Buchanan Exposes Churchill

By Samuel Ashwood | March 9, 2009

http://civilizedrevolt.com/?p=288

Winston Churchill is generally regarded as one of the greatest men in English history, the
man who rescued the world from a Nazi regime bent on world domination. Few know
him as the man who sold out eastern Europe to the brutal regime of Joseph Stalin, or the
man whose narrow vision resulted in the collapse of the British Empire. Patrick
Buchanan exposes him to be more of the latter than the former in _Churchill, Hitler, &
The Unecessary War._

While most of the civilized world tends to adulate men of peace, Winston Churchill was
by all accounts a war-mongerer. When the First World War broke out, gloom hung over
the entire British government, with the sole exception of First Lord of the Admiralty
Churchill, who practically danced with glee. His personal satisfaction in having a war to
run when he took over from Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May of 1940 was
hardly less. Churchill was undeniably a man who delighted in war, and considered
himself an expert at directing a war, his tragic blunders at Gallipoli and Greece
notwithstanding.

Buchanan traces international events in Europe from the outbreak of the First World War
to the conclusion of the Second. While it would practically take another book to list the
many conclusions drawn, a few things stand out as obvious. One strong argument made
by Buchanan is that Hitler, contrary to popular accounts, was not obsessed with the idea
of world domination, but rather sought European hegemony, similar (but with a more
brutal ideology) to Napoleon’s aspirations. Hitler’s eye was ever turned eastward, to his
mortal foe the Soviet Union, populated by the Communists and Slavs he so
despised. Rather than seeking war with Britain and the West, Buchanan ably
demonstrates that Hitler did all he could to prevent that from happening. Alone among
world leaders at the time, Hitler genuinely admired the British Empire, and considered it
an important force of world stabilization, similar to the Roman Catholic Church. This
would later put Churchill in the awkward position of allying himself with two
men determined to see the Empire perish (Roosevelt and Stalin), while ruthlessly seeking
the extermination of the one man who favored the Empire, Hitler.

Buchanan gives a different slant on the “appeasement” of Hitler by Neville Chamberlain

at Munich in 1938. Why, he asks, should Chamberlain have been willing to risk world
war to prevent Hitler from annexing a Sudetenland that was anxious to join the Reich
anyway? But the author also goes on to excoriate Hitler for his blunder of annexing the
rest of Czechoslovakia the next year, an error that humiliated Chamberlain, and caused
him to rashly give his war guarantee to Poland.

The guarantee to go to war on behalf of Poland was one of the greatest diplomatic
blunders of European history, Buchanan argues. It committed Britain to the support of a
dictatorial, anti-semitic power, that it could in no way support militarily. It prevented a
peaceful conclusion of the Danzig dispute between Germany and Poland, for Hitler
desired Poland as an ally against Stalin. Without the guarantee, Buchanan speculates
Britain, France, and the United States could have watched peacefully as the armies of
Hitler and Stalin bled themselves white in mortal conflict.

Worse than the appeasement of Chamberlain, Buchanan alleges, was the selling out of
eastern Europe to Stalin by Winston Churchill. At one time the severest critic of
Bolshevism, during the war Churchill became a gushing admirer of Stalin, turning a blind
eye to the deceitful and murderous practices of that dictator’s regime. In fact, Buchanan
contends that Churchill did much to create the “Iron Curtain” that he so roundly
condemned after the war in Fulton, Missouri.

Uneducated admirers of Churchill are very likely to come away from Buchanan’s book
with a very different picture of the great war leader, a man who was unscrupulous, eager
for war, and often duplicitous in his dealings. The American reader will also come away
concerned for the future of his own country, for Buchanan demonstrates in his conclusion
that, just as Churchill and the British government reached imperial overstretch with their
world-wide financial and military commitments, the United States is currently following
the exact same path with its “hot” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its global
commitments to the “war on terror.” Will we be regulated to second class power status
through the same historic blunders that brought about the collapse of the British Empire?