I’m a subscriber and huge fan of TAC, and I don’t plan on cancelling my subscription over this, but I’ll admit I’m not happy to see what sounds like a solid book get a somewhat negative review.  I have a hard time believing Lukacs’ closing sentence of the review would appear in TAC of all magazines, considering the publication’s excellent stand against neoconservatism and the Iraq war.

An addendum:

The review is raising some eyebrows over at the TAC online blog as well:

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/05/23/john-lukacs-neocon/

I didn’t like when Ron Unz took over.

I declined to renew my subscription then, though I continue to receive issues - so I must have subscribed for 3 years prior. To my defense, I had thought of TAC as Buchanan’s magazine since its first issue.

I only subscribed to it in the first place because I thought it Buchanan’s magazine.

And Mr. Theodoracopulos wrote some good articles too.

The fact that Buchanan’s book has survived both attacks from the left and right convinces me that it must be most accurate! Patrick has a gift for understanding the world of today vs the history of yesterday.....Bring your notebooks children!

Marcus:
I totally agree with your commentary, which I find very much on target. Just a note:

Lukacs was mad with Irving for years, including many years when Irving’s reputation
was considerably higher (after all he was praised by Sir John Keegan and Prof. Gordon
Craig as the “most knowledgeable historian” of World War II), before Irving made comments
that got him into hot water. Curiously, Lukacs, in his THE HITLER OF HISTORY, where he
cites Irving to criticize him, does so in various instances incorrectly and erroneously.
I actually looked up most of his references and was stunned to find how shoddy were his citations.
His animus apparently goes back quite a ways, to when Irving’s HITLER’S WAR was published,
and a volume he wrote was virtually ignored. On Churchill he refuses any criticism, including
from respected historians like Maurice Cowling, John Charmley, and Louis Kilzer.

Lukacs, for all his merits, was definitely NOT the author to whom Buchanan’s book should
have been given. I just renewed by sub to TAC, and in fact, was a charter subscriber. But
now I must wonder....

On Churchill, Pat Buchanan is right, and Lukacs dead wrong.

Taki contributor Tom Piatak’s comments over at the http://www.amconmag.com blog echo what
Marcus Epstein has written. Lukacs’s review is little more than a brush-off, appealing to the
authority of St. Winston, whose infallibility for him is more extensive than that of almost any
pope.  One last note: in addition to Peter Hitchens’ judicious commentary (19 April, 2008),
Paul Craig Roberts in a column also has a good review (13 May, 2008). Both should be read
as correctives to Lukacs’ screed.

“but John Lukacs views on Churchill are not conventional. He regards Churchill as the greatest man of the century if not of centuries and the savior of the West.”

I don’t know what planet you are from but views such as Lukacs are widely held by people such as the current President of the United States just as they were held by other heads of state such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Indeed, the fact of Churchill’s greatness has been the conventional wisdom for several generations since WWII.

Lukacs has never understood Americans. He’s always considered isolationists pro-Nazi.  That most Americans simply didn’t CARE about a bunch of jabbering foreigners in Europe in ‘39, is beyond his comprehension. As for Winnie, he was a warmonger, and anti-German. That he was right about Hitler was pure luck.

The Nazis?

Quite up-date-and-trendy, I was glad to discuss with my 6-year-old nephew Indiana Jones and the Nazis, and the Communist Soviet Union who he is fighting 20+ years later.

That is, the Nazis are SO “old news” that a 6-year-old not only has no concept of the occult bastards, he isn’t even afraid of the goddamned Communists, whereas a 30+ year old such as myself remebers [at least] those f-ing communists and them, somehow, creeping through the Fulda Gap at midnight (I grew up in [West] Germany, thus am familiar with that part of the world’s geography).

Anyway, the point is: not only are the Nazi sumbitches foreign to our children today, but so are the f-ing communists; ergo the reason for the “War on Terra”, perhaps.  PJ Buchanan’s book is no more important for today’s future policy-maker as was a book on Vietnam by Stark Johnston in the 1950’s.

“He says the “deeper problem” of the book is “Buchanan’s sincerity” because Buchanan is not an admirer of the British Empire. Well yes, Pat does not have any real fealty to the empire, but this cannot mean he can believe that the way it fell after WWII was good for the West.  Buchanan has lamented for years that the British have lost pride in their empire.”

Why should ANYONE have any positive feelings for an imperial foreign policy?  May I remind everyone here that we are still paying today, not only for the foreign policy mistakes of our own country, but of Great Britain as well?  Empires have a tendency to get hit back hard at the end, better to not do it in the first place if you wish to avoid the boomerang.

To re-iterate my “friend” Jerry’s point:

Of what benefit was the British Empire, other than the people who controlled it at it’s prime, namely Queen Victoria, and the Group of Perverts that surrounded “her”.

So The Great War, Part II destroyed the British Empire?  That alone makes it ALMOST worthwhile.  The [main] problem(s) are that communism [and, of course, paganism] replaced the [heretical] Anglicanism that once dominated their “colonies”.

I did not renew more subscription either,after Unz took over, but still recieve it. Except for Pat and Taki, I never liked it that much. Now I get it but very seldom read it.

Why start a magazine?  It’s only a matter of time until neo-cons or
crypto neo-cons like Lukacs infest.  They’re like termites.  Fumigate as you might,
they’ll always be back.

Stick to newsletters, churches, direct mail, the internet, etc.  Magazines are as hopeless as TV or
talk radio.

By the way, let’s all toast Buckley’s demise.  Would that it have happened 40 years ago
for our country’s sake.

P.S.  I’m a paleo, but I’ll vote for Obama before John the Mad Bomber.

Buchanan is right that WII replaced Hitler’s Fascism & Japanese Imperialism with Stalin and Mao’s Communism....WWII was a mistake, with the betrayal of Eastern Europe and delivering it into the hands of Stalin particularly ugly.
We merely backed the wrong man in China, which at least was a mistake, not a betrayal.

The poor Czechs & Poles, betrayed at Munich, and then betrayed again at Yalta, it is sickening to hear the garbage about the “Greatest Generation” and their so-called “accomplishments”....

I always thought that TAC was a little weird, when it published a an article way back praising the legacy of of MCGovern as a return to the old American midwestern populist/isolationist spirit.

McGovern was a neo-commie, a fool too. He was no Senator LaFabre.

Is it true that McConnell is an ex-leftie?

“it is sickening to hear the garbage about the “Greatest Generation” and their so-called “accomplishments”.... “

Joe populist, I thought that “Greatest Generation” usually referred to the generation that
served as privates and junior officers during the war.  Not to FDR, Truman, and Alger Hiss.
That they betrayed the cause of the West does not necessarily reflect on the virtues of
the man in the tank or the ship.

John Lukacs hates nationalism—or what he perceives as nationalism. Given his personal experiences at the hands of National Socialists and a certain type of hungarian nationalist, that is perhaps understandable. The real danger for us today, however, comes not from nationalists, but from a cosmopolitan elite. Lukacs is in his 80s—his mind is sharp, but likely it will always be 1939 or 1944 for him (he has the excuse of actually being there, whereas Frum, Goldberg et al don’t).

Tell us, Sid. What do you think of your ‘great hero’ Churchill proposing that the Tories fight the 1955 election on the slogan ‘Keep Britain White’?  The documentation that he did is easily available on the web.

Lord, so Sid has shown up with his usual threadjack. Look, for Sid’s “opponents” to now appear so they can engage in their usual, tedious, “battle of wits”.

As I don’t follow all the inside, personal stuff in the paleo media, could someone give me a rundown of what happened with TAC?

Truthfully, I haven’t noticed all that much difference since the new guy took over.  TAC was always on the inclusive side.  After all, they had a Norman Mailer interview, didn’t they?

