Pat Buchanan Defends Hitler

[Polycarp]

As long as he doesn’t write a book titled “We”

[Nobody]

@Guinastasia

Didn’t some guy named Chamberlain suggest that very theory?

Wilt or Richard?

[Larry_Borgia]

@Tenebras

Pat Buchanan ran for president in 2000 as a Reform Party candidate. He ran for president in 1996 and 1992 as a Republican. In 1992 he challenged Bush in the primaries and won 38 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. During his run in 1996 he won New Hampshire, and came close to winning Iowa.

By contrast, Ralph Nader has never seriously contended in Democratic primaries. The closest he came was when he was a write-in candidate in 1992. When he stood in both the Republican and Democratic primaries.

Pat Buchanan gave the keynote address at the Republican National convention. Ralph Nader tried to blackmail John Kerry into adopting his campaign planks. Truly, the two men are like two sides of the same coin.

Buchanan abandoned the Pubbies after the 90s. He was a Republican but he hasn’t been one in over a decade. Even when he was a Republican he was running insurgent campaigns against the Republican establishment. I admit he was better at it than Nader was against the Democrats.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Normal_Phase

No he’s not. He’s an all-purpose bigot, white supremacist, and apologist for genocide.

I gotta go with not an idiot. At least if W or Sarah is our gold standard of idiocy. Buchanan has a soft spot for old Uncle Adolf, carrying on the tradition of Marge Schott that he wasn’t all bad. Frankly, Hitler is a wunderbar example of the ugly beast that resides in every human in the reptilian part of the brain and a shocking warning to keep that beast under close guard.

[Olentzero]

@Polycarp

As long as he doesn’t write a book titled “We”

Hey, I liked that book.

[MEBuckner]

Hitler only wanted Danzig? What a truly Hitler-sized lie.

Hitler didn’t just seize Danzig; Hitler (and Stalin) wiped Poland off the map. In the areas of Poland they annexed to the Reich or that they ruled in the colonial-style “General Government”, the Nazis sought to systematically annihilate the Polish nation–since Pat is so damned fond of Christians (and especially Catholics), it’s worth pointing out that, as part of their policy of exterminating the leadership of Polish society, the Nazis murdered thousands of Catholic priests (along with millions of good Catholic Christian Poles, and of course even more millions of Jews). And when Hitler inevitably turned on his partner in crime and attacked the USSR, he did so to fulfill his goal of turning the rest of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, and all of European Russia into a vast killing field and slave labor camp, in which the “sub-human” Slavs would be treated as slaves or serfs at best, until they could simply be dispensed with and replaced with members of the “Aryan master race” ruling over a Greater Germany streching from Alsace-Lorraine to the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus; with just about every other part of Europe reduced to the status of German satellite states.

When the late, great Molly Ivins quipped that one of Buchanan’s speeches must have “sounded better in the original German”, I used to think that was a bit unfair.

Go to hell, Pat, you lying, blame-America-first, Nazi-loving goon.

[Marley23]

Man, those old Jews in Florida who voted for Buchanan in 2000 really have to be regretting their decision right about now.

[Wallenstein]

@wierdaaron

Is it possible that Buchanan is Hitler? I mean, has anyone seen Hitler’s body?

This chap did… he’s the last surviving member of Hitler’s entourage in The Bunker, interesting read.

[Mycroft_Holmes]

@Scylla

I’ve read Mein Kampf and it’s not unreasonable.

Are you being serious? I really can’t tell if you’re trying to whoosh us all, or if you really, honestly think “Mein Kampf” is not unreasonable. I don’t see how paragraphs like this:

@Adolph Hitler

The Jew himself knows this best. He, whose great men have always been great only in their efforts to destroy mankind and its civilization, takes good care that they are worshipped as idols. But the Jew tries to degrade the honour in which nations hold their great men and women. He stigmatizes this honour as ‘the cult of personality’.

can be considered “reasonable”.

