Plato thought that all knowledge was a sort of recollection, anamnesis. I older I get, the more wisdom I discern in that elusive idea–not, perhaps, as an epistemological datum but as a plain statement of political truth. Let me explain. It has often been observed that one of the distinctive achievements of the species homo sapiens sapiens is its ability to pass knowledge down from one generation to the next: the great repositories of technical know-how and scientific insight into the workings of nature are eloquent testaments to this awesome process. Unfortunately, the operation of tradition, of handing down, is less successful in the realm of morals and politics (which is one reason that traditions in the civilizational sense of the word are so important: they are safeguards against the anarchy of innocence). A child born today receives as his birthright the past’s accumulated warehouse of technical knowledge, from reading and writing to the recipe for scones, penicillin, suspension bridges, internal combustion engines, and nuclear weapons. There is an important sense in which a clever 18-year-old knows more physics than Newton, more chemistry than Lavoissier, more mathematics than Euclid. But is he wiser about politics than Madison or Tocqueville? Does he know more about the question, “How should I live my life?” than Socrates?
To ask these questions is to answer them. What prompts me to raise them in the first place is the melancholy reflection that, when it comes to the field political-historical experience, almost nothing is finally settled. Every generation, it seems, has to recollect the vital, hard won lessons of the past. When it comes to political wisdom, forgetfulness is all-too-often mankind’s inheritance. Hence the pertinence of Plato’s arresting image.
How much, I wonder, did Patrick J. Buchanan have to forget to write Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War? Buchanan is not stupid. He is not, I think, malevolent. But his book exhibits an historical obtuseness that is as morally reprehensible as it is politically toxic. Buchanan’s central thesis is that the chief blame for the Second World War (and for the Holocaust) belongs to Winston Churchill, not Hitler. Germany, in his revisionist view, was the chief victim of the First World War, and he repeats the canard, popularized by John Maynard Keynes, that the harsh terms of Versailles Treaty paved the way for Hitler and made World War II all but inevitable. (This contention was usefully exploded by Andrew Roberts in his magisterial book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. As Roberts shows, the treaty should have been much harsher, dividing Germany into two or more parts. Instead, it left Germany “in a physical position to launch her fifth war of territorial aggression in three-quarters of a century.”)
If Patrick Buchanan were less intelligent, his book would be less depressing. Does the record really need to be set straight about the origins and nature of World War Two? Is even that recent conflagration up for fundamental political renegotiation? Apparently so. In a way, the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s response to the book says all you need to know about it: “The Delusional Views of Pat Buchanan, Pseudo-Historian,” but the whole review is worth reading. In another brilliant review for Newsweek, Christopher Hitchens eviscerates Buchanan’s argument while providing some much needed historical context about Germany’s behavior during the last century and a half. (Hitchens seems taken with the conventional, Keynesian line about the Versailles Treaty, but that is a minor quibble.) The whole review is eminently worth reading, too, but let me quote here a passage from the last part of the piece:
As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. 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. He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets–at least I hope it’s only forgetfulness–that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. . . .
Buchanan’s ugly book is hardly the only reminder we have that, when it comes to history and politics, our first task in facing the future is to remember the past. Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War isn’t even the only book to argue that Churchill was the war’s chief villain. An other recent specimen Nicholson Baker’s mendacious novel [Update: A reader points out that it is "not a novel" but "a collage - some might say a farrago"] Human Smoke (about which see this review). But Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War is in a category by itself, partly because of Buchanan’s rhetorical skill. He casts his immoralism in high-toned moralistic terms, presenting himself as a Jeremiah who has been warning us all of the coming dissolution of our civilization. In fact, what our civilization has chiefly to fear at the moment (even more, I suspect, than any external threat) is the internal atrophy of that gumption–what the Greeks called thumos–that fired statesman like Churchill and whose lack among our leaders today makes for dispiriting contemplation.
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31 Comments
1. Paul:Much of Buchanan’s ugliness in political argument, which shows only sporadically through his intelligence and his sometimes (but not always) predictable strong-conservatism, is easy to understand if one just faces the facts: he has the disease that John Derbyshire once complained about among otherwise competent conservatives — the Jew disease. If he can find an argument, any argument, no matter how absurdly complex or risibly flawed, to justify his deep and fundamental anti-semitism, he raises and embellishes it. It’s a deep thing, and unavoidable, almost a faith. Yes, I know: “some of his best friends are Jews.”
Jun 16, 2008 - 9:06 am 2. vanderleun:Now,now, Roger. I fear you are shaving your game just a bit.
