Churchill über alles and the scourge of revisionism

While probing the past is always worthwhile, revising it, is something else altogether.

In the latest epidemic to contaminate our understanding of World War II, two publications assert that the brutal British and the aggressive Americans, not the genocidal Germans, are the true villains.

Roy Williams’ assessment of - and let’s not mince words here, Nazi sympathiser - Patrick J. Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World exposes the latest strain of the virus (see December’s edition of the Australian Literary Review).

Buchanan argues that had the savage Winston Churchill not corralled a certain Austrian into an untenable corner, Der Fuehrer might not have, on September 1, 1939, dispatched 1,850,000 soldiers, 3,100 tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces and 2,085 airplanes to subjugate Poland. And in turn, have the Allies “unnecessarily” declare war, two days later. Elsewhere in the book, among other distortions, Buchanan opines that it was the Allies’ folly and not Hitler’s long standing desire of ridding Europe of Jews, which was responsible for the Holocaust.

Tens of millions of Europeans died needlessly because the Allies fought a war they chose not to avoid, seems to be what Pat Buchanan is selling. And Roy Williams is buying. And to boot, he wants us to buy too. But at what price?

The liberties we currently enjoy are the going rate, I suspect.

In an equally twisted review by Williams, this time of the leftist Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, the case is promoted that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime. Baker seemingly frog marches in lock step with one Jorg Friedrich, a most unattractive apologist for Nazi conduct during the war, who has railed for years against what he deems are Britain’s “war crimes”.

Baker says that there was no need to carpet bomb German towns and to pulverise infrastructure. This was so “unnecessary”, he declares. Suggesting, I infer, that less destructive ways (such as negotiations) were available to say, the Royal Air Force, to stop the flow of fuel, storm troopers, collaborators and bullets, earmarked for the mobile Nazi death units called the Einsatzgruppen which pillaged and raped, before merrily shooting and gassing their way through Europe and Russia.

Both Buchanan and Baker either mourn Hitler’s defeat or they are talking through their respective hats. They reveal the absurd demand (rekindled recently when asked of Israel while the Jewish State was fighting terror outfits like Hezbollah and Hamas, and asked of the United States when combating the jihadists in lraq) that western democracies be not just better than their adversaries, but must do battle with one arm tied behind their backs. Even it would seem, when fighting, an existentialist threat.

A major piece of heavy-duty revisionist artillery the sympathisers wheel out is what they label as the vengeful Treaty of Versailles, claiming that it ended World War I on a bitter note for the defeated Germany. The revisionists wilfully ignore that the terms offered to Germany were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 (after the Franco-Prussian War), or what Germany had planned for Britain and France had it won WWI. Such inconvenient truths by-pass the authors and their reviewer.

What led to World War II was not Allied malice to Germany between the two wars. The Allies’ mistake was in not occupying all of Germany after the WW I. Such an occupation would have shown the German people what the post WW II occupation of Germany demonstrated: first, that the Allies were committed to reintegrate Germany into Europe, and second, that an occupation dedicated to producing a robust democratic Deutschland bred 60 years of peace.

All three: Baker, Buchanan and Williams are guilty of waving selective quotes to suit their prejudices. Not surprising really. After all, it was the great Irish politician and writer, Conor Cruise O'Brien who wryly observed that all quotation is selective, otherwise it wouldn't be quotation.

Nicholson Baker reveals his naked bias: scraps of data are presented in such a way as to defend those who opposed the war, and denounce those who waged it. As an example, he mentions a 1940 Gestapo plan (approved of by Himmler) to create a “super ghetto” on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, to which 4 million European Jews would be taken. The implication is, of course, that the Nazis would have “resettled” rather than gassed those Jews, if only Winston had not declared war and cornered Adolf Hitler. Leaving Hitler (naturally) with no option but Zyklon-B.

In other parts of his book, Baker immortalises pacifists and humanises Nazis.

Pat Buchanan, props up a good part of his argument on the erroneous condemnation of Britain’s guarantee to Poland (of March 1939), which in turn, Buchanan laments, saw Britain declare war six months later. He considers the guarantee to be undiluted stupidity. Deceitfully, Buchanan ignores that Britain declared war because for years Hitler had violated all of Germany’s WWI agreements and had castrated Czechoslovakia.

Buchanan often repeats his assertion that the mass murder of Jews resulted from Hitler being trapped by the Allies, and echoes (as do many other pseudo historians) that extermination was not planned by the Nazis but was more of an ad hoc response to the circumstances in which the Third Reich found itself. Buchanan once again shows that he is masterful in not allowing his critics to say he misrepresents the facts. In most cases he doesn’t. He merely ignores them. There is compelling evidence, ignored by Buchanan, that from as early as 1920 (some say 1919) Herr Hitler was committed to liquidating Europe’s Jews.

That Buchanan’s sympathies rest with the Reich are clear. In the chapter “Fatal Blunder”, Buchanan uses the title to paint Britain’s political leadership - responsible for launching WWII - as overseeing the “greatest empire since Rome” shrivel into a pitiful island sucking at the American teat for subsistence.

Among other “blunders” is an event that began at 01:00 on November 10, 1938. An event best known as Kristallnacht.

That’s right. The organised state-sanctioned anti Jewish riots that razed 267 synagogues and either vandalised or looted more than 7,500 Jewish businesses, while butchering least 91 Jewish people and rounding up 25,000, is to Buchanan, a “blunder”. The Chosen People should be grateful for such generosity. After all, Buchanan’s “blunder” captures 91 deaths, whereas the pseudo historian and certified crackpot, David Irving, dismissed the gigantic human abattoirs of Auschwitz, Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka and others, as “mere details”.

Ignoring rather than misrepresenting the facts is what condemns Buchanan and Baker. But such slyness is not limited to the two authors. The reviewer, Roy Williams exposes his bias or ignorance. Perhaps both.

Williams parrots Buchanan: “Hitler did not fight World War II to bring about the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a direct and foreseen consequence of Germany being simultaneously at war with Britain, the US and Stalin’s Russia.” Clearly both Buchanan and Williams are at best unaware, or at worst excuse, the one million Jews slaughtered in the name of racial purity before the plans of the Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question) were fully implemented in 1942.

Williams further shows his hand when, at the end of his review, he crows “in July 1945, soon after the war ended in Europe, Britain held a general election … (where) Clement Attlee’s Labor Party won in a landslide. The beleaguered British people ... had seen through (Churchill)”.

Not a peep from Williams reminding readers that Churchill regained the Prime Ministership in 1951.

If Buchanan and Baker want to ignore facts, pen distortions and revise history, then so be it. But let’s demand that reviewers don’t give them a free pass.

Of course that presupposes that reviewers, unlike Buchanan and Baker, didn’t skip history classes at school. A tall order I suspect.