No War, No Holocaust?

[fatman]

An interesting article, not sure if I buy into it but definitely interesting.

Opinion
 
Pat Buchanan
Was the Holocaust Inevitable?Fri Jun 20, 3:00 AM ET
 

"What Would Winston Do?"

So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all.

Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power.

That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks."

Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The Brits kicked away their empire. Through colossal blunders, Britain twice declared war on a Germany that had not attacked her and did not want war with her, fought for 10 bloody years and lost it all.

Unable to face the truth, Hitchens seeks solace in old myths.

We had to stop Prussian militarism in 1914, says Hitchens. "The Kaiser's policy shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe."

Nonsense. If the Kaiser were looking for a war he would have found it. But in 1914, he had been in power for 25 years, was deep into middle age but had never fought a war nor seen a battle.

From Waterloo to World War I, Prussia fought three wars, all in one seven-year period, 1864 to 1871. Out of these wars, she acquired two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, and two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. By 1914, Germany had not fought a war in two generations.

Does that sound like a nation out to conquer the world?

As for the Kaiser's bellicose support for the Boers, his igniting the Agadir crisis in 1905, his building of a great fleet, his seeking of colonies in Africa, he was only aping the British, whose approbation and friendship he desperately sought all his life and was ever denied.

In every crisis the Kaiser blundered into, including his foolish "blank cheque" to Austria after Serb assassins murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Kaiser backed down or was trying to back away when war erupted.

Even Churchill, who before 1914 was charging the Kaiser with seeking "the dominion of the world," conceded, "History should ... acquit William II of having plotted and planned the World War."

What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust.

Yet consider. Before Britain declared war on him, Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France.

Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain ? a war he never wanted.

If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.

Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France?

If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.

That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.

And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.

Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.

"Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime ... ?"

Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.

The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.

The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. No wonder Winston Churchill was so melancholy in old age. No wonder Christopher rails against the book. As T.S. Eliot observed, "Mankind cannot bear much reality."


Link

[Plane]

If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.

Because The British sank it with air raids.

[Michael Tee]

Hitler did threaten:  "if the international financial Jewry within and outside Europe should succeed once more in dragging the nations into a war, the result will be, not the Bolshevization of the world and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." 

I think war gave Hitler the cover he needed to carry out the Holocaust, and I believe it's at least possible that Buchanan is right, "No war, no Holocaust."    Britain and France did not go to war to prevent the Holocaust or save the Jews or destroy fascism.  They had their own reasons, largely connected with their desire to protect their own Empires, and I'm very grateful to Professor R. Overy's book "The Origins of the Second World War," for explaining all this to me.  For most of my life, I had wondered why DID France and Britain go to war, and Prof. Overy answers this very competently and convincingly.

Still and all there is no way to under-estimate the evil of Adolf Hitler.  This guy was a moral monster, to Aryan Germans who opposed him no less than to Jews, Gipsies and other so-called "untermenschen."  Even without a war and a Holocaust, Hitler was capable of immeasurable evil, and who is to say that another way would not have been found for him to commit deeds as evil as the Holocaust but in some other venue, had Britain and France not decided to challenge  him on the invasion of Poland.

I also don't agree with Buchanan that the Holocaust only began after the Wannsee Conference.  Wikipedia has an excellent article on the Holocaust, from which it is perfectly clear that the Holocaust was well underway by the end of 1941 before the Wannsee Conference began, only the Germans were limited by their killing methods (mass shootings and Vernichtung durch Arbeit or Anihilation Through Work) in which Jewish slave labour was killed by a combination of endless back-breaking labour, starvation, exposure to the elements, torture, beatings and deprivation.  Both the mass shootings and the Vernichtung durch Arbeit  claimed hundreds of thousands of victims - -  the only solid accomplishment of the Wannsee Conference was that it ended a dispute between those who wanted the Jews kept alive as a source of slave labour and those who wanted to kill them off as fast as possible.  The debate was resolved in favour of the latter position and soon thereafter the use of Zyklon B gas in new, massive gas chambers replaced the older and less efficient killing methods.

[sirs]

Is it no wonder certain contingents of the left moronically keep trying to imply some twisted thought process that Bush = Hitler (or a moronic version of such)

[Michael Tee]

The similarities between Bush and Hitler are all too obvious.  The "equals" sign is misleading, because even after allowing for Bush's obvious inferiority to Hitler in terms of battlefield courage, verbal and oratorical skills, writing skills, artistic skills, organizational skills, resourcefulness etc., I don't say that there is a precise correspondence between the two, only that Bush is a lot LIKE Hitler, not that he is the same as Hitler, as the "equals" sign would seem to imply.

