Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

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ThomasG
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Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#1

Post by ThomasG » 01 May 2008, 23:40

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (Hardcover)
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Product Description
Were World Wars I and II—which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction—inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men’s control? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen—Winston Churchill first among them—the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.

Among the British and Churchillian blunders were:

• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that muti- lated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo- Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hitler
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill’s astonishing blindness to Stalin’s true ambitions.

Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.

About the Author
PATRICK J. BUCHANAN was a senior adviser to three American presidents; ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1992 and 1996; and was the Reform Party candidate in 2000. The author of nine other books, including the bestsellers Right from the Beginning; A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; State of Emergency; and Day of Reckoning, Buchanan is a syndicated columnist and founding member of three of America’s foremost public affairs shows: NBC’s The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s The Capital Gang and Crossfire. He is now a senior political analyst for MSNBC.
The book will be available on May 27, 2008. It will be a sensation. I definitely recommend preordering it.

http://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler- ... 030740515X

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krichter33
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#2

Post by krichter33 » 01 May 2008, 23:48

Another interesting book that is similar is Nicholson Baker's book "Human Smoke" that was just released. Another controversial book.

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Smoke-Begin ... _b_title_2

Personally I have read "Human Smoke" and 'know' most of what is in Buchanan's book, I've already preordered it, and all I'll say is that I tend to agree with both of them...


ThomasG
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#3

Post by ThomasG » 27 May 2008, 10:28

The book is now out. :)
Europe, the Mother Continent of Western Man, is today aging and dying, unable to sustain the birth rates needed to keep her alive, or to resist conquest by an immigrant invasion from the Third World.

What happened to the nations that only a century ago ruled the world?

In “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” published today, this writer will argue that it was colossal blunders of British statesmen, Winston Churchill foremost among them, that turned two European wars into world wars that may yet prove the mortal wounds of the West.

The first blunder was a secret decision of the inner Cabinet in 1906 to send a British army across the Channel to fight in any Franco-German War. Had the Kaiser known the British Empire would fight for France, he would have moved more decisively than he did to halt the plunge to war in July 1914.

Had Britain not declared war on Aug. 4 and brought in Japan, Italy and the United States, the war would have ended far sooner. Leninism and Stalinism would never have triumphed in Russia, and Hitler would never have come to power in Germany.

The second blunder was the vengeful Treaty of Versailles that added a million square miles to the British Empire while putting millions of Germans under Czech and Polish rule in violation of the terms of the armistice and Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points.

A third was the British decision to capitulate to U.S. demands in 1921 and throw over a faithful Japanese ally of 20 years. Tokyo took its revenge, 20 years later, by inflicting the greatest defeat in British history, the surrender of Singapore and an army of 80,000 to a Japanese army half that size.

A fourth British blunder, which Neville Chamberlain called the “very midsummer of madness,” was the 1935 decision to sanction Italy for a colonial war in Ethiopia. London destroyed the Stresa Front of Britain, France and Italy that Mussolini had forged to contain Germany, and drove Mussolini straight into the arms of a Nazi dictator he loathed.

In 1936, France sounded out the British to determine if they would support a drive to push German troops out of the Rhineland that Hitler had occupied in violation of Versailles. The British refused. And Churchill congratulated France for taking the matter up with the League of Nations, and said the ideal solution would be a voluntary Nazi withdrawal from the Rhineland to show the world that Hitler respected the sanctity of treaties.

Munich, 70 years ago this September, was a disaster. But it was a direct, if not inevitable, consequence of a Versailles treaty that had consigned 3.5 million Sudeten Germans to Czech rule against their will and in violation of the principle of self-determination.

But the fatal blunder was not Munich.

It was the decision of March 31, 1939, to hand a war guarantee to a neo-fascist regime of Polish colonels who had joined Hitler in the rape of Czechoslovakia.

Britain gave Warsaw a blank check to take her to war over a town, Danzig, the British themselves thought should be restored to Germany. Result: a Hitler-Stalin Pact and a six-year war that left scores of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the British empire bankrupt and breaking, 10 European nations under the barbaric rule of Joseph Stalin and half a century of Cold War. Had there been no war guarantee to Poland, there might have been no war, no Nazi invasion of Western Europe and no Holocaust.

Churchill was the indispensable war leader who held on until Hitler committed his fatal blunders, invading Russia and declaring war on America. He was also the man most responsible for Britain’s fall from mistress of the greatest empire since Rome to an island dependency of the United States.

About the character of the Bolshevik regime in 1919 and Nazi regime in 1933, Churchill had been right. About British rearmament, he had been right. But Churchill was also often disastrously wrong.

