The Court Historian of The Neoconservatives
Victor Davis Hanson has taken umbrage at Pat Buchanan’s description of him as “the court historian of the neoconservatives,” and even more umbrage at Buchanan’s book. Unfortunately for Hanson, Buchanan’s description of Hanson is accurate, and Hanson’s review of Buchanan’s book shows all the care and intelligence we have come to expect from one of the biggest cheerleaders for Bush’s disastrous scheme to bring democracy to the Middle East by force of arms.
To begin with, it is hard to see why Hanson objects to being called “the court historian of the neoconservatives.” Hanson is an historian, and he is, literally, a “court historian,” having been invited to come to the Oval Office to tutor the President. And the history lessons Hanson imparts are undeniably neoconservative ones, and unrelated to any traditional notion of American conservatism. An example of just how far Hanson is from those who founded the magazine for which he most often writes, National Review, showed up in a Hanson column, “The Brink of Madness,” in which, in stereotypical neocon fashion, Hanson wrote that “if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.” But the neocons do more than think every year is 1938; they also consistently reveal a leftist mindset reminiscent of the Popular Front, as Hanson did in this column. Hanson compared “the rise of fascism” in Spain to the rise of Hitler, ignoring the fact that Franco fought to save Catholic Spain from Communist butchery, kept Spain neutral in World War II, and was later an American ally in the Cold War, facts appreciated by such earlier National Review writers as Brian Crozier, James Burnham’s successor as NR’s foreign affairs columnist and a Franco biographer and admirer. Even more astonishingly, Hanson blasted the “fantasies” of “Pope Pius,” writing that “it is baffling to consider that such men ever had any influence.” (The great historian does not tell us which Pope Pius he is criticizing, Pius XI, who authored the anti-Nazi encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge and told Belgian pilgrims in 1938 that “it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism,” or Pius XII, who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust and so enraged the Nazis there were plans to kidnap him).
Hanson’s leftist fantasies, of course, extend to the present day, with his belief that we are once again fighting “fascism,” despite the many obvious differences between the Moslem anti-nationalists who want to reestablish the Caliphate and the extreme European nationalists (who were also often anti-white racists) who were the genuine fascists. As Hanson told Front Page Magazine’s Jamie Glazov in November 2005, our enemies in Iraq are part of “a horrific fascism--anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-modern--that is at war with all the Enlightenment has achieved” and the War on Terror should be a “dream come true for proper leftists.” Hanson also tells Glazov that “the only man of the Left who rightly fathomed this” was Christopher Hitchens, who, perhaps not coincidentally, shares Hanson’s views on Franco, any Pope Pius you can think of, and the desirability of risking the lives of American soldiers to bring “all the Enlightenment has achieved” to the Middle East.
A man as eager as Hanson is to label our enemies “fascist” can safely be expected to dislike any book casting doubt on the wisdom of British policy leading up to World War II, so it is no surprise that Hanson disdains Buchanan’s book. What is somewhat surprising is just how much Hanson gets wrong about the book. Hanson claims that Buchanan “accepts that there was nothing intrinsic within National Socialism as practiced under Hitler that would necessarily have led to war,” which ignores one of Buchanan’s central arguments, which is that Britain should have directed Hitler’s blows to the east, not that those blows were never going to fall. As Buchanan writes, “Had Britain never given the war guarantee, the Soviet Union would almost surely have borne the brunt of the blow that fell on France.”
