You know who else was a Hitler lover?
The Autobahn also wasn’t Hitler’s idea, and in fact, the first stretch of the Autobahn opened before Hitler came to power.
Hitler certainly wasn’t batshit insane. I hate that characterization of him because it discounts both the banality and insidiousness of his evil. He had a clear agenda for the type of world that he wanted and he took methodical steps to make it happen. And part of the reason for his success was that he did build upon some legitimate grievances: Yes, the treatment of Germany after World War I was unfair. Yes, ethnic Germans living outside of Germany deserved to somehow be integrated with the rest of Germany. Yes, