The Tory Anarchist

The Good Hitchens, Peter, has already weighed in on Pat Buchanan’s new book, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”, and now the Bad Hitchens, Christopher, takes his turn. There’s much tripe in his review of the book for Newsweek, but this bit of offal is especially nauseous:

he commits important sins of omission that can only be the outcome of an ideological bias. Barely mentioned except in passing is the Spanish Civil War, for example, where for three whole years between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy lent troops and weapons in a Fascist invasion of a sovereign European nation that had never threatened or “encircled” them in any way. Buchanan’s own political past includes overt sympathy with General Franco, which makes this skating-over even less forgivable than it might otherwise be.

Never mind that Franco’s ties to Italy and Germany were nowhere near as tight as those of the anti-Franco forces to the Soviet Union. The ideological bias and sin of omission here is not Buchanan’s, it’s Hitchens’s — his criticism of Buchanan whitewashes Soviet meddling in the Spanish Civil War right out of history. Hitchy styles himself a follower of Orwell, but here he conveniently forgets the lessons of Homage to Catalonia.

Even worse is this distortion:

It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany’s grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It’s quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was “not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war.” Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler’s fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do.

Buchanan is making anything like the claim that Hitchens says he is. He’s making the historical observation that the Holocaust only began after World War II was already underway — and it’s plain enough that wartime conditions facilitated Hitler’s other war, the one against Jews and Poles and other enemies in territories he already controlled. Hitler’s racism was a cause that contributed to the war, but the Holocaust itself was a manifestation of that racism that followed from the war. And that in turn does not mean that “those who wanted to resist him” were “mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews.” Not only does that not logically follow — if someone sets a fire and a murderer kills someone under the cover of the smoke, the murderer is still primarily responsible, not the fire-starter — but Buchanan says explicitly that “one man bears full moral responsibility” for World War II: Hitler. (See pp. 292-293.) Buchanan goes on to blame Churchill and Chamberlain for choosing when and under what circumstances Britain would enter the war, but his statement about Hitler’s culpability is as categorical as you can get.

Thomas Fleming’s review of Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War from The Wanderer is a corrective to Hitchens’s nonsense. My own thought on the book is that, like everything Pat Buchanan writes, it’s eloquent, heartfelt, and very much worth reading. But Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War should perhaps be three books rather than one, since it has three distinct parts: there is the synoptic history of Anglo-German relations and German strategy more generally, which occupies about two-thirds of the volume; there is the revisionist take on Churchill, to which one full chapter is devoted and significant portions of many others; and the assessment of Hitler’s ambitions, which again gets a full chapter to itself and rather less coverage than Churchill elsewhere in the book.

The case against Churchill is strong, but deserves a much greater elaboration — and more careful consideration of the case for Churchill as well. The chapter on Hitler’s ambitions is the weakest in the book, and in general I think Buchanan underestimates Hitler. He writes, for example:

Had Britain not declared war on Germany, perhaps Hitler, after taking back Danzig, would have turned west and overrun France as he did in 1940, then stormed into Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa as he did in 1941. But why? And what would have been lost had Britain and France never given the war guarantee to Poland, but rearmed and waited to see if Hitler would ever attack Western Europe?

I agree with Buchanan on the question of the Polish war guarantee — Britain was foolish, and morally negligent, in bluffing at price of the Poles’ lives. But there are pretty good reasons for thinking that Hitler would have turned West sooner or later. Would he have tolerated anything less than a puppet regime on his Western flank, especially given long history of Franco-German hostility? Hitler’s ambitions were always directed eastward, but to vouchsafe his Lebensraum he would, it stands to reason, desire to neutralize France. There is also the factual point that Hitler did, in fact, invade the West before going to war with his true bete noir, Soviet Russia. Hitler’s lust for eastern territory was sufficiently great that he did indeed go to war with Britain and France. He was not forced into doing so: he could have chosen to forgo acquiring Danzig and transit through the Polish Corridor, in order to avoid war with the West, and he might have bided his time until he could add to his empire without war. That he did not do so, and instead chose to call the West’s bluff, is proof enough of his intentions not only toward the East, but toward the West.

As for Buchanan’s account of British and German actions in the run-up to the war, it’s good, thought-provoking stuff, but doesn’t argue a thesis as strongly as it might. Buchanan laments, and rightly so, the collapse the British-French-Italian Stresa Front against Germany and he outlines the many blunders of British statesmen and other European leaders in dealing with Hitler. But is the lesson of these mistakes that Britain (and other powers) should have confronted Germany sooner, or that they should never have confronted Germany at all — or is it something else altogether? Buchanan’s critics have chosen to read his book as defending appeasement, but Buchanan doesn’t actually do that — in fact, his narrative discusses its failure. The argument that I find at least implicit within Buchanan’s book is that Hitler could have been contained (not “appeased”) by firm measures short of war. But Buchanan doesn’t explicitly argue for what a strategy of containment would have looked like. Perhaps the preservation of the Stresa Front would, by itself, have been enough. But if not, and given that the Stresa Front did fall apart, what would have been the soundest approach to German expansion?

One might expect Buchanan’s answer to be “splendid isolation,” and Buchanan does argue that Britain had little to fear from Germany in either World War — or would have had little to fear had she not decided to get involved. I agree on that point: while Hitler would have wanted to pacify France sooner or later, he could very well have accepted British naval power as no threat to his dominance of the European continent. But Buchanan is a Cold Warrior, and just as I would not expect him to say that America should have done nothing to contain the Soviet Union, I would be surprised if he thinks total indifference to Nazi power would have been an appropriate course for Britain. His critics take that for granted, but between perfect noninterventionism and war (or offering war guarantees that cannot be backed up) there are a range of options, and Buchanan at various times (as in his discussion of the Stresa Front) writes favorably of them, though never so favorably as to make clear what his own optimal course would have been.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 12:18 am and is filed under Books, War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.