Pat Buchanan's new book

The last post was about Churchill, Hitler and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Pat Buchanan's new book. I read all the articles linked to in the post. I also read Patrick Buchanan and the Necessary Book and Morality — Trotskyite vs. Christian (comparing Christopher Hitchens views on the issue and Buchanan's). I also watched interviews with Buchanan on The Colbert Report and The Situation Room. Having absorbed all of this, here's my view.

Buchanan repeatedly admits that Hitler was a violent, vicious, antisemite who targeted Jews before the war. He's saying that it was the war that magnified his campaign against them to the point that it resulted in the Holocaust, and that the war might have been prevented if the British had acted differently. His case is that essentially, Hitler lit a fire and Chamberlain (with his war guarantee to Poland) and then Churchill tried to put it out with gasoline.

Buchanan is not denying the Holocaust, he is arguing that it might have been prevented. He is not saying that Churchill wanted it to happen. He is not saying that Hitler was not a murderer who was fine with killing 6 million Jews and many others. He's talking about unintended consequences of taking the wrong course of action in foreign policy. In my analogy for his argument, Hitler starts the fire, and Churchill tries to put it out. However, doing things the wrong way can be disastrous.

I don't think I can speculate exactly on what would have happened if Chamberlain and Churchill hadn't pursued the course of action they did. I can, however, think of a few possibilities.

The first is what he speculates, that the war could have been prevented. If the war didn't happen, the Holocaust might not have. Here is why I think this is possible. In the U.S., Japanese people were rounded up into camps because their loyalty was held in question. There would never have been such camps if it weren't for the war. If, similar to Germany, we had had 10 years of a viciously racist anti-Japanese dictatorship which repeatedly used Japanese people as scapegoats and perpetuated the idea that they were subhuman, and it was that dictatorship that put them in those camps, those camps would have been deadly. Someone in that dictatorship may have cooked up a "final solution." In a time of war, whatever freedom you have shrinks, as government demands you give up more of it out of "necessity." In the case of Jewish people, Hitler demanded the last one, the freedom to live.

A second possibility is that the Germans may have gone after the Russians, but not fought Western Europe. This would have spared French Jews, Belgian Jews, etc., but the fate of Jews East of Germany would have been the same. I don't see a reason why the victims of the concentration camps would be treated differently in this case. As Buchanan says, British troops wouldn't have died fighting on the side of Stalin, and the British Empire might not have crumbled, at least the way it did (although I don't support empires). It's a better scenario for the British and the rest of Western Europe, but no different for anyone targeted domestically by the Nazis, the people of Eastern Europe, or anyone living under Stalin.

The last possibility is that the Chamberlain and Churchill couldn't have avoided the war, and things would have been the same all around. In that case it wouldn't matter as much what they did.

Given all of this, it seems that there could have been either a positive effect if they followed his advice, or no effect. Taking a gamble between an improvement and no change seem like good odds to me. There's nothing to lose and millions of lives to win. This man is not a "freaking idiot."


As for the question at the end of you post, I wouldn't say he represents the conservative view. He represents a conservative view. Conservatives disagree with each other on plenty of things. As an example, Buchanan called Barry Goldwater, who some called "Mr. Conservative", "the father of us all" (conservatives). He also wrote an introduction to Goldwater's book The Conscience Of A Conservative. However, if you compare their views, you'll find that Goldwater supported Planned Parenthood, gays in the military, seperation of Church and State, and was a saber rattling hawk. Buchanan on the other hand, opposes abortion, gays in the military, and separation of Church and State, while he is a non-interventionist in foreign policy. However, their views are much closer when it comes to issues like gun rights, states rights, and reducing taxes.