Buchanan: Hitler Didn't Want War
It feels like I've been living in bizarro world the last few years. There have been serious arguments put forward and given credence by certain segments of the political world that:
a) torture works and should be embraced when necessary
b) McCarthy was justified and vindicated by history
c) Japanese Internment camps were necessary and justified
and now, d) Hitler wasn't that bad after all, if only we hadn't boxed him into a corner.
Until recently, this sort of thing was the stuff of crudely-xeroxed pamphlets or articles in the John Birch newsletters: the realm of crazies. It's pretty scary that the crazies and radicals are gaining respect and prominence in our national discourse.
Usually, historical revisionist arguments of the "Hitler Was Actually A Man Of Peace" variety are confined to the kind of poorly designed and little-read white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites that Holocaust Museum shooting suspect James Von Brunn patronized.And Pat Buchanan is the pundit on-call for every breaking news story on the Very Liberal News Network, MSNBC. Wowie.
But that doesn't account for the mainstream media's token Hitler sympathizer, Pat Buchanan. To mark the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Buchanan, a frequent commentator on MSNBC, has written a syndicated column entitled "Did Hitler Want War?" [...]
According to Buchanan, Hitler's invasion of Poland -- which led to Britain's declaration of war on Germany, and the start of World War II -- was motivated merely by Germany's desire to regain the city of Danzig, which had been given to Poland in the Versailles Treaty. Had Poland simply negotiated with Hitler, war could have been averted. In fact, Hitler wasn't bent on world, or even European, domination. He would have been happy with just Danzig, Austria, and the Sudetenland, you see. Hitler "wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." It was only thanks to the aggression of Britain, Russia, and the U.S. that the conflict was expanded. So, goes the implication, any deaths that occurred after 1940 -- including the 6 million that comprised the Holocaust -- are on the Allies' heads.
It feels like I've been living in bizarro world the last few years. There have been serious arguments put forward and given credence by certain segments of the political world that:
a) torture works and should be embraced when necessary
b) McCarthy was justified and vindicated by history
c) Japanese Internment camps were necessary and justified
and now, d) Hitler wasn't that bad after all, if only we hadn't boxed him into a corner.
Until recently, this sort of thing was the stuff of crudely-xeroxed pamphlets or articles in the John Birch newsletters: the realm of crazies. It's pretty scary that the crazies and radicals are gaining respect and prominence in our national discourse.
1 comment:
This is weird. Not because there are crazy people in the world, I get that.
But:
A) He's smart. And smart people don't say the stuff that they know will make them reviled by 90% of the world, even if they believe it.
B) He's one of the better political commentators on TV anywhere. And I don't mean his opinion, I mean his insight into how efficacious politicians' messages are. He is equally willing and able to comment on how great a move HClinton's teary moment was, or how super a speaker Obama is, all the way to how good or bad a Republican's move was. I've said it before, he's the anti-Brazille, in that he separates his opinion of the politician from the analysis of the political strategy.
That he could be so tone deaf about his own insanity is really, really interesting.
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