Patrick J. Buchanan deserves respect for blasting open an important historical question that the gatekeepers of allowable opinion probably assumed they had welded shut. According to the official version of American history, we are supposed to draw from World War II only a series of neat lessons about “appeasement” and our government’s unquenchable thirst for justice. Innocently wondering if there might have been some alternative to 50 million deaths and the most terrible war in history is enough to make you an object of suspicion—what are you, some kind of extremist?
Even from parts of the Right, the subject of World War II elicits the shrill denunciations, the smears, and the unchallengeable orthodoxies for which conservatives have traditionally condemned the politically correct Left. Buchanan may be wrong (though I do not think he is), but there is nothing wicked or perverse about considering contrary-to-fact scenarios in light of historical evidence. His prose is measured and non-polemical, and his judgments, which are shared by a great many historians and other figures of distinction, deserve to be considered on their merits. Claims that Buchanan’s version of history is politically motivated can hardly be taken seriously, especially coming from people who have made comfortable livings out of distorting the historical record on behalf of their own foreign-policy ambitions.
Munich is the most obvious example. Counting on popular ignorance, neoconservatives never weary of applying the “lessons of Munich” to modern American foreign policy. These so-called lessons turn out to be a decontextualized muddle of half-crazed maxims about the pointlessness of negotiation, the self-serving fraudulence of all enemy grievance claims, and the risk that unless the United States responds with overwhelming force to the slightest modification of the status quo—the justice or injustice of which is not up for discussion—we’ll soon be speaking Ruritanian. Cartoon history begets cartoon policy.
If only the matter had been as simple as modern propaganda about Munich would have it. In 1919, in defiance of the much heralded principle of self-determination, 3 million Germans had been consigned to what became second-class status in the new Czechoslovakia. German grievances, most of which were considered reasonable by just about everyone, had to be addressed one way or another if an endless cycle of war and punishment was to be avoided.
In other words, crushing Germany in a war over the Sudetenland would merely have returned Europe to square one: more punitive peace terms, further German resentment, and yet another episode of hyperpatriotic German politics aimed at revenge. Diplomats in the real world, denounced today as fools and appeasers, had a difficult situation on their hands as they approached this problem.
Buchanan makes a strong case against Britain giving a war guarantee to Poland rather than drawing a realistic line in the West that Hitler could not cross without risking war. George Kennan, as mainstream as they come, said so in a letter to Buchanan in 1999. And Ernest May, my old professor at Harvard, noted, “a government that a half-year earlier had resisted going to war for a faraway country with democratic institutions, well-armed military forces, and strong fortifications, now promised with no apparent reservations to go to war for a dictatorship with less-than-modern armed forces and wide-open frontiers.” A swashbuckling Polish regime was thus given the power to decide whether Britain would be drawn into war, a war Britain was absurdly unprepared to wage, much less win.
The number of politicians—and, later, historians—who considered Chamberlain’s war guarantee reckless and ill advised will surprise most readers. Lloyd George called it a “frightful gamble” and laughed out loud at the suggestion that it would deter Hitler. Even Churchill, in his official history, wondered (albeit disingenuously in light of his own position in 1939): “How could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? … Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”
Why should legitimate opinions like these be beyond the pale?
Probably the most important reason that free discussion of World War II—the diplomatic blunders, the Allied atrocities, all the what ifs—has been frowned upon or suppressed is that some people perceive an implicit disregard for the unspeakable fate of Europe’s Jews. Yet it was the war itself that put Europe’s Jewish populations in danger in the first place, an obvious point that has been missed by all but a few writers.
In February 1942, for example, Goebbels wrote in his diaries, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe. … The Führer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.” A month later, after describing the deportations from Poland’s ghettos, Goebbels observed, “Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.”
“Because Britain issued the war guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany,” writes Buchanan, “by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans.” If he’s right, then with more sensible British diplomacy, the Jewish populations of Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, and Yugoslavia would have survived, just as the Jewish populations of Sweden, Switzerland, and the Iberian Peninsula did.
David Gordon, a (Jewish) scholar Buchanan thanks in his acknowledgments, has likewise wondered in light of all this: “Was it not a clear moral imperative to avoid the outbreak of war and, if possible, to secure the evacuation of the Jews from parts of Europe likely to fall under German control? Further, once war broke out, was it not imperative to end the war as soon as possible?” This, surely, is a morally serious position.
No one would have begrudged Buchanan a quiet retirement. He chose instead to re-examine a historical episode that all sectors of society treat with religious reverence, knowing full well how his work, which most of his opponents would not bother to read, would be received. But once the guardians of acceptable opinion have finished venting their spleens at what a scoundrel Buchanan is for not dutifully repeating the things he was taught in seventh grade, normal people may begin to evaluate his thesis rationally. The existence of this symposium suggests that that process may have begun.
by Thomas E. Woods Jr
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