I didn’t read Pat Buchanan’s anti-non-white-immigration screed of two years ago. And I have no intention of reading his latest opus Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.
But Stephen Colbert’s rather amusing interview with a fulminating Buchanan probably tell us all we need to know about his thesis: that a belligerent Winston Churchill was largely to blame for the Second World War and that Britain and the United States should have let Hitler have his way in Poland and eastern Europe, while drawing a red line to Germany’s west and leaving Germany and Russia to destroy each other. Buchanan suggests such a strategy would have prevented the Holocaust– and perhaps the book explains exactly how this would have happened. But given that the vast majority of Europe’s Jews were in Germany and the East, I don’t see what would have stopped it.
Oh, and Buchanan suggests a direct comparison between the “unnecessary” war against the Nazis and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Buchanan’s book follows by a few months the release of another “revisionist” book about World War II– Nicholson Baker’s strange Human Smoke (reviewed here by Anne Applebaum).
Buchanan is a paleoconservative and Baker is a leftwing pacifist, but they seem to agree that much of the unpleasantness between 1939 and 1945 could have been avoided if it hadn’t been for that nasty warmonger Churchill.
