Pat Buchanan’s Vile Defense of Hitler
Sep 3rd, 2009 | 48 responses
Pat Buchanan’s anti-Semitic, ahistorical screed about Hitler and World War II (linked through Matthew Yglesias) has caught some attention today, although not nearly enough considering that this is the same man who accused Sonia Sotomayor of being a racist:
Following Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Pat Buchanan went to eleven. He said that Sotomayor “believed discrimination against white males is okay”; he said she believed in “tribal justice” and “preached and practiced race discrimination against white males”; and he generally spent a great deal of time accusing Sonia Sotomayor of being a racist. He didn’t even attempt to give her the benefit of the doubt — being Puerto Rican in a country built by white people, Sotomayor was by definition the enemy.
But you know who Buchanan does think deserves the benefit of the doubt? Adolf Hitler. No, I’m not breaking Godwin’s Law or comparing conservatives to Nazis. Here’s Pat, in a column titled, “Did Hitler Want War?”:
Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative “to stop Hitler” after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that. If true, a fair point.
Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet ‘s, or Fidel Castro’s, was out to conquer the world?
Most of the commentary focuses on Buchanan’s History for Dummies analysis of the causes of World War II. I want to look at his anti-Semitism — which obviously in one sense is implicit in his very thesis that Hitler never intended to invade Poland or start a war. But it does actually become explicit in a few places, and I want to note those.
Here is the first:
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.
Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished.
The sentence I emphasized is the crucial one — the short paragraph above it is just for context.
And in the next paragraph:
By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.
Again, the bolded sentence is the one to look at. This may not be as obvious if you are not Jewish, but that lumping together of Christian and Jewish deaths — conveying the idea that they were of equal significance — was a very commonly used tactic in Britain and the United States to deny or trivialize what Hitler was doing to European Jewry, either out of blatant anti-Semitism or out of an unwillingness to take any significant action to save Europe’s Jewish population (which also was rooted in anti-Semitism).
My point is not that Christians and other non-Jews did not suffer under the Nazis, as well as under Stalin, or that they were not victimized and killed in great numbers. Obviously, they were. But the millions of Christians who died during World War II were not killed as Christians. And if that seems like a meaningless distinction, it’s not: By treating the planned, deliberate, very close to successful attempt to exterminate the entire European Jewish population as just part of the total number of war dead, Buchanan is denying the reality of genocide.
And then there is this sentence:
“Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.”
Clearly, he’s saying that Hitler never had any intention of murdering the entire Jewish population of Europe — if the Western Allies hadn’t pushed him so, he never would have done it. Of course, in order to believe this, you have to ignore
- the Nuremberg Laws, which, beginning in 1935, singled out Jews for harsh restrictions, discrimination, and persecutions. The crucial thing to remember about these laws is that they were specifically grounded in Nazi racial ideology. They were not just superficial or transitory measures.
- Kristallnacht, a savage orgy of violence against Jewish property and Jewish lives that took place over two nights in November, 1938. Kristallnacht is widely recognized and understood to be the real beginning of the Holocaust. It marked the point at which Jews, who up until that point had “merely” been subject to legalized discrimination and harassment, began to be the targets of outright violence, and murder.
- The camps — at least some of them — that would eventually be used to gas and cremate millions of Jews were already in place long before “the trains began to roll” to them. Dachau, Buchenwald, and Ravensbruck were all constructed and opened before 1940.
- The law requiring all Jews to wear a yellow star — the Star of David — was passed in December 1939.
- The first ghetto for Jews — in Piotrekow, Poland — was established in November 1939. The following year, the Warsaw Ghetto was created.
Steve Benen guesses that nothing much will come of this:
Anyone want to lay odds on whether this interferes with Buchanan’s role as a high-profile political commentator? I’m guessing his status in the media establishment goes unaffected. It always does.
I have to agree with him — and it’s a disgrace.
48 Responses to “Pat Buchanan’s Vile Defense of Hitler”
I was waiting for someone to post that.
What a truly twisted look at history. The Left has rightly been critisized for overlooking Stalin's, Mao's and other such leaders failures and crimes at the time, but this is as bad or worse than than those.
Given what is known of the workings of the Third Reich and Hitler's inner circle, the long-term planning that went into many of the efforts, especially the termination of Jews, Gypsies and other non-desirables, repugnant was the word that came to mind when I first read this yesterday.
Considering the First Amendment, what do you suppose we should do Kathy?
Frankly, it's Pat Buchanan. What did you expect?