As you should know (not that you practice it) what most book editors want from their authors is, “The same thing. Only different.” Crown will encourage PB to recapitulate his previous high selling tomes. It will not encourage a deviation.
Nor would PB be likely to deliver one.
You may recall an article many years ago by Tom Wolfe in which he begins by running a calculator to total his monthly nut. It is a substantial figure. PB has the same need for cash flow. He can’t have a minimal lifestyle and is probably wallowing in debt just to keep his status at a level.
This means he has to be constantly seeking for big truths to push over with bigger lies.
As they say in the movies, “Follow the money.”
But you know that.
Jun 16, 2008 - 10:17 am 3. Don Kenner:I’m surprised Buchanan didn’t blame WWII on Israel. True, Israel didn’t exist then, but why should that deter the man whose magazine blames 9-11 on Israel. What a Jew-hating fraud he has become. Why he is allowed to troll the media (including Fox News) is beyond my powers of comprehension.
Jun 16, 2008 - 1:16 pm 4. Bridgehampton:Don Kenner,
Jun 17, 2008 - 7:00 am 5. John Zmirak:When did Pat Buchanan’s magazine (The American Conservative?) blame 9/11 on Israel? Or are you making this up? Actually TAC gave quite a scathing review to the book.
This review ignores the central assertion Buchanan makes, and significantly distorts his thesis. He does not blame World War II on Churchill–although he does spend a significant amount of critiquing an imperfect man whom neoconservatives have turned, for rhetorical reasons, into an Ozymandias. And we all know how he turned out. It might have been useful actually to cite Buchanan’s argument–you could have made space for it by leaving out the praise of that embittered anti-Catholic opportunist, Hitchens–which was this: The Entente, after winning a morally ambiguous war, cast themselves as moral heroes, in part using the language of Woodrow Wilson. In fact, they behaved with great Machiavellianism, trying to cripple Germany. But they were insufficiently ruthless, just as they had been insufficiently high-minded. In other words, they were stupid Machiavellians–worthy of the Bush administration. They wounded the beast, and left it alive. Then they surrounded it with weak nations of dubious legitimacy. Knowing just how cynically they had behaved, they lacked the moral courage to resist a revived Germany. The great tragedy, of course, is that Germany was led not by a reasonable nationalist with satiable demands–as the appeasers believed–but by a murderous sociopath. (Buchanan does NOT pass over lightly Hitler’s barbarism, as the libel-happy Hitchens suggests.) Eager to avoid the errors of August 1914, the bumblers in Britain perpetrated Munich 1938. They compounded the error by drawing the wrong line in the sand, cynically pretending to defend a Poland they could not, would not, and later on did not, protect. Poland was literally thrown to the wolves for the sake of rallying British opinion, Buchanan argues, and that was done by Chamberlain, not Churchill. What Buchanan argues is that Chamberlain should have pressed Poland to accede to Hitler’s territorial demands, and become a client state–even as France and Britain armed to the teeth in their own defense. In the event, Poland was sacrificed (1/4 of its population died in that war), which served the purpose of… buying time for France and Britain to rearm (the Phony War). And Hitler gained an alliance treaty with Stalin, freeing up his armies to concentrate on overrunning most of Western Europe. It doesn’t take a paleocon, much less a moral amnesiac, to recognize the folly of such a policy. Anyone who cares about the Poles (Hitchens was mocking them even as Communist thugs murdered Solidarity priests) should be sympathetic to this argument. Of course, Hitchens has never forgiven the Poles for beating Trotsky in 1919. Why a brilliant, tradition-minded Catholic like Mr. Kimball should be siding with a vicious evangelizing atheist like Hitchens over an honorable, honest fellow Catholic like Pat is one of the mysteries of the putrefying conservative movement.
Jun 17, 2008 - 7:08 am 6. Bridgehampton:True, the review http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_02/article2.html (by the eminent traditionalist historian John Lukacs) does not address in detail the tactical and strategic questions faced by the Western Powers after 1936–and before. (John Zmirak’s overall account above is quite lucid.) What it does address is the central question raised by Buchanan’s book, which is whether Hitler posed a greater threat to Western Civilization than Stalin. This is a fairly difficult one: many of us have been living in the Arendtian universe which posits two equal, malevolent totalitarianisms, the first vanquished in 1945, the second in, when–1956?, 1989? But those with decisions to make in the 1930’s didn’t have luxury of equal condemnation. The question of whether Stalin was Hitler’s equal in malice is obviously difficult. The underlying premise of most of the America Firsters (the bedrock of Buchanan’s book) is that Communism was much worse– which tended to makes such people less
Jun 17, 2008 - 8:05 am 7. ron james:hostile towards Nazism than they should have been. Lukacs makes the case differently, that Nazism, more popular, and because linked to nationalism, more “natural” was the greater threat to decency. This is counter-intuitive to much of the Old Right, but I think it’s largely correct.
