 1930s through the war -- that we had no problem with a totalitarian regime that killed millions of people.
2. Many of the U.S. and British tactics in the war -- notably the bombing of German cities -- were either (a) ineffective due to weather, lack of precision, losses of aircraft and crews, etc., or (b) deliberately ineffective due to attempts by the U.S. to minimize damage to German industrial facilities.
Item (b) is what makes me particularly cynical about what the U.S. involvement in World War II was all about.
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
VDH is a neocon? And here I thought he was a classical liberal and a registered Democrat.
But is there an argument to be made that our sanctions of Japan were an overreaction at the behest of the China Lobby? There is a difference between historical revisionism and looking at past mistakes so as to avoid future problems. The Japanese felt (and some still feel) that they were only doing to China (and Korea and Vietnam) what every other nation that had the chance had done, and that we only got upset because of our business interests, missionary concerns and the fact that they weren't white. The Japanese felt that were only engaging in the same kind of imperialism that the British, French, Germans and Portuguese were doing- from their vantage point. Would there have been an attack at Pearl Harbor if we had not sanctioned the Japanese? Did we have any more ‘right’ to the Philippines than the Japanese? Was the ‘Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere’ any less legitimate than the East India company?
I don't know. The fact is that they treacherously attacked us, contravening all rules of ‘civilized warfare’ and we beat the hell out of them. But how much of the initial animosity was racial and imperialistic on our part? Not zero, not one hundred percent. Not making any apologies but maybe not all of those questions have answers that we can be completely comfortable with if we are honest about the past actions of the Roosevelt administration, and can look past our own wartime propaganda.
You are posing interesting questions.
I think that sometimes a very complicated situation can be explained away if a right question is asked. For example, a very complicated Israel-Arab conflict can be distilled to this: imagine that one side “magically” loses all of its weapons, what happens then? The answer is simple: if Jews lose their weapons - they are massacred. If Arabs lose their weapons, Israel exhales with a relief and goes on with building prosperity for themselves and will happily include the now peaceful Arabs.
Back to the Empire building by Europeans and Japanese. The right question here, I think, is how they treated their possessions? As far as I know, Germans and Portuguese were brutal. French were much less so. They still maintain some relationships with former colonies. (Just look at their soccer team!) Its hard to overestimate the positive cultural influence brought by the British Empire. Were Japanese fit there? The most brutal of all. It took decades after the end of WWII for Chinese and Koreans to stop hating Japanese that much.
So the attitude adjustment they received from America was timely. They would had grown only stronger if the war did not start when it did, and the bloody price was paid.
The answer is simple: if Jews lose their weapons - they are massacred. If Arabs lose their weapons, Israel exhales with a relief and goes on with building prosperity for themselves and will happily include the now peaceful Arabs
Well put!
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