Wasn't it Mark Twain who said, “Never argue with a fool. People might not be able to tell the difference.”
Unfortunately, Buchanan is the most intelligent and articulate of a huge Logorrhea of Fools.
They should all be grateful for that most sacred of laws, the First Amendment.
Consider, in the 1930's, Hitler tried to deport the Jews to Palestine, but the British objected. Then Hitler tried to deport the Jews to Madagascar, but the French objected. Then Hitler opened up to any country to take the Jews, nobody would, except one…Japan. Japan had conquered Manchuria, in China in 1936, and called it Manchkwo, and would welcome the Jews of Europe. Hitler started deporting Jews by ship, to the Japanese conquered area of China. As soon as Hitler entered Poland ( to end the Polish corridor at Gdaniz, and reunite Germany with Prussia), Britain declared war, and stopped the deportation of the Jews. Britain and France both knew what would happen to the Jews as the Nazis moved east, encountering more Jews has they went (this move east, was spelled out in Hitlers book My Struggle in 1923) and the rest is history. Hitler, the Nazis, WW2 and the extermination Bolshevism(Jews), was a plan of the West ( has Stalin believed), spawned by the French in 1919.
thearrogantloner–
–[Hitler started deporting Jews by ship, to the Japanese conquered area of China]–
Good Grief! I wonder what happened to those deported Jews!?
So… Pat Buchanan is now endorsing Obama?
A.J.P. Taylor wrote a lot of the same stuff in his book The Origins of World War II. I can't understand how Liberal Fascists like Yglesias and his peanut gallery have their noses so completely out of joint. I don't agree with Taylor or Buchanan, but hypocritical corporatist fascists like Obama and the JournalList-service Hauptfuehrers basically are arguing for the kind of Corporatist oligarchy that Mussolini and Hitler set up. The big corporations fall in line under Big Government while small businessmen and the taxpayer get slaughtered economically. FDR wanted to base some of the New Deal on a lot of Mussolini's statist/corporativist brand of neo-capitalism run by unaccountable elites. Just as Obama does today.
Like Marx said, what goes around, comes around, ["the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce"], only the Liberal Fascists nowadays forget they're fascists and stress the “liberal” part.
Just a marketing ploy, but the Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin's old-time totalitarian personalism has morphed into the new-style personalism that banana republic caciques employ throughout the Southern Half of the Western Hemisphere. Now we're getting school-mandated pledge of allegiance to Obama as a civics lesson DVD.
Chiquita Obama is trying to move the caudillo politics of Latinos into the Anglosphere part of North America!! The same thing was tried in the thirties in Europe by Adolf, Benito, Uncle Joe and to a lesser extent stateside by FDR.
Ah. Leave it to our resident anti-American nutcase to turn a discussion that had absolutely nothing to do with our President…into a discussion entirely about our President.
Stay classy, nutcase, stay classy.
More and more it seems the only people who take Buchanan seriously are a small group of right-wing zealots, the Sunday TV shows, and the far left.
daveinboca…. “Duke Of The False Parallels”.
Pat Buchanan… “Duke Of The Nonsensical”.
“The Left has rightly been critisized for overlooking Stalin's, Mao's and other such leaders failures and crimes at the time, but this is as bad or worse than than those.”
How big is your broom AR? Who, specifically on the left ( pundit-wise) was a Maoist or Or Stalin apologist? I find, like many of your epithets against the contrary position, to be made of swiss cheese.
Easy one FT, we use the power of the purse strings. Hit MSNBC with so much boycott-sponsor talk the backlash will send crazy anti-semitic Uncle Pat to the shuffleboard closet.
Easy to throw around a word when you don't know what it means. Its a legbone favorite for slavering dogs.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
note the source- not Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, or wikipedia.
Fascism, National Socialism and Communism are all different. Lumping them all together just shows how obtuse you are.
Hitler fought agaisnt Stalin and was anti-communist. (Yalta conference ring a bell?)
Where's the suppression of dissent…hmm been to a Town Hall meeting?
Have they, Saddam Hussein style gone “eeny meany miney-mo” those I pick you must kill or go?”
nope, don't see that.
I think Dave needs a better spam filter on his email inbox- maybe Factcheck.org can come up with one?