He led the West down a moral incline to its own barbarism by imposing a starvation blockade on Germany in 1914 and launching air terror against open cities in 1940. These policies brought death to hundreds of thousands of women and children.

He was behind the greatest British military blunders in two wars: the Dardanelles disaster of 1915 and the Norwegian fiasco of 1940 that brought down Chamberlain and vaulted Churchill to power.

While excoriating Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler, Churchill’s own appeasement of Stalin lasted longer and was even more egregious and costly, ensuring that the causes for which Britain sacrificed the empire — the freedom of Poland and preventing a hostile power from dominating Europe — were lost.

Churchill was, however, surely right when he told FDR in their first meeting after Pearl Harbor that they should call the war they were now in “The Unnecessary War.”

He was a Great Man — at the cost of his country’s greatness.
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=997

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krichter33
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#4

Post by krichter33 » 27 May 2008, 22:24

Can't wait to receive it. I preordered it. Human Smoke was very good, but I think Buchanan's book is going to be even more controversial.

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Patzinak
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#5

Post by Patzinak » 27 May 2008, 23:07

ThomasG wrote:
[…] a neo-fascist regime of Polish colonels […]
One may not know who Buchanan is, but that little tidbit shows what he is -- clueless.

--Patzinak

ThomasG
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#6

Post by ThomasG » 28 May 2008, 07:05

Patzinak wrote: One may not know who Buchanan is, but that little tidbit shows what he is -- clueless.
It is indeed strange that Buchanan calls the Polish colonels neo-fascists because the Italian Fascists were their contemporaries.

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Michael Emrys
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#7

Post by Michael Emrys » 28 May 2008, 16:41

ThomasG wrote:
Patzinak wrote: One may not know who Buchanan is, but that little tidbit shows what he is -- clueless.
It is indeed strange that Buchanan calls the Polish colonels neo-fascists because the Italian Fascists were their contemporaries.
Buchanan has always struck me as a strange mixture of rare insight and lots of confused, garbled misinformation apparently guided by peculiar emotional urges that I cannot fathom. Although what he writes is occasionally of interest, one has to sift through a lot of chaff to find the grain.

Michael
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Dan W.
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New book blames WWII on Britain

#8

Post by Dan W. » 30 May 2008, 00:14

This is an interesting, if not comical, look at the origins of WWII.

I have not read Buchanan's book but I hear this man's commentary on politics constantly. So he said on "Late Edition" to Wolf Blitzer that Britain, had it of not declared war on Hitler, could have averted, with the rest of Europe, WWII, and the Holocaust would not have happened.

To prove his analysis is utterly ridiculous the Holocaust was already in full swing before the start of WWII, so the saving of Jewry by avoiding WWII makes no sense to me.
Joining us now from our studios in New York is Pat Buchanan. He is the author of a brand-new big entitled, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.” Britain lost its empire and the West lost the world.

Pat, thanks very much for joining us.

PAT BUCHANAN, FORMER GOP PRES. CANDIDATE: Thank you, Wolf.

BLITZER: You make the case there would have been no Hitler, there would have been no World War II, there would have been no holocaust albeit in effect for Winston Churchill. What’s the point?

BUCHANAN: Well the point of this is obviously Hitler came out of World War I and the tearing apart of Germany but what I am saying is, had Britain not given an insane war guarantee to Poland and then go on the war on behalf of a Poland it could not save, I don’t think there would have been any war in Europe. I don’t think there would have been a war against the western democracy. At the very least, all the Jews of Western Europe would have survived. That’s basically one of the cases we make.

BLITZER: Here’s what you write on page 421. Let me read it to you.

“Rather than follow the wisdom of conservative men like Kennan, Eisenhower and Reagan, we began to emulate every folly of imperial Britain in her plunge from power. With all our braying about being the indispensable nation and bring them on bravado (ph), we exhibited an imperial hubris the whole world came to detest.”

You’re implying that the same mistakes that Churchill made that you suggest he made between World War I and World War II President Bush has been making now.

BUCHANAN: That’s right, Wolf. What I’m saying is this. Basically the blunders the British made in alienating allies, in pushing enemies together or rivals together and turning them into enemies, in cutting off alliances, in giving war guarantees they could not defend, the United States has been emulating itself. Just has Britain gave a foolish war guarantee to Poland it could not honor and did not honor in the end, the United States is giving war guarantees to Poland, the Baltic Republicans. We’re thinking of giving a NATO war guarantee to Ukraine and to Georgia.

Secondly, the United States is engaging in wars I think are unnecessary wars.

BLITZER: You speak specifically about the war in Iraq which you think has been a horrible blunder.