Hanson’s sloppiness spills over into viciousness when Hanson claims that Buchanan in essence “empathize[s] with a psychopath” and charges that “British military weakness is blamed for Auschwitz.” Reading Hanson, one would never guess that Buchanan wrote this: “For what happened to the Jews of Europe, Hitler and his collaborators in the unspeakable crimes bear full moral responsibility. The just punishment for people who participate in mass murder is death, be it in a bunker or on a gallows. The Nazi murderers got what they deserved.” Or this: “For that war one man bears full moral responsibility: Hitler.” Hanson’s review overlooks Buchanan’s endorsement of the Stresa Front against Nazi Germany, his statement that the French should have invaded Germany in 1936 in response to the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and the course of action he says Chamberlain should have taken after Munich: “Tell Britons the truth: Hitler was not to be trusted and he was on the march. Chamberlain could have imposed conscription, stepped up production of aircraft, begun buying munitions from the United States, and waited. Rather than commit Britain to a war she could not win, he could have done what Truman did when another ruthless totaliarian seized an indefensible Prague. Adopt a policy of containment.” What Buchanan criticizes is the British war guarantee to Poland, not British action to contain Nazi aggression. Anyone misled by Hanson into thinking Buchanan “empathizes” with Hitler should consider Buchanan’s description of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: “Hitler won the competition for Stalin’s hand for a reason: They were brothers under the skin, amoral political animals with blood on their hands who would unhesitatingly betray nations or crush peoples to advance state or ideological interests.” Not even Hanson, I trust, would suggest that Buchanan “empathizes” with Hitler’s “brother under the skin,” Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin.
Buchanan’s problem, in fact, is that he is a serious anti-Communist, who believes that Stalinism was worse than its slightly less murderous German rival. Buchanan writes that if the Nazis had attacked the Soviet Union instead of France in 1940, “Bolshevism might have been crushed. Communism might have perished in 1940, instead of living on for fifty years and murdering tens of millions more in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A Hitler-Stalin war might have been the only war in Europe in the 1940s.” This view earns Buchanan nasty attacks from anti-anti-Communists of both the left and right, but it does not win much agreement from Americans who find it easier to sympathize with the victims of Nazism than the victims of Communism, in part, no doubt, because books and movies have made the Nazis’ victims more familiar to us. How many Americans even know of the two million people deported from eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and Romania in 1939 and 1940 to die in the Gulag, the seven million Soviet citizens killed in the camps during World War II, the million POWs (including Finns and Poles) killed by the Soviets during World War II, or the million members of minority nationalities, such as the Volga Germans or Crimean Tatars, who perished in the Gulag during the war, not to mention the five to six million who died there following World War II, including those repatriated (sometimes with British and American help) from territory that had been occupied by the Nazis? How many Americans realize that Mao-Tse Tung--who came to power only because Stalin survived World War II--was the greatest tyrant in history, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese?
Given the enormity of Stalin’s crimes both during and after the war, it is curious that Hanson writes that “millions of Red Army soldiers were not communists, but brave patriots” and that “the motivation for many was not global communism or Comrade Stalin.” This is no doubt true, but the motivation of Red Army soldiers is no more relevant than is the motivation of German soliders. Both the Red Army and the German army were instruments of power for aggressive totalitarian dictators. The Red Army whose soldiers Hanson lauds used World War II to install Communist dictatorships over Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, and to help spread Communism to Yugoslavia, Albania, and Asia, not to mention guard the Gulag and keep it supplied with a fresh stream of victims. Those who think of World War II as a “good war” are ignoring half of the war.
Incredibly, Hanson even claims that there was “no one more suspicious of the ally Stalin, or more sympathetic to the Poles” than Churchill. In fact, Churchill had already agreed to giving eastern Poland to Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943, without bothering to inform the Poles of this secret arrangement. This is what Churchill told Parliament, on August 2, 1944, as the Red Army was standing idly by watching the Germans crush the Warsaw Uprising: “The Russian armies now stand before the gates of Warsaw. They bring the liberation of Poland in their hands. They offer freedom, sovereignty, and independence to the Poles.” And when some MPs questioned the wisdom of Yalta, Churchill told them: “Marshall Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies....I know of no Government which stands to its own obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”
Those who share Hanson’s view of Churchill should carefully consider those words, spoken by the prime minister not only in the knowledge that he was lying but knowing that his brave words of defiance to the Nazis in 1939 and 1940 had been paid for, in part, with Polish blood, both in resistance to the Nazi invasion of 1939 and the defense of Great Britain. In the crucial days of September and October 1940, Polish pilots constituted between an eighth and a quarter of the pilots available to Fighter Command for the defense of London and accounted for 18 percent of German planes destroyed on September 11, 14 percent on September 15, 25 percent on September 19, and 48 percent of all German planes destroyed on September 26. As Air Chief Marshall Dowding admitted after the Battle of Britain, “had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry I hesitate to say that the outcome would have been the same.” For this “unsurpassed gallantry,” the Poles received at Yalta what the Czechs received at Munich--the subjugation of their country--with one difference: This time, Churchill defended the betrayal in Parliament.
