I'm not a fan of Pat Buchanan. I flip the channel or change the station when I hear his voice or see his face. And I certainly don't read his column unless someone directs me to it because of specific content.

This is one of those cases -- and ought to be sufficient grounds for my fellow conservatives to excommunicate him from the movement.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement. ..."

Again, Bush has made a hash of history.

Appeasement is the name given to what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in September 1938. Rather than fight Germany in another great war -- to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised -- he agreed to their peaceful transfer to German rule. With these Germans went the lands their ancestors had lived upon for centuries, German Bohemia, or the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain's negotiated deal with Hitler averted a European war -- at the expense of the Czech nation. That was appeasement.

German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson's 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.

Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.

But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.

From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.

The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.

Pat Buchanan is clearly more than an idiot in this column -- he is one who is deluded in his thinking. It is quite clear from Mein Kampf and Nazi campaign rhetoric that Hitler had a plan for expansion that went well-beyond the "recovery" of land that was inhabited by ethnic Germans. It was undeniable that the evils of the Final Solution have their roots not in the intransigence of Poland in the face of militaristic threats by Germany, but in a deeper seated hatred of the Jews. After all, the Nuremberg laws and other restrictions of Jews predated the invasion of Poland by years, and are clearly presaged in Hitler's earlier writing. For that matter, the spring of 1939 had seen the blitzkrieg into parts of Czechoslovakia which Hitler had promised to leave unmolested only a few months before. One has to at a minimum be ignorant of the historical record to make the claims that Buchanan does in his column.

But we all know that Buchanan is not ignorant of History.

No, for Buchanan to praise the appeasement of Hitler and condemn those who stood up to him is clearly based in something else -- either an antipathy to the Jews (a charge we've heard against him before) or an anti-Communism run so deep that even Hitler can be rehabilitated in the name of that cause. Indeed, i find myself looking for a proposal that the British and French would have done better to ally with Hitler to attack Stalin in 1938 & 1939, despite the fact that the most acute threat to European security was the Nazi regime and not the Red Menace.

So let me make it clear -- Pat Buchanan has clearly moved beyond the pale of conservatism, into that shadowy realm of right-wing authoritarianism which circles around to meet its left-wing siblings of socialism, communism, and fascism. He has therefore earned a place of shame with Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times

H/T Gateway Pundit, One Jerusalem, Below the Beltway, Soccer Dad

Posted by: Greg at 10:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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