Buchanan’s book is a part of a leftist and paleo-conservative attempt to repudiate World War II (and its Allied leaders) and enshrine the “lessons of Vietnam” in their place. You might also have included a recent article by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas on the “mythology of Munich.” All of this is meant to promote isolationism and pacifism, and in the case of the left, to facilitate the election of Barack Obama.
Jun 17, 2008 - 8:09 am 8. John Zmirak:For more on this, I invite readers to read this essay on Buchanan’s book:
Jun 18, 2008 - 8:12 am 9. Steynianism 172 « Free Mark Steyn!:http://www.takimag.com/site/article/patrick_buchanan_and_the_necessary_book/
[...] is OK, but we’re with Roger Kimball on much of his outlook: neofascist nuttery– “Patrick Buchanan and the perils of forgetfulness” …. (humanevents.com, [...]
Jun 18, 2008 - 11:41 am 10. Peter Laverick:One is always fascinated by the US views of the Second World War. Could I suggest that Buchanan raises his really idiotic thesis, because he feels guilt over the fact that the Americans were very late on entering it. That is not to say that the US was not the staunch defender of justice at all times, but that some paleocons are somewhat miffed that the US was not involved as a world player in the years bewtween the Wars. For that, you have to blame Wilson and then Roosevelt, not the British and the Europeans.
Jun 18, 2008 - 6:14 pm 11. Greg:re: I’m surprised Buchanan didn’t blame WWII on Israel.
He can’t do that, he already blamed WW2, the Holocaust, Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe on Poland.
Buchanan has a history of crypto-fascism, re-writing history in favor of Nazi Germany, and generally being a prick about the events in the early half of the 1900s.
Jun 19, 2008 - 12:26 pm 12. Sissy Willis:“Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons.”
Jun 19, 2008 - 2:57 pm 13. "Cicero":Having already replied to John Zmiras on Taki’s Mag I shall now take issue with Mr. Kimball. It is obvious from his comments that Kimball is a die hard Anglophile who takes heavy doses of castor oil English propaganda for his reading in history. He needs a revisionist history lesson badly. Here it is.
Although it might surprise Mr. Kimball to learn this, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles ascribing “sole guilt” to Germany for World War One is not a historical “fact”. Neither is the “wicked Kaiser” myth. English apologists always like to forget the works of the revisionist historians of the 1920’s who demolished their World War One fables. When these works are mentioned at all, the English apologists claim that they have been “refuted” by Franz Fischer’s 1961 nonsense “Germany’s War Aims”. The dear old English have an incomparable gift for believing their own propaganda lies. In this, they resemble the Zionists, who have convinced themselves that Arab Palestine was a deserted wasteland before the Jews came and “made the desert bloom”. In the English mind, “aggression” is what other people,principally Germans,do. Thus, the German wars of unification under Otto Von Bismarck, are labeled “aggression”. Comparable English wars of unification,like Oliver Cromwell’s slaughter and rape of the Irish or Lord Cumberland’s well-known depredations in Scotland, do not similarly qualify. Dr. Joseph Goebbels once sagely commented that the English had a history which was “more than dubious”. Pious Englishmen and their clones, like Roger Kimball, do not like to be reminded of this history. It offends their highly polished sense of hypocrisy. Thus,there is no mention of stealing other peoples ships on the high seas, the deliberate starvation of the Irish by absentee English land owners, the hooking of the Chinese on opium, the slaughter of the Boers so that Jewish financiers could get their hands on the gold and diamonds of South Africa, the starvation of millions of Hindus and the looting of their wealth for three hundred years,the “Copenhaging” of the Danish fleet by Lord Castlereagh in 1807 to enforce the naval blockade against Napoleon, the sell out of the Arabs post-World War One which laid the basis for the mess in the Near East or the constant playing off of one rival after another which kept Europe in a constant stae of warfare for three to four hundred years, all to England’s material betterment. Still less is there any discussion of the Hundred Years War by which the gentle English robbed France blind and set new standards of jurisprudence at the expense of Joan of Arc.
