It's not every day that a major media personality decides to defend Hitler, but Pat Buchanan is old, cranky, anti-semitic, racist, and has a permanent cot in the MSNBC green room. So apparently, he doesn't give a shit anymore.
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. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.
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.
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?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn't want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.
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 [...]
Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia.
It was Poland's fault, and the UKs for instigating an unnecessary war. And those concentration camps?
[W]hen 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? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
Heck, he even employs this bit of rhetorical sleigh of hand to try and minimize the Holocaust:
Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished.
If you only do the math (and everyone has the "6 million Jews" figure ingrained in their heads), you can see that it was the CHRISTIANS who took the brunt of the conflict, the very conflict that Hitler really, really, really wanted to avoid and had no choice to fight because of those damn Poles and Brits. It wasn't his fault he had to invade neighbors and murder Jews.
But why didn't Hitler adequately prepare for his effort at world domination? One obvious reason:
Hitler tried to conquer the world without the requisite equipment because he was a mad man who was also a pisspoor military strategist. Yet Buchanan would have it that Hitler's ambitions of domination have been overstated; that, while he might not have been a peacenik, he did not want war. The Furher, you see, has gotten a bad rap from history.
We already know that Buchanan is a crazy anti-semitic racist who can write or say nothing to get him off the air at MSNBC. But defending Hitler and pinning the Holocaust on the allies? That might be too crazy for even Glenn Beck.
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