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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15 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