It is to Buchanan’s credit that he questions the morality of Britain’s guarantee to defend Poland in 1939, a guarantee Britain made no real effort to honor in 1939, when the British and French essentially did nothing when Poland was invaded by both the Nazis and the Soviets or, indeed, at any time during the war, when Soviet designs were masked in part by British lies. Buchanan’s book is a well-written and exhaustively documented attempt to explore whether different strategies could have helped avoid some of the bloodshed and terror of those tragic years, and its arguments are well worth considering even when one disagrees with them. Alas, the same cannot be said for Hanson’s review of the book.
Comments
I’ve never understood Buchanan’s comments, in their totality, towards the shoah and the people who helped carry it out. On one hand, he’s obviously not any kind of Nazi sympathizer, and I don’t doubt the sincerity of the anti-Nazi quotes here. On the other, his cuddling up to concentration camp guards (at least one of which had admitted it) back in the early 1990s, and that bit about the people trapped in the subway surviving, seem kind of, oh, I don’t know...indefensible for one.
Did he just hate the Jewish-American “establishment” so much that it was an “enemy of my enemy” kind of thing? Has his stance shifted over the years?
Please note that I’m not accusing him of “anti-Semitism” or any other thought crime. My question is directed to anyone who might want to answer, and I realize that some of his friends might consider it inappropriate to do so.
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Hanson is contemptible, but sadly, symbolic of the widespread pop culture level of history that even ostensibly “professional” mainstream academia historians regurgitate. He seems to have received his talking points education from Neocon seminars, Indiana Jones movies and perhaps the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. God knows he doesn’t have the intellect to question the two-dimensional red-herrings and straw-men constructed by the Neocon puppet masters pulling his strings. He’s probably trying to replace George Will as the State-sanctioned, suitably convincing “opposition” to the left-liberal status quo, cashing checks on the side from Big Brother. What a cad. Pseudo-conservatives are even worse than liberals, because they are far more intellectually dishonest.
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Excellent article. I read part of VDH’s response and its just name calling “Pat’s a Nazi, Pat’s a Nazi”
Of course, Hansen’s a Neo-con, how else could a no talent hack like him became famous. If you don’t have talent you need powerful friends.
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Hanson is typical of the vicious character assassins who sell their services to the highest bidder, which at the moment, are AIPAC/the neocons.
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“For this “unsurpassed gallantry,” the Poles received at Yalta what the Czechs received at Munich--the subjugation of their country--with one difference: This time, Churchill defended the betrayal in Parliament.”
Send that one to Hanson tied in a ribbon. Nicely done.
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@Tom Piatak,
Fine essay and commentary. Churchill very likely knew the truth of the Katyn Forest
Massacre by the Reds of thousands of high ranking Polish officers and officials. The
Reds blamed the massacre on the Germans, despite Red Cross proof otherwise. And official
Allied opinion, including Churchill, publicly accepted Uncle Joe’s explanation, despite
some misgivings, for many years [see Constantine Fitzgibbon’s unsettling study on the
topic].
