Buchanan and an Unnecessary War? (Conclusion)

My last several posts attempted to critically examine Pat Buchanan's assertion that WWII was an unnecessary war. By way of summary I essentially argued the following:

1.) Hitler was obsessed with solving "the Jewish Question" and obtaining Lebensraum. These two themes saturated his writings and speeches.

2.) A major focus of Hitler's foreign policy aims was the acquisition of a major portion of Polish territory (beyond Danzig) towards at least a partial fulfillment of his obsession with Lebensraum.

3.) Polish stubbornness was not really a factor for even if the Polish leadership had given over Danzig Hitler would still have invaded the country.

4.) The invasion of Poland would have resulted in the incorporation of millions of more Jews into the Third Reich pressing upon Hitler the need to find an expedient solution to his "Jewish Problem".

5.) The question of a British declaration of war is irrelevant since Hitler would still have a limited war with Poland to provide him the "cover" for his subsequent crimes against humanity, especially the Holocaust.

6.) Therefore, WWII was a necessary war.

To conclude, the thrust of my position is that even if we grant most of Buchanan's chief assertions that Churchill was a warmonger or that the Treaty of Versailles was unjust, etc, I maintain that Hitler still would have invaded Poland with the result that the Holocaust still would have occurred. A most disturbing implication then of Buchanan's position is that had no one intervened to stop Hitler many more millions of lives might have been lost than eventually were during WWII. No, it was both morally right and necessary, at whatever cost, to stop Hitler who in the final analysis ultimately bears the responsibility for starting WWII...

Usually at some point or another soldiers will begin to question whether the war they are fighting is a necessary war. And for the soldiers of WWII it was no different. One of my favorite episodes from the acclaimed HBO series Band of Brothers is the appropriately titled "Why We Fight". In this episode soldiers of the 101st begin to question why they have gone through hell for what appears to them problems related exclusively to Europe. The answer is finally revealed to them as they liberate their first concentration camp. And it is with a clip from this episode that I'll end this series of posts.

Buchanan and an Unnecessary War? (Part III)

Although Hitler began to initiate certain "crimes against humanity" long before WWII began I noted that for many this would probably not constitute a sufficient enough reason for waging war against Hitler because at that point it was still a domestic matter and even a good portion of non-isolationists would most likely be hesitate to advocate intervention then. So the sine qua non for maintaining the traditional argument of the necessity of WWII (or at least, minimally, of stopping Hitler) lies with Poland or more specifically with Hitler's geopolitical objectives concerning Poland. Recall that a major component of Buchanan's argument depends on the notion that Polish stubbornness in refusing to part with Danzig was a chief cause of the war. Thus to reiterate: according to Buchanan if Poland had simply acquiesced to Hitler's "just" demand to hand over Danzig he would have refrained from invading the country. (Remember the sequence here: no invasion of Poland, no British war declaration and therefore no war crimes).

But just as Buchanan failed to adequately take into account Hitler's obsession with the "Jewish Question" so too has his analysis of Hitler's foreign policy goals in regards to Poland been myopic. In addition to a preoccupation with the "Jewish Question" Hitler also consistently obsessed over Lebensraum or "living room (space)". This being the notion that Germany was in need of "breathing room" and that Eastern Europe, Poland in particular, would address this "need". (Incidentally this was not a theme exclusive to Hitler but formed a major part of German/Prussian thinking stretching as far back as the middle ages. Here then Hitler was, on this matter, in lockstep with traditional German foreign policy aims at the time.) But more importantly in relation to Poland, and I can't emphasize this enough, contrary to Buchanan Danzig was not really the issue, rather, it was the existence of Poland itself.

Historically, for the Germans/Prussians (and Russians) the existence of Poland was an abberation on the European continent (this is in fact what formed the backdrop to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact signed in Aug of 1939 that divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union). The territory that now forms Poland was at varying times either a part of the Prussian empire or Tsarist empire (or both) from 1795, the last time Poland was properly a country, until after WWI when the treaty of Versailles made Polish independence a reality once more. So it wasn't just that the Treaty of Versailles took away Danzig from Germany but that it dissolved a major portion of Germany's eastern territory in order to (re)create Poland. And so German foreign policy even during the Weimar era before Hitler stressed a desire to eradicate this part of Versailles. Now what Hitler did was to appropriate this strong German desire, combine it with the historic concern for Lebensraum, and intensify it to eventually include extension beyond Poland and ultimately to the Soviet Union. Therefore, it is extremely improbable that had Danzig been given over to Hitler that this would have satiated his eastern territorial ambitions. No, as consistently expressed by Hitler since at least Mein Kampf only the elimination of Poland as a political entity would have sufficed.

