Pat Buchanan must be feeling ignored (or sales are down on his latest book), because he has written a blog post that guarantees some attention: Did Hitler Want War?

In the piece, Buchanan makes the bizarre claim that Hitler really didn’t want a wider war in Europe:

Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia.

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

Multiple people have weighed in on the subject. Rusty Shackleford notes that a glance at Mein Kampf gives some clues in regards to Hitler’s goals to the east (as does Matthew Yglesias). Michael C. Moynihan addresses Buchanan’s arguments about German’s Siegfried Line.

Exactly why Buchanan is making such arguments appears to center around the thesis that the Soviet Union would not have become the power that it did if WWII had not happened. Specifically, the there would have been no occupation of Eastern Europe:

Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.

By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.

What cause could justify such sacrifices?

I would note, before continuing, that a goodly number of non-Christians and non-Jews died in WWII as well. Indeed, it is telling that Buchanan uses the term “Christian” as though it represents ethnic identity, rather than a religious one¹ One suspects that he is equating “Christian” with “White, non-Jewish European.” At any rate…

Buchanan makes it sound like all of the Second World War, and its commensurate horrors, all boils down to an unnecessary conflict over a sliver of Poland. How, for example, Britain’s willingness to come to Poland’s defense explains everything else Hitler did (like, oh, I don’t know, the Holocaust, amongst other policies) is left in abeyance.²

As TAP’s Adam Serwer wrote:

That whole invading Poland thing was clearly just a big misunderstanding. He didn’t want war, he just wanted to arbitrarily annex whatever part of Europe he felt like having — the response was clearly overblown, and maybe even a little rude.

Indeed.³

I am less amazed than I once would have been about Buchanan’s views. I think his thesis is fueled by a combination of factors, including his monomania about the Soviet Union and genuine sympathy for at least part of Hitler’s policies, i.e., the notion that it was legitimate to try and unite ethnic Germans into a greater German state.

If one looks at Buchanan’s various writings, one sees that he believes in that one’s ethnicity is of great significance to politics, to the point that he believes that certain political ideas can only be propagated by certain people groups. For example, from his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America wrote:

If Western peoples perish, as they are doing today, Francis was implying, we must expect our civilization to die with us.

The above is in the context of the growing number of non-white Americans. I wrote a post on the subject, with specific comparisons to Hitler’s writings here: A Disturbing Comparison. He made some similar claims in a Human Events column that I commented upon here: Buchanan and “White America”. Ann Coulter made similar arguments in another column (and if one wants to see what people who believe that culture is conveyed by race, check out the comments section on that post, plus here).

Such views make it impossible to take Buchanan seriously as an analyst, and yet he is treated in many quarters like an elder statesman of American politics.

1. This can be done with Jewishness, but is problematic with Christianity, as there are ethnic, non-religious Jews to the point that it is possible to an atheist and an ethnic Jew, but are not ethnic, non-religious Christians. It would be a non sequitur to claim to be an atheistic Christian. One could claim to have come from a Catholic family, for example, but “Catholic” is not an ethnicity. [↩]
2. Along those lines, Digby notes:
   

   In 1939, in a small town named Averduct on the German-Polish border, practically every member of my family was rounded up by Nazi authorities, herded into a local synagogue, and burned alive inside. This would fall in Buchanan’s revisionism as part of the supposedly honest and forthright effort by Hitler to annex Danzig and restore the German homeland (hey, Hitler just wanted some Lebensraum - why not let him annex whatever he decided was part of Germany, right? Don’t you want to save lives?). But my dead ancestors didn’t live in Danzig (now Gdansk). They had nothing to do with such a conflict. Maybe that was the work of a few bad apple Nazis acting alone. That and the other 6 million incidents.

   [↩]

3. And props for Adam’s post title: “Pat Buchanan: Sotomayor? Racist. Hitler? Misunderstood.” [↩]

7 Responses to “Buchanan, Hitler and WWII”

1. Kingdaddy Says:
   September 3rd, 2024 at 11:32 am

   I can’t think of any good reason why Buchanan would keep pushing this line. I can think of several bad ones.

   Buchanan has denied that his father was a fan of Father Coughlin, the isolationist, anti-Semitic priest that was the Rush Limbaugh of his age, particularly among like-minded Irish Catholics. The Coughlinites were big on the whole “crusade against Bolshevism” argument that the Nazis and Fascists pushed before and during the war.

   Does this mean that Buchanan is trying to rehabilitate his father, or Coughlin? Who the hell knows. His ridiculous book, which is getting far more coverage and distribution than it deserves (as opposed to, say, Evans’ monumental history of the Third Reich, or Andrew Roberts’ recent book on British and American leaders in WWII), may just be part of the poisonous effort to push the word “communist” back into political discussions, whether it belongs there or not. (”Hey, everybody, look how bad the Stalinist regime was! Now, who’s being accused of communist or socialist leanings these days…?”)

   Or, he may just be a stubborn goat of a man, who has started masticating some idiotic notion that he won’t let go of and no one else could swallow.

2. Steven L. Taylor Says:
   September 3rd, 2024 at 11:42 am

   Or, he may just be a stubborn goat of a man, who has started masticating some idiotic notion that he won’t let go of and no one else could swallow.

   That may be the line of the day.

3. Hume's Ghost Says:
   September 3rd, 2024 at 8:55 pm

   I won’t provide the link, but it may be of interest that if you google “THE NEW REVISIONISM: WHAT IF HITLER WON THE WAR?” you can find Michael Shermer’s article on the mainstreaming of Holocaust denier originating revisionism by Buchanan, Nial Ferguson, and Nicholas Baker at the anti-Semitic Institute for Historical Revisionism. (A shame that Skeptic doesn’t have the article up at their site.)

   It’s a rather insightful article; not surprising, since Shermer has previously written a book on Holocaust denial.

4. Hume's Ghost Says:
   September 3rd, 2024 at 8:56 pm

   Er, Institute for Historical Review, that is.

5. Steven L. Taylor Says:
   September 3rd, 2024 at 9:13 pm

   Accuracy via error, eh?

6. B. Minich Says:
   September 4th, 2024 at 10:43 am

   I wouldn’t say that Ferguson or Baker are deniers, but that they move the blame for WWII around, typically blaming Britian for antagonizing Germany. I completely disagree with this, but that’s what they say.

7. Hume's Ghost Says:
   September 5th, 2024 at 2:50 pm

   Shermer doesn’t accuse Buchanan, Ferguson, or Backer of being or promoting Holocaust denial. He’s making a more sophisticated point

   This new revisionism aims to reconfigure “the good war” as “the unnecessary war” (Buchanan), combine the two world wars into one long ethnic and economic conflict that could have been avoided had England left Germany alone (Ferguson), and to demonstrate the moral equivalency between the Axis and the Allies in the outbreak and conductance of a war whose waging probably failed to help those who most needed it (Baker and Ferguson). Weber’s lecture — “The ‘Good War’ Myth of World War Two” — in fact, echoed these three mainstream historians, although according to Weber he wrote his lecture before these books were published. And in any case, says Weber, World War Two revisionism of this sort dates back to the 1950s when highly regarded academic historians such as Charles Beard and A.J.P. Taylor even then challenged the received wisdom that WWII was a “good war.”