Those who accuse Lukacs of neoconservatism haven’t read him and in particular haven’t read the review in question:

“That the present American empire is much overextended, overgrown, and at risk of all kinds of dangers, most of them willfully ignored by the American people and their politicians, is so. Buchanan deserves credit for having pointed this out, again and again, in his articles and books.”

SOME FACTS

american conservative is now owned by ron unz the leftist software tycoon who used to write for the nation.  ron unz loves immigration.

ron unz spent $1 million of his own money to try to defeat proposition 187 in california

Pablo H.—So, now you’re entering into the fray, huh?

I’ll be short—Sid IGNORES the fact that Buchanan wrote the book.  So he should denounce
Buchanan as a Nazi or SHUT THE HELL UP!

Lukacs point is simply that the Churchillian/Rooseveltian Europe we ended up with, half dominated by the Western democracies and half controlled by the Soviets was preferable to a Europe entirely dominated by the Third Reich.  This is a perfectly reasonable point of view that hardly justifies the hysterical attacks by Epstein, Piatak, et al. on Lukacs “real” motives.

NBF is right.  A half-free Europe was better than an entirely totalitarian one.

NBF,

If Britain and France had not declared war on Poland in 1939, would Hitler have still gone west? “Lebensraum” suggests that his ultimate ideologically driven goal was to go east, hence the 1941 attack against Russia. And absent a western front, that was likely to end up a very long, perhaps decades long stalemate, draining both totalitarian forces to the benefit of the “free” west.

Per Scott McConnell, I have had two Letters-to-Editor published in TAC in recent issues (Feb. 25, May 19), both of which most would consider to be on paleo themes. Further, the first letter was explicitly critical of McConnell, but to my surprise was published anyway.

Absent Britain and the US as enemies and as suppliers of war material to the Soviet war effort, Germany would most likely have beaten Russia.  After all they almost did as it was.

NBF,

A victory resembling Iraq only with a 150 million insurgents surfacing. Russians are very patriotic, and they would have bled amyone dry re: Napoleon and of course the eventual German experience. How does one occupy the vast spaces of Russia without destroying oneself? Answer: One doesn’t attempt it unless one wishes to bleed a slow painful death.

Romantic nationalism is all well and good but in 1941 Stalin’s regime was universally feared and despised by not only native Russians but also by its various subjugated ethnic groups.  The Ukranians initially welcomed the Germans as liberators.

Sid writes: “My fellow SCV member ain’t no Fascist or Nazi.”

Morris Dees writes: “There is a strange paradox here. These people deride what they call political correctness, and yet one of their first missions is to whitewash the Confederacy of any connection with slavery. They actually seem sensitive to any possibility that the Confederacy is linked with race, and want to absolve the Confederacy of any charges of racism at all.”

Citation can be found: here.

Oh Sid, and what of the Stresa Front (the alliance of Britain and “old Benito”, whom Churchill
praised as “a man sent by Providence, a man of the century”?). So, Chancellor Dollfuss looked
around for support to prevent Hitler from swallowing up Austria, and, to the vocal
applause of Churchill and the French, got Benito to help him. So, according to your
“logic,” that makes him suspect of--shudder, shudder--"brown jackboots”?  You really are
off your rocker this time. I can supply literally dozens of encomia by the sainted
Winston praising Mussolini (pre-1940).  Cf. Nicholas Farrell’s new bio’ (praised on this site by
Taki himself). Let me ask: did the alliance with the USSR then make Winnie a “para-
communist?” Certainly some of his actions (cf. Poland, the Baltic countries, etc.) with
“Uncle Joe"--using YOUR framework---would argue for that.... [By the way, I don’t go
along with that line of argument, but I do agree with Buchanan, John Charmley, Niall
Ferguson, and Maurice Cowling about Churchill, and for me he is the antithesis of a
“conservative hero.")

