I see that our old friend Pat Buchanan is talking out of his arse again. Apparently, blame for WW1, WW2 and even the Holocaust can be laid firmly at the doorstep of mainly British politicians, and Winston Churchill in particular. Even by Buchanan's usual standards, he really is excelling this time; he's not just misinterpreting facts, but in his new book
'Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World' even manages to re-write them!
Case in point; he alleges that "the secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France," is directly causal of WW1.
I assume that, by that, he's actually referring to the 1904
Entente Cordiale agreements, which have essentially been the basis of Britain and France's alliance for over a century and paved the way for military and diplomatic co-operation between Britain, France and Russia as part of the Triple Entente. That'd be the Entente Cordiale that was brought in by a majority vote in the House of Commons, as opposed to a secret agreement by "a tiny cabal."
The Entente was signed for several reasons, one of which was an agreement of mutual defence should the Germans invade either country - and given the aggressive expansion policy Germany was undertaking at the time, is it any wonder? But of course, signing a mutual defence agreement - secret, as alleged, or otherwise - is clearly a spark for continent-wide warfare. Nothing to do with those poor Germans conquering other countries and declaring war on Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan, in which they'd sweep through what're now the Benelux countries to invade France. Nothing at all.
Some websites sympathetic to Buchanan's views have pointed out that, if the agreement was indeed secret, had there been a huge fanfare surrounding it instead, Germany would have known not to go to war. The logic there is valid to a point, but that's like saying that a murderer wouldn't have committed the crime if he'd
known he'd be caught - the fact remains that the act was carried out by him. That aside, I somehow suspect that an agreement voted through in the House of Commons couldn't have been all
that secretive - and even if the mutual defence part was kept under wraps, wouldn't the fact that
Britain and
France were suddenly best friends have given a vaguely astute politician a bit of a hint?
Anyway, moving on to WW2. Apparently, we should basically have just stood back and let Hitler invade other countries, which would have brought peace to the globe. Our promise to declare war if Hitler invaded Poland - when his army was already on the border and ready, let us not forget - was the catalyst for WW2, and poor old Germany got the raw end of the deal again.
So in essence, it's all Britain's fault, because if we hadn't issued that guarantee, Hitler
might not have invaded Poland after all, or any of the countries that followed.
To suggest such a thing can only stem from stupidity, naivety or a desire to cause controversy in order to sell a book. Normally, I'd go with number three, but given that it's Buchanan we're talking about, I'm not quite certain. Hitler had made it quite clear that he intended to acquire
Lebensraum through any means necessary, including the resources required to make the Third Reich self-sufficient. Given the aggression he began showing as soon as the policy of appeasement was abandoned (and indeed beforehand), how one could argue that he didn't actually intend to go to war is quite beyond me.
As for the Holocaust? Well, the Allied response to Hitler's war (i.e. fighting back) clearly forced him into it. He didn't really want to do it. It just came about that way. To quote Buchanan, "What Hitler did was a monstrous crime... But it was a war crime. Had there been no war there would have been no Holocaust in my judgment."
Essentially, while Buchanan concedes that Hitler was anti-semetic, he argues that had Britain not made that guarantee, Nazi Germany wouldn't have expanded westwards and would only have killed
some of the Jews - which is hardly a holocaust now, is it?
There might have been even the slightest
teasing hint of credulity to that belief if it weren't for the fact that he'd been talking about the extermination of Jews openly in 1939 (never mind hints even earlier, such as in Mein Kampf), when he declared in a speech that, "A second world war... will result in the destruction of Jews in Europe." Given that the war didn't really start going against him until 1941, it's hard to see how the war forced the poor little lamb into such action - and even then, the extermination started in autumn of 1941, whereas things started going badly wrong for him in Russia in December 1941. And then there's the whole 'concentration camps' shindig before that, the first of which - Dachau - opened in 1933(!).
I'd have to read the book in full to really pull it to pieces, but given just those basic fundamental flaws just from the excerpts available, I don't think it warrants the money being spent on it. I won't deny that Churchill had his faults (indeed, he had many), but to lay the blame for over 50 million dead and the worst case of systematic genocide in recorded history at his feet really is pushing it just a bit!
Pat Buchanan, you're an arse. But then, we were all already pretty keenly aware of that.