And for the record, a Cacique is an indian chief native to South America, which has been co-opted to name a local politico in Latin America. I have come to the conclusion that someone is slipping you the wrong meds, Dave. Better give up your Medicare, it's only a Govt run Socialist zombiecorps conspiracy!!!!!
and btw, this discussion is about Hitler and Nazism. Fascism 101 is the class after this one.
and apparently, a small group of Jewish voters in Florida in 2000
RN -
Then you are uneducated and unlearned, and unaware of Walter Duranty and the Pulitzer Prize given to the NYT reporter for supporting and lying about Stalin, and the Left's overall support of tyranny and terror.
Learn to read before YOU make asinine comments.
Listen, for those on the right reality ended circa 2002, now it's history's turn. And, hell, lets be fair here, Pat has a point, all Hitler wanted was the jews out (and by the way, contrary to modern histroy books, Kristallnacht is an old German custom where shattered glass is sprinkled on city streets to herald the first frost of the year). Instead the rest of us liberal facists forced him into gassing them.
BTW – I was also very clear how offensive Buchanan's comments are.
“What a truly twisted look at history.”
But not surprising. As for the developmentally defective “Godwin's Law,” go redact your own history.
Pat Buchanan has been writing paens to Hilter for decades. He considers himself a WWII scholar. He's been spewing anti-semetic, anti-black, anti-mexican, anti-woman, anti-gay BS for as long as he's had a platform to do so. Father_Time's cynicism and helpless “oh my there's nothing we can possibly do about it” crap is so typical; thanks to RememberNovember for suggesting what should have happened long, long ago: take away this man's platform.
“arguing for the kind of Corporatist oligarchy that Mussolini and Hitler set up”
That fascism has been sought by the Left since the 1930s (industrial and labor “codes,” “government-business partnerships,” federal corporate charters as Nader and others have wanted, “industrial policy,” little green fascists wanting to direct business toward air-headed, fuzzy-faced-when-not-evilly-self-crippling “green” objectives) has been long known, though denied by the Left routinely.
HillaryCare's HMO “alliance-” based health care takeover was openly fascistic, as is likely what will exist for now, at least, under ObamaCare (neutered, shackled insurers made to go along, for now).
Shhh. The ignorant and developmentally defective cannot stand to face the truth and their moral and other problems.
“Now we're getting school-mandated pledge of allegiance to Obama as a civics lesson DVD.”
??? A Ken Burns film, produced by Oliver Stone? [*** SNICKER ***]
“More and more it seems the only people who take Buchanan seriously are a small group of right-wing zealots, the Sunday TV shows, and the far left.”
Anything goes, these days, given how desperate the far Left is about the failing health care effort and the progressive alienation of people by the Dems (including Obama) this year.
Meanwhile, far away from leftist pathology, in Grown-Up Land:
“Pat has a point, all Hitler wanted was the jews out”
It was progressive. First came discrimination. Then came deportation efforts. When this failed (in no small part from the discriminatory practices of other nations, as well as in their appeasement of the Nazi regime insofar as aggression elsewhere in Europe was concerned — which, incidentally, was a good deal of the motive behind the Russian decision to be bought off by Hitler [with part of Europe as a bonus] and to get at least temporary peace, too), then came the systematic mass murder. Nobody's saying it's the West's fault that mass murder happened, though wiser people, at least, note that appeasement didn't stop Hitler's aggression, and refusal by the West (“Australia, having no racial problem, does not wish to create one,” etc.) is as historically noteworthy as the hyper-lefty-style-tantrumy-moralistic nature of the Versailles Treaty (which in large part propelled Hitler to power among the German populace).
As to descending to low-IQ Right-bashing with the Hitler object (by the same defectives that like to play illogical and immature games like “Godwin's Law” on-line), it's no surprise that the much worse record of death and destruction by the Left is conveniently overlooked — or deliberately avoided.
Given how pathological the Left has chosen to be lately with the endanged DimHealth effort, the timing of this doesn't surprise me. (Never mind that Obama wants to make health care run on time. [snicker])
Keep spinnin but Facisim is a far RIGHT ideology, just because a few righty talkers do not know how to open a dictionary does not mean that they can re-define reality.
“I was also very clear how offensive Buchanan's comments are.”
I'll defend Buchanan as I've defended others against scummy attacks, and with reason against the emotion and often dishonesty and misconduct of the Left, but Buchanan is far from “angelic.”
The paleo-cons (especially) and the nativists are in a losing game, even if they routinely are the subject of much worse misconduct by the other side. Buchanan said long time ago, for example, “The ship of integration is going down. It's not our ship.”
Related:
http://www.adl.org/special_reports/pb_archive/p…
Such people make fine targets of the extreme Left, but they are a small minority with little clout. (The paleo-cons have even less clout than the demonized, object-of-hatred Religious Right in Washiongton, in fact.)