You continually bring up the charge of semi-Pelagianism, misapplied in the case of both
Dollfuss and Salazar. NO one in Portual, Austria (1932-1938), or for that matter, in
Spain (under Franco) was FORCED to accept the Catholic faith [I spent four years in Spain
when Franco was Caudillo--I saw no hooded goons dragging folks off to churches to be baptised.
There is--and I must point this out to you for the umpteenth time---a huge difference in
creating an environment in society that is conducive to the FREE conversion of individuals, and “forcing”
someone to convert. The later is against the Faith; but if there are conditions in society
that encourage conversion, that is laudable. And the Church has taught that institutions
should reflect Christ’s teachings. That does NOT mean forcing ANYONE to violate his
conscience. But nor does it mean that one’s conscience is correctly aligned with what
Our Lord wishes.

A general remark: as usual, you make no arguments other than to call anyone who disagrees with you
a “nazi.” Well, it won’t work Sid. Your ad hominem attacks and attempt to tar and
feather anyone who disagrees with your heroes as “stormfronters” and “browns” is
reminiscent of the tactics of the ADL and and various neo-cons. It is a sorry tactic,
and you are better than that.

As to Lukacs, he’s never termed himself a conservative. And I accept him at his
word. His views were shaped by his years in Europe, 60 years ago. He is no model
for traditionalist American conservatives.

Though I like most of the John Lukacs books I’ve read he seems stuck in the 1940s. He made up his mind then on almost every topic and does not appear to have reconsidered anything ever since. (Sid Cundiff is probably the same!) He’s never taken the Left’s ideological agenda seriously, and I think that is because of his view of Stalin as more a Great Russian chauvinist than a Marxist ideologue. (A view I agree with especially in his later years).

Those of us born after the 1960s know all about the Left. From the programmes we watched on TV as children, to influential popular music to the propaganda we were fed at school right through to workforce sensitivity training the Left’s ideological agenda has been shoved down our throats all our lives. To make matters more serious we’ve also been made to watch as every non-Western ethnic group is encouraged to be more nationalistic and to blame all their troubles on us. Making reasonable arguments against the Left and non-white nationalism is now something one can be prosecuted for in most of Europe, and probably soon in the US. Yet to Lukacs the real danger always seems come from white populists and nationalists.

Dr. Cathey’s most recent post is exactly right:  Churchill is not a conservative hero, and Lukacs is not a model for American conservatives.

However one may feel about John Lukacs’ review of Pat Buchanan’s most recent book, one should not extend any annoyance towards attacking the entire American Conservative magazine.  It may no longer be Pat Buchanan’s magazine, or can even be classified as paleoconservative, but it is still a solid conservative magazine—a great deal more preferable to Commentary, the Weekly Standard, National Review or Reason.  It always features solid articles and columns covering the fallacies of current American foreign policy (not just the war on Iraq), problems associated with illegal immigration and the dangers of state-enforced social engineering (i.e. gay marriage, abortion-on-demand, women in military combat roles).  In addition, TAC has recently published excellent articles examining the recent sharp decline in the dollar, and the credit-crisis, from an Austrian economics viewpoint.  Scott McConnell is a wonderful editor, and lucid writer, who is not an ex-leftie (i.e. an ex-Trotskyite, ex-Stalinist, or ex-New Deal/Great Society liberal, like the neocons), but an ex-neoconservative/establishment conservative who understands, very well, how the neocons work, their Israel-first foreign policy and their willingness to compromise, or even surrender, in the face of criticism from influential left-liberals.  This is exactly what happened to Mr. McConnell during the early 1990’s when he was fired as Editorial Page Editor of the neocon New York Post because the publishers refused to back him up against Latino activist groups in NYC after he wrote an editorial criticizing the idea of statehood for Puerto Rico.

I have renewed my subscription to TAC, and encourage other readers of this site to do so as well.  Also, make sure to visit their excellent blogs, including that of TakiMag’s own, Daniel Larison.  To those who merely want to read the official paleoconservative line, including a bizarre infatuation with Serbia, they can read Chronicles.  To those who want a wide of non-neoconservative opinion and commentary—from Eisenhower-Colin Powell realists and “moderates” to Buchananite “isolationists,” and from anti-Islamic traditionalist conservatives to Rothbardian libertarians—they should read TAC.  Remember, even National Review (pre-purge of Sobran, Brimelow et. al) featured the writings of journalists and columnists who strongly disagreed, and even, despised each other, and openly debated within that magazine’s pages.

