The Last Taboo

Pat Buchanan has authored a book that indicates a knowledge of history that is exceedingly rare among the bloviators who dominate our public discourse. As something of an amateur historian myself, it is extremely gratifying to know that somebody out there understands the real import of the World Wars and is not afraid to confront that ultimate taboo: Hitler was rational, and war was unnecessary.

Our paradigm of the "good war", the "greatest generation" and so forth is part of a pattern of historical ignorance that, if anything, greatly increases the chances that America will impale itself on the same swords of folly that claimed the European empires.

What Hitler was after, and what so few people are capable of acknowledging, were rather rational and limited prizes. He sought simply to reclaim historically German lands that had been ripped from the Reich as part of the punishment meted out after World War I. Hitler was a son of a bitch, a racist, and a Jew-hater, yes, but when one considers what was "won" in the war against him, the fall of Hitler is Pyhrric in retrospect.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamerlain's "appeasement" of Hitler was a round peg that Americans have been smashing into square holes ever since. What Chamerlain "gave away" was not his to give, first and foremost. He "gave" German land back to Germany. Hitler did not seize non-German land until after the British Empire declared war on Germany.

And why did the British Empire declare war on Germany? Because Germany insisted on reclaiming the German city of Danzig, which had been given over to Poland after World War I. It was here that the British drew the line. It was the British who turned a revanchist and irridentist and inherently finite German movement into a World War.

It was the British who began the aerial bombardment of German cities. And, lest we forget, the unparalleled crime of the Holocaust was a result of the war of extermination against Germany, not a cause of it.

And what was "won"? Well, Eastern Europe was eventually "liberated" by a totalitarian dictatorship which brought with it a half-century of tyranny and military occupation. Winston Churchill is accredited with saying "We've killed the wrong pig." And England? England went from the Empire upon which the sun never set to an island dependency of the United States. Some victory.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Americans were quick to label him a new Hitler. They were right, but they didn't realize that they were drawing the wrong analogy, for in truth, not even Hitler was Hitler, as most of us understand him.

Saddam Hussein seized land that had historically been part of the Iraqi state. Hussein was a son of a bitch, but his seizure of Kuwait, just like Hitler's seizure of the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, and Danzig, had clear historical logic. This distinction was deemed irrelevant by the leaders of the West, however, and each man was portrayed as an irrational, insatiable aggressor, who would press on to San Diego if given the chance.

It is natural that Americans would be loathe to question the necessity of the "good war", since we are so conspicuously deficient of "good wars" as of late. But there is a truth here that is actually rather liberating. The truth is that a single son of a bitch does NOT have the power to plunge superpowers into war. Only the superpowers can do that.

"We killed the wrong pig", said Churchill, after delivering half of Europe and much of the de-colonized new nations to Stalin. And have we not "killed the wrong pig" in Mesopotamia as well? What have we gained from the demise of Saddam Hussein? An ungovernable Iraq and an ascendant Iran. There is a parallel here worth considering.

Seen from the proper perspective, the World Wars were actually a single 30-year European Civil War. East and West, left and right, market and state. These were the combatants. The end result was the death of European civilization as the dominant political force on Earth, with America salvaging what remained. This, in my mind, is the ultimate tragedy.

I hope it unnecessary to patronize myself by stipulating that I have no illusions about Hitler. The reality, of course, it that it is my country's memory that is illusory when it comes to Hitler. A son of a bitch? Yes. But a man whose defeat was worth the death of the West? I doubt if such a man has ever been born.