-Caveat Lector-
<<Apparently, some in the media would want you to believe one thing when in all
actuality, another thing represents the truth. Although PJB is a little
different than your run o' da mill politician, from all accounts, he seems to
have a little better grip on American (and perhaps Australian, New Freelander,
and other nationalities) need to establish a foreign policy that is not a
'kinder and gentler, sooner than later, thousand points of light {over
Baghdad}' scorched earth (usually theirs) for the non-allied. A<>E<>R >>
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Dear Brigade,
Almost missed two excellent columns from our good friend Sam Francis (they
were buried in my inbox).
GO PAT GO!!!!!!!!!
Linda
-----------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date sent: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 16:37:38 EDT
Subject: Pat pieces
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Linda -- if you're still putting out pieces about Pat on your list, I'm
sending you two you can send out. The shorter one is a coulmn I've just
done on Pat's switch to Reform. The longer is an article appearing in the
current (November) issue of Middle American News reviewing the reviews and
press about his book. Hope they're useful. Sam
---------------------------------------------
SAMUEL FRANCIS
Buchanan and his enemies
FOR RELEASE Friday, October 29, 1999
When Beltway pundits first began to realize, about a month ago, that Pat
Buchanan was serious about leaving the Republican Party and running for
president in the Reform Party, the consensus that immediately congealed
held that he was doing so because he no longer had any significant
following in the GOP itself. Thus, neo-conservative editor Bill Kristol,
the world's leading Beltwayoid, wisecracked that Mr. Buchanan's "real
problem is that in the Republican party, he has increasingly found himself
a demagogue without a demos."
Yet for a demagogue without a demos, Mr. Buchanan continues to
attract a good deal of attention. This week he actually did leave the
Republican Party and declare his candidacy in the Reform Party. The day
after, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the
Washington Times, among other major newspapers, all made the story their
lead, with front-page pictures of the new candidate.
The Wall Street Journal devoted almost the whole of its op-ed page on the
day of his actual announcement to an article rehearsing the now-quite
tedious (and quite thoroughly refuted) claim that Mr. Buchanan is an
"anti- Semite." The next day the Journal denounced Mr. Buchanan yet
again, and the day after sported an editorial ranting about him and the
Reform Party. The New York Times and the Washington Times carried lead
editorials that swiped at Mr. Buchanan's "divisive social views" and
snorted once more that his lack of a following among Republicans made him
"the Harold Stassen of Republican presidential politics."
Actually, Harold Stassen was the Harold Stassen of Republican
presidential politics, but the larger point is that the major media are
simply obsessed with Pat Buchanan and with convincing everyone that he is
really unimportant and has no following and that no one needs to pay any
more attention to him at all -- except for the front page stories about
him, the lead editorials repudiating him and the op-eds denouncing him.
Could it be that they suspect that the "demos" -- otherwise known as the
American people -- entertains rather different ideas about Mr. Buchanan
after all?
Could it be that the establishment media of both the left and right know
full well that many Americans are disgusted by what the stale and phony
"alternatives" the other two parties continue to offer and that once
voters have a chance to hear the real Pat Buchanan instead of the lies and
libels the Beltway media spread about him, the "demos" will dump the two
main political parties in precisely the same historical wastebasket as the
late, unlamented and largely forgotten Mr. Stassen?
American conservatives who have traditionally voted Republican today have
every reason to follow Mr. Buchanan into the Reform Party. In his
announcement speech this week, Mr. Buchanan not only trumpeted his
distinctive issues of economic nationalism, an "America First" foreign
policy and immigration reform -- issues that most real conservatives, as
opposed to their Beltway "leadership," support -- but also beat the drum
for more conventional conservative principles: reduction of the size and
scope of the federal government, control of the federal judiciary, the end
of affirmative action, the defense of American national sovereignty, the
restoration of constitutionalism, and others.
