Pat Buchanan's Nazi and Islamist Appeasement

Pat Buchanan, promoting another book, accuses President Bush of making "a hash of history," as Bush warned of negotiating with Iran or Hamas, comparing it to negotiating with Adolf Hitler.

While Buchanan saturates the Leftist media with his message, insisting that there would have been no WWII had the world listened to Neville Chamberlain and curtailed Winston Churchill, Sultan Knish, reporting from NY to Israel, addresses Buchanan's "appeasement," in detail.

"The Sultan" is among the very best blogging for liberty and freedom for Israel, America and humanity, in general. He is a "blogger, columnist and freelance photographer born in Israel and currently living in New York City." His columns appear at IsraeleNews and Canada Free Press, he is an author at IsraPundit, and his blog is "Named one of the Jewish Press' Most Worthwhile Blogs, 2006, 2007 and 2008."

"The Sultan" may not have the air-time Buchanan has, but he is huge in the blogosphere, and this piece rebutting Buchanan's tendency to blame the WWII allies for causing the war, needs to be read and talked and blogged about.

Sultan Knish on Pat Buchanan's Nazi Appeasement
"whether it's Nazi Germany or Islamist Iran."

Can you hear the echo?

Iran has nothing to gain by war... No, it is not Iran that wants a war with the United States. It is the United States that has reasons to want a short, sharp war with Iran.

Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.

That echo is the sound of appeasement at the heart of Buchanan's rhetoric, 1939-2008.

Pat Buchanan has spent a lot of his career dancing around the Nazi question, from throwing in his lot with Holocaust deniers, defending Nazi War Criminals and badgering Reagan to lay a wreath at an SS memorial. Lately though Pat Buchanan has stopped dancing and begun to seriously lay down a revisionist history that seeks to blame Nazi crimes on England and America as an anti-war argument against the United States taking military action against the Hitlers of today and tomorrow.

Buchanan opened the hellgates back in 2005 by arguing that WW2 wasn't worth it since much of Eastern Europe wound up in Soviet hands anyway. Despite the backlash it would begin laying out one of Buchanan's key thesis that WW2 was a mistake, that Churchill and FDR had been wrong, and using the fall of Eastern Europe as a key plank in his argument.

The quote from Buchanan's 2005 article is typical of his disingenuous position

In 1938, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain refused. In 1939, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Poland. Chamberlain agreed. At the end of the war Churchill wanted and got, Czechoslovakia and Poland were in Stalin's empire. How, then, can men proclaim Churchill "Man of the Century"?

True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – on behalf of Poland.

The pattern inherent in Pat Buchanan's Nazi apologetic, is the same one used today by defenders of Islamofascism-- it's to argue that any Nazi action was actually a reaction to the actions of England or Poland or America. This can be called Pat Buchanan's "But the Nazis Weren't Bothering Anyone" argument. It's a kissing cousin of the modern day anti-war "But Muslim Terrorists Weren't Bothering Anyone" argument that Buchanan himself has championed.

The logical fallacy at the heart of it is that it expects us to believe that Hitler had no ambitions on Western Europe and would not have acted against Western Europe. We know of course that he did. In Buchahan's universe, England and France should have let Hitler have Eastern Europe and waited until Nazi troops were actually attacking them. Considering that most of Western Europe was overrun even when Churchill did enter the war, letting Hitler and Stalin carve up Eastern Europe and giving Germany access to Volksdeutsche recruits and slave labor and allowing it to move against the Allies at its leisure-- would have course have been far more destructive, something Buchanan knows quite well.

Even in 2005 Buchanan had set the pattern for sneaking in small Nazi apologetics in between the lines, e.g

At least the Sudenten Germans wanted to be with Germany.

Just as he continues to do so to the present day.

If he (Hitler) wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?

