Did Hitler Want War?<\/a>” goes too far. The question itself is idiotic. <\/p>\nAdolph Hitler was a pyschopath. Any effort to rehabilitate him or rationalize his motivations is doomed at the outset.<\/p>\n
Buchanan’s view — that Hitler was a more or less reasonable nationalist, forced into conflict with the rest of Europe — is reprehensible.<\/p>\n
First, a bit of context. Buchanan is convinced that the white Christian culture that grew out of Western Europe is threatened, even embattled.<\/p>\n
He views the Second World War as “the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.”<\/p>\n
He’s right in a sense. Prior to the war, the West held colonial sway over much of the globe. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
After the war, that superiority was in shambles. <\/p>\n
German culture, with its magnificent philosophy, its unsurpassed refinements of music, architecture and literature, had produced the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.<\/p>\n
The racism and exploitation at the core of Western imperialism had been exposed. <\/p>\n
Buchanan’s column argues all of this might have been avoided. How? By further appeasing Adolph Hitler’s ambitions.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Failing that, we should have accepted peace on Hitler’s terms after the fall of France.<\/p>\n
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…” <\/p>\n
He also claims that the German military was essentially defensive in its organization.<\/p>\n
His arguments are bizarre, factually inaccurate, and morally repugnant. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We allowed the canker of communism to take root in eastern Europe, leading to the gulags, pogroms and concentration camps of Josef Stalin.<\/p>\n
Buchanan seems to think that allowing Nazism to take root in western Europe would have had a more happy outcome.<\/p>\n
Yes, the West paid a massive blood price to stop Hitler and his followers. <\/p>\n
(In fact, soldiers from around the world, from the Communist east and of all races contributed to the effort.)<\/p>\n
But as Winston Churchill observed, the Second World War was also our finest hour. <\/p>\n
In that crucible, our grandparents and great-grandparents fought and died for what truly matters in our civilization.<\/p>\n
Reading this essay, one wonders what Pat Buchanan thinks we were fighting for, or against. <\/p>\n
And one wonders which side he would have been on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Conservative Pat Buchanan has had a storied and controversial career, extending back to the shadowy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}