There simply is no candidate in the Republican Party today who
endorses the conservative orthodoxy that Mr. Buchanan supports in the
Reform Party. Even if there were, he or she would have virtually no
chance to shape the party and its leaders, since, as Elizabeth Dole
bitterly commented after her own withdrawal from the race last week, "The
bottom line is money." The Republican Party today has become the toy of
plutocrats who can buy the nomination -- and perhaps the national election
itself -- without even waiting for actual contests in primaries and
elections.
But conservatives, conventional or not, are not the only Americans who
have good reason to support Mr. Buchanan. On the distinctive issues of
trade, immigration and foreign policy with which Mr. Buchanan is
particularly known, he offers real and serious alternatives that the other
parties, their leaders and their pet apologists in the media are
determined to ignore. In almost every case, the alternatives he offers
threaten the power and interests of those who not only ignore them but
vilify anyone who raises them.
The plutocratic power elite that now dominates both major political
parties as well as its allies in the cultural and media establishment have
every reason to smear and distort the truth about Pat Buchanan and what he
offers. But the "demos" -- the American people, whether conservative or
not - - needs to listen carefully to what Mr. Buchanan really has to tell
them and to do some hard thinking about what future they and their nation
will face if his enemies and the interests those enemies represent
continue to prevail.
Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.
----------------------------------------------
Buchanan's Critics Offer Lies, Contradictions, Distortions
by Samuel Francis
For nearly a solid month, Pat Buchanan's new book on American foreign
policy, A Republic, Not an Empire, was the target of an almost
unprecedented campaign of vituperation, distortion and denunciation in the
establishment press. Appearing in bookstores at almost the same time that
Buchanan began talking about plans to abandon his current campaign for the
Republican Party's presidential nomination and to run as a candidate on
the Reform Party ticket, the book quickly became a stick with which
Buchanan's political enemies tried to beat him. But the attacks on his
book, while obviously politically motivated, reveal more than ordinary
political disagreement. The nasty tone and reckless content of the
accusations that many politicians, journalists, and academics in the
establishment have hurled at Buchanan and his book also unmask the bitter,
almost personal, hatred and fear those enemies harbor for him, his
political ideas, and the millions of Americans who support him.
But the response to Buchanan's new book also reveals something else as
well -- namely, that much of the criticism is simply phony. After reading
A Republic, Not an Empire and looking at the reviews and discussions of
the book, it immediately becomes clear that many of those hurling the
ugliest charges have not read the book at all, or, if they have, are
simply lying about what it says. Moreover, many of the book's critics
contradict each other in what they say or write about the book. Those
contradictions also show that many critics -- including not only
politicians who are Buchanan's rivals but also nationally respected
journalists and prestigious academics at world- famous universities --
either simply don't know what they are talking about or that they are
dishonestly distorting the book and its contents as well as the important
historical issues with which the book deals.
A Republic, Not an Empire is a 436-page book documented with more than 700
footnotes. It recounts the story of American foreign policy form the
early days of the Republic down to the present, and it offers Buchanan's
own critique of where our foreign policy has gone wrong, what the
consequences of its errors have been for this country and the rest of the
world, and what he would do to set it right. Often accused of
"isolationism," Buchanan in fact rejects the term as "a dismissive slur on
a tradition of U.S. independence in foreign policy and nonintervention in
foreign wars."
Buchanan calls for a foreign policy based on what he calls "enlightened
nationalism," a careful attention to the real interests and security needs
of the United States as the basis for our military involvement and
diplomatic commitments abroad. He rejects both the erosion of our
national sovereignty through institutions like NAFTA and the United
Nations and the abandonment of our national interests in the foreign
policy favored by both Republican George Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton.
He sees the roots of our present misguided compulsion to intervene in
foreign conflicts that are irrelevant or actually dangerous to our
national interests in the errors and misconceptions of such leaders as
Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. The
historical sections of A Republic, Not an Empire are of vital importance,
because they set up the framework for understanding how we went wrong as a
world power and why we continue to do so today, when globalist foreign and
trade policies descended from those that dragged us into two world wars
threaten our national interests, security, sovereignty, independence, and
prosperity and again threaten to involve us in an unending series of wars
over matters that are none of our concern as a nation.
