Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Patrick J. BuchananEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-07-28
ISBN: 0307405168
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Book Reviews of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
Book Review: Pat Buchanan's Unnecessary Book
Summary: 2 Stars
Pat Buchanan gleefully stirs up debate with his latest book, Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary War (2008), making the rather controversial claim that World War II was primarily the fault of blundering British statesmen rather than Nazi Germany. In doing so, Buchanan engages in any number of blunders, from self-contradiction to errors of omission to outright distortion. And while others not of Buchanan's political persuasion may share his viewpoint, it's difficult to keep his hard-right, borderline racist ideology out of one's mind.
Of course, it's hard for Buchanan to hide his true colors. His introduction engages in predictable blathering about the decline of Western civilization, and the destruction of Western culture by Bolsheviks, atheists and non-whites. He spends quite a bit of time bemoaning the post-war fate of "Christian" Eastern Europe, as if the enslavement of Jews, Gypsies, Muslims and others don't matter. This might explain his indifference towards the Holocaust, as well as his complaints about the bombing of "white, Christian Serbia" in 1998 - as if Milosevic's being white and Christian makes his ethnic cleansing any less repellent.
Later passages equate WWII with the US invasion of Iraq, another "war of choice" - an argument based in large part on George Bush's having a bust of Churchill in his office. Asinine though it is, this passage illuminates Buchanan's motivation in writing this book: sticking it to the neo-cons who have hijacked conservatism. Ideology aside, however, Buchanan's history is frequently suspect, from 1914 onward.
It is difficult to give either side a moral high-ground in World War I, and Buchanan is probably right in saying Britain did not need to intervene over Belgium. But he is wrong in his characterization of Wilhelmine Germany, which he presents as more peaceable than its contemporaries. He downplays the Moroccan crises, deliberately provoked by Germany, completely omits Germany's loud and provocative support of the Boers against England, and their aggressive Drang nach ostern, which involved, in part, solidarity with and promotion of an aggressive Ottoman nationalism that led to the Armenian Genocide and the Arab Revolt. And if this ignorance isn't enough, we have the following jaw-dropper:
Buchanan states that Germany did not fight in any wars between 1871 and 1914.
Read that again.
Germany did not fight in any wars between 1871 and 1914.
Germany contributed thousands of troops to the Allied expedition which crushed the Boxer Rebellion, committing horrific atrocities on the road to Peking. (Indeed, this is the origin of the epithet "Hun," bestowed by the Kaiser himself.) And the 65,000 Herero tribesmen slaughtered in pre-war Namibia would be relieved to know that Germany was not actually at war with them. This comment is only true if you restrict this to Europe, and then you ought to give the British even more credit, as no Tommies set foot on the Continent between the Crimea and Mons.
Not to mention, this alleged period of peace comes directly after a decade in which Germany launched three wars of aggression in a period of nine years.
So, in one of his least-controversial arguments, Buchanan has already established himself as less-than-trustworthy. But we're just getting started, ladies and germs.
Buchanan is at his best chronicling the inter-war years. He attacks the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which did little more than piss off Germany enough to make a second war inevitable. He shows Britain and France bumbling their way from one idiocy to another, driving away their Great War allies (Italy, Japan, the USSR), reducing their military strength and constantly refusing to stand up to Nazi aggression until it was (almost) too late. These are salient, well-observed points, and Buchanan's analysis is mostly right. But he draws a rather bizarre conclusion: not that Britain should have stood up to Hitler sooner, but that they were wrong to stand up to Hitler at all.
Buchanan's assessment of Hitler is flat-out wrong. Buchanan constantly portrays the Fuhrer as a rational, canny statesman with a shrewd ability of political judgment. Apparently, Hitler's only motivation was to redress the wrongs of Versailles. He conveniently ignores Hitler's military support of Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, a nakedly aggressive action without any "Germanic" justification. His comments on the annexation of Czechoslovakia are inexcusable, implying that the Czechs were somehow better off as a Nazi protectorate, and he marvels over Polish intransigence over Danzig - not realizing that maybe Poland, having seen what happened to Czechoslovakia when they went to the bargaining table, might not want to experience it for themselves. He ingenuously points out the huge disparity in death and destruction between Poland and Czechoslovakia, conveniently ignoring Poland's huge Jewish population.
Perhaps if we'd just left Hitler alone, there'd have been no war in 1939. But a super-powerful Nazi state, astride all of Central and Eastern Europe, with an insatiable hunger for land and power, and with nothing to stop it but a leery Soviet Union, is a prospect far too hideous to contemplate. The idea of peace at the price of giving Hitler everything he wanted betrays either ignorance or a repulsive ideology I'd rather not think about.