A suitable example of the paleo-cons for many years has been Chronicles, from the Rockford Institute. (When I lived in St. Louis, I was acquainted with someone who grew up with a relative of the main person associated with this publication, and she had no idea how far to the right his elder relative would be.) It's mainly of academically-oriented political interest only, but worth a glance. (If you've looked at it and them before, consider how well or poorly they are doing now compared to in the 1990s.)
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/
I'd like some names or quotes on this, please. Oh, from like today, not 70 years ago.
Oh no, Pat said something ignorant again. Yes, we all know he belongs in a Klan sheet.
This article has one purpose…to bash conservatives by linking them to Buchanan.
“This article has one purpose…to bash conservatives by linking them to Buchanan.”
Health Care Desperation
Use your imagination, FT. I have confidence that you can come up with something.
“all Hitler wanted was the jews out “
Oh poor Hitler, he had no other choice but to kill all of them! Yes, this was most certainly the fault of those meanie Europeans and Americans and Russians.
Wow, that's some pretty sick stuff there.
Thank you, roro. Frankly, I'm appalled at the difficulty a lot of people seem to have with grasping the central points here — that Buchanan's anti-Semitic ravings are unacceptable (which does NOT have to imply that we violate the First Amendment), and that the Nazi extermination of European Jewry should not be used as a handy opportunity to slip in your favored left-right partisan shpiel. There are other opportunities for that, and plenty. This is not one of them.
“that Buchanan's anti-Semitic ravings are unacceptable (which does NOT have to imply that we violate the First Amendment), and that the Nazi extermination of European Jewry should not be used as a handy opportunity to slip in your favored left-right partisan shpiel”
As if your far-left motives as well as “method” on this site hasn't been transparent already…[grin]
AR-
I looked at that book you linked, “United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.” Here's a charming 5 star review from said book:
“For instance, if you were to announce on the “View”, to the hosts and audience, that a mystery guest was about to appear who was a mass murderer, a theocrat, a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a torturer, and a homophobe, the set of the show would instantly be filled with angry boos and jeers from the crowd. However, when the identity of the guest were to be revealed as Fidel Castro, the knees of the female hosts would suddenly quiver and an about face would occur. Barbara Walters would be the first to her feet to greet the great Leftist Dictator. The crowd would follow, taking her lead on giving Castro a standing ovation. Within minutes after the applause died down, movie pals Steven Speilburg and Francis Ford Coppola would greet their little darling via speaker phone. (Again, it's all in the packaging. Those who work in a business of illusion and deception are easily deceived.) “
Please tell me you linked this as a joke.
If you're being sold on this, I'm laughing at you, but also intrigued. You apparently believe these grotesque fantasies, which means I can write a lazy, poorly researched book screaming about how the Left loves Stalin and Sean Penn and make a lot of money. Thanks for the heads up.
(Btw, the Left doesn't love Ahmadinejad. We just don't want to start a preemptive NUCLEAR WAR over him, as some of you do.)
Hitler didn't want war with anyone – ROFLMAO.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&Mo…
If the Nazis stuck to the German-Soviet Pact, also known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Eastern and Western Europe would have been under Nazis domination. Operation Barbarossa put the Nazis war onto three fronts, Africa Europe and the USSR. Pat is off his meds, or just try to push paperback sales for this trash:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/03074051…
Dave in Boca:
“Now we're getting school-mandated pledge of allegiance to Obama as a civics lesson DVD.”
As I just wrote elsewhere, about the divisiveness Obama and the Dems have been creating:
Making things worse is the Sep 8 speech Obama wants to give to school children. The “campaign” behavior this year is degenerate enough; this is bringing Washington more into schools than ever before, in a direct way that reeks of personality cultism as well as government control — like Chavez. Is a politicized curriculum in the future, or school-grounds Bolivarian Circles, too? They're logical!
Hell, this is potentially more “productive” than earlier “nuclear education,” “AIDS education,” or someday, “climate education,” “food education,” etc., piecemeal extremist indoctrination stuff.
The only thing missing is distribution of one or more books by Obama, to be taken and kept at home.
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/09/…
“Hitler didn't want war with anyone”
Just meet his demands. How hard was that?
I'm just glad that he mixed things up to the point where he didn't concentrate on cutting off Suez (forcing the Allies to go around Africa and past submarines) and seizing the Middle East oil fields before grabbing the Caucasus after that. (What state would the war have been put, had he done it?)