It is precisely that historical section that has excited the most
controversy and has been the target of the most bitter attacks. Buchanan
argues in that section that U.S. entry into both World War I and II was
unnecessary, that neither Imperial Germany in the 1900s nor Hitler's
Germany after 1940 had any aggressive intentions toward the United States.
It is his claim about Hitler in particular that unleashed the torrent of
abuse and denunciation.
"Following his victory [in 1940 over France and Britain]," Buchanan writes
(p. 268)
Hitler made no overt move to threaten U.S. vital interests. He
occupied the Atlantic and Channel ports of France; halted his tanks at the
Pyrenees; turned the rest of the nation over to the French Vichy
government; declined to occupy France's colonies in North Africa; offered
England, in exchange for peace, guarantees of the British Empire; visited
Paris; and went home, never to return. No one can know the mind of
Hitler. But as of mid-1940, his actions argue that beneath the overlay of
Nazi ideology, he was driven by a traditional German policy of Drang nach
Osten, the drive to the East.
Citing historian William Henry Chamberlin's view that Hitler sought
conquests only in Russia and the East, Buchanan writes that "in this
[Chamberlin's] analysis Hitler had not wanted war with the West. But when
the West declared war, he overran France to secure his rear before setting
out to conquer the East. In this analysis Hitler saw the world divided
into four spheres: Great Britain holding its empire; Japan, dominant in
East Asia; Germany, master of Europe; and America, mistress of the Western
Hemisphere." (p. 269)
After Hitler's loss of the Battle of Britain in 1940, "the German
invasion
threat [to Britain] was history. If Goering's Luftwaffe could not achieve
air supremacy over the Channel, how was it going to achieve it over the
Atlantic? If Hitler could not put a soldier into England in the fall of
1940, the notion that he could invade the Western Hemisphere -- with no
surface ships to engage the United States and British fleets and U.S. air
power dominant in the west Atlantic -- was preposterous.... [In June,
1941] Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, a giant of a nation with thousands
of tanks and planes and millions of soldiers. The United States was now
even more secure." (278-79)
Buchanan argues that, absent U.S. involvement in the European theater of
World War II, the war between the Soviets and Nazi Germany would have led
to the destruction or crippling of both and that Western Europe would not
have been devastated. Moreover, it was the guarantee of Polish security
against Hitler by Britain and France that directed Hitler away from Russia
and against France and Britain. "Had Britain and France not given the war
guarantees to Poland, there might have been no Dunkirk, no blitz, no
Vichy, no destruction of the Jewish populations of Norway, Denmark,
Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, or even Italy." (p. 266)
Buchanan makes an articulate, well-reasoned, and well-documented
case for these positions, citing a number of respected historians as well
as contemporary figures and documents, and whatever the merits of his
views, he is neither the first nor the only student of this period of
history to express them. Yet the hysterical reaction to the book and its
arguments grotesquely distorts and misrepresents them as well as the
reasoning behind them.
Thus, neo-conservative columnist Arianna Huffington, writing in the Los
Angeles Times on Sept. 26, denounced Buchanan's "loony theories about
World War II" and wrote "On what does he base this view that Hitler was
appeasable? Well, on the writings of Hitler." Citing an interview with
Buchanan on CBS News' "Face the Nation" of Sept. 19, she quotes Buchanan
as saying, "If you read a lot of Hitler...." "Read a lot of Hitler?"
Huffington snorts. "Like we're supposed to explain the deeds of a madman
by the writings of the madman?"
Of course, historians commonly read the writings of the personalities
they are studying in order to understand them, but that idea apparently is
a novelty to Huffington. As for Buchanan's exact citation of Hitler --
"If you read a lot of Hitler, he'd given up the idea of global empire,
which the Germans, under the kaiser, had" -- he was referring to historian
William Henry Chamberlin's references to Hitler's Mein Kampf to justify
his view that Hitler's imperial ambitions lay in the East and not against
the West. Nor does Buchanan claim that Hitler was "appeasable," a word
employed only by Huffington. "Appeasable" implies that Hitler had
aggressive intentions toward us but could be bought off; what Buchanan
argues is that Hitler had no such designs at all in 1940. Huffington, of
course, offers no facts at all to contradict Buchanan's argument, but in
this she is not alone.
