Patrick Buchanan- Nazi

I've had to get my nerve up to write this post, I was so upset by what follows. Patrick Buchanan is not some out-of-the-mainstream lunatic sitting in his parents' basement with one hand on the keyboard and the other in a bag of cheetos. He is, apparently, a respected and legitimate member of the mainstream commenter class, treated as an acceptable political voice by a wide range of mainstream pundits (that means you, in particular, Rachel Maddow.)

What follows is a perfect demonstration of how far our country's political discourse has been damaged by the most vile of right wing madness. In order to comprehend the true malignancy of this article, you must have some real familiarity with the events leading up to World War II. There is not room here to fully document all of the assertions I am about to make, but anyone is free to check. At the end of this piece, I will list my favorite sources for this information.

Well, here we go, with our descent into true ugliness. This is an article which Pat saw fit to publish yesterday. And let me say, I'm not throwing the word Nazi around lightly here. This guy, as I've said before, is the real thing:

"
Did Hitler want war?"

Oh, I don't know, Pat. He'd been talking about it since the early twenties. It turned out that he meant what he said, huh? Yet you are now about to try to convince us that this noble man, Adolf Hitler, wanted nothing more than to live in peace with his fellow man.

"By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Josef Stalin"

The most barbarous tyranny in history? The greatest terrorist of them all? You know Pat, that was Hitler's argument. Let me do what I want, because communists are worse. And guess what? They weren't, as you know perfectly well, you ugly lying monster.

"What cause could justify such sacrifices?"

Lebensraum, Pat. Blood and Soil. Remember those ideas? You have written articles this year advocating these classic Nazi principles for our country. Don't tell us you've forgotten that Hitler had been saying since at least 1923 that the superior Aryan race deserved the land occupied by the inferior people to the East (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Hungary, Rumania, etc.) and had a perfect right to take them by force.

"The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination.

Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire

would come to Poland's rescue."

Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Hitler? Are you kidding me? Maybe because they saw what happened in Czechoslovakia, where "negotiation" consisted of abject capitulation or mass slaughter. Maybe they saw the same thing happen in Austria. Maybe they saw even the pathetic guarantees Hitler gave those countries as he occupied them brushed aside in days, in favor of reigns of terror. And right they were. Let us not forget that Pat knows full well, that it was Hitler's plan to exterminate the Polish people by slavery and starvation as rapidly as possible. Maybe that's why the Polish government didn't "negotiate" with Hitler as he incited German hatred of the Poles in obvious preparation for what was to come. Maybe they didn't feel like signing their own death warrants.

"But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?"

Maybe a junta of Polish colonels seemed like a better ally than the biggest mass murderer in history.

"Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative "to stop Hitler" after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.

If true, a fair point."

But, of course, according to Pat, it is nothing but a big lie. Hitler wasn't out to conquer the world. Oh, no, no. He wanted nothing but peace and love with his fellow man.

How can any person put these words in print? This is a moral depravity on a level with the worst criminal behavior I can think of.

"After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.

"Crumble and come apart?" It was overrun by a vicious, murderous army and subject to a reign of terror. And that is what you would call it, Pat? It crumbled and came apart under German jackboots.

The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary's ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate."

There is so much lying in this paragraph that I cannot deal with all of it. The Slovaks had their "full independence guaranteed by Germany." This consisted of a Hitler created puppet state, which was agreed to as the only alternative to complete destruction. The "protectorate" that Hitler forced on the Czechs was in fact a terrorist slave state run by the SS and the Gestapo, under the rule of one of the most ruthless Nazis of all, Reinhard Heydrich. Hungary received its piece of Slovakia in return for eventually turning itself into a small Nazi state itself. And all of these agreements were carried out under the threat from Hitler that the alternative would be far worse.

"Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?"

Are you totally crazy? How does conquest manifest an interest in conquest? What in God's name are you trying to sell us? How stupid would we have to be to buy this? The destruction of Czechoslovakia, cynically called by Pat a "partition," was the third such action in the previous two years, after the seizures of the Rhineland and Austria. What were people to make of such behavior?

"If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?"

Because he controlled airfields in France and Belgium that he and Goehring were convinced were more than sufficient to carry out an air attack against Britain.

"Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?"

Because he made a big mistake. Pat, do you think Hitler was the perfect human being, above mistakes?

"Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?"

Because he intended to attack the Soviet Union as soon as possible, and didn't want to fight a two front war. We know from massive records that he intended to deal with Britain as soon as it was convenient. And we also know from his peace deal with Stalin, what peace with Hitler meant.

"Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez?"

Because at the end of World War I, the Germans were defeated and the Allies could make such a demand. After the fall of Paris, the French fleet was still in unconquered French hands in the Mediterranean.

"Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?"

Because he wanted all of Italy's troops to aid him in his planned attack on the Soviet Union, and he didn't want to have energy wasted on what he saw as irrelevant issues.

Every assertion I have made above is massively documented with German records captured after World War II, and most of it was crystal clear at the time. Pat Buchanan, in arguing otherwise, is not only perpetrating one of the ugliest lies any human could tell, but he is voluntarily spreading Hitler's own rationalizations.

"Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps."

This is an absolute lie, and Pat knows it full well. Hitler, in 1940 was planning his attack on the Soviet Union, which he massively underestimated, and was occupied in Northern Africa in his eventually unsuccessful drive to Saudi Arabia's oil fields.

And by the way, is Pat asserting that, if the Allies had capitulated to Hitler, he wouldn't have killed the Jews?

"Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland"

This is also an absolute lie. It was Hitler's intention to eliminate the Polish people entirely, so their land could be taken by Germans. In fact, this plan had been largely carried out in large parts of Poland by the end of the war, so there really can't be much question about this. In hundreds of Polish villages, the residents were simply ejected into the forest to starve and die, while their homes were occupied by Germans.

"....why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France?"

He didn't want to be surrounded by friendly neighbors. He wanted their land, and he wanted them dead. Maybe you never noticed that, Pat.

"As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?"

I don't know, Pat. Maybe he had the idea that, between then and his planned 1941 invasion of Russia, he would seize the countries between Germany and Russia, and then he would be right next door. You think there is any historical evidence that that was his idea? By the way, just as an aside, in 2003, the United States did not have a border with Iraq. How then could we invade Iraq, you stupid dick? It is possible, you know.

"Winston Churchill

was right when he called it "The Unnecessary War" – the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization."

Right on there, Pat- stopping Hitler may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.

Now let me make this clear: Every word Pat Buchanan utters here parallels exactly the arguments and positions of Hitler himself. And every word is devoted to somehow arguing away the manifest evil of Hitler, and portraying him as the victim of the presumably liberal allies. I can think of no more contemptible, lying, malignant argument that any human being could make. And yet here it is, in the middle of our supposedly serious national discourse, with, apparently no one except the pathetic Green Eagle to express a word of outrage. That's how sick the right has made our nation.

As promised, my two favorite general sources for information about the Nazis: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer, and the three volume history of the Nazis recently completed by Cambridge Professor Richard Evans. Both of these works are generally available.

Update: Well, Green Eagle is not the only one to be outraged over this. In a quick look, I found comments on Pat Buchanan's abominable piece on Eschaton, Talking Points Memo, Americablog, Daily Kos and American Prospect. This thing should be rammed down the throats of all the sick right wingers out there who try to claim the higher moral ground for their gospel of greed and hate.

Comments

Poll P. said…
Bravo!

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