Like most revisionist historians though, he's careful about tipping his hand. This is typical Buchanan and it's a typical apologetic for Western defenders of tyrannies that they sneakily support. Buchanan has avoided an outright defense of Nazi Germany, like Lindbergh and many of the WW2 era anti-war groups, his thesis has been to heap the blame on England, on Churchill and on the Allies.

So to fit the pattern Buchanan avoids actively justifying the Holocaust in his latest column, Was the Holocaust Inevitable? Instead he blames England and America winning the war for the Holocaust.

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.

The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

Never mind of course that the Nazis had been killing Jews long before the Wannsee conference. One million Jews had been murdered before the Conference. The concentration camps were being built in 1940. The first gassings at Auschwitz began in 1941. Buchanan's cynical attempt at historical revisionism attempts to treat the Holocaust as a consequence of the Allies War on Hitler. Yet it's quite clear that the Holocaust had been in the offing well before then.

Buchanan himself can't make any credible connection for his claim that the Holocaust was a consenquence of the war. His primary argument that Hitler's conquests were a response to Western aggression fails to apply to the Holocaust. But Buchanan is recycling Linbergh's old argument that Britain and the Jews would have the most to lose from American intervention in WW2. That the Holocaust itself proved Linbergh wrong, has not deterred Buchahan in the least.

The ultimate thrust of Buchanan's arguments however is to discredit WW2's premise of military intervention against foreign tyrannies. It is the ultimate agenda behind Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. In penning his Nazi apologetics, Pat Buchahan is actually conducting a Jihad on behalf of the Fuhrer, but not merely Hitler, but the Hitlers of the present and the future. By attacking Churchill, Buchanan is trying to restore Appeasement to a position of honor and respect.

In Munich 1938, Buchanan makes that ultimate agenda increasingly clear

When President Bush, before the Knesset, used the word "appeasement" to label those who would negotiate with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he invoked the most powerful analogy in any debate over war and peace.

No man wishes to be regarded as an "appeaser."

Chamberlain believed not -- and, after three trips to Germany that September, he effected the transfer of the Sudeten Germans to Berlin's rule, where they wished to be. He came home in triumph to be hailed as the greatest peacemaker of all time.

Why, then, are "Munich" and "appeasement" terms of obloquy?

Of course as Buchanan will tell us it was actually all the fault of those stubborn Poles. Appeasement it turns out is a good thing. It is those who refuse to appease tyrants who are to blame for what the tyrants do next.

Hitler did not want war with Poland. Indeed, he wanted the kind of alliance with Poland he had with Italy. But, first, Danzig must be resolved... The problem was the Poles, who refused to discuss Danzig... Then, in March, Czechoslovakia suddenly began to fall apart... Hitler intervened to guarantee the independence of Slovakia...

Chamberlain, now humiliated, mocked by Tory back-benchers, panicking over wild false rumors of German attacks on Romania and Poland, made the greatest blunder in British history. Unasked, he issued a war guarantee to Poland...

The final conclusion of course is that Poland brought the War on itself, by refusing perfectly reasonable demands from Germany. Hitler of course had no interest in invading Poland, he only wanted an alliance. In a minor variation of the same column titled "Bush Plays the Hitler Card", Buchanan spews out the same vile justification for laying the Nazi murder of millions at the feet of those countries that refused to surrender to Hitler.

The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.

Thus all of Hitler's crimes are actually laid at the doorstep of those who refused to submit to him-- in Pat Buchanan's foully twisted moral universe. It is classic appeasement and it explains why Buchanan today heads up the faux conservative branch of the anti-war movement via the American Conservative, a magazine bankrolled by Taki, a convicted cokehead and features such as its editor, Scott McConnell, who had been fired from the New York Post. It's these dregs who continue to promote Buchanan's vision-- the question is, when all the dancing stops, what is that vision really?