Huffington, however, was not concerned with what Buchanan had actually
written or what his reasoning and sources were but only with caricaturing
what she called "his loathsome views." "Buchanan," she wrote, "would be
perfect casting for the role of the Fuehrer-loving playwright" in the Mel
Brooks comedy "The Producers," and she also managed to drag in the
anti-white black racial bigot Louis Farrakhan, whom she called Buchanan's
"fellow anti- Semite."
Linda Chavez, another neo-conservative, writing in the Orange County
Register on Sept. 20, also misrepresented Buchanan's argument. After
ridiculing Buchanan's interpretation of the origins of World War II, she
tells us, "Now the real Pat knows that the primary reason Hitler waited to
invade the Soviet Union was a nasty little agreement, the Hitler-Stalin
non- aggression pact signed in August 1939.... It wasn't until the summer
of 1941 that Hitler attacked Russia, after he had overrun not only eastern
Europe but Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France, and
exacted a punishing toll on Great Britain." All that information, of
course, is in Buchanan's book, but it's interesting that Miss Chavez
thinks the "madman" Hitler was deterred from attacking Stalin by a treaty.
Perhaps Miss Chavez should get in touch with Miss Huffington for some
history lessons, as well as some tutoring in abnormal psychology on the
behavior of madmen.
It's not surprising that uneducated people like Huffington and Chavez
would not understand Buchanan's argument or know how to argue against it.
What is perhaps more surprising is that much the same irrational,
emotional, and ignorant (or dishonest) response was common among
better-known journalists. Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times wrote in
his column of Sept. 25, for example, "His [Buchanan's] new book does not
hide his belief that it would have been better if Nazi Germany had won the
war.... He believes that if Britain and France had not gone to the rescue
of Poland and Franklin D. Roosevelt had not tricked Americans into getting
into the war, the Nazis would have been able to conquer Europe and the
Soviet Union, so there might have been no blitz or Dunkirk."
Of course, (a) Buchanan nowhere in his book or elsewhere suggests or
argues that "it would have been better if Nazi Germany had won the war";
(b) Britain and France in fact did not "go to the rescue of Poland";
Poland was conquered by Hitler and Stalin. Britain and France went to war
with Hitler because of the guarantees to Poland they had given, but their
war did nothing to rescue Poland from Hitler or Stalin; (c) Buchanan does
not say that Roosevelt "tricked Americans into getting into the war"; the
United States went to war because of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the
Japanese and because Hitler declared war on us, as Buchanan notes in his
book and as every schoolboy knows. Buchanan, however, does document lies
that Roosevelt told the American people that were intended to incite war
fever against Germany before the war.
(d) Buchanan never suggests that the Nazis would have conquered the
Soviet Union and Europe or the Soviet Union by itself. He argues that
Nazi Germany would have been either destroyed or crippled by a war against
the Soviets and that even if it had beaten the Soviets, Britain and France
then would have been better armed to meet him than they were in 1939-40.
(p. 267), and (e) avoiding the blitz and Dunkirk are the least of what
Buchanan suggests might have been avoided had it not been for the British
and French guarantees to Poland.
But, while Rosenthal is blasting Buchanan for his supposed sympathy for
Hitler and Nazi Germany, another journalist, liberal columnist Richard
Cohen in the Washington Post, was almost sympathetic to Buchanan's book.