England went to war against Germany in 1914 and 1939 for exactly the same reasons she went to war against Philip Two of Spain, the various Louis of France and the Dutch-to destroy political and commercial rivals she felt were becoming too strong. All English historiography of the two world wars is an artful camoflauge for this untidy fact. Mr. Kimball, a pious and self-serving Englishman from the looks of his noble face, would rather pontificate on the horrors of German expansion in Central and Eastern Europe than admit that his militarily incompetent countrymen bit off more than they could chew. There was no English nobility in two crusades against Germany; there was only English stupidity (a commodity which exists in abundance). The English easily could have preserved their vastly ovverated empire by collaborating with Hitler; instead they tossed it away. The poor Jews suffered during the war (although not as much as the victims of the Jewish gulag commissars of Joseph Stalin, surely.) That would upset the same English who attacked the Chinese to make billions for the poppy lord, Sassoon. The tears shed by Lionel Phillips, Samuel Montague, Ernst Oppenheimer, Barney Barnato, Werner and Beit and the other Zionist plutocrats profiting from Dutch blood can easily be imagined.
It has been a pleasure responding to your posts, Mr. Kimball. As much as I may disagree with John Zmiras on aspects of World War Two history, he is at least historically literate. You, however, have lost your handless Belgian baby and now resort to “cut and paste” historiography. I anticipate that your reaction to my demolition of your position will go far beyond Mr. Zmiras charge on Taki’s blog that I compose “intellectual pornography”.
Jun 19, 2008 - 9:58 pm 14. joey:I didn’t read the book but did Buchanan mention the nuclear weapon program the Nazis had started just prior to WW2.
I think not knowing him. If Churchill had not fought Hitler their would’ve been no resistance movement throughout Europe to assist in keeping tabs on the Nazi progress with theit nuke programs. If Hitler had succeeded the British and all other democracies would’ve yielded to Hitler’s dominance backed by nuke threats. Remember the Nazis had superior rocket technology and without Britain’ war effort at sea, the Germans would soon enough have developed submarines capable of firing nuke missiles from offshore into Britain, Russia and the USA.
Buchanan makes an idiotic proposition that there was no need to crush Hitler.
Jul 15, 2008 - 5:18 am 15. Hans Froehling, PhD:Please remember that Buchanan wrote a simple Master’s thesis in journalism, not in history. So, the first thing to ask is who was his thesis supervisor and what did he/she know about the subject? In essence, there really is not much to expect from a man who never went through the rigour of a PhD program in history. I was under the impression that he at least had a Master’s in history and read Gibbons. So let’s take this pathetic pamphlet for what it is. I doubt that he ever read the 3 volumes of “Mein Kampf” in German. The original contains German misspellings that poor Buchanan would not even have realized. “Gemeinsames Blut gehoert in ein gemeinsames Reich”. This passage alone destroys his thesis. The fact is that Buchanan lacks the language skills that would have allowed him to corroborate his “thesis”. In addition, he was not sufficiently proficient in German to understand Hitler’s speeches prior to WWII which at the time of his dissertation were widely available in vinyl records (in German of course). So it is not surprising that his poor “journalistic” mind became confused when he had to deal with a historical topic that far surpassed his poor language skills.
Jun 3, 2009 - 7:57 pm 16. cicero:Mr. Froehling claims that Buchanan cannot read German. Neither can Deborah Lipstadt, that world renowned expert on “gas chambers” that never existed. Mr. Froehling likes to march behind historical orthodoxy the same way that Germans once marched behind Adolf Hitler. Perhaps Phd schoolboy Hans Froehling should put on his Kaiser Wilhelm uniform before reciting Article 231 or 234 of the Treaty of Versailles.
Germans who march behind historical orthodoxy are a scant improvement on Germans who once marched behind their Fuehrer. Mr. Buchanan may not have the Phd but he has an honest inquiring mind – something that the intellectual goose stepper, Hans Froehling, will never have.
Aug 13, 2009 - 11:37 am 17. cicero:Patrick Buchanan has just written a very cogent column arguing that Adolf Hitler was not aiming for a world war in September 1939 but only for a limited war against Poland to secure German interests in the east. He is quite correct. All the evidence indicates that Hitler was stunned when Britain and France declared war over Poland. His reaction when the declaration was read to him by his interpreter, Paul Schmidt, was dead silence for several minutes. Then he uttered the question: “What do we do now?”
All the evidence indicates that Hitler wanted war against Soviet Russia and a German empire in the east. He had nothing but admiration for the British empire. The war in the west came about because Britain wanted it, not because Hitler wanted it. The German demands over Danzig, a German city, were entirely reasonable. There was nothing in those demands which in any way threatened Polish sovereignty.
Buchanan is right about the consequences of the war. It did cost Britain her empire and the US the loss of her traditional policy of non-intervention. It also gave the Zionists the necessary propaganda hoax to steal Arab Palestine and Joseph Stalin the means to conquer half of Europe. WW2 was the wrong war against the wrong enemy.Adolf Hitler was not a man of peace but he was the better alternative to what actually happened.
Sep 5, 2009 - 11:12 am 18. Hans Froehling, PhD:Cicero,
It might be of interest to you that “schoolboy” Hans Froehling, PhD wrote an article reviewed by no other than Ernst Noltke, the conservative revisionist of the Holocaust, and who violently approved of it my own revisionism.
It might be also of interest to you that my Great-Grandfather Freiherr Egon von Linden-Neuntausend was the first justice minister under Bismarck and saved the property of the Catholic Church in Southern Germany, the reason why he received a gift of the pope that contained a particle of Jesus’ cross. This was in confiance to the first German Emperor after the victory over France in 1871.
Furthermore my Great-granduncle was Karl Marbe, the co-founder of the Wuerzburg School of Psychology and forced to resign in 1935 because he was married to a Jewish Woman, or that my mother spent two years in a concentration camp because she was actively involved in the opposition to the Nazi Regime. Moreover my grandfather was honored by the State of Israel for smuggling Jews out of Germany and treated them as an MD in the evenings when nobody would dare to get in contact with him.
I think you are doing a serious dishonor to Cicero and his “De officiis” by adopting his name by reducing your argument to a simple “ad hominem” argument “schoolboy”
.
I also wonder if your family or that of Buchanan would ever have the courage to act in a similar fashion against the forces of evil under the circumstances of the “Third Reich”. As for marching behind “historical orthodoxy”, as mentioned, it is on record that I have gone my own way and published in “Der Bundestag” the most widely read historical journal in the Federal Republic of Germany. Ironically it is fully published that I did not follow the “historical orthodoxy” as you mentioned in your vile response. However, that does not mean that I twist historical facts as Buchanan did who is simply ignorant and unacquainted with critical sources of the historical time that he covers.
I wonder what contributions you have made that can be publicly verified on this subject. My guess is that you neither have the education of a PhD in History nor the intellectual capacity to write dissertations and papers that demonstrate that you can analyze and synthesize large amounts of information on your own. Sincerely,
Hans Froehling, Phd, DBA, PsyD, CMBB (and hopefully a schoolboy for the rest of his life because the end of learning is the end of life … I hope you are not there yet
.
Sep 25, 2009 - 10:02 am 19. Hans Froehling, PhD:Cicero,
Sorry Mr. Cicero, but German aristocrats like I (I still hold the official title of a “Freiherr”) doesn’t goose step behind a plebeian like Adolf Hitler. As Nietzsche said “Wir Vornehmen: Das natuerliche Empfinden fuer Unterschiede im gesellschaftlichen Range”. Of course, this aphorism will be very difficult to find by “Cicero” in Nietsche’s work and even more difficult to translate. But even if he finds the citation in, it will be next to impossible to determine its riddle. Instead, “Cicero” will end up in the ultimate “enigma coma”
. Vielleicht ist die Wahrheit ein Weib, das Gruende hat ihre Gruende zu verbergen – Baubo ist ihr Name.
Good luck with tracing these sentences back to its sources and correctly interpreting them. You will be in the same dilemma that poor old Buchanan was in when he attempted to chew a bone that was too big for him. As a friend of mine said: “If you want to bark with the big dogs, don’t p..s like a pincher”.
Sep 25, 2009 - 2:29 pm 20. Hans Froehling, PhD:Three corrections:
1. confiance should read defiance
Sep 25, 2009 - 3:22 pm 21. Hans Froehling, PhD:2. Airstocrats like I (…) doesn’t, should read “Aristocrats like I don’t”
3. “But even if he finds the citation in” should read “even if he finds the citation” or “even if he finds the citation in his work”.
You see at least I can determine and correct my mistakes.
What a sad internet site that does not even allow a scholar who has written about Adolf Hitler in Journals reviewed by Ernst Noltke, Germany’s premier historian of Third Reich revisionism against ad hominem arguments levelled by ignorant hobby historians like “Cicero” using terms ike “schoolboy”, “goose stepping”, and false accusations of “historical orthodoxy”. Thankfully neither “Cicero” nor Buchanan have or will ever make an impact on the education in history. After all, this is just a silly site where opinions are biased towards a specific rather uneducated audience.
Sep 25, 2009 - 8:10 pm 22. FroehlingHans, PhD:P.S. Dear editor: According to the very rules of this site (see rule 3), shouldn’t Cicero’s ad hominem against professional historians such as “schoolboy”, or “goose stepping” be removed from this site? At least be consistent if you cannot help but be biased
.
Sep 25, 2009 - 8:13 pm 23. FroehlingHans, PhD:Dear Cicero,
Hitler’s key passages in regards to WWII and Britain are part of volume 3 of “Mein Kampf” which has never been translated into English. To my knowledge there is only one copy available in the Library of Congress. So research skills and skills in German language do make a big difference when dealing with such a sensitive topic as attempting a full-scale revision of history. A simple trip to Washington would have saved Buchanan quite a bit of scorn from professional historians like myself.
Sep 25, 2009 - 8:20 pm 24. FroehlingHans, PhD:Dear editors: This site does have integrity after all. I don’t care what political angle someone is coming from, after all free speech is what makes this country so special! But the fact that you allow me to dispel the inaccurate accusations of “Cicero”, i.e. “schoolboy”, “goose-stepper behind the German Emperor” or the idée fixe that I am steeped in historical orthodoxy, which is totally taken out of the blue air, is greatly appreciated.
. But the world looks still different depending on which site of the pond the frog sits.
Sep 26, 2009 - 10:36 am 25. FroehlingHans, PhD:As a matter of fact, I belong to the German revisionist of psychoanalytical theories of Hitler’s assumed “psychosis”. This is something that was widely published in Germany and brought me the wrath of the “historical orthodoxy” in the 1990s in this country. How ironic that I would now be accused by an ignoramus of the same crime
This does not mean however, that I agree with Buchanan’s thesis, which is clearly falsified by historical facts. As a matter of fact, it is one of the few instances in the history of science where a hypotheses has been truly falsified because it is not phrased as a probabilistic, but as a deterministic statement. As a result, one instance of references that falsifies the statement leads to the total collapse of the argument from the point of view of philosophy of science. In Buchanan’s case neither Imre Lakatos’ research program, nor Kuhn’s version of the history of philosophy or even Feyerabend’s methodological anarchism can be brought into play to find a way out of the intellectual morass that Buchanan put himself into by stating his thesis as a deterministic one rather than an inductive one. Apodictive statements always incite Tisiphone, Megaera and Alecto to let loose the furies on the perpetrators of intellectual “crimes”. The infamous 5% rule introduced by R.A. Fisher in 1925 does not apply to Buchanan’s non-probabilistic thesis (be it in the form of the frequency of probability, Bayes’ subjective probability, Keyne’s propensity theory of probability or Fisher’s maximum likelihood version of probability. His thesis is refuted by the facts that lay buried in a simple book in the Congress of library. How sad that a “historian” has such little grasp of the impact history can have on his beloved work. As Weber said, be aware of the unintended consequences of your actions.
Cicero,
Let’s hope I or other Germans will never know your true identity. The sentence “Adolf Hitler was not a man of peace but he was the better alternative to what actually happened” will cost you a minimum of 7 years in prison if you ever decided to enter the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany. Should I ever know who you really are, be assured that the “Deutsche Amt fuer die Verfassungssicherung” will know of you and your pro-Nazi opinions. I used to work for them when I was still in Germany in the area of counterterrorism. Your unreflected rambling is shameful from an historical point of view and luckily criminial in modern Germany. My suggestion: Stay in the US or keep your mouth shut in case you decided to visit Germany. With your big mouth you’ll be faster in prison than you can even imagine!
Sep 26, 2009 - 8:05 pm 26. FroehlingHans, PhD:Dear Editors, please remove my posts from this site. Thanks!
Sep 28, 2009 - 3:12 pm 27. FroehlingHans, PhD:By all means, is there a way that my posts can be removed from this site. I want to have nothing to do with Neonazis and antisemits who are obviously happily posting on this site. At first sight, this is not obvious. But after reviewing the comments, this is clearly a Pro-Nazi, antisemitic forum. Thanks!
Sep 29, 2009 - 1:57 pm 28. cicero:Mr. Froehling has been mightily offended by inconvenient truths.
Whether Mr. Foehling likes it or not, the fact is that two world wars were a disaster for western civilization. Continuing to pound on the Germans as the “sole cause” of these wars and applying Article 234 of the Treaty of Versailles to Adolf Hitler the same way it was applied to Kaiser Wilhelm does not make for honest history; it merely constitutes groveling before the propaganda of the victors. Mr. Froehling lives in a society where bootlicking of victors history is a legal requirement.
Speaking of Mr. Nolte, perhaps Mr. Froehling should read Professor Andre Gerrits recently published book, “The Myth of Jerwish Communism”. There he will learn that the charge of Jewish Communismwas substantially true, despite Professor Gerrits best efforts to whitewash this fact.
