In some ways, Pat Buchanan is big media’s favorite conservative. He’s brash. He speaks his mind. And he has an awful tendency to put his foot in his mouth thus totally discrediting conservative positions.
In short, big media gets to kill two birds with one stone; they get an entertaining talking head as well as a ready made Bogey man to represent eeeevil conservatives.
A few years back, Pat made a rather innocuous point about the difference between Hitler’s death camps like Auschwitz and concentration camps like Mauthausen that landed him in hot water with the liberal media and branded him as a “holocaust denier.” The point being that inhabitants of concentration camps had a chance at survival in that they were more likely to be worked to death rather than executed outright. This is true as far as it goes, although in the closing days of the war, Himmler had a list with 10,000 high profile names of inmates at concentration camps who he ordered executed before the fall of the Third Reich. Thankfully, the Americans were advancing so quickly in the closing days of the war that many on the list survived simply because there was no time to execute them.
Now Mr. Buchanan has taken on the legacy of Yalta, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill ostensibly divided the European continent between the Soviets and the West thus betraying our war aims of freeing all of Europe from oppression. It’s times like this that Buchanan betrays himself for what he is; a mossback conservative, a throw back to the 1950’s paranoids who opposed the formation of the United Nations, our joining NATO, and any other idea that did not conform to the “fortress America” position on foreign policy. This isolationist strain of conservatism in the Republican party is often referred to as the “Robert Taft wing” of the party.
Taft was a Senator from Ohio, son of President William Howard Taft whose name was magic for a generation of Republicans who opposed the New Deal and foreign entanglements of any kind. It was a quaint kind of republicanism that supported the concept of isolationism because America was too good, too pure to sully its hands by mixing it up with peoples in foreign lands. Contrast that with today’s old/new left’s isolationism that seeks to withdraw from the world because America is too evil to engage the rest of the planet and must beg forgiveness for all of our sins, bother real and imagined.
Buchanan’s reading of Yalta and the consequences of that momentous conference is laughable. He takes President Bush’s speech in Riga this past week where the President condemned Soviet occupation of the Baltic states totally out of context:
If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that was a monstrous lie.
As FDR and Churchill consigned these peoples to a Stalinist hell run by a monster they alternately and affectionately called “Uncle Joe” and “Old Bear,” why are they not in the history books alongside Neville Chamberlain, who sold out the Czechs at Munich by handing the Sudetenland over to Germany? At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany. No Christian peoples of Europe ever embraced their Soviet captors or Stalinist quislings.
First of all, the President didn’t call Yalta “immoral” he called Soviet occupation of eastern Europe immoral. The President criticized Yalta as Roosevelt’s contemporaries criticized it: it was at best an expediency, a recognition that there was no way to get Soviet troops to go home once the war was over.
Secondly, where in the wide, wide, world of sports did Buchanan ever get the idea that the Sudeten Germans “wanted to be with Germany?” This was Nazi propaganda that Buchanan has evidently swallowed whole. The problem was that the Sudetenland was composed not only of Germans but of Czechs, Slovenes, Moravians, with a smattering of other minorities and that even a majority of Sudeten Germans had no desire to join the Reich. Hitler’s propaganda machine spun bloodcurdling tales of atrocities committed against the German minority that even Chamberlain took as gospel and which the master appeaser partially used as an excuse to cave in to Hitler’s demands.
Buchanan should know better.
Mr. Buchanan then posits the notion that because the peoples of eastern Europe traded one dictatorship under Hitler for another under Stalin that the west in fact lost World War II:
Other questions arise. If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war?
If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?
At bottom, World War II was a war of survival. That was the war aim for all western powers; to survive as sovereign, independent nations. Anything else was gravy. France and Britain’s guarantee of Polish sovereignty was a recognition that their own survival was at stake not necessarily an end in and of itself. The mutual defense pact France had with Poland was meant as a deterrent to German aggression. In the end, neither France nor England was able to send one single soldier to defend Poland against the German attack. And for Buchanan to say that Polish “freedom” was “lost to communism” is just plain wrong. Pre World War II Poland was a military dictatorship as harsh as any government imposed on the Poles following the war by Stalin. The fact that the west restored Polish sovereignty only to be thwarted by Stalin’s designs does not negate the accomplishment of the allies’ defeat of the German empire.