While Buchanan is overtly arguing for appeasing tyrants, he's no peacenik. Outside of pacificists, those who argue for appeasing tyrants-- only do so to appease the tyrants that they favor. Buchanan was no fan of appeasing the USSR. Behind his defense of Chamberlain and his indictment of Churchill and Poland lurks a darker truth, which is that Buchanan favors Hitler's victory. Buchanan may not entirely embrace the Third Reich, from his standpoint the Nazis ventured too far into secularism, but as his arguments tellingly show, he believes that Nazi Germany was preferable to not only the USSR-- but to the rise of a Secularist Europe and America. The former is an argument Buchanan makes mostly by implication, the latter is one that slowly peeks out around the fringes of his rhetoric.

Many are asking why Fox News and other major Conservative outlets are giving Buchahan airtime. Part of the answer is his connections. Part of it is his limited supply of charm and TV ready personality. Much of it is because Pat Buchanan has mastered the art of talking around conservatives, leaving too many hosts and pundits missing the point.

Buchanan subtly introduces his real agendas, he doesn't use them as premises. He leaves the reader to draw the right conclusion with a few obvious prompts. Take Buchanan's The Lost Tribes of Israel column, which he begins by seemingly praising Israel for its achievements, then neatly digressing into a demographic discussion, that takes a sideswipe by blaming American Jews for abortion, progresses to arguing that Israel must appease the Arabs, concluding by subtly stating that Israel is doomed and it's time for America to embrace the Arab victors.

Those who do not like the Saudi monarchy should consider what is likely to rise in its place, should the House of Saud fall. The same is true of the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies, and the sheikdoms, emirates and sultanates of the Persian Gulf.

In any struggle of generations, the critical question is often: Whose side is time on? As President Bush celebrates Israel's 60th birthday, and is celebrated in turn as Israel's best friend ever, it is a fair question to ask.

Of course Buchanan has already answered the question with reams of statistics that seem impressive, until you realize they're nothing more than projections and that they reflect a demographic reality that Israel has already survived. But it's typical of Buchanan's minuets that he dances around his real point, which is that it's time to toss Israel overboard and appease the Saudis. A conclusion that he buries in so many rhetorical questions and convoluted statements that it takes a discerning reader to get his point.

As the Prophet of Appeasement to Conservatives, Buchanan knows he has a difficult task, to pull the wool over the eyes of mainstream conservatives while remaining tight with the anti-war flank he's come to head. So Buchanan plays the academic, focuses on WW2, inserts occasional formal condemnations of Nazism, dances from spot to spot but the conclusion is always the same and it falls on the side of appeasing tyranny.

When Iran murders US soldiers, Buchanan argues that Iran is justified because they're only defending themselves.

How? Gen. David Petraeus explained. The Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah are arming, training and directing the Shia militia fighting U.S. and Iraqi forces in Basra and firing rockets into the Green Zone. Said Petraeus, the Quds Force is responsible for killing hundreds of American soldiers.

Why, then, would Iran bloody it up? Why, when things are going Iran's way in Iraq, would it risk war with the United States over Iraq?

The April 16 Los Angeles Times offers an answer. Iran's proxy war against us in Iraq may be Tehran's response to a U.S. proxy war being waged against Iran. Ahmadinejad may be exacting blood for blood.

If you've read this entire post, Buchanan's rhetoric here should seem early familiar. It's the very same rhetoric Buchanan used to defend Hitler's invasions up above.

If he (Hitler) wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?

Why, then, would Iran bloody it up? Why, when things are going Iran's way in Iraq, would it risk war with the United States over Iraq?

Buchanan is repeating himself and his thesis remains one and the same, to defend tyrannies and to blame their crimes on the democracies who resist them. Whether it's Nazi Germany or Islamist Iran. Can you hear the echo?

Iran has nothing to gain by war... No, it is not Iran that wants a war with the United States. It is the United States that has reasons to want a short, sharp war with Iran.

Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.

That echo is the sound of appeasement at the heart of Buchanan's rhetoric, whether it is focused on 1939 or 2008.

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