From reading Prof. Gottfried I’ve learned that Germans today are taught to hate themselves over their past.  Does he, or anybody else know, if there’s a good chance of Buchanan’s book being translated into German?  Maybe Spencer or Gottfried can make a project out of it.

So, why were these decisions made?

A great response from Pat Buchanan. Hanson is an acolyte of the neo-con cabal
that is largely responsible for the quagmire we now find ourselves in in Iraq.
His career and writings are proof that some persons just never learn anything
from history.

Pat’s response is brilliant up until the last sentence. Actually I wouldn’t care to have the
Hanson tutoring Greek history any more than I would want to have him teaching World
War One. He confuses narratives and presents the Spartans as stand-ins
for the Kaiser’s Germany and Athens as a society of global democratic Wilsonians. He
also drags over this anachronistic interpretative grid for the American Civil War;
the last time I checked, Hanson had turned Sherman into Pershing or Eisenhower.

Seeing as Hanson is a Hooverite I dont read his stuff. Floaters, think -tankers, write what they are paid to thus they have to reinvent, confuse narratives as posited above, historical figures. So Hanson is basically a sophist who makes bad look good and good look bad.

Now, if he would just stay in that sensory deprivation tank…

Nice to see Pat slap that hack Hanson back down.

Bismarck rarely made blunders, and Teutonic stupidity sounds cheap. Alsace, or Elsass Lothringen had been German territory for centuries. A great majority of German speaking people lived in towns with German names which have not changed to this day. When Louis XIV decided to annex it, the Germans couldn’t do anything about it. But after the 1870 war they could. Meaning, they simply took back what was theirs.

I first became aware of this VDH through a WarNerd column, in which Hanson was completely destroyed. (Hanson compared every struggle in the contemporary world with ancient Greek warfare and the WarNerd wouldn’t have any of it! Good stuff.)

The second time, I read a NRO column of him, in which he basicly stated that the US is the best, will always be the best, can only be the one who will always be the best, should be the best (as the rightful best ever, since the Spartans) and stay the best, yadayadayada. Ergo: pretty embarassing stuff.

I always thought that historians were eager to discuss history by as many different interpetations as possible. After all, the truth will win out in the end. Hanson is about as non-partisan in histography as Mark Steyn is in describing contemporary demographic dynamics.

Not very much so.

PS courthistorian of the neocons? I thought Jaffa was assigned to that task. Oh well..

I sympathize with “man“‘s point above, and have some family background to illustrate the confusion of nationalities in that region. My mother’s family, named Ohmer, came from Alsace/Elsass, and although having what I would have thought was a Germanic name, seem to have conceived of themselves as French. Neverthless, once they arrived in Ohio, that did not stop them from marrying folks with unambiguously German names such as Beckmann and Kiefaber.

Of course here in Houston we have the more famous example of the same kind of “confusion” in the Schlumberger (Texianized in speech to “Slumber-Jay") family.

“Was it a war crime for the Kaiser to break up Lenin’s evil empire?”

Does Mr. Buchanan not know that in 1917 Germany helped Lenin travel from Switzerland to Russia in order to further the collapse of the Russian state. A tactic that worked, making Germany in some sense responsible for Lenin’s “evil empire”.

Steven Zoraster

Excellent response by Pat. Sad that Hanson can’t argue the facts and resorts to name calling. But he is a neo-con after all. As for Alsace-Lorraine, tit was bad because it gave the French a reason to hate Germans and desire revenge. And I’ve never read that A_L was upset at being returned to France.

“As for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany imposed on Russia in 1918, is Hanson aware that the prison house of nations for which he wails, which was forced to disgorge Finland, the Baltic republics, Poland, Ukraine and the Caucasus, was ruled by Bolsheviks?...What were the consequences for Poland of trusting in Britain? Crucifixion on a Nazi-Soviet cross, the Katyn massacre of the Polish officer corps, Treblinka and Auschwitz, annihilation of the Home Army, millions of brave Polish dead, half a century of Bolshevik terror.”

Neocons like Hanson fixate on Germans and Nazism as original sin and ignore Bolshevism/Communism (and denigrate those who don’t) for two reasons: because their intellectual forebears emerged from the Communist milieu, and because their current statist-authoritarian program so resembles that of their forebears, any reminder of the evils of Bolshevism is unwelcome and untimely.

The Bolsheviks murdered millions of Christians, yet the Neocons seek to bury that history. What does that tell you?

