Off the Rails
Posted By Russ Emerson on May 12, 2005 at 6:10 pm
Stephen Green at VodkaPundit reviews the post-WW2 historical record and uses it to demolish Pat Buchanan, who is alleged to be smart enough to have a syndicated column, and further alleged to be a conservative. I think neither allegation could be proven in a court of law. With Stephen, I would agree that PB has gone right round the bend. Or rather, I would say that his train has jumped completely off the track.
To reiterate what I said in his comments, I note that Stephen used the expression “the slippery slope from Young Turk conservative columnist to Nazi Apologist troglodyte” which, to me, seems to imply that both states can be found on the same political continuum.
I think that one would have to leave that continuum (I’d label it “Rationality”) entirely to become a Jew-hating Nazi apologist, as Buchanan apparently has become, just as one would have to do in order to turn from, say, a “Scoop Jackson” Democrat into a Stalin apologist.
That minor gripe notwithstanding, I agree with Stephen. It is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the most deluded kind to believe that in the Summer of 1945 the western Allies could have prevented the Soviets from doing exactly however they pleased in the Eastern European nations they had “liberated” from the Nazis. Yes, it would have been technically possible, particularly given America’s soon-to-be-revealed atomic weapon capability, but the price would have been far too high to pay.
It’s long past time that serious people at any place on the aforementioned Rationality spectrum listened with anything other than revulsion (or at least, disgusted curiosity) to what Buchanan says.
I know I have posted this type of comment at other bloggers’ entries on this topic, and I apologize if it offends you that I’m re-posting it here as well. The purpose of me doing this is not “spam,” but rather, to post my thoughts at blog entries that are on the same subject.
I think that Mr. Green’s entry is quite misleading, and he is way over the top in his attack on Mr. Buchanan. This blog entry is the best one that I’ve see so far, about this issue.
Unless he has changed it within recent years, Pat’s position on WWII has been this: Once we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war against us, we had to defeat the Axis powers. But I think that he has also said that we should have avoided an alliance with the Soviet Union…. And that if Britain and France had not guaranteed Polish boundaries, then Germany would have attacked the Soviet Union, which would have been of benefit to the Allied Powers. He asserts that it would have been better for us to have entered WWII after Germany and the Soviet Union had decimated each other.
(This is just an explanation… I am not saying that I agree with his assertions.)
For more information on this, from a balanced perspective, here is a book review from the Brothers Judd, and one from Professor John Pafford, and an article by William F. Buckley.