[Jackmannii]

Buchanan not only has a questionable reputation among Republicans, he even revolts fellow conservatives - as when he recently defended the deported ex-Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, calling him the “American Dreyfus” and comparing him to Jesus Christ.

As noted, the Hitler apologist stuff is nothing new.

There’s a lot of hate and nuttiness in Pat.

[villa]

@Guinastasia

Didn’t some guy named Chamberlain suggest that very theory?

In short, no.

[Captain_Amazing]

@MEBuckner

Hitler didn’t just seize Danzig; Hitler (and Stalin) wiped Poland off the map.

Well, he may have started out just wanting Danzig, but once you take a country over, how can you not annex it, wipe it off the map, and enslave and slaughter its people? I mean, in for a penny…

But seriously, I have no doubt that had the Poles turned over the Polish corridor, he would have taken it and waited a few more months before he demanded something else. Posen, maybe, or Luxemburg, or Northern Schleswig

[BrainGlutton]

@Scylla

I’ve read Mein Kampf and it’s not unreasonable.

Just what is reasonable about it? Hitler’s whole race-based worldview is fundamentally unsound. His entire theory of history and culture is wrong. Every characteristic he imputes to the Jews, or rather, to “the Jew,”* is nonsense. All of this must have been painfully obvious to all reasonable persons even in 1926.

• As if there were only one, or they were all the same. In fairness, this was a widespread form of usage at the time and long after. Martin Luther King himself spoke often of “the Negro.”

[Jackmannii]

@Scylla

Buchanan asks:

But if Hitler was out to conquer the world…Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines?..If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?

It’s nifty how Pat takes examples of bad strategic military planning by Hitler as evidence of his pacific intentions.

In the case of the small German submarine fleet, for instance, the Germans apparently believed, as the British did, - that the British ASDIC/sonar would greatly limit sub successes against surface ships, so there was no point in having a big sub fleet. After German subs scored lots of kills early in the war through night surface attacks (against which ASDIC was relatively helpless), Hitler OKd a large buildup in subs (fortunately too late, since by the time they came into service the Allies had radar and other anti-sub tools).

If Buchanan hadn’t consistently defended Hitler and Nazis, it’d be tempting to excuse his latest apologisms as evidence that his brain has atrophied and there’s excessive Lebensraum in his skull.

[Marley23]

I’ve always said the claim that Hitler was trying to take over the world, and that ‘if not for U.S. involvement we’d all be speaking German’ was overblown and not true. And a lot of other people have said the same thing. But Hitler was trying to dominate Europe and Northern Africa and murder previously unimaginable numbers of people. Even to someone who’s far from a WWII expert Buchanan’s post is full of gaping holes.

[aldiboronti]

Hitler wanted a free hand in the East, to establish Lebensraum for the German people, especially in territories like The Ukraine. He had no territorial ambitions in the West at all, but on the other hand he was prepared to fight the Western Powers to establish Germany’s right to expand, as he saw it. Britain, France, etc had their world empires, Hitler thought it only just that Germany should be allowed to empire-build, in its case eastwards, the Drang Nach Osten.

He certainly had no wish to fight the English, a nation he admired (he was always holding up as an example their domination of India, with a few thousands of English troops holding sway over countless millions of Indians.) America he had less respect for, regarding it as a mongrel nation and hopelessly in thrall to the Jews, but there again he had no desire for conflict.

So it’s perhaps true to say that Hitler didn’t desire a World War, but he would not allow his goals to be thwarted for fear of one.

Buchanan though is an ass.

[Giles]

@aldiboronti

Hitler wanted a free hand in the East, to establish Lebensraum for the German people, especially in territories like The Ukraine. He had no territorial ambitions in the West at all, but on the other hand he was prepared to fight the Western Powers to establish Germany’s right to expand, as he saw it. Britain, France, etc had their world empires, Hitler thought it only just that Germany should be allowed to empire-build, in its case eastwards, the Drang Nach Osten.