And so having been emboldened by a series of appeasements culminating in the Munich Agreement, Hitler, I submit, most surely would have invaded Poland irrespective of the solution over Danzig. Furthermore, regardless of whether or not Britain declared war on Germany, Hitler would've at least had a limited war with Poland in which to further extend his "crimes against humanity". More importantly, invading Poland would have saddled Hitler with millions of more Jews (and undesirable Poles for that matter) which would have served to intensify his "Jewish problem". Eventually then Hitler would have been driven to the same "solution" that he was in WWII, namely, the extermination of the Jews (and others that Hitler deemed undesirable). (In fact it is conceivable that the Holocaust would have happened much sooner without a wider war because Hitler would not have had the luxury of briefly contemplating deportation as a possible solution to the "Jewish Problem".) In other words either a limited war with Poland or a wider, world war would have resulted in the Holocaust. And thus the world surely would have had a strong moral mandate to initiate war against Hitler to put a stop to his "crimes against humanity". It is in this sense then that WWII was a necessary war because either way Hitler's foreign policy objectives would have resulted in the Holocaust.

Alright, in the concluding post to this series I'll try to sum up Buchanan's position and my arguments against it.

Buchanan and an Unnecessary War? (Part II)

Now on a narrow level Buchanan is correct: World War II was an unnecessary war. But this is only true in so far as all wars are in some abstract, general sense "unnecessary". War is a tragic event and so rightly should never happen. Yet they do, time and time again because war is an enduring characteristic of humankind, and where there exist nations with mutually exclusive interests, war will always be a distinct possibility. However, my major problem with Buchanan is not so much with his very flawed analysis of how WWII began (which will be touched on at a later point) but with the fact that he continues to emphasize in this program and in the parts of the book that I have read that when WWII did begin it still was an unnecessary war to fight and that the United States' security interests would have been better served by not intervening in the conflict. Now if Buchanan had been discussing WWI, the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, etc just maybe he might have something since I will concede (though not necessarily affirm) that it is possible to examine these conflicts much more skeptically in terms of threats to our national security interests.

But except for fringe revisionists like Buchanan most historians of American foreign policy admit that of all the wars that the United States has been in WWII is probably the one with the greatest amount of moral justification. Of course, nation states don't generally go to war for moralistic reasons but rather on the basis of perceived threats to their national security and as I intend to argue in a later post the United States was no exception when it came to WWII. But in terms of when the war began I and most other historians would assert that there was a strong moral component involved in defeating Hitler.

So then what's the moral basis for affirming WWII as a necessary war to fight? The answer: Hitler's atrocious crimes against humanity, particularly the Holocaust. Surely, stopping Hitler by means of war in order to halt his terrible crimes against humanity would justify describing WWII as a necessary war would it not? In fact, Buchanan was asked this very question on the program by a perceptive viewer. His reply was two fold:

1.) Though acknowledging the evilness of Hitler and the Holocaust, Buchanan stressed that these crimes against humanity were first and foremost war crimes, and so

2.) if British diplomatic missteps and Polish intransigence hadn't caused the war then these crimes of humanity would have never occurred.

Besides being an appalling means of shifting the blame for these terrible crimes against humanity from Nazi Germany and Hitler to Britain and Poland this argument ultimately fails because it does not take into account the consistent obsession of Hitler with the Judenfragen, i.e. the "Jewish Question". (Here we are touching on an aspect of the aims of Hitler which if you will recall Buchanan states that Hitler had no concrete foreign policy objectives. On this score Buchanan's thought is simply derivative of A.J.P. Taylor's scholarship and thus by no means original). The "Jewish Question" preoccupied Hitler probably ever since at least WWI forming a major part of his notorious political treatise Meinkampf and continuing to be an obsession throughout his rule.

(Note that there is a broader debate here on the matter of Hitler's policy towards the Jews which pivots on the question of whether Hitler was an "intentionalist", i.e, was his objective from the very beginning the annihilation of at least European Jewry or was he a "functionalist", namely, was he wanting to get rid of the Jews but not by necessarily killing them only to be "forced" into that solution by the events of WWII? My own take on this is that Hitler was probably in spirit always an intentionalist but believing it not to be a pragmatic option was a functionalist in practice until circumstances during WWII made this option feasible.)

In fact, immediately after Hitler abolished the Reichstag (German Parliament) which enabled him to make policy by fiat one of his first decrees was the infamous Nuremberg Laws. These essentially began the systematic persecution of German Jews which among other things stripped them of German citizenship. The point here is that Hitler was already beginning his crimes against humanity before WWII began. Of course on this score Buchanan's rebuttal would probably take the form of claiming that no matter how terrible these actions of Hitler were they were matters of domestic concerns of Germany only with no bearing on the rest of Europe or the United States for that matter. Therefore, we need to look more specifically at Hitler's designs on Poland to further augment the argument that WWII was a necessary war. This we'll do in the next post...