Reading some of these comments, one might become an advocate for intelligence testing as a requirement before voting.
Oh go bite a finger off.
You and your Obama's-program, people's-will (the “general will” a la Rousseau, embodied in the federal government when not in Obama), government-doesn't-do-enough opposition-bashing on another thread, Father Time, has made me think about Morley, and also about Talmon, related to the subject of this recent writeup. It's better than your opposition-bashing, as well as the typical metro area weekly, say.
http://mydailyclarity.com/2009/06/the-totalitar…
“intelligence testing as a requirement before voting”
Actually, I've wanted this, or other means of qualification of the suffrage, such as a knowledge test, similar to what foreigners might be expected to take before being granted U.S. citizenship.
Better still would be not only qualification, but weighting based on criteria like this, taxes paid, etc..
So long, libs and Dems!
AR, can you come up with something more contemporary than the dessicated corpse of Duranty the Stalin apologist? Ye gods that was from the 1920's. The Left back then ( as was the Right) was far different. Apparently you seem to whitewash everything into todays climate much like the ADHD media.
Oh I know, how about the Torture apologists in Kristol, Friedman, Yoo, Gonzalez, Rice, Powell,Bush and Cheney? That's going back say on y maybe 5-8 years.
Learn to be relevant before you make “asinine” statements. Times change, events need to be correlated into their proper timeframe.
DLS- as far as divisiveness goes I think you need to look farther back. The election of 2000 pretty much set the tone of animosity and personality politics over policy.
You mean like literacy tests? Hmmm…there might be something out there that would say that's not ok…it's just on the tip of my tongue…gimme a second…oh! I've got it! It's Constri-friggin-tution.
Sure, as you are apparently too addled to Google on your own:
Hugo Chavez could teach US leaders a thing or two about winning votes
Hey, Sean Penn: This Is What Hugo Chavez, Eve Golinger, and Bart Jones Call Journalism
<a href=”
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005… William D. Delahunt is an apologist for Chávez
That took me 30 seconds, and is just the first two for Chavez. To pretend the Left doesn't just LOVE Chavez, Castro, et. al. now, and Stalin and Mao in the past (which, BTW, is why I used old references when I brought them up. They are historical figures, and who I initially brought up. Kind of hard to not point to them when discussing who was an apologist then. I realize this is too complicated a logic trail for you, but I just cannot figure out how to dumb down this concept for your level. There are no 3-grade level readers on mid-20th century politics for me to point you to) is to truly deny reality.
Luckily, though, the Left still loves Leftist dictators, the more repressive they are, the more you seem to love them.
p.s. – Buchanan is still an idiot.
Good one FT.
I come and go from this blog hoping there might be some voluntary and self imposed “moderate testing” since it is billed after all as “The Moderate Voice”. But each time I visit, I am disappointed to read the loony hard core Right spewing hateful and vile diatribes against the not-so-moderate Lefties on the site. Defenses of Hitler? What are you hanging around this blog for?? Good Lord, why not find some Aryan supremacist buddies and beat up some gays will ya?
Anybody know of a blog where moderates actually hang out?
“… by the way, contrary to modern histroy books, Kristallnacht is an old German custom where shattered glass is sprinkled on city streets to herald the first frost of the year”
Dear Alibicaff, can you please give us a link that would verify? Cant find a reference to this online, and have not heard of such a 'folk custom'… as glass was a precious commodity in Eu., and people still used in many parts horse drawn wagons, and children played in the streets. Thanks.
dr.e.
“The election of 2000 pretty much set the tone of animosity and personality politics over policy.”
Actually, the election of 1980 did. But post-2000 was bad. Trying to steal an election that the Dems lost didn't help — all those legal battles (“this is MY sandbox”). (And could you envision Obama in the infamous broadcast “conference call” PR stunt?)
* * *
“You mean like literacy tests?”
No, like intelligence and knowledge tests, real qualification tests, though literacy should be valued.
No, I'm advocating no “poll tax or any kind of tax,” so don't bother with that other cheap shot.
Austin Roth — don't forget the most recent stunt:
“You know we've had all kinds of problems in some of our past elections, as you might remember. In 2000, our presidential election came down to one state where the brother of the man running for president was the governor of the state, so we have our problems, too.”
Pat Buchanan is the screwloose righty counterpart to Paul Krugman on the left. Neither one has too much clue about history.
Try again, Pat is more like Nader. A mean Nader but still off the political map. Krugman is to the left what Barone or Krauthamer is to the right.