He had limited ambitions in the West: he wanted the German-speaking Saar and Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen) to be added to Germany. However, I agree that his main ambitions were in the East, and there they included non-Germanic territories.

[Argent_Towers]

Buchanan obviously realizes (correctly) that his brand of conservatism is completely extinct in this country, and so he’s just saying what he’s always thought all along. Buchanan, by the way, is half-German. He has always been very close to his German heritage; his mother is a Bavarian - don’t be fooled by his Scots surname.

[BrainGlutton]

@Argent_Towers

Buchanan obviously realizes (correctly) that his brand of conservatism is completely extinct in this country . . .

No, it isn’t. It even has its own political party, or two if you broaden the definition. Or, if you broaden it still further . . .

[BrainGlutton]

@Marley23

I’ve always said the claim that Hitler was trying to take over the world, and that ‘if not for U.S. involvement we’d all be speaking German’ was overblown and not true. And a lot of other people have said the same thing. But Hitler was trying to dominate Europe and Northern Africa and murder previously unimaginable numbers of people. Even to someone who’s far from a WWII expert Buchanan’s post is full of gaping holes.

Hitler’s principal war aim was to destroy the nations of Poland and Russia – not simply to destroy Soviet Communism; not simply to conquer Poland and Russia and exploit them like a colony in Africa; but to destroy them utterly as nations, and build a greater Germany on their bones, thus transforming Germany into a continental power to rival the United States. All this is well-documented from Hitler’s own words.

From Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson, Chapter 10, “The End of Old Europe”:

Hitler’s aims can be reconstructed not merely from Mein Kampf itself, with its stress on the ‘East Policy,’ but from his early speeches and so-called ‘Second’ or Secret Book of 1928. This material makes it clear that the ‘cleansing’ process – the elimination of the Jews – was essential to the whole long-term strategy. Being a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the dynamic of history was race. The dynamic was interrupted when race-poisoning took place. The poison came, above all, from the Jews. He admired the Jews as ‘negative supermen’. In his Table-Talk he said that if 5,000 Jews emigrated to Sweden, in no time at all they would occupy all the key positions: this was because ‘blood purity’, as he put it in Mein Kampf, ‘is a thing the Jew preserves better than any other people on earth’. The Germans, on the other hand, were poisoned. That was why they lost the First World War. Even he was poisoned: that was why he sometimes made mistakes – ‘all of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood’. Race-poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of Hitler’s youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of many in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion of ubiquitous poisoning appealed strongly to the same type of person who accepted conspiracy theories as the machinery of public events. As with the later ecologists, they thought the race-poison was spreading fast, that total disaster was iminent, and that it would take a long time to reverse even if the right policies were adopted promptly. Hitler calculated it would take a hundred years for his regime to eliminate racial poisoning in Germany: on the other hand, if Germany became the first nation-race to do so successfully, it would inevitably become ‘lord of the Earth’. (Mein Kampf.)

What distinguished Hitlerian race-theory was, first, this rooted belief that ‘cleansing’ could make Germany the first true superpower, and ultimately the first paramount power in the world; and, secondly, his absolute conviction that the ‘Jewish race-poison’ and Bolshevism were one and the same phenomenon. In 1928, when he wrote his Second Book, he did not appreciate that old-style ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism had ceased to exist and that Stalin’s Russia was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been. On the contrary, he believed the Soviet Union was a Jewish cultural phenomenon. Hence the object of his policy was to combat ‘an inundation of diseased bacilli which at the moment have their breeding-ground in Russia’. Thus the ‘cleansing’ fit in perfectly with the resumption of traditional German East policy, but on a far more ambitious scale.

Hitler’s full programme, therefore, was as follows. First, gain control of Germany itself, and begin the cleansing process at home. Second, destroy the Versailles settlement and establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe. All this could be accomplished without war. Third, on this power basis, destroy the Soviet Union (by war) to rid the ‘breeding-ground’ of the ‘bacillus’ and, by colonization, created a solid economic and strategic power base from which to establish a continental empire, in which France and Italy would be mere satellites. In the fourth stage Germany would acquire a large colonial empire in Africa, plus a big ocean navy, to make her one of the four superpowers, in addition to Britain, Japan and the United States. Finally, in the generation after his death, Hitler envisaged a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination.