Regarding Pat Buchanan’s defense of Ukranian John Demyanyuk, the facts regarding that case demonstrate
an outrageous miscarriage of justice in which the Soviet secret police, the American Office
of Special Investigations, and the Israelis were all complicit. Simply put, Demyanyk was
not who he was accused of being. Pat defended him and repeatedly pointed out that it was
a frame-up. Finally, the Israeli Supreme Court, confronted with overwhelming (and embarrassing)
evidence, freed Demyanyuk. In recent years, the attack by the professional Nazi hunters
has been to suggest that, well, no he wasn’t a guard at one camp, but maybe he was
a guard at another camp, so let’s expel from the US him anyway. For anyone interested,
there is a spine-tingling book on the affair by Demyanyuk’s Israeli lawyer. His
commitment to justice and truth underscores the admirable role that Buchanan played
in the affair.
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Cicero:
A similar book that will never see the light of day in this now Sovietized country:
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Two Hundred Years Together
Remember Solzhenitzyn? He was a hero in the US in which I grew up, because more than any other Soviet subject, faced down Soviet tyranny. He also happened (deservedly) to have won the Nobel prize.
Since then, he has gone down the proverbial memory hole, but he hasn’t stopped writing.
Recently, he wrote the above book which will never, ever be published in the
so-called land of the free. Google it and you’ll understand why.
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On the concentration guard thing, you need to understand that some people view this as a “foreign” group going after a fellow AMERICAN, which he was at the time.
There is a lot of concern that the guy would not receive a fair shake, which ENDED UP being true, as he was not who they said he was. (Got to give the Israeli court props for that, more than we can say for the “fellow americans”.)
Then you have the issue of him being just a regular “guard,” and when you start to prosecute low level soldiers, even those who held despicable posts, you are moving on to victors justice.
A war is a war. Everyone is guilty of crimes during a war if held to peacetime standards.
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Louis Auchincloss put paid to Hanson after the mismatched pair were give the National Medal of the Humanitiesinthe OvalOffice.
It would be a bit much to expect this President to keep a copy of Anabasis on his bedside table but by now he shouldhave detected the gap between the Classic Comix version of Thucydides Hanson feeds the Neos and what he says in serious company, as in his TLS piece last summer .
Good to see Tom on his tail however belatedly-
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/05/hicks_nix_styx_.html#more
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Dr. Cathey, your remarks on Demjanjuk are misleading at best and utterly contemptible. Demjanjuk himself (through his lawyers) presented evidence in his own defense that he was a guard at the extermination camp Sobibor (not a concentration camp, as I’d said earlier), and therefore not “Ivan the Terrible”. This evidence was presented to the Israeli Supreme Court, which in its ruling referred to Demjanjuk as “Wachman Demjanjuk” to emphasize the fact that he was in fact an extermination camp guard--just not the one he’d been accused of.
Cathey’s post is the kind of contemptible twisting of the facts that Buchanan himself engaged in after Demjanjuk himself had demonstrated that he’d been a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. Absolutely disgusting.
Anyway, I couldn’t care less about Dr. Boyd D. Cathey’s motivations. I’m still interested in Buchanan’s, though. Similarly with Buchanan’s article about the stalled train and the diesel exhaust.
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Mr. Almoni:
You may actually wish to read the book by Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, which says pretty much what Dr. Cathey says it does. Demjanjuk has always denied he was a guard at Treblinka or Sobibor, and Sheftel argues in the book that the identity card placing Demjanjuk at Sobibor was unreliable.
But Demjanjuk was extradited and tried in Israel not for having been a guard, but for being “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka, a notorious guard remembered by survivors of Treblinka as being especially brutal and sadistic. Demjanjuk was not “Ivan the Terrible,” which was why the Israelis did not convict him and sent him back to the United States. And the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Demjanjuk’s prosecution as “Ivan the Terrible” had involved serious prosecutorial misconduct, including the withholding of exculpatory evidence from the defense.
As for Buchanan’s motivation, it probably was significant that the first accusations against Demjanjuk were made in the Communist press, and the evidence used against him (including the identity card) was provided by the Soviets.
