TW: Pat Buchanan has held positions of authority with the U.S. government (under Nixon) and was a serious if unlikely candidate for POTUS (winning New Hampshire primary). He can have interesting insights on politics when he is not being a shill. But this piece to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII frames how a pundit can distort, mislead and end up at point C if they try hard enough. To me it is a metaphor of how pundits/commentators with either agendas or illogic can seek to lead the public astray. If one is not familiar with WWII history or especially the pre-war period one could almost follow his piece as a legitimate critique.
I have studied tomes of analysis on how WWII started. How the world got into WWII in particular after WWI is fascinating. But Buchanan's piece is stunningly insidious. Will insert a couple of critiques from memory.
Buchanan's basic premise is insidious- Did Hitler want war in Sept 1939? Of course not, given his druthers the Poles would have folded like the Czechs, Austrians and their alleged French/Brit allies, but that is not really the issue is it? At the end of the day, if we know anything we know Hitler and the Nazis were sickos yet Buchanan seeks to defend their motives. If one can defend the Nazis, one can defend anyone.
From Pat Buchanan via Yahoo News:
"...The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.
[TW: PB is attempting some jujitsu. As losers in WWI, the Germans got the short stick on the post war geography re-alignment, Hitler was merely attempting to redress Versailles- so implies PB. PB heads the path of had the Poles just ceded Danzig then Hitler would have stopped despite Hitler having not stopped after Saarland, Austria, Sudatenland, the rump state of Czechoslovakia].
Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? [TW: PB just quietly slips in the suggestion that Hitler was dangling a shard of his previous conquest, how did Hitler get shards of Slovakia? Not a bad deal if you can get it, overrun territory then use it to negotiate for more]
Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue.
But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels [TW: a junta of Poles implies a problem perhaps an illegitimate government or a poor ally, that Hitler was a junta of psychopathic Nazis apparently not a problem], giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn't want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany. [TW: my recollection is that the Nazis has been instigated and manufacturing "clamor" throughout their target geographies, Buchanan accepts the Nazi induced "clamor" as organic]
Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative "to stop Hitler" after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.
If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet's, or Fidel Castro's, was out to conquer the world?
After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.
The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary's ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate. [TW: see the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was really the Czechs fault- so PB says. Hitler did do well getting the Poles and Hungarians to bite on participating in his land grab to the Poles and Hungarians eternal shame.}
Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest? [TW: it was not the world extrapolating the Czech experience, it was the world extrapolating Saarland, Austria, Czech and then beginning to wonder if Hitler was serious when he wrote Mein Kampf, Hitler's real enemy was the Soviets for sure so I suppose PB is headed down path of had we let Hitler roll then he would have just gone after the Soviets leaving the world with a massive Germany peace-loving albeit Jew hating government co-existing with France, Britain and the U.S. ]
....But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can't get out of the Baltic Sea?
If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?
Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
[TW: because he wanted to go after the Soviets which again I think PB is quite comfortable with a scenario by which we let Hitler have his way with the commies as long as he left us alone, of course had Hitler whipped the commies he would have been the world's pre-eminent power]
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia.
Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.
As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?
Winston Churchill was right when he called it "The Unnecessary War" — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20090901/cm_uc_crpbux/op_3311160
No comments:
Post a Comment