McBrown is right.  Hitler was no victim of Churchill, and he never would have been satisfied with Danzig.  Anybody who thinks that is dreaming in technicolor, as a few taki writers have pointed out here.

mcbrown, reasonable people disagree on these matters as we have seen here at TakiMag. But when VDH uses language like “poor Hitler” to describe Buchanan’s position his slimy implication is clear. That kind of rank demagoguery needs to be responded to and criticized for the intellectual dishonesty that it is.

“Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.”

No Pat is NOT arguing that at all. Thats what VDH WANTS to write about. Just the same old tiresome trick of set up a straw-man, then knock it down and leave the slimy insinuation that any believes otherwise is a Hitler lover.

Buchanan is not defending Hitler; he is explaining the context in which he arose. Why is it that examining the context in which Bolshevism, Communism, Leninism and Stalinism arose is perfectly acceptable intellectually and academically, but examining the context in which Hitler arose makes one a neo-Nazi? Is it because Buchanan is a Catholic? Then by that standard, Jewish academics and Neocon/Neolib polemicists who have examined the context in which Jewish Bolshevism, Communism, Leninism and Stalinism arose must be neo-Communists seeking to excuse the Communist holocaust against Christians, and perhaps spark a new one.

Attacks on Buchanan bear the hallmark of left-liberal double standards with the agenda of keeping the “Right Wing” on the defensive and burying the Left-wing’s even more murderous history, which in fact established precedents that gave rise to Hitler and Nazism and its implementation.

Left-liberals, Neocons and Neolibs seek to bury that history for a reason: because it is a cautionary tale of statist-authoritarianism under the guise of seeking justice, “liberalism,” and equality. They know the truth, which is that all their talk of spreading democracy is merely window dressing for a malignant statist power grab. Examining the context of Hitler and Nazism gets people asking questions about the narrative handed down by left-liberals for all these years, and left-liberals would rather keep the masses ignorant and compliant, which makes them easier to manipulate and turn into cannon fodder for statist Neocon/Neolib wars of agenda.

Chris Moore:  nobody denies the need to study the ‘context’ leading to Hitler!  It’s just that PB is selective about context.  Hitler wouldn’t have been satisfied with Danzig.  The whole point of Nazism was to crush Soviet communism.  Hitler said this a million times!!  He didn’t need Churchill to motivate him to do this.

Hanson thinks that it was a great injustice that Russia had to give up Poland, Finland, the Baltic Republics, Ukraine and the Caucasus in the Brest-Litovsk treaty. After the German defeat in 1918 Russia could re-conquer all these states with the exception of Poland and Finland. After 1989 all these states became independent again, and moreover Belarus. That means that the partition of Russia by the Brest-Litowsk treaty was not so much due to German meanness but was a quite natural development and a triumph of democratic principles.

Dear Pat Buchanan,

“Germans, Austrians and Hungarians by the millions were then consigned to Belgium, France, Italy, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Lithuania, in violation of the principle of self-determination.”

Thank you for mentioning this issue in this light.  Rarely does one hear of these event from this perspective, and it was extremely unfair and counterproductive.

A side issue: Italy´s entrance into the war was a particularly sad and unnecessary event.  The Catholics in Italy were pro-Peace, anti-war (Benedict XV intervened for peace).  The Habsburgs even agreed to let Italy have the Italian majority areas (Friuli, Trieste, Istria).  Unfortunately pro-war liberals, nationalists, and revolutionary socialists got the upper hand in the matter.  The battles fought between Austria-Hungary and Italy at the Isonzo were particularly dreadful.

While I disagree with many of Buchanan’s speculations about WW 2, I am troubled by Hanson’s speculation that the Allies should have occupied Germany after WW One in the hope that the nation would’ve been integrated into the league of democracies.  Had this occurred, it is a reasonable guess that the resulting discontent would have brought the Nazi movement into being that much sooner.

“The whole point of Nazism was to crush Soviet communism.”

If only that was the “whole point” of Nazism and stopped there, it would have actually been a good thing. After all, wasn’t that also the point of Reaganism? And if hatred of Communism makes one a neo-Nazi, next they’ll be saying that of Reagan. The difference is that Reagan was a Christian, and Hitler was not, and so Hitler sought not to liberate, but enslave. Buchanan was a huge supporter of Reagan, and as such should be given the benefit of the doubt. But the Neocons must malign Buchanan as a neo-Nazi in order to discredit traditional conservatism and replace it with their own brand, which is kind of a twisted amalgamation of Zionism, elitism and state-worshipping authoritarianism.