You may also wish to look up a New York Times op-ed I remember reading at the time of his acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court as to why the Israelis weren’t interested in trying Demjanjuk as having been a guard at Sobibor. This op-ed (I can’t recall the author) pointed out that none of the survivors of Sobibor recognized Demjanjuk, and that the maximum penatly under Israeli law for having been a guard at a camp, with no evidence of the sort of atrocities that “Ivan the Terrible” had engaged in, was seven years, a period of time that rougly corresponded to the period when Demjanjuk had been tried in US and Israeli courts prior to the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court.
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Mr. Almoni:
Before you get all hot and bothered and start calling folks names, let me suggest you take
Tom Piatak’s good advice and read Yoram Sheftel’s excellent recounting of the whole sorry mess.
The only thing “contemptible” is the way some persons refuse to see the truth in this matter.
You might do better at an ADL blog....
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“...read Yoram Sheftel’s excellent recounting of the whole sorry mess.”
Sure, let’s read Demjanjuk’s lawyer in the “Institute of the Historical Review”
This is where the noble effort to correct to the mythology of WWII get hijacked by and associated with unsavory charachters, and in turns singes the names of good people who share nothing with holocaust deniers.
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Kevin,
Sheftel’s book was published by Regnery, if I recall correctly.
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At what point do people start attacking the smear merchants instead of regarding them as misguided? Or even worse writing long posts “educating” them. Anyone who calls Pat “a Nazi” because he kept an innocent man from being executed is not interested in reasonable discussion.
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Tom,
The whole squalid episode, turning on tampered evidence, Soviet involvement, the passage of severa; decades and whether Ivan the Terrible’s name was Marchenko - Demjanjuk’s mother’s maiden name, or Demjanjuk, resulted in an acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court. Demjanjuk’s innocence ("he was just a guard") remains in doubt, but whether his case became the cause celebre of a disreputable fringe, isn’t. I wish PJB had remained more distant from the whole thing and hope a fruitful reexamination of WWII doesn’t descend into a defense of the S.S.
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@Kevin,
Although I generally agree with you prudentially, I also think that too often we have ceded points
and failed to defend what is right because...someone “disreputable” may have also argued the case. Take,
for instance, the case of the Confederate Battle Flag which, for me, is a hallowed symbol. Simply because
some klan-types have displayed it or it has been used by disreputable people, does that mean I should
abandon it altogether? At that rate half the things we believe would be consigned to the junk heap of
history. No, the better, and probably most difficult, route is to defend what we think true, even if there
are others who misuse or mistake those things, and more, to distinguish between a proper defense and one
that may not be.
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The fact is that the Sobibor document was presented in Demjanjuk’s defense at the trial as evidence that he was a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. Maybe he didn’t “admit” it in so many words, but that’s about as close as you can get. (And is it surprising that he denied it afterwards?)
I’m going by the facts of the trial as they were reported in Israel at the time. I haven’t read the book by Demjanjuk’s attorney, and I don’t dispute any of the factual assertions made here by Mr. Piatak--except that the Sobibor document was not used against Demjanjuk, but rather in his defense, and the judges even asked his attorney at that time if he was sure he wanted to go ahead with it.
What’s important to this issue is that if Buchanan did read the attorney’s book (and I doubt if it had even been published at the time), then he gave no indication of that in his writings. Instead, Buchanan gave the false impression after the trial that Demjanjuk was just some ordinary, innocent guy who was falsely accused. That was indefensible.
Mr. Piatak’s comment about the Soviet angle may be a plausible explanation of Buchanan’s initial involvement, but it’s less compelling when you consider the totality of Buchanan’s writings on the Shoah, including that charming article about the diesel exhaust. I still think the best explanation is his strong antagonism to the Jewish-American “establishment”, including the neocons. Other paleos as well--being human--have allowed that same antagonism to spill over to related but undeserving targets.
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What it really gets down to is Pat helped save a man from execution. He was guilty of the crime.
But somehow thats a bad thing. And Pat isn’t Pro-Israel enough, so QED he’s a Nazi. I have no idea why conservatives keep arguing with the deranged haters of Pat.
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Whoops. I meant he WASN’T guilty of the crime. As stated by Israeli SC.
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