Not helping matters, Buchanan frequently betrays a sneaking sympathy for the Fuhrer. He marvels at Hitler being "a figure in German history to rival Bismarck... [who] could say, as Bismarck could not, that he had done it all without bloodshed." Feeble denunciations elsewhere of Hitler as a "barbarian" seem like ass-covering.
The portrait of Churchill is not entirely incorrect: Churchill had his faults, including a desire for war and an insatiable power-hunger. It's truly an odd criticism from Buchanan, though, inasmuch as the latter seems to endorse Churchill's rosy view of imperialism, and a vigorous West ruling the world. He rather hypocritically paints Churchill as a racist: his praise of multi-cultural modern Britain is completely at odds with his whining about the decline of White civilization elsewhere. Buchanan is clearly having his cake and eating it too.
Buchanan's assertion that World War II doomed the British Empire is only partly true. The Empire was already on its last legs, by my estimation: Britain had lost Ireland in the '20s, the Indian Independence Movement was gaining momentum, and Britain's WWI conquests in the Middle East proved virtually ungovernable. The Empire was doomed eventually; WWII just sped up the process. Buchanan's implication that Churchill and Co. cut down a thriving British Empire by thrusting it into war with Germany is ludicrous, and in any case further illustrates a morally dubious worldview on Buchanan's part.
Buchanan's most odious commentary comes on the Holocaust. Apparently, the slaughter of six million Jews is the fault of Britain and France, whose stand against Nazism provoked Hitler into committing the largest crime in human history. To quote: "The destruction of the European Jews was not the cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war." And if Britain was responsible for the war, the implication is that they caused the Holocaust.
This is nonsense. The first Nazi camps were established in 1933; the Night of the Long Knives, with the assassination of political opponents, came a year later; the mentally ill, homosexuals and racial minorities soon followed suit; and the Nuremburg Laws, Kristallnacht, and the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe, and so on, all occurred before the Wannsee Conference convened. The sheer scale of the project, diverting tens of thousands of troops, and much needed cars, trains and supplies, even after the tide turned against Germany, shows that the Holocaust was not incidental to the Nazi war effort, but an essential part of it.
In sum, Buchanan's view of the Holocaust is either ignorant or disingenuous, and his attempt to pawn responsibility to the Allies is beneath contempt. The war unquestionably sped up the process, but given Hitler's peacetime actions against Jews and minorities, it's impossible to think that something like the Final Solution was avoidable. And one has to think that, even if Britain and France had left Hitler alone, that the incompatible ideologies of Nazism and Communism would have butted heads eventually - and where would THAT leave the "untermensch" of Europe? But at least Buchanan bestows "moral responsibility" upon the Nazis, whatever that means.
And so on. Buchanan cries over the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe - never considering, even for a moment, what the results of a Nazi-dominated Europe would have been. He expresses bafflement at Churchill's urging a Soviet alliance in light of his bellicose anti-Bolshevism, while excusing the far more incongruous Hitler-Stalin Pact. He claims that Hitler's ideology had no broad appeal outside Germany, ignoring the Nazi-inspired governments that have sprung up from Baghdad to Buenos Aires (let alone his ongoing popularity among the Far Right and Islamist groups). He compares the Holocaust with the bombing of Dresden like a dime-store David Irving. He proclaims that the USSR was the war's primary beneficiary - ignoring their 20 million dead, and the utter devastation of the Soviet infrastructure and economy, which they never entirely recovered from. Very little of what Buchanan says makes sense, adheres to known facts or stands up to scrutiny. It's both bad argumentation and bad history.
To be fair, there is much truth in what Buchanan writes: the British and French were lackadaisical in confronting Nazism through the `30s; Churchill was a flawed man with a lust for war and personal aggrandizement; much of Europe ended the war as badly as they had begun it. But most of this has already been said by authors much better, and less ideologically-repugnant, than Buchanan, whose research consists entirely of second-hand sources. Buchanan is not an historian anyway, but an ideologue, and facts matter less than how he can twist them.
Yes, World War II was an atrocity on a global scale, and neither side was innocent of crimes. But there was one man unquestionably most responsible for it, and he answered to "Der Fuhrer." Yes, the victory was imperfect. Half of Europe was condemned to a half-century of enslavement, but the other half - including Germany itself - was painstakingly nourished back to life, emerging as a mostly-free society. And today, virtually all of Europe, from the Urals to Gibraltar, is democratic and prosperous, with totalitarianism left and right an increasingly-dim memory. For Buchanan to suggest this is no better than what a Nazi victory would have wrought is beneath contempt.
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Summary of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment?In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen?Winston Churchill first among them?the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe?s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.
Among the British and Churchillian errors were:
? The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
? The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
? Britain?s capitulation, at Churchill?s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
? The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War
Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and ?the Unnecessary War? is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.
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