Caper sed: “Joe populist, I thought that “Greatest Generation” usually referred to the generation that
served as privates and junior officers during the war… FDR, Truman, and Alger Hiss… betrayed the cause of the West does not necessarily reflect on the virtues of the man in the tank or the ship.”

Well, those privates and junior officers like to believe the nonsense that they “saved the world from Hitler”....the fact was that WWII was fought as a war of attrition with Germany, with Soviet Russia doing all of the attrition...US causalities were NOTHING compared to the iron storm that engulfed the Russian people.

If Hitler was defeated, it wasn’t the USA that defeated him, those “men in the tank or ship"should be thanking the Russian people for winning the war, not pretending the US was the “victor” and denigrating Russian and it’s people as backwards.

Is TAC really owned by a lefie now?

Some FACTS on Ron Unz.

Unz sponsored California Prop 227 to replace Calfornia’s bi-lingual education with an
English only curriculium...that doesn’t seem to be a “leftist” position.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Unz

Lukacs raises some issues but doesn’t really prove an opposite conclusion.  What would Germany have done after defeating Russia? 

Hitler didn’t put Germany on a total war production basis until late in the war.  He wanted guns and butter.  Hitler was careful with his popularity.  Once he had a good part of Russia, say up to the Urals, he likely would have tried to make good to the Germans for the losses they would have had. 

Hitler understood a dictator needed to maintain popularity.  That means he could have only so many wars.  Hitler wanted to have the one war that he wanted with the USSR and then keep the German people happy with him.  He knew some in the office corps wanted to kill him.  Russia would have been enough sacrifice, so he would have stopped there for a long time.

Hitler would have taken some easy additional gains in Central Asia and also expanded towards the Pacific, as the Tsars did.  But that likely would have been it.

I think the comments here re: Lukacs have been really helpful. I love the TAC, but I will keep a wary eye on it. It’s got some of the best articles and reviews of any magazine in the US now, but that doesn’t mean it can’t go bad.

I love how some of the very people who made their names in TAC are now rushing to purge TAC from the paleo rollcall for excessive deviationism. Maybe some of you’d be better off advancing a positive agenda than casting aspersions at your [erstwhile?] allies.

Can someone explain how/when the magazine stop being run by Taki and Buchanan?  Why does it seem like Buchanan has the attention span of a 12 year old?  He cannot seem to stick with any one project for more than 2-3 years.

I think TAC’s publishing Lukacs semi-negative review of the book was fine, but what I can’t understand is why they left in this strained linking of Holocaust Denier, David Irving, with Buchanan’s anti-Churchill argument. This was a cheap, neocon shot, and I hold it against the magazine for doing so.

I think it is a reasonable position for non-interventionists to say WWII was a special case and that in the modern world we need to move away from empire building and so forth, but I give Buchanan credit for the guts in the past and for taking on the Holy Grail argument of interventionism. And no doubt in the years to come, there will be outpouring of scholarship questioning “The Good War"--how we got in the boondoggle---that inevitable resulted in 50 millions deaths, the Holocaust, the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War among other horrors.

I am grateful for having had my attention drawn to Mr Lukacs’s interesting and astute review which has saved me from wasting my money on what is clearly a deeply flawed book by Mr Buchanan. On the other hand, on the basis of Mr Epstein’s remarks I have now ordered a copy of one of Mr Lukacs’ s own works, which I am now looking forward to reading.

Unfortunately, the US’s romantic obsession with its own revolutionary republican mythology has tended to blind it to its own “manifest destiny” to become an imperial Power. Paradoxically, the anti-imperialistic bias of the US has actually been a major contributory factor to many of the international problems in which it has become embroiled. Churchill was right to remind us, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”.

