Does Hitler deserve a second look? No

Conservative Pat Buchanan has had a storied and controversial career, extending back to the shadowy days of the Nixon administration.

He’s been a charismatic and unpredictable player in American politics, opposing the war in Iraq and serving as both a gadfly and booster of the conservative movement.

He enjoys a megaphone presence in newspaper columns and as a pundit on cable TV.

But his latest essay, “Did Hitler Want War?” goes too far. The question itself is idiotic.

Adolph Hitler was a pyschopath. Any effort to rehabilitate him or rationalize his motivations is doomed at the outset.

Buchanan’s view — that Hitler was a more or less reasonable nationalist, forced into conflict with the rest of Europe — is reprehensible.

First, a bit of context. Buchanan is convinced that the white Christian culture that grew out of Western Europe is threatened, even embattled.

He views the Second World War as “the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.”

He’s right in a sense. Prior to the war, the West held colonial sway over much of the globe.

Superior technology and a sense of moral supremacy — the so-called “white man’s burden” — lent a veneer of manifest destiny to the whole enterprise.

After the war, that superiority was in shambles.

German culture, with its magnificent philosophy, its unsurpassed refinements of music, architecture and literature, had produced the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The racism and exploitation at the core of Western imperialism had been exposed.

Buchanan’s column argues all of this might have been avoided. How? By further appeasing Adolph Hitler’s ambitions.

He claims that the Poles should have surrendered the city of Danzig to the Germans.
That, he insists, would have satisfied the German Fuhrer once and for all.

Failing that, we should have accepted peace on Hitler’s terms after the fall of France.

Buchanan goes on to insist that prior to 1939, Hitler was a tin-pot villain, whose victims amounted to “a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro’s…”

He also claims that the German military was essentially defensive in its organization.

His arguments are bizarre, factually inaccurate, and morally repugnant.

By 1939, Hitler was master of the largest military force on the planet. Before a single foreign soldier set foot on German soil, the Nazi war machine rolled over Europe.

What’s more, the central premises of the Nazi political movement — including the racial superiority of the West and a murderous strain of anti-Semitism — were fundamentally evil.

We allowed the canker of communism to take root in eastern Europe, leading to the gulags, pogroms and concentration camps of Josef Stalin.

Buchanan seems to think that allowing Nazism to take root in western Europe would have had a more happy outcome.

Yes, the West paid a massive blood price to stop Hitler and his followers.

(In fact, soldiers from around the world, from the Communist east and of all races contributed to the effort.)

But as Winston Churchill observed, the Second World War was also our finest hour.

In that crucible, our grandparents and great-grandparents fought and died for what truly matters in our civilization.

Reading this essay, one wonders what Pat Buchanan thinks we were fighting for, or against.

And one wonders which side he would have been on.