BUCHANAN: I think the war in Iraq was quite clearly an unnecessary war. Saddam Hussein did not attack us, did no threaten us, want war with us, and we went to war with him to deprive him of weapons he did not have.

BLITZER: You would agree —

BUCHANAN: It was an unnecessary war.

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.BLITZER: Let me get back to the book now because we’re almost out of time. I want you to explain the notion that you have that Hitler would have never come to power, there would have been anti- Semitism, to be sure, but there wouldn’t have been the extermination of 6 million Jews. Because that’s going to cause a lot of controversy, this notion you have that, in effect, Churchill was responsible for the chain of events that led to the Holocaust.

BUCHANAN: Churchill was not — Chamberlain made the decision to give the war guarantee to Poland.

Here’s my view, Wolf. I’ve read and studied Hitler. One thing he did not want was war with the British Empire. He admired it. He respected it. He never wanted war with it. He wanted to make an ally of it. Had Chamberlain at the goading of Churchill not given a war guarantee to Poland, Britain would not have had to go to war on behalf of Poland. It’s because Britain declared on Germany that Germany came west. That’s the reason Germany had basically hostages of everybody in Western Europe from the —

BLITZER: Hitler had plans of exterminating the Jews in the ’30s, a lot earlier.

BUCHANAN: Wolf, I have not seen any plans of extermination. Hitler went genocidal after the invasion of Russia was broken down in Russia, after he declared war on the United States, and he was looking to defeat in the face. It was at that point that the conference was held, Wolf. As you know, that was in January of 1942.

BLITZER: What about all the anti-Semitic laws, all those Jews who were rounded up starting in the 30s in Germany?

BUCHANAN: Look, there’s no doubt Hitler was anti-Semitic from the time even before he wrote camp. What we’re talking about, when you mention the Holocaust, for heaven sakes, is genocide. You’re not talking about anti-Semitism. It was anti-Semitism in Poland in those years. There’s no doubt that Nuremburg laws were in 1935. They were dreadful. As a consequence, half the Jews had left Germany before November 1938. Another half fled after that. They were outside Germany with the curtain fell.

What Hitler did was a monstrous crime, Wolf. It was a war crime. Had there been no war, there would have been no holocaust in my judgment.

BLITZER: All right. Pat Buchanan has written a provocative book, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.” Pat, thanks very much for joining us.

BUCHANAN: Thank you as always, Wolf.

[*]


Hitler, Churchill, and The Unnecessary War

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phylo_roadking
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Re: New book blames WWII on Britain

#9

Post by phylo_roadking » 30 May 2008, 00:19

Dan, this isn't a WI, AND there's already another thread on it open elsewhere.

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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#10

Post by Jon G. » 30 May 2008, 00:23

Topics merged in order to insert Dan W's comments into the existing thread instead of starting a new thread.

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krichter33
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#11

Post by krichter33 » 30 May 2008, 00:30

The Wannsee conference wasn't until 1942.

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Patzinak
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Re: New book blames WWII on Britain

#12

Post by Patzinak » 30 May 2008, 00:31

Dan W. wrote:[…]
Buchanan wrote:[…] what I am saying is, had Britain not given an insane war guarantee to Poland […]

[…] Just has Britain gave a foolish war guarantee to Poland […]

[…] Chamberlain made the decision to give the war guarantee to Poland. […]
[…]
More proof that the man is clueless. "War guarantee"?! What the heck was that? "Insane"? "Foolish"? Sounds like propaganda, not history to me.
Dan W. wrote:[…]
Buchanan wrote:[…] There’s no doubt that Nuremburg laws were in 1935. They were dreadful. As a consequence, half the Jews had left Germany before November 1938. Another half fled after that. They were outside Germany with the curtain fell. […]
[…]
Say what?!

--Patzinak

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Dan W.
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#13

Post by Dan W. » 30 May 2008, 00:48

The real tragedy of nonsense like this is someone equally clueless will read it and repeat it to people who have even less of a clue than they or Buchanan.

Like Jonah Goldberg's book "Liberal Fascism", history is being revised before our very eyes.

That this man will keep a prominent position in the media should tell you all you need to know about the disinformation that passes as informed commentary

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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#14

Post by Dan W. » 30 May 2008, 00:51

ThomasG wrote: The book will be available on May 27, 2008. It will be a sensation. I definitely recommend preordering it.
I'd recommend waiting a month and picking one up in the bargain bin for a couple bucks.

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Michael Emrys
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Re: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

#15

Post by Michael Emrys » 31 May 2008, 02:12

I think I'd recommend skipping it altogether. Life is too short. But that's just me.

Michael
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