After World War I, it was the anti-imperial determination of the US to break up the Anglo-Japanese naval alliance that unleashed the train of events which culminated in Japan’s attack on Hawaii, and thus to the belated and reluctant entry of the US into World War II. And the efforts of the US to undermine the British Empire before, during and after World War II eventually led to the US itself being saddled with the sort of imperial responsibilities which it had contrived to make Britain relinquish. Although there is a certain poetic justice in all this, it can give no satisfaction to those who continue nowadays to share Churchill’s belief that the cause of freedom is best served by a strong Anglo-US alliance and by a special relationship between the two countries.

However, Mr Buchanan makes a valid point when he question’s whether Britain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany in 1939 was really in Britain’s own best interests. As Churchill predicted, the war brought her nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. But he knew that the stakes could not have been higher: if Britain could manage to stand up to Hitler, “all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

Whether Hitler wanted it or not, war between Britain and Nazi Germany was inevitable; and if it had been postponed until Hitler had conquered the Soviet Union, the odds would have been stacked even more heavily against Britain - and, eventually, also against the US. From Britain’s point of view, much that was good was lost in the war: but this loss resulted in Europe’s gain, and the US’s gain and humanity’s gain. The only benefit that Britain herself obtained from the war was that of her own survival; and she survived with only a shadow of her former greatness, exhausted both materially and morally to an extent from which she has never recovered. But although the sacrifice was so great - and although it is grossly impertinent for the unappreciative beneficiaries of Britain’s struggle to criticise its imprudence - Churchill was correct: such sacrifice was both right and necessary.

Of course, the voices of appeasement, pacifism and isolationism continue to sing their siren songs, but it is really impossible to reach a long-term accommodation with the forces which threaten the freedom that the US and Britain hold dear. Such forces always seek to expand, just as the sea erodes the land. They always have to be resisted sooner or later; and the cost of such resistance tends to be higher the longer it is deferred. This does not mean that the US should feel obliged to plunge recklessly into every possible foreign adventure; but it does mean that the US must bear the international responsibilities concomitant with its status as the world’s sole remaining imperial Power. After all, its solitary splendour is the result of its own anti-imperial policies.

Without in any way belittling the sacrifices it has already made, we must recognise that the US has not yet had to endure its “finest hour” in the defence of freedom. Let us pray that if history ever calls upon it to make a sacrifice of US lives, wealth and power that is in any way proportionately equivalent to that made by Britain in World War II, it will respond with similar resolution and generosity, so that whatever may betide the US itself, “government of the people, by the people, for the people may not perish from the earth”.

Unfortunately, the US’s romantic obsession with its own revolutionary republican mythology has tended to blind it to its own “manifest destiny” to become an imperial Power. Paradoxically, the anti-imperialistic bias of the US has actually been a major contributory factor to many of the international problems in which it has become embroiled. Churchill was right to remind us, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”.

This needs to be explained further.

Lewkowski:

I guarandamntee you have kin who were exterminated in the Holocaust. Do some proper genealogical research.

http://www.zchor.org/bialystok/yizkor-le.htm

Excerpt from Matra:

“He’s never taken the Left’s ideological agenda seriously, and I think that is because of his view of Stalin as more a Great Russian chauvinist than a Marxist ideologue. (A view I agree with especially in his later years).”

***

FYI, the non-Russian Stalin would easily persecute an independently minded patriotic Russian over a perceived loyal non-Russian Communist.

Over the years, I’ve noticed Luckas having some kind of a problem with Russians.

Shame on him.

Russians are very patriotic, and they would have bled amyone dry re: Napoleon and of course the eventual German experience.

Well, the Germans in World War I showed that the Russians don’t inevitably defeat an invader from Western Europe.

Equating FDR and Churchill with Adolph Hitler is absolutely preposterous!

“Well, the Germans in World War I showed that the Russians don’t inevitably defeat an invader from Western Europe.”

****

In that war, the Russians did rather well against the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman forces.

The Germans lost WW I, with Russia having gotten itself into an internal civil war before WW I ended.