The similarities are:
 - readiness to engage in wars of unprovoked aggression based on pretexts that are pure fiction
 - readiness to use torture to extract information from enemies, or just as punishment
 - demonization of entire groups of human beings with assigned motivations that are patently absurd and ridiculous (the "evil" Jews plotting to take over the world, the "evil"  "militant" Muslims plotting to destroy "the West" because "they hate us for our freedoms")
 - unrestrained war on civilian populations to achieve stated geopolitical objectives
 - creation or exploitation of random terroristic attacks to justify a program of ever-increasing erosion of basic civil and human rights (the Reichstag Fire, the Sept. 11 attacks)
 - elevation of the executive branch over the other two branches (the "Fuhrer principle," the "Imperial Presidency")
 - unrestrained militarism, glorification of war and violence as the highest calling in the nation.

[sirs]

Thanks for validating my point regarding the twisted thought process, Tee

[Michael Tee]

My pleasure, sirs.  Sorry I forgot to make my usual concession that Bush would likely be more fun to hang out with.  Never meant to imply that he was inferior to Hitler in EVERY respect.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Hitler was an actual leader. People followed him and his ideas, not his party.

Juniorbush is a second-rate flunky the oligarchy hired to do their bidding because to a man, they are all too utterly despicable to get anyone to follow them. Observe how no one likes Cheney, and after all, Wyoming elected him to the House several times, so he is about as agreeable a clown as they have.

Juniorbush has never had a single original idea.

That said, we are lucky that Juniorbush is NOT another Hitler.
Some poisons kill, others just give you the trots. Hitler was more like the former, Juniorbush the latter.

WWI was entirely avoidable, and we'd all have been better off if everyone had just let the Austrians clobber the Serbs and forgotten about it. The US had no business entering WWI, either.

[hnumpah]

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.

That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.

As I recall, the trains didn't have to roll... the Jews (and others) were confined to ghettoes (such as in Warsaw). There they could be robbed of all their valuables, used for forced labor, starved and killed off in other ways. Seems the Germans had a good start before the trains started rolling.

[hnumpah]

Morality ? Trotskyite vs. Christian
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Did Hitler's crimes justify the Allies' terror-bombing of Germany?

Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek response to my new book, "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War": "The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities."

Atheist, Trotskyite and newborn neocon, Hitchens embraces the morality of lex talionis: an eye for an eye. If Germans murdered women and children, the British were morally justified in killing German women and children.

According to British historians, however, Churchill ordered the initial bombing of German cities on his first day in office, the very first day of the Battle of France, on May 10, 1940.

After the fall of France, Churchill wrote Lord Beaverbrook, minister of air production: "When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path ... an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland."

"Exterminating attack," said Churchill. By late 1940, writes historian Paul Johnson, "British bombers were being used on a great and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian population in their homes."

"The adoption of terror bombing was a measure of Britain's desperation," writes Johnson. "So far as air strategy was concerned," adds British historian A.J.P. Taylor, "the British outdid German frightfulness first in theory, later in practice, and a nation which claimed to be fighting for a moral cause gloried in the extent of its immoral acts."

The chronology is crucial to Hitchens' case.

Late 1940 was a full year before the mass deportations from the Polish ghettos to Treblinka and Sobibor began. Churchill had ordered the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and civilians before the Nazis had begun to execute the Final Solution.

By Hitchens' morality and logic, Germans at Nuremberg might have asserted a right to kill women and children because that is what the British were doing to their women and children.

After the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945, Churchill memoed his air chiefs: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed."

Churchill concedes here what the British had been about in Dresden.

Under Christian and just-war theory, the deliberate killing of civilians in wartime is forbidden. Nazis were hanged for such war crimes.

Did the Allies commit acts of war for which we hanged Germans?

When we recall that Josef Stalin's judges sat beside American and British judges at Nuremberg, and one of the prosecutors there was Andrei Vishinsky, chief prosecutor in Stalin's show trails, the answer has to be yes.

While Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were surely guilty of waging aggressive war in September 1939, Stalin and his comrades had joined the Nazis in the rape of Poland, and had raped Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well. Scores of thousands of civilians in the three Baltic countries were murdered.

Yet, at Nuremberg, Soviets sat in judgment of their Nazi accomplices, and had the temerity to accuse the Nazis of the Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps that the Soviets themselves had committed.

Americans fought alongside British soldiers in a just and moral war from 1941 to 1945. But we had as allies a Bolshevik monster whose hands dripped with the blood of millions of innocents murdered in peacetime. And to have Stalin's judges sit beside Americans at Nuremberg gave those trials an aspect of hypocrisy that can never be erased.

At Nuremberg, Adm. Erich Raeder was sentenced to prison for life for the invasion of neutral Norway. Yet Raeder's ships arrived 24 hours before British ships and marines of an operation championed by Winston Churchill.

The British had planned to violate Norwegian neutrality first and seize Norwegian ports to deny Germany access to the Swedish iron ore being transshipped through them. For succeeding where Churchill failed, Raeder was condemned as a war criminal and sent to prison.