Oct 25, 2009 - 2:43 pm 29. cicero:THE MYTH OF JEWISH COMMUNISM
“The Myth of Jewish Communism” by Andre Gerrits is the latest academic attempt to explain away some well-known but highly sensitive facts about the Jewish overrepresentation in communism. Gerrits doesn’t try to explain away the facts outright as that would be impossible. Instead, he engagingly asserts that the documented facts about Jewish involvement in communism tells less about Jews than about the psychological dimensions of anti-Semites. The basic parameters of Gerrits approach is laid out in the opening paragraph of Chapter Three. He writes:
“Jews have played a role out of all proportion to their numbers in the socialist and communist movements in Europe. Their participation in the early communist regimes of post-1917 Russia and the countries of Eastern Central Europe after the Second World War, in particular, bolstered anti-Jewish sentiments. The myth of Jewish Communism became one of the most powerful and destructive political stereotypes in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. The most crucial feature of a (xenophobic) myth, as discussed earlier, is that it renders the abstraction of the group as more real than any of its specific, individual components. On this basis, one could argue that the actual involvement of the Jews in the communist movements is of only minor importance for the study of Jewish communism. The myth of Jewish Communism tells us more about anti-Semites, and perhaps communists, than it does about Jews. It should be considered, first and foremost, in the tradition of politically motivated anti-Jewish thinking. If the question of Jewish communism is basically a chimera, a political fantasy, there would seem to be little need for historians to tread beyond either its mythical or fantastic dimensions. The problem is compounded by the fact that Jewish participation in the communist movement lacks a reliable, empirical basis. Figures are fragmentary and limited and therefore difficult to assess. Jewish communism is as controversial as it is elusive. No wonder then, that so few historians have risked burning their fingers by it.”
Let us analyze what Professor Gerrits has just said. He begins by admitting the basic fact under dispute – that Jews were very disproportionately involved in Communist movements everywhere. He then asserts that this fact has no significance in itself but tells us more about the anti-Semites and their evil mind set than it tells us about the Jews, those eternally innocent people. Thus, he converts a factual dispute already settled into an attempt to pathologize those who reason from facts to justifiable conclusions (e.g., the Jews did it). This short essay does not intend to review “The Myth of Jewish Communism” in its entirety but merely to indicate the general approach of the book. It is certainly not without merit. The volume covers a vast amount of material which, although not all-encompassing, provides more than enough evidence of where the “myth” of Jewish communism came from. However, the volume most definitely follows the usual apologetic techniques of trying to ascribe Jewish involvement in communism to particular circumstances rather than to inherent characteristics of the Jewish people as a whole.
“The Myth of Jewish Communism” is hardly unique in the general approach it employs. But it must be said that Andre Gerrits does an exceedingly good job in trying to explain away the unexplainable. The book is well written and superficially plausible. The slant is obvious, however. Despite the slanting all kinds of inconvenient facts keep popping up. Thus, Gerrits has to admit that various Jewish authors such as Jaff Schatz, maintain that there were important similarities between Jewish messianic ideology and communist ideology. He also takes note of “anti-Jewish” academics like Albert Lindemann, Kevin MacDonald and Yuri Slezkine who have written extensively on the Jewish involvement in revolutionary socialism. Andre Gerrits basic problem, as anyone who reads the book can tell, is that the facts are simply against him.
No matter how masterfully he writes, it turns out that “The Myth of Jewish Communism” was the “Reality of Jewish Communism”. Too many people saw the face of the murderous tyrrany up close for there to be any doubt. Andre Gerrits “The Myth of Jewish Communism: An Historical Interpretation” is an important book because it shows that a century old charge has yet to die. It never will die because the evidence in support of it is simply too vast to be explained away. The fact that the Jews feel compelled to produce an expensive academic paperback rebutting the charge shows how concerned over it they are even to this day. “The Myth of Jewish Communism” may be a response to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Two Hundred Years Together”; it may be a response to massive Internet publishing on the Jewish-Communist connection; it may be a combination of these things. It is unlikely that a better job of attempted refutation of the Jewish communist charge can be penned than “The Myth of Jewish Communism”. If the rebuttal fails – and it does – then the charge must be conceded as true. Andre Gerrits has given the subject his best shot. The reader who perceives the deficiencies of his account will have no further illusions on the subject of Jews and communism.