I agree with man.
Alsace and Lothringa have been part of the Holy German Empire since 870 AD. Its repossession by Bismarck was therefore no blunder. A blunder is the blatant distortion of this historical fact, and to call it ‘Teutonic stupidity’ is a descent into tawdriness that no serious historian would permit himself.

anti-strauss, if, as you say, the “whole point of nazism was to crush Soviet communism”, perhaps you can explain how this warranted a British declaration of war against Germany in September 1939? Did the British declare war on Germany to defend Soviet communism? Clearly, it’s you, not Mr. Buchanan, who has difficulty with “context”.

Hanson’s assertions are often difficult for anyone with a real knowledge of history to take very seriously, but that apparently doesn’t stop quite people from doing just that.  If you want to see a particularly crude example of double standards applied to those historical figures who fit into ones ideological lens and those who don’t, read Hanson’s work.  Being such a vulgarization of that tendency illustrates it nicely for people who aren’t stupid but aren’t experts in the field.  Otherwise don’t bother reading him, as his work often verges on what Buchanan calls “comic-book history” you get the impression that he’d be better off writing for Hollywood.

In his book, Buchanan never shows Hitler as anything but the evil and stupid disgrace to his country he was.  What Buchanan wants to move away from is the Hitler of comic book history and show an adventurer and murderous revolutionary with no respect for the balance of power, which does not absolve him of wrecking our civilization but rather holds British leaders to higher scrutiny for helping unleash him and not handling him properly.  For these reasons and others people with nostalgia for the comic book Hitler will hate this book.  It should be remembered that there was no uniform opinion of the Nazis and German people in America leading up to, during, and following our involvement in the Second World War, but it was Japan that most Americans were far more concerned with.  Hollywood and academia then rewrote history to make people think otherwise, or that this was wrong.

Buchanan points out in his book that Hitler did offer to bring the Poles into his
alliance against Russian Communism. Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania had in fact already
joined with Hitler and did fight with the Wehrmacht. But it was the assurance of British
backing that clearly swayed the Poles to stay in the Western European orbit. In this
way, Poland become an geographic obstacle to Hitler’s Drang nach Osten to secure
colonies for Germany to the east. At the time, European powers still believed they needed
colonies to survive economically. The Allies, please recall, had taken all of Germany’s
colonies at Versailles. The Drang nach Osten, with the twin goal of defeating Communism
and acquiring colonies, would have continued with or without Polish cooperation, but,
had Poland joined Germany, the resulting war would have been very different and likely
with less devastating consequences.

To Chris Moore:  you don’t know many Russians or Slavs do you?  Claiming that Hitler was right to try to crush the USSR!!  And re-enslave all the Soviet peoples??  Shame on you.
As for your tortured Reagan analogy, I wonder how PB’s hero would’ve reacted to the revisionism here?  Reagan at Pointe du Hoc in 1984 called WW 2 a just war; he wasn’t bothered by the anti-British sentiments that some Americans have.
To Acurmudgeon:  the Brits declared war on Hitler in 1939 to bluff him out; it didn’t work but it was worth a try after the Munich disaster.  Hitler was still the greater threat; as much as Stalin was an SOB, he wasn’t a crazy imperialist like Adolf. As Lee Congdon pointed out, he wasn’t just a cruder Bismarck.  He was nuts.  Mussolini knew this after it was too late for Italy.

Go Pat go, in terms of the struggle for historical
truth. 
Concerning Alsace Lorraine, I’ve often wondered what
would have happened had a fairly run plebiscite been held
there after WW1, with the residents being allowed to vote
for either Germany or France.
Concerning the outbreak of WW2, one thing haunts me as I
review the history of that time. Regardless of one’s view
of Hitler as a reckless, brutal revolutionary, the German
demands on Poland in that summer of 1939 were hardly outrageous,
calling for Polish agreement that Danzig go back to Germany from
its bizarre League of Nations city-state status, and for a
plebiscite to be held in the corridor region. Its not as if Germany
was asking for Poland to cede to Germany the big chunk of territory
in the Posen/Poznan region, or around Bromberg/Bydogozsc (sp) that
had been part of Germany until 1918. Nor did Germany reopen claims for
the resource rich Katowitz area in Silesia. 
If Hitler was set on war in 1939, surely he would have ramped
up demands for all these areas, to make a Polish refusal certain.
Now, perhaps in the future Hitler would have escalated his demands,
but Polish and Allied statesmen could have, at that point gone to
war with Germany, not with a Germany that was still showing
some moderation and restraint. 
A final proof of German moderation at this time was German agreement to
a ceasefire the day after its invasion of Poland, with an Italian
brokered conference to be held, tentatively at San Remo. If Germany
was set on war, they hardly would have agreed to a cease-fire. Britain
however insisted on a German withdrawal to its borders before
any conference, and Hitler foolishly, and tragically refused to accept
this.