No one since Napoleon had thought in such audacious terms. In its gigantic scope the concept was Alexandrine. Yet until he was engulfed by the war he made, Hitler was always pragmatic. Like Lenin he was a superb opportunist, always ready to seize openings and modify his theory accordingly. This has led some historians to conclude he had no master-programme. In fact, while always adjusting the tactics to suit the moment, he pursued his long-term strategy with a brutal determination that has seldom been equalled in the history of human ambition. Unlike most tyrants, he was never tempted to relax by a surfeit of autocratic power. Quite the contrary. He was always raising the stakes on the table and seeking to hasten the pace of history. He feared his revolution would lose its dynamism. He thought himself indispensable, and at least four of his phases must be accomplished while he was not only still alive but at the height of his powers. It was this impatience which made him so dangerous in the short term and so ineffectual in the long term (the very reverse of the Soviet strategists). In a secret speech to German newspaper editors in November 1938, after his great Munich triumph, he deplored the fact that his need to talk about peace had led the German nation to relax too much. He argued that for Germany to accept peace, and thus stability, as a permanent fact of international life was to accept the very spirit of defeatism. Violence was a necessity, and the public must be prepared for it.

Same book, Chapter 11, “The Watershed Year”:

[quote]
Hitler’s ultimate aim was to create a German Volk of 250 million. He said that he proposed settling 100 million Germans on the great plains to the west of the Urals. In 1941 he envisaged that over the next decade the first 20 million would move east. Though he saw the colonization process clearly, he was vague on where the settlers were to come from. Those eligible and willing to settle, the Volksdeutsche from south-east Europe, numbered only 5 million, perhaps 8 milllion at most. His colleage Alfred Rosenberg considered the idea of ‘drafting’ Scandinavian, Dutch, and English settlers, being racially approximate to Germans, when the war was won. Some aspects of this great population transfer, to be the most formidable and decisive in history, were determined in meticulous detail. There was to be polygamy and a free choice of women for servicemen with decorations. The Crimea, after being ‘cleansed’ of Slavs and Jews, was to be turned into a gigantic German spa under its old Greek name of Tauria, populated by a mass transfer of peasants from the South Tyrol. Over vast areas of the Ukraine and south European Russia, a new Volk civilization was planned. As Hitler described it:

The area must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe. It must be Europeanized! . . . The ‘Reich peasant’ is to live in outstandingly beautiful settlements. The German agencies and authorities are to have wonderful buildings, the governors palaces. Around each city, a ring of lovely villages will be placed to within 30 or 40 kilometers . . . . That is why we are now building the large traffic arteries on the southern tip of the Crimea, out to the Caucasus mountains. Around these traffic strands, the German cities will be placed, like pearls on a string, and around the cities the German settlements will lie. For we will not open up Lebensraum for ourselves by entering the old, godforsaken Russian holes! The German settlements must be on an altogether higher level!

As Hitler’s vision expanded, in the heady days of 1941, it came to embrace all Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the whole of France north of the Somme were to be incorporated in a Greater Germany, the names of the cities being changed – Nancy would become Nanzig, Besancon Bisanz. Trondheim would become a major German city and naval base of 250,000 inhabitants. The Alps would be the boundary between ‘the German Empire of the North,’ with a new ‘Germania’ as its capital, and ‘the Roman Empire of the South’. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St. Peter’s Square. Strasbourg Cathedral would be turned into a giant ‘Monument to the Unknown Soldier’. New crops, such a perennial rye, would be invented. He would forbid smoking, make vegetarianism compulsory, ‘revive the Cimbrian art of knitting’, appoint a ‘Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs’ and an ‘Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects’.’