Oct 25, 2009 - 2:47 pm 30. cicero:EXPLAINING AWAY JEWISH COMMUNISM
It is a marvel to read the sophistries by which learned historians try to “explain away” the overwhelming Jewish involvement in communism. Several classic examples occur in Andre Gerrits book “The Myth of Jewish Communism”. On pp. 140-141 he writes:
“The new political order in East Central Europe, not yet fully communist but under the political control of communist parties and their foreign masters, offered Jews unforeseen and unprecedented opportunities. Apart from their physical security (for which Jews depended on the communist-dominated governments) they profited in particular from the unique possibilities for social mobility, employment and political emancipation which the new order offered. Abel Kainer (pseudonym of Stanislaw Krajewski) emphasizes that few Jews as Jews chose for the communist regime in Poland. Those who participated in the new order (a minority among the Polish Jews who had survived the war, but the majority, most probably, of those who ultimately decided to stay) did so as individuals, mostly assimilated and, as Kainer asserts, often convincingly communist. Kainer lists a series of variables that can be read as partial explanations for why Jewish survivors were above average with respect to their receptivity to communist rule. Under post-war conditions, communism meant more than just acceptance by a community of non-Jews. Considering the situation in which most Jews found themselves immediately after the war (lacking housing and employment and boasting few relatives to fall back on), many relied heavily on support from the communist authorities…Jan Gross adds that: “They (Jews) certainly considered the Communist-dominated government as a natural ally, given the hostility of the social environment.”
On p.147 Gerrits writes:
“Immediately after their moment of greatest grief and disaster, Jews attained what they never attained before: formal positions of political power. At a time of almost existential crisis for most countries of the region – from the ravages of war and occupation to the subjugation to Soviet rule – Jews had returned with a vengeance, or so many believed. There were fewer Jews than ever but they seemed more powerful than ever. Jews appeared to be the main beneficiaries of the new order, profiting from the misfortunes of the East European nations…the notion of Jewish Communism appeared to have lost most of its pre-war mythical qualities. With the conspicuous role of Jews in most of the communist regimes, it seemed far more real than ever before – as biased and malevolent as this interpretation of communist rule my have been.”
Here we have the stereotypical effort to explain away the huge preponderance of Jews in communism as the product of particular circumstances, not as an inherent Jewish tendency. One might cynically comment that anyone who actually believes this should be looking for the proverbial bridge in Brooklyn to buy. It is no different, in essence, than the claims that Jews participated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 because they had been oppressed by the Czar and therefore, communism offered the best opportunity for liberation. Jews were simply availing themselves of the protection of a power which had saved them from the Nazis. Under the circumstances of the time Jews had to do business with the system which could clothe, house and feed them, so naturally they had to put on commissars uniforms. What else could they have done, as Messrs. Gerrits, Gross and others tell us? The Poles lacked the literacy to fill the upper level positions in the government, just as the Russians so lacked it in 1917, so the government just had to fill the positions with Jews. What did any Jewish pre-disposition for communism have to do with it?
This sort of apologia is utterly unconvincing. When juries in courtrooms hear these kinds of arguments from defense attorneys, they vote to convict. The Jews did not turn to communism because they were persecuted or because circumstances in individual countries made it conducive to their economic betterment. They turned to it because of their hate filled Talmudic tradition. Communism was never anything other than what the anti-Semites said it was – a Jewish attempt to tear down the non-Jewish world and to bathe it in blood. Andre Gerrits and similar academic hacks write endless pages trying to ascribe every possible motivation to Jewish participation in communism other than the real one. The intellectual gymnastics make for interesting reading but do not establish the case.
Oct 25, 2009 - 2:49 pm 31. john thames:Unlike the intellectually intolerant Hans Froehling and his fellow krauts, Americans believe in concepts called “freedom of thought” and “freedom of speech”. That means Americans cannot be imprisoned for thinking or expressing opinions offensive to the powers that be. Medieval Germany still has not caught up with these concepts – and neither has the enlightened Mr. Froehling.
Unlike Mr. Froehling, I do not threaten my opponents with prison terms. I employ the more effective tactic of destroying their arguments. Since Hans Froehling, trapped in the Falaise pocket of his own stupidity, cannot deal with this tactic, he instead invokes the Inquisition and hurls anathema at me. Very impressive, Hans.
I have news for you, Mr. Froehling. The general Pattons of historical revisionism are already shooting down your orthodoxies and ramming steel bayonets of facts into your pious guts. Your stormtroopers of intellectual conformity are being butchered by fast moving, fast thinking Audie Murpheys of quick shooting intellectual marksmanship – and your clumsy, slow moving ivory tower Panzer will not save you.
Nov 7, 2009 - 11:49 am