And had Churchill been listened to in 1922 or 1937, all of this could have been avoided.

“To Chris Moore:  you don’t know many Russians or Slavs do you?  Claiming that Hitler was right to try to crush the USSR!!  And re-enslave all the Soviet peoples??  Shame on you.”
Posted by anti-strauss on Jun 13, 2008.

What I said (quoting you) was that if only “the whole point of Nazism was to crush Soviet communism,” it would have been a good thing. How on earth does this become a claim that it was right for Hitler to try to “crush” and “re-enslave all the Soviet peoples”? And who were these “Soviet peoples”? They themselves were Russians enslaved by the Bolsheviks under the guise of humanitarianism.

Think of it this way: if only Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq was to remove Saddam (whom Washington, after all, had once enabled and allied) and then leave, the Iraq invasion might have been a good thing. But the removal of Saddam was only part of the Bush/Neocon scheme, just as the destruction of Communism was only part of the Nazi scheme, just as professing “social justice” was only part of the Bolshevik scheme.

Similarly, if those who destroyed Hitler were merely interested in liberating Germany from Nazism, they would never have consigned half of it to Stalin and Communism. They wanted to grind the German people’s nose in the dirt just as the Neocons wanted to grind Islam’s nose in the dirt by invading and occupying Iraq. Part of this was giving the serial killer Stalin free reign over millions.

There’s a sadistic kind of malice at play here that only reveals its ugly side after the “liberation.” I don’t think Buchanan objects to the destruction of Nazism, I think he objects to both the blundering incompetence and Communist appeasement that gave rise to it, and the aftermath that consigned half of Europe to the murderous Bolsheviks.

Washington has engaged in a similar kind of blundering incompetence with regard to Mideast policy and Zionist appeasement for years, which gave rise to Israeli abuses, Arab dictators, Saddam, the Neocons, the Iraq war, and all kinds of other mischief and American misfortune.

We’ll never know what might have happened if Britain did not promise the Poles military support against a German attack in the summer of 1939, but we do know what did: to wit, the fourth partition of Poland; the utter destruction of Germany, the end of the glorious British Empire and the ravaging of European civilization; the rise of the Soviet Union as the dominant power on the Eurasian landmass along with the communist enslavement of east central Europe; the invention and use of the atomic bomb followed by the rise of the American military-industrial complex and the Cold War--all because the British refused to concede the legitimate German claims to Danzig and the construction of a highway across the Corridor to East Prussia. In retrospect,does it all seem worth it?

Pat: err lets face it, Hanson never read it. It’s how WWII was reported
and chronicled prior and in its aftermath, via only the pre-disposition
and political objective of that predisposition. Yes the personal is political,
and culture shapes the personal as well.

Here’s some Facts I doubt Hanson is aware of either:

The Germans were very clear and forthcoming about what the “New Order” meant.
It meant right to self-determination. The by-word of their regime was:
“National Socialism is not for export.”

If the Germans wanted world conquest, they did not boast about it.
Rather it was *inferred real or imagined by those who wanted a world war,
again. -?-

Further, as Pat Buchanan says elsewhere, Hitler was publicly
and consistently an *admirer of the British Empire for its civilizing
influences. This is of course why the British were allowed to *leave
Normandy in *peace at the beginning of the war.

*And why the number two man in Germany, flew alone to Britain
to negotiate a peace and an end to the war — and was promptly
and forever *jailed incommunicado. What does the likes of a ‘Hanson’
reply to that? (He’s probably Not read much of anything.)

Churchill, by ignoring these overtures and allying with
*International Socialism, ended the British Empire for all time.
And ask yourself in behalf of what-?-his next brandy snifter?! He
was probably drunk - well not probably he always was - but impaired.