To be continued...

Buchanan and an Unnecessary War? (Part I)

One of the programs that I enjoy the most on Booktv is "In Depth" in which an interviewer (usually CEO Brian Lamb or his son) spends three hours with a noted writer discussing their published works as well as permitting viewers to submit their own questions to the guest. Before deploying to Afghanistan I was able to catch the entirety of Pat Buchanan's appearance on "In Depth". For those unfamiliar with him, Buchanan is a conservative political commentator who twice sought the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996 and ran for president in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket. Yet he is perhaps best known for having been one of the original hosts on CNN's now defunct political debate program Crossfire where he advocated a strongly conservative position. But additionally Buchanan has authored numerous books one of which is entitled Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World which is what I want to discuss in the next series of posts. But first here's a little snippet from the program where Buchanan talks about the book, specifically concerning Hitler and Churchill:




From what I can gather from the program the following is a summary view of Buchanan's position on WWII.

1.) Much, if not most, of the responsibility for causing the war lies with Winston Churchill and not, as it has traditionally been believed, with Adolf Hitler. Following the diplomatic historian A.J.P. Taylor Buchanan asserts that Hitler actually harbored no great war aims and any foreign policy "goals" that he might have had were limited to just some parts of eastern Europe, particularly Poland and the city of Danzig. Furthermore, relying again on Taylor, specifically The Origins of World War II (1967), Buchanan argues that Hitler was less a madman and/or evil fascist bent on conquering the world and more a shrewd opportunist who skillfully took advantage of the diplomatic blunders made by Great Britain (though it should be noted that Buchanan stated in the program that he does believe Hitler was Satanic and evil) . Churchill on the other hand was a warmonger whose battle rattling was a major factor in the diplomatic failures that led to WWII.

2.) The Versailles Treaty which brought an official end to WWI was excessively harsh in its treatment of Germany, especially with the additions of the so called "war guilt" and reparation clauses. These punitive measures resulted in a widespread sense of resentment among the Germans against the former allied powers which influenced the thinking of such people as Adolf Hitler. And so Hitler was quite justified in his desire to annex the predominately German speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovokia and the city of Danzig from Poland which were unjustly taken from Germany via the Treaty of Versailles. (Additionally Buchanan asserts that Neville Chamberlain was right to "appease" Hitler at Munich.)

3.) Polish intransigence, especially over Danzig, was another major cause of WWII. Because Danzig is more demographically German and was acquired by Poland unjustly through the Treaty of Versailles the political and military leadership of Poland should have been willing to forgo Danzig since as was stated previously this was the extent of Hitler's territorial ambitions concerning Poland.

4.) Reminiscent of the statement, usually attributed to Bethmann-Hollweg, that Britain went to war in WWI over a 'scrap of paper' (Britain's treaty with Belgium) Buchanan similarly states that it was Britain's futile treaty guarantee to Poland that it would go to war to defend the country if it were ever attacked by Germany that was the proximate cause for WWII. Britain was not in a position to guarantee anything to Poland much less military assistance and so it was foolhardy for them to sign this treaty that ultimately led to the war. (Note that Buchanan also asserts that it was Britain's foolish guarantee that "bucked up" the Polish leadership which helped to cement their tough position on Danzig.)

To sum up, Buchanan's thesis is that everything under the sun except Hitler's foreign policy ambitions was the cause of WWII, i.e., Versailles, Churchill, Poland, and a foolish treaty were the the true architects of an unnecessary world war. Furthermore, states Buchanan on the program, the world would have been better off to have allowed Hitler to have his way with Europe once the war began and that the United States should have never intervened in what was purely a "European" conflict. (Another part of Buchanan's argument that I don't have space to deal with here has to do with the way British and American Asian policy steered Japan into the arms of the axis powers).

Now none of this is too terribly surprising coming from Pat Buchanan because when it comes to foreign policy he is a self described isolationist, i.e., he believes that the United States should stay out of world affairs as much as possible and focus purely on domestic concerns. (Isolationism echoes the views of some of the founding fathers who back then asserted that we should "avoid entangling alliances" [Washington] and refrain from "seeking monsters abroad to destroy"[John Quincy Adams]. This made sense then when we had two vast oceans separating us from the often tumultuous affairs of Europe but is in my opinion an antiquated and naive view to hold today. ) Therefore, Buchanan's foreign policy beliefs force him to view any engagement on an international level negatively and WWII is for him no exception.

But this isn't where I want to focus my criticisms nor do I wish to attempt to rebut point by point his arguments since I have not fully read the book. That would simply be unfair. Instead what I want to do in the next couple of posts is to focus on the question of the "necessity" of WWII by way of the Holocaust...

To be Continued...