Finally, Buchanan asks if the war was worth the sacrifice in blood and treasure and then really jumps the shark when he says the German people didn’t deserve to be liberated because “they voted Hitler in:”
When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?
If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a “smashing” success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in
.
The entire thrust of the first statement presupposes that France and England had a choice about going to war against Hitler. This is nuts. Buchanan has said in the past that the United States had no need to fight Hitler because, after all, Hitler never attacked us. All one can say about these statements is that they’re extraordinarily short sighted and myopic. There wasn’t a thinking person alive in the west during the summer of 1939 who didn’t realize that Hitler was not going to stop, that an attack on Poland was a prelude to an attack on Germany’s arch rival France (at which point one assumes Buchanan would grant the French permission to defend themselves) and that Britain, in order to protect itself, would surely come to the aid of the French. In short, despite desperate efforts to avoid it, those last weeks of August in 1939 pointed toward a general European war. France and Britain assumed Russia would join them in the fight against Hitler but ended up underestimating the cynicism of Hitler and the greed of Stalin.
As for Hitler being “voted in” by the German people, perhaps Mr. Buchanan should stop surfing neo-Nazi web sites and read a history book or two. Hitler lost the Presidential election in 1932 by a wide margin to incumbent President Hindenburg. Only by shady maneuvering with other conservative and nationalistic parties was Hitler able to be named Chancellor, an unelected position appointed by the President. Hitler then used the fire at the Reichstag building to declare a state of emergency and using the full power of the state, conducted a referendum on his decision that passed overwhelmingly.
Saying that the German people supported Hitler is one thing. That came later, after he threw off the shackles of Versailles, reoccupied the Rhineland, and the Anschluss with Austria. But to say that Hitler was voted into office is just plain wrong.
Once again with this article Buchanan proves that his brand of conservatism does not reflect the thinking of either a majority of Americans or conservatives in general. And his constant problems with foot in mouth disease is an embarrassment both to himself and the conservative movement.
UPDATE
Ace quotes WF Buckley who says Buchanan is an anti-semite:
As William F. Buckley concluded in a long essay on Pat way back in the late eighties (I think), Buchanan takes a number of positions, each of which seems defensible on its face, and yet, taking them all together, the cumulative impression is that he just hates Jews.
Pat is a traditional Catholic and I know is galled that people think him anti-semitic. I think part of the ruckus over Pat is that he grates on some people and therefore it’s easy to take what he says out of context. The quote on concentration camps is one example that comes to mind. In that case, Buchanan was making the same point made by many scholars of the holocaust - that Nazi’s intentionally inflated the numbers of dead in concentration camps to please Himmler. Why that was taken to mean that Pat was a holocaust denier I have no idea.
Then there’s Pat’s distress over “Zionism” and how our foreign policy is tilted toward Israel in the middle east. Pat thinks it’s not in the national interest to always support Israel. Many times, Pat uses the rhetoric and even the very words of Israel’s mortal enemies to criticize the Jewish nation.
While Pat tries to draw a distinction between Jews and Zionism, there are so few Jews today who do not support the idea of a Jewish homeland that it seems to me foolish to try and seperate the two.
And that may be Pat’s biggest problem: He’s just a fool.
AND STEPHEN GREEN IS BACK! HE IS! HE TRULY IS!
No one does a full frontal fisking like the Drunkmeister himself who after a short blogging hiatus is back at it with a vengance. READ THE WHOLE THING.
UPDATE II
John Hawkins defends Buchanan not for what he said but for what people are calling him; a Nazi apologist and anti-semite:
However, to call him a “Nazi Apologist” or “anti-Semite” because he believes the US should have stayed out of WW2 is ridiculous since Buchanan is just being consistent. He’s a Paleocon, he’s an isolationist, and as an isolationist, he’s just being consistent when he says we should have stayed out of WW2.
Cross Posted at Blogger News Network