I note that many Americans don’t seem to be aware of what Socialism
meant to Europeans back then. Up until the aftermath of WWII,
the term still held connotations in common with the populist (volkisch)
movement. To differentiate what Americans call socialism from the
populist element, they called the former *international socialism
(Marxism) and the latter national socialism (i.e. self-determination.)

(Now Europeans use the word socialist the way Americans use liberal.)
The Germans also used the word “nation” in an ethnic sense.

To criticize how the Germans treated Czechoslovakia and Poland is to
question the principle of *self-determination. Czechoslovakia was a new country,
a fiction, an *abstraction that included three million *real Germans scattered
around the country and concentrated homogeneously along the German border.
Those native Germans *voted to rejoin Germany.

In Poland, *the president, who was a strong ally with Germany
was assassinated by *British agents prompting Germany to declare
a day following to be a bank holiday and day of mourning. Soon thereafter,
Polish partisans began attacking, wounding, and killing *tens of thousands
of German civilians, who had found themselves ruled by a foreign government
in the new boundaries made after WW-One. All this violated the principles of
*self-determination. What does a ‘Hanson’ say about that? Isn’t he in Iraq
(of course not himself personally) in behalf of “self-determination”?

This is why some say that had Hitler died in 1938, he would be *remembered
as a great statesman. In other words, it was in the *war that he became evil.

There is also the double standard of approving Allied occupation during
and after the war — Germany is *still occupied — but, our pretending that Axis
occupation during the war, alone was *“conquest.” Any valid criticism should
be *consistently applied. Hanson, is probably pushing perpetual occupation of
Iraq by u.s. forces. Right Mr. Hanson? WHO are you?

To say that Germany of the 1920s and 30s was a greater threat than the USSR
is to ignore the very real history of the *international Marxist movements.

When the Germans publicly denounced world conquest as against the principles
of self-determination and “race”, they were pointedly attacking the well-known
*promises of the USSR/Comintern for *world revolution.

(I.e. their form of globalism.) How soon we forget.

The USSR/Comintern had an unlimited budget financed out of *Manhattan
and had a larger army and more armaments than the *rest of the world *combined.

But Germany until the new government of 1933 was in the depths of an
*Allied-imposed *ten-digit inflation, massive unemployment and had no military
to speak of.

If the Germans secretly wanted world conquest *just like the Comintern,
it was an unrealistic fantasy.

You need to understand we are all concpetual creatures, so culture matters.
We pause at the conceptual level prior to activity and most of what we
decide at that pause or level is filled in by our culture.

The christian culture in the west has NOT had the media since the beginning
of the 20th Century. Instead it is molded and shaped by the culture dedicated
not to truth or free speech but rather its culture instructs to be dedicated
to the narrative i.e. ‘their narrative.’ That is a very dangerous culture to
be posing ‘as if’ dedicated to truth and to free speech to be in control of
a nation/s media. Sure that is tragi-comic. Right Hanson?

Dah...Hanson’s going maybe I should read again? Yes, Hanson - you should.

Buchanan does a great service by getting us past the “Great Patriotic War” spin that the Kremlin has put on WWII and he hints at the easy solution to saving 135 million in the last century.

No , the issue is not WWII revisionism.  It is WW 1.5 amnesia which was the real Big Bang of the 20th century.

Imagine there is no Trotsky/Lenin?

We avoid genocide of 15 million Ukrainians and Amish and Mennonite farmer in Ukraine in 32-33.

We avoid the thousands of “Bruder in Not” letters from Ukraine (yes, google it) that were displayed in Berlin storefronts that fanned support for the Nazis so that the peak of the genocide coincided with Hitlers assumption of the dictatorship ( to the month).

Yes, with no madness in the east, there would have been no madness of Germany ; no WWII and no Cold War.

Instead, we had a president who chose to fete Duranty and have his son reap a kings ransom in “commissions” for the sale of war planes to Stalin.

Instead we had a president who held back Patton and surrendered the west to the communists.

The average man will bitterly fight any reassessment of historical facts because when you rob him of his lifelong illusion, and you rob him also of his happiness (Ibsen).

Hanson is not an average man. He is a propagandist with an agenda, and perhaps with some outstanding IOUs to his neocon masters.

Just for information, here is Gary Brecher’s (William Lind?) outspoken assessment.

Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor
By Gary Brecher

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7843&IBLOCK_ID=35