i am flabbergasted. i have never been a big fan of Pat Buchannan, but this is truly outrageous
Posted at 2008-06-20 11:28:30 [PermaLink]Buchanan is turning into a loony old man. I suspect he's trying to keep himself in the public eye, and doesn't care how he does it.
Posted at 2008-06-20 11:58:25 [PermaLink]He is doing immense harm to the cause of the Republican party. They need to repudiate this loony, and FAST!
Posted at 2008-06-20 12:15:27 [PermaLink]"He is doing immense harm to the cause of the Republican party. They need to repudiate this loony, and FAST!"
How? He's already ran for the presidency on the ticket of a different party, and he's not an elected member of anything as a Republican, nor has he been on good terms with the current Administration or with the current Presidential candidate What more exactly can they do?
You might as well claim that various parties need to repudiate David Orchard.
Look, just because what he's saying doesn't match what you've learned in elementary school doesn't mean he's wrong, still less a disgrace. This is basic, uncontroversial history. The decision to exterminate the Jews was made at the Wannsee Conference, and the Holocaust began in 1942. That's the fact.
Yes, the Germans killed a lot of Jews before then. Buchanan hasn't said otherwise, and your quote doesn't refute or contradict what he said. He's not wrong. He's not a Nazi or a Nazi apologist. I've never seen a source that didn't make it clear that the Holocaust was the consequence of the Nazi conquest of Europe, and was not decided on until there had ceased to be convenient independent countries to which the Jews could be deported more easily than they could be killed.
You're being childishly ignorant.
Only one copy of the Wansee Protocol survived the war and it was not discovered until March 1947, after the principals who participated in the conference had been executed. But it is not in itself a decision for the Holocaust. It is rather a confirmation of a policy which already existed. It merely fixes the time of the beginning of the Holocaust.
Posted at 2008-06-20 13:08:45 [PermaLink]History is a plagued subject. When a museum chooses to memorialize the word sardine as a morbid euphemism, it's as sad as Buchanan's interpretation of facts.
I don't think the problem is that he's historically 'wrong', but the fact that he seems to suggest that if compromises were made, the murderous intent of the Nazis would somehow have withered instead of becoming a monstrously efficient nightmare.
He seems to take a dim view of the kind of compromises that would seem to have been necessary to try it 'his way'. In this article, he calls it appeasement:
[External Link]
It also offers a theory on why some other insurmountable piles of corpses left scattered around Europe weren't really the Nazis fault either. To be honest, he's so far out there I'm not even 100% sure that he's using 'appeasement' in a bad way, so take it for what you will.
Oh COME ON, ebt
Buchanan is a historical illiterate. I've specialized in WW2 history for my MA, and the dreck he's written is so full of drivel, I'd smack the publisher who actually accepted this crap upside the head.
As to deciding when the Holocaust started - sunshine, it was well before 1942. All the Wannsee conference did was attempt to organise what had heretofor been a disorganised effort. Read your bloody history, sunshine and stay away from revisionist garbage penned by loony tunes. Or better yet, take a bloody undergraduate history class taught by someone who is actually qualified to teach it.
As for the contention that WW2 could have been averted in 1939... only a complete, blithering idiot would believe it possible. The window to stop Hitler closed in 1936, when the western powers let him re-militarize the Rhineland without a whimper. Had the French and the British countered with enough threat of force, Hitler would have been finished. That's not revisionist history - that's fact: Hitler and his generals were privately shitting their pants at the thought of the French stopping them in 1936. The Nazi war machine wasn't anywhere near what it was 3 years later, and his regime would have soured on the generals and the Germans.
Buchanan can kiss my tuches - he knows sweet f-all about history.
Please let us not forget that the Holocaust was not uniquely a Jewish tragedy... indeed, fewer than half of National Socialist victims were Jews. The other 8 millions must be remembered and honored.
That those additional 8 millions of the 14 millions were not mentioned by Buchanan suggests either gaps in his knowledge or an obsession.
Lori has it right.
The 1942 Wansee conference lasted only 90 minutes and was mainly concerned with coordinating activities. The death squads, SD-Einsatzgruppen, began operating in July of 1941, and the first large-scale gassings took place one day after Pearl Harbor, 12/8/41.
The NAZIs initially stripped the Jews of their wealth and sent them elsewhere. One problem was finding places that would accept them. Ships carrying Jewish refugees were routinely turned away from their destinations. It was only well after the beginning of the war, when the NAZIs had no place to send them, that they began routinely exterminating Jews.
The notion that Hitler could (or should) have been easily appeased is laughable, though.
Just to add one more quote.
Christopher Hitchens:
I myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with misgivings. ("Adlai," said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N. ambassador during the Bay of Pigs crisis, "wanted a Munich.") Yet the more the record is scrutinized and re-examined, the more creditable it seems that at least two Western statesmen, for widely different reasons, regarded coexistence with Nazism as undesirable as well as impossible. History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.
The whole book review is here:
[External Link]
The protocol of the Wannsee Conference has an up-to-date list of the Jewish population of Europe, including unoccupied countries, such as Spain and Ireland. The total is eleven million, which is relevant in that one standard denier claim is that there were only four million Jews in Europe.
But the listing I'm think of is very simple:
Estland -judenfrei-
"Estonia free of Jews".
Gassings in Poland began in December of 1941.
History is not just a list of facts. To say that Buchanan is "right" because Wansee was in 1942, or that he was "wrong" because Jews were rounded up before that, or pointing out that not only Jews suffered, all seems a bit pointless to debate.
My approach is that the overwhelming mass of evidence shows that Hitler wanted all Jews gone from the face of the Earth (and of course not by converting them to Christ...). And if he couldn't kill them off, he at least hoped to make his Reich Jew-Free.
Therefore, I'm offended with Buchanan's whole presentation. Some of his points could otherwise be debated. For example, his thesis that the UK and US could or should have avoided war in Europe, and left Hitler and Stalin to fight over the spoils. We'll never know will we, since that's not what happened.
But whatever he's trying to say, his obvious attempts to minimize Hitler's blood-lust make whatever else he has to say beside the point. Once I read that, I'm not interested in anything else he has to say.
He's like one of these moonbats arguing that the US shouldn't be in Korea or Iraq, and you say, "Hmm, you might have a point," and then they start yapping about how great Saddam was, and what a great leader Kim Jong-il is, and how Obama and McCain are both controlled by space aliens.
[External Link]
Speaking of Churchill (and keeping in mind our present dangers):
[External Link]