The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal decided that at Nuremberg only the crimes of Axis powers would be prosecuted and that among those crimes would be a newly invented "crimes against humanity." This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48 hours after we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and 24 hours before we dropped the second on Nagasaki.

We and the British judiciously decided not to prosecute the Nazis for the bombing of London and Coventry.

It was an understandable decision, and one that surely Gen. Curtis LeMay concurred in, as LeMay had boasted at war's end, "We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9?10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."

After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking place at Nuremberg as "victor's justice." Ten years later, a young colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft "A Profile in Courage" for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The young senator was John F. Kennedy.

June 25, 2008

via LewRockwell.com

[hnumpah]

Is it no wonder certain contingents of the left moronically keep trying to imply some twisted thought process that Bush = Hitler (or a moronic version of such)

I didn't notice anyone mention el Shrubbo in this thread until you did.

Guilty conscience?

[Michael Tee]

<<Seems the Germans had a good start before the trains started rolling.>>

Well, that was the whole point of the Wannsee Conference.  What looked like a good start to some people was, in German eyes, clumsy and inefficient.   The whole process had to be speeded up and, in effect, turned into an industry.

Bush's similarity to Hitler is not in his objectives, for Bush has no real ideology.  He's smart enough to read Mein Kampf and even to "get" it, but he wouldn't bother, because he has no interest in ideas.

Bush like Hitler places no value on human lives, certainly not on foreign lives anyway, and will do or say anything, to get where he wants to go.  The most notable similarity was in the almost eerie parallel between the use that Hitler made of the Reichstag Fire and the use that Bush made of 9-11.  Other major similarities are the pre-fabricated "attack" made by "Poland" on Germany (the Germans dressed German convicts in Polish uniforms, shot them full of holes and dumped the bodies at the German frontier post that the "Poles" were said to have "attacked") and the totally phony "WMD" story concocted by the Bush administration to justify its own long-planned attack on Iraq.

I've wanted to get Buchanan's book ever since I read about it coming out.  I wonder if he is going to explore the links between British, American and French capital and the Nazi Party during the late 1920s up to the late 1930s.  In some ways I see the whole Nazi movement as analogous to the Taliban - - Western capital builds up a new movement that is going to be the nemesis of their nemesis, the Soviet Union, only the new nemesis develops its own ideas and agenda, which are not what its creators had in mind for it.

[sirs]

Is it no wonder certain contingents of the left moronically keep trying to imply some twisted thought process that Bush = Hitler (or a moronic version of such)

I didn't notice anyone mention el Shrubbo in this thread until you did.  Guilty conscience?

Naaaa, just llike to remind the audience of the Left's perpetual idiocy, in this matter

[Xavier_Onassis]

Pat Buchanan is an Irishman, overdosed on Catholicism of the sort it would be hard to come by in the Aude Sod today. He hates the English and therefore likes the Germans in the way that a good Sinn Fein man would.

This is not to say that the Brits were not manipulative dorks. I fact, they were the inventors of manipulative dorkery, which is how they used every tool at their disposal, including priests, to infiltrate and thwart every Irish independence movement from Wolfe Tone on down.

But the fact that the Brits were acquisitive monopolists does not make Hitler a good guy. Hitler being an evil genius does not mean that there were a few international bankers who did not also profit from the instability of Germany after WWI, either, and some of them were even Jewish.

WWI was a useless war. Everyone would have been better off had they just let Austria wale on Serbia for a couple of months. How does the poem go,?

 The Siege of Belgrade

      AN Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
      Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.
      Cossack commanders cannonading come,
      Dealing destruction's devastating doom.
      Every endeavor engineers essay,
      For fame, for fortune fighting - furious fray!
      Generals 'gainst generals grapple - gracious God!
      How honors Heaven heroic hardihood!
      Infuriate, indiscrminate in ill,
      Kindred kill kinsmen, kinsmen kindred kill.
      Labor low levels longest, lofiest lines;
      Men march 'mid mounds, 'mid moles, ' mid murderous mines;
      Now noxious, noisey numbers nothing, naught
      Of outward obstacles, opposing ought;
      Poor patriots, partly purchased, partly pressed,
      Quite quaking, quickly "Quarter! Quarter!" quest.
      Reason returns, religious right redounds,
      Suwarrow stops such sanguinary sounds.
      Truce to thee, Turkey! Triumph to thy train,
      Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!
      Vanish vain victory! vanish, victory vain!
      Why wish we warfare? Wherefore welcome were
      Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier? (ooh look! he mentions me!!!!)
      Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!
      Zeus', Zarpater's, Zoroaster's zeal,
      Attracting all, arms against acts appeal!

          Alaric Alexander Watts

[Michael Tee]

<<Naaaa, just llike to remind the audience of the Left's perpetual idiocy, in this matter>>

Well, unfortunately, all you succeeded in doing was reminding us how blind the right wing is to the most obvious facts.