Pat Buchanan: Hitler Apologist

Pat Buchanan has written a 'revisionist' account of Winston Churchill and World War II in which he claims that the war was completely unnecessary. When I read that Buchanan had written on this subject I immediately decided that I wanted to read the book. I am no fan of Buchanan, but I do enjoy reading books that offer controversial arguments. What I am looking forward to doing is reviewing (ripping it apart would be a better way of putting it). Christopher Hitchens, however, has beaten me to it. Hitchens has written about the book for Newsweek. He wrote:

"Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities."

"Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:"

"-That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939."

"-Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland."

"-That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions."

"-The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions."

"-That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong."

"-That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism."

Full review.