Buchanan On Churchill: The Axeman Cometh

 by Bernie Reeves  

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Patrick Buchanan has penned a book attacking the leadership of British leader Winston Churchill and accusing the Allies in World War II of reprehensible morality in the same league with the Nazis.

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Crown (May 27, 2008)
Hdbk., 544 pgs.
ISBN-10: 030740515X
ISBN-13: 978-0307405159  

The sigh of relief didn’t last long watching the far Left radical scholars fade away from universities, think tanks, government agencies and the national mass media in recent months. Some are retiring, some have committed spontaneous human combustion like Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado, but mostly they are discredited.

But here’s the shocker. Replacing the post-modern, deconstructionist politically correct crowd, who kicked out the pillars of Western culture – claiming it is racist, homophobic and chauvinist and therefore not worthy of existence – is a cadre of far-Right pundits and scholars who are grabbing the same cultural pickaxe and flailing away at the edifice of our inherited values just like the tenured radicals. Who would have thunk it?

The highest profile name leading the right-wing Rough Riders up the San Juan Hill of cultural upheaval is the always wrong but never in doubt conservative gadfly Pat Buchanan. Maybe it’s because he’s Irish that he has penned a book attacking the leadership of British leader Winston Churchill and accusing the Allies in World War II of reprehensible morality in the same league with the Nazis.

The dismemberment of Churchill, voted the greatest figure of the 20th century in 2000 due to his wartime leadership, is curiously based on the loss of the British Empire after the war. That’s a specious argument coming from an American since it was the US that demanded the abandonment of the Empire as a condition for our support of Great Britain as she stood alone against Nazi Europe. The title of Buchanan’s book sums up his attitude: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. And attitude, it appears, is all Buchanan has.

Churchill came into office after the failure of appeasement at Munich on the wings of his diligence in identifying German rearmament in the 1930s in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Churchill knew that Hitler was aiming to capture Europe for imperial reasons before attacking the USSR for political reasons.

Buchanan is saying the Germans rolled across Holland and Belgium into France because the Allies declared war after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, an act that could have been avoided. That’s the only sense I can make of his thesis. Is he saying Britain ended up isolated from the Continent and in real danger of invasion, or at least starvation — until the US entered the War — because the British and French lived up to their treaty obligations? I doubt that standing up to Hitler over Poland could have stopped the Blitzkrieg or the Battle of Britain — also disparaged by Buchanan.

What must Brits old enough to remember think? They sailed out in their own small boats to rescue their army at Dunkirk, stood alone against Germany’s redoubt in Europe, endured incessant bombing of their homeland and suffered the loss of dead and wounded across the globe at war against Germany and Japan. Rationing remained in place in the UK until the early 1960s, a legacy that makes the point of their sacrifice, while repaying the enormous war debt to the US.

Oddly, Buchanan — and his defenders on the Right — and now Niall Ferguson in the recently aired PBS documentary War of the World, another revisionist WWII muddle by a conservative, is willing to toss away the pride of our victory to arrive at the point I agree with. Due to the necessity to ally with the USSR, we birthed the vilest killing machine in history. The Soviets in the aftermath of the defeat of Germany were given carte blanche to occupy Eastern Europe and set in motion an international propaganda onslaught that nearly brought down the West. We toughened up finally over Berlin, but stood aside as tanks rolled into Hungary and later against the Czechs and Poles. Not until the Reagan/ Thatcher days did we finally stiffen our spines.

As for the loss of the Empire as a result of WWII, this was a condition Churchill traded for US help. The Atlantic Charter mentions this demand specifically. Additionally, after the war, the US State Department and other key figures fell for the propaganda from the Soviets pushing for the extinction of imperialism. In the UK, the Socialist government that succeeded Churchill — influenced by its political sympathy for the Soviets — devolved the Empire before anyone really noticed.

It’s hard to blame Churchill since he strived to save India before partition and the creation of Muslim Pakistan in 1947. And it’s a stretch to blame the Allies in WWII for US policy to deploy troops to keep the peace across Europe and the Far East in Korea and Japan — and of course Vietnam and now Iraq. That’s the real issue with Buchanan. He’s an isolationist in a global environment looking for ways to rewrite history to prove the US could have stayed home and avoided becoming a victim of the treaties and intrigue of our European cousins.

Another point of interest to me is that Buchanan and Ferguson and their colleagues verify the purpose of the Raleigh Spy Conference (www.raleighspyconference.com), convened in 2003 to learn about the latest in the deluge of declassified data suddenly available over the past 15 years since the collapse of the USSR and the revelations of the Venona files. The problem is that scholars and nut cases are rewriting modern history at a rapid rate. Sadly, many of the purveyors of the new information — like Buchanan — either have an agenda to prove or just don’t have the intellectual capability to understand what they are reading.

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War" is available on Amazon.com.

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