Here's More On Buchanan's Churchill

Jeet Heer, of the Guardian, recently reviewed Buchanan's book on Churchill's unnecessary war with Hitler. Heer wrote:

"Churchill, Buchanan contends, was a disaster for western civilisation. Instead of fighting Hitler, Britain should have followed a policy of "dual containment" keeping out of Europe to let Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia fight among themselves. This policy would have allowed Britain to maintain its empire for generations to come, rather than become a shrivelled post-war welfare state at the margins of the European Union. In sum, Buchanan's Churchill is an epic failure."

"It's easy to dismiss Buchanan as a crank. His alternative history scenario is built on the type of half-baked speculations that make scholars wary of counterfactual history: What if Napoleon hadn't attacked Russia? What if Abraham Lincoln had allowed the South to secede? What if Superman had been a Nazi? These are questions for an undergraduate bull session or a pub argument, not serious scholarship."

"Laughable as a historian, Buchanan is interesting as an ideological symptom. Buchanan's thinking on this is hardly a personal eccentricity and reflects the larger worldview of the anti-communist right, both in the distant past and the present. If you listen to Bush and Cheney, Churchill worship seems like an inherit part of conservatism. But the fact is that both in the past and the present, many right-wingers have hated Churchill. Buchanan is both a throwback to an earlier conservatism and perhaps the harbinger of coming trends." ...

"Buchanan grew up in an isolationist household, where Charles Lindberg was regarded as a hero for trying to keep America out of the second world war. As Buchanan recalled in his 1988 autobiography Right From the Beginning, his father agreed with the popular late 1930s American adage "Let Hitler and Stalin fight it out". This sentiment still undergirds Buchanan's thinking about the second world war."

"The dividing line between Churchill and his conservative critics was Nazism and anti-communism. Churchill thought that Nazism was a greater evil than communism. His critics feared communism more, so much that they were willing to tolerate a Nazi-dominated Europe. But Buchanan isn't just channelling long-dead isolationists. His new book also builds on the work of recent scholars, many of them British conservatives, who take a dim view of Churchill, seeing the roots of Britain's post-war diminishment in his failed leadership."

"As historian John Lukacs, a confirmed Churchill devotee, noted in his 1999 book Five Days in London, the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of a school of revisionist historians that included Maurice Cowling, David Reynolds, Sheila Lawlor and John Charmley. Although their works had different approaches and arguments, Lukacs saw them as united by a common theme: "that Churchill had no plan in May 1940 except to keep fighting, hoping that something might turn up (Micawber-like), though he hardly knew what and that Churchill's obsessive hatred of Hitler may have blinded him, for had he accepted an accommodation with Hitler by 1941 at the latest, the Empire might have been saved.""

"Although Buchanan is sometimes dismissed as an Anglophobe, he's essentially popularising the works of these revisionist British scholars (most of who are conservative Thatcherites). In effect, Buchanan's book fuses together two mutually contradictory strands of nationalist history. On the one hand, Buchanan frequently evokes the themes of traditional American isolationism, an Anglophobic tradition that argues that England suckered the United States into the two world wars. But on other occasions Buchanan rehearses the themes of English right-wing historians, an often anti-American tradition that contends that Churchill's attachment to the "special relationship" with the United States led to a radical decrease in British power. Of course, both these intellectual traditions are flawed, but Buchanan's attempt to combine the two together makes for a very incoherent brew."

"The British revisionist school Buchanan relies on is often remarkably feckless. John Charmley, for example, wrote that defeating Nazism was "a great achievement, but it buttered no parsnips". The moral problems of leaving Europe at the mercy of Hitler are obvious. But there is another weakness in this type of revisionism that is less often noticed. It's absurd to think that the life of the British Empire could have been extended more than a decade or two. By the 1930s, you already had a full-fledged nationalist movement in India and embryonic stirrings throughout the empire. It's inconceivable that Britain could have held on as a global power for much longer than it in the real world. In a nutshell: the second world war was caused in part by Britain's weakness; the war was not the cause of Britain's weakness."