In his column of Sept. 28, Cohen wrote, "He [Buchanan] does not say that
Hitler was a good guy, and he does not say that we should not have fought
the war once Pearl Harbor was bombed and Germany, Japan's ally, declared
war. He is merely saying that maybe this was a war that did not have to
be fought." Cohen in fact expresses agreement with Buchanan's
interpretation of the war, noting that "some of those who attack him for
saying -- correctly --
that the United States faced no imminent threat from Hitler, opposed U.S.
intervention in Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and now East Timor." Thus,
while Rosenthal denounces Buchanan for wanting Nazi Germany to win the
war, Cohen endorses Buchanan's view that Hitler was "no imminent threat"
to the United States. Which one is the reader to believe?
While conservatives like Chavez and Huffington were screeching about
Buchanan's damnable views, other conservative journalists actually
expressed agreement. Thus, neo-conservative R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.,
editor of the American Spectator, wrote in his column in the Washington
Times of Sept. 17, that Buchanan "reveals he has read a vast amount of
history.... And he properly diagnoses the malady that today infects
American foreign policy, namely Wilsonian bilge. Woodrow Wilson's
idealism got us into a war we did not need to fight, World War I."
Tyrrell never mentioned World War II or Buchanan's interpretation of it,
so apparently what his fellow neo- conservative Huffington called
Buchanan's "loathsome views" and "loony theories about World War II"
didn't register with him. Conservative Robert Novak, however, while
"rejecting in full his [Buchanan's] dogmatic closed- borders policies
against trade and immigration," declared in his column in the Washington
Post on Sept. 27 that "Buchanan's vision is worth contemplating: The
equally loathsome Soviet and Nazi tyrannies locked in a death struggle.
While the West belatedly built its strength and avoided casualties, the
armies of these dictators would be bleeding." Apparently Mr. Novak did
not stumble across Buchanan's "loathsome views" either, nor upon any
desire that the Nazis should have won the war.
Other journalists, however, simply expressed astonishment at what they
tried to claim were Buchanan's illiteracy, stupidity and ignorance. Thus,
Michael Kelly, editor of the National Journal, in a column in the
Washington Post of Sept. 22, misleadingly cites Buchanan's account of the
results of U.S. involvement in World War I. Kelly writes, "Had America
stayed out of the Great War, asserts Buchanan, 'the Allies would probably
have been forced to negotiate an armistice or sue for peace. The Kaiser's
army, bloodied but undefeated, would have gone home.... Lenin, Trotsky,
Stalin and the whole grisly gang might have been hung from the lampposts
of Petrograd. A strong, united and prosperous Germany would not have
spawned a Hitler. There might have been no Holocaust, no quarter-century
reign of Stalin, no Cold War. There would have been no Versailles, no
occupation and dismemberment of the German nation, no American war dead,
no debt, no era of disillusionment.'"
Kelly's sarcastic reaction to this speculation is: "My God. And it gets
worse when the great man shines the mighty light of his mind on the
question of World War II."
But in the first place, Kelly has not accurately described Buchanan's
passage. Although the quoted part is accurate, Kelly claims Buchanan
"asserts" it as though it were certainly true. In fact, Buchanan writes
in a passage that precedes the one Kelly quotes at length but conveniently
neglected to cite at all, "No one can say for certain how history would
have unfolded had America stayed out of the Great War." In other words,
Buchanan's reconstruction of history is clearly labeled as speculative,
not "asserted" as unexceptionable fact.
In the second place, Buchanan's speculation is not unreasonable and in no
way justifies Kelly's astonished "My God." Buchanan's argument is that
U.S involvement in World War I converted what otherwise would have been a
negotiated end of the war into total and crushing victory over Germany.
Had the war ended with a negotiated settlement, the imperial German
government would not have been overturned and the humiliating Versailles
treaty would not have been imposed on a prostrate Germany. The economic
dislocation of Germany after the war might not have occurred, and in the
absence of Versailles, the economic collapse, and the resulting threat of
communist revolution within Germany, Hitler could not have risen to power.
The communist revolution in Russia might have been avoided as well.
Buchanan may well be reaching too far in some of these speculations, but
they are not far-fetched. Instead, Mr. Kelly has apparently never thought
about the matter at all, and his expression of astonishment probably tells
us more about the conventionality of his own mind than his deliberate
insults tell us about Buchanan's. Like Huffington, Chavez, and other
critics, Kelly never offers any facts to dispute Buchanan's
interpretation.
Kelly, however, denounces Buchanan's interpretation of World War II as
even more "worse" than that of World War I, though he rather
mischaracterizes Buchanan's interpretation. "Anyway, says Buchanan, the
Nazis represented no threat to America, because, 'Hitler saw the world
divided into four spheres: Great Britain holding its empire; Japan,
dominant in East Asia; Germany, master of Europe; and America, mistress of
the Western hemisphere.' Buchanan seems to have no real problem with the
idea of the Third Reich as the 'master of Europe.'" As we have seen,
Buchanan in this passage is citing historian William Henry Chamberlin,
though Kelly cites it as Buchanan's view. It may be Buchanan's view also,
but Kelly is trying to deceive his readers by making them think that only
Buchanan ever held such an absurd interpretation and that he approves of
Hitler's conquest of Europe. It does not occur to Kelly that there is a
significant distinction between "having a problem" with Hitler being
master of Europe, on the one hand, and going to war with Hitler because of
his domination of Europe.
Neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer tried to use a similar
tactic in a column in the Washington Post on Sept. 24. "He [Buchanan]
might be slightly cracked -- for example, writing in his latest book that
Hitler's invasion of France was defensive ('to secure his rear') or that
Nazi Germany was no threat to the United States after 1940...." What is
amusing in responses of this kind is that it is those who write them who
expose their own ignorance, not Buchanan. A number of historians have
expressed views similar to those of Buchanan, but writers like Kelly,
Krauthammer, and others evidently either don't know that or else
deliberately pretend that no one has ever held such views before Buchanan.
But then historians themselves were not always entirely truthful about
the
Buchanan book either. On Oct. 5, the New York Times carried on its
editorial page a quarter page advertisement for an on-line "e-zine" called
TomPaine.com, which promised to sink whatever claims to intellectual
respectability Buchanan and his book might make. Vowing to provide an
account of "Hitler's plan to attack America," the ad demanded "Take a
look, Pat Buchanan" and stated that "Adolf Hitler always planned on
fighting the United States. As early as 1928, Hitler said preparing for
war with America was a key task of the Nazi Party. Now comes Pat Buchanan
to say Hitler never meant us any harm ... at least not until 1941, when he
suddenly decided to declare war on us." The website offered essays by
several historians that supposedly supported this claim.
One of the historians, Alexander DeConde, is Professor Emeritus of
History at the University of California at Santa Barbara and, at
Buchanan's request, had actually read Buchanan's manuscript before it was
published. So far from devastating Buchanan's views of World War II and
the history of American foreign policy, DeConde says he criticized some
parts of the book and praised other parts and made some suggestions as to
how it might be improved. He says he is himself a "liberal Democrat" and
disagrees with much of the political content of the book, which he faults
for being a "polemic." He is more in sympathy with Buchanan's concerns
over American "global hegemony" today and thinks this should be brought up
as a campaign issue.
As for Buchanan's view of World War II, DeConde writes, "Buchanan's
judgements on Adolf Hitler's racial horrors inflicted on Jews and others
in Western Europe, on his imperial ambitions as lying in the east, and on
the British-French declarations of war as saving Russia for communism are
ill- founded and do not fit with verifiable research on the subject."
Yet, despite that disagreement, so far from being the sort of devastation
of Buchanan that the New York Times ad had promised, DeConde's criticisms
were quite mild and often even friendly.
It is not clear what he means by Buchanan's "judgements on Hitler's
racial horrors" since Buchanan says little or nothing about the
persecution of Jews and other groups by the Nazis. As for the question of
Hitler's "imperial ambitions as lying in the east" being "ill-founded,"
other historians seem to take it more seriously. Thus, writing in the New
York Times on Sept. 30, two historians, Christopher Layne, Visiting
Scholar at the Center for International Relations at the University of
Southern California, and Benjamin Schwartz, correspondent for the Atlantic
Monthly, report that Buchanan's "interpretation is hardly beyond the pale
of respectable discourse. Diplomatic historians have long made similar
arguments." With respect to Hitler not being a threat to the United
States because, among other reasons, "Germany was not capable of
threatening the United States," they write that "numerous scholars have
made this argument," including Yale political scientist Bruce Russett.
They also cite several historians who have questioned whether Britain
should have guaranteed Poland against Hitler.
Two other essays on the TomPaine website are more vigorous in
attacking Buchanan. One, by Gerhard Weinberg, Professor Emeritus of
History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is apparently
the source of the website ad's claim that "Adolf Hitler always planned on
fighting the United States. As early as 1928, Hitler said preparing for
war with America was a key task of the Nazi Party." Weinberg writes in
his essay that "As early as the summer of 1928 he [Hitler] asserted in his
second book (not published until I did it for him in 1961) that
strengthening and preparing Germany for war with the United States was one
of the tasks of the National Socialist movement." In fact, Hitler says
nothing of the kind in the book Weinberg cites.
The book was indeed published by Weinberg in German in 1961 and later in
an English translation as Hitler's Secret Book with an introduction by
Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. In his
introduction, Taylor in fact points out that "The United States emerges
from these pages in a far more favorable light than anywhere else in
Hitler's recorded pronouncements." While Hitler does speak of the
emerging power of the United States in the early 20th century, post-World
War I world, he nowhere discusses a desire to make war against it, let
alone any "plan" to wage war with the United States. One purpose of the
"second book" apparently was to assure Britain that the National Socialist
movement had no hostile intentions toward the British Empire, and
suggesting an alliance between Germany and Britain was one way Britain
could counter the rising American power in the world that Hitler suggested
was a long-term rival to British world power. It may be questioned how
relevant a book written in 1928, five years before Hitler even came to
power and never published during Hitler's lifetime, might be to the
question of what Hitler's intentions were in 1940, but it was Professor
Weinberg who brought the subject up.
Weinberg, along with yet another historian on the TomPaine website, Norm
Goda of Ohio University, also cites the construction of a German long-
range bomber, known as the "Amerika" bomber (the Messerschmitt 264) in
1940 as further proof of German plans to go to war against the United
States, as well as efforts by the Germans to obtain French African,
Spanish, and Portuguese ports on the Atlantic coast and in the Canary
Islands, Cape Verde, and the Azores in the Atlantic as bases for an
invasion of the United States. The publication of these claims set off
yet another round of denunciation of Buchanan and his book by (again)
National Journal editor Michael Kelly in the Washington Post (Oct. 6) and
historian Jeffrey Herf in The New Republic (Oct. 18).
Yet the claims are of little substance. Germany did begin construction
of
a long-range bomber in 1940 and actually had constructed all of two of
them (both experimental) by the end of the war. In doing so, it was
catching up to trends in military aviation and strategy that had been set
long before by the United States and Britain. Sir John Keegan, one of the
foremost military historians in the world, writes in his book The Second
World War that the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had been founded as a
medium-range force, not a strategic (long-distance-range) force and that
only in 1943 did the Luftwaffe command belatedly "take up the policy which
a generation of British and American airmen had adopted and refined at
leisure." Does the construction of long-range bombers by the United
States and Britain beginning in the 1930s show an aggressive "plan to
attack Germany" on their part, as Germany's plan to develop them when it
was already at war with Britain in 1940 supposedly shows a "plan to attack
America"? Keegan, moreover, has also expressed agreement with Buchanan's
assessment of Hitler's intentions toward the United States. Interviewed
on WJTR radio in Detroit, Michigan, on Sept. 28, Keegan told his host,
David Newman, "I don't think he [Hitler] would ever have attacked the
United States straight off. I don't think he would ever have tangled with
the United States if he hadn't got into the sequence of events which led
to fighting France, then fighting Britain, then fighting Russia. You
know, fighting the United States was very, very low down Hitler's order of
priorities. His plan was to defeat France, do a deal with Britain which
didn't come off, and then turn on Russia." Keegan's view directly
contradicts Professor DeConde's claim that Buchanan's views of Hitler's
intentions "are ill-founded and do not fit with verifiable research on the
subject," as well as the claims of Professors Weinberg and Goda on the
same subject.
Moreover, as Buchanan pointed out in a response to the attacks on his
book in a column in the Washington Post (Oct. 11), "The idea that Hitler,
with no surface navy or fleet of transport ships, no landing craft or
seamen who had even served on a carrier, could construct in Africa or the
Canary Islands ships to threaten the United States, on the other side of
an ocean the U.S. and British navies had ruled since Trafalgar is a
proposition too absurd to require rebuttal." Finally, the whole point of
the debate between Buchanan and his critics over Hitler's intentions
toward the United States is whether the United States should have gone to
war with Hitler in 1940 or 1941. If Buchanan is right and Hitler had no
aggressive intentions toward us in that time, then the United States had
no compelling national security reason to go to war. But even if his
critics are correct in claiming that Hitler did harbor aggressive designs
against the United States and that building long-range bombers able to
attack New York and seeking Atlantic bases for an invasion are evidence of
these designs, they do not constitute grounds for going to war. Had
Roosevelt in 1940 gone before the U.S Congress and demanded a declaration
of war against Germany because Germany was building a long-range bomber
and seeking bases in the Atlantic, he would have been laughed at and
ignored.
Hitler's 1928 book does reveal a concern over the emergence of
American power in the world, and had Hitler won the war, he might well
have developed into an active enemy of the United States. No one denies
that, and Buchanan does not argue against it, but it is beside the point
of what Hitler and Nazi Germany intended in 1940 and irrelevant to the
issue of what U.S. foreign policy toward Hitler and Europe should have
been at that time.
The controversy over the Buchanan book -- more exactly, over a small
portion of the book -- is remarkable for the anger, bitterness, and sheer
ugliness of the tone in which critics of the book have engaged. But the
controversy is remarkable also for another reason -- the ignorance of many
of the loudest critics of what the book actually says and the
contradictory statements made by many of the critics themselves. While
conservative as well as liberals have attacked the book, some
conservatives denounce Buchanan's supposedly "loathsome views" and "loony
theories" while others seem to miss those views entirely, express
agreement with Buchanan's main points, or disagree with him on other
points. Some liberals, on the other hand, accuse Buchanan of supporting
Hitler and wanting a Nazi victory in World War II, while other liberals
agree with Buchanan that Hitler was not an imminent threat to the United
States. Some academic historians denounce "Buchanan's unwarranted
conclusions" while others write that "numerous scholars" have made the
same argument that "Germany was not capable of threatening the United
States" and call Buchanan's interpretation "a fair reading of history."
What the controversy over Buchanan and his book shows, then, is not that
Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer or an irresponsible writer who has
distorted history for personal or political purposes but rather that the
distortions and misrepresentations have come from his critics and
political enemies and that neither journalists nor academics can be relied
upon to give straight, serious, accurate, and non-polemical answers to the
questions Buchanan has raised. What the dishonesty as well as the
ugliness of the attacks on Buchanan and his book suggest is that Buchanan
has in fact exposed a weak point of the establishment that its apologists
are unable to answer and that the only sort of answer they can offer is
one that centers on smears of Buchanan's character and intelligence,
grossly distorted accounts of what Buchanan thinks, says, or advocates,
and irrelevant responses to straw man arguments that Buchanan never made.
Real and important questions -- whether we should have gone to war with
Hitler in 1940-41, whether Hitler was really our enemy or not, whether our
entry into the war was due to real threats to our security or due to an
undisclosed desire to pursue some other agenda that Franklin Roosevelt and
the dominant elites of that time wanted to pursue, and whether the results
of our involvement in World War II were really in the best interests of
this country -- need to be asked and answered. So far, only Pat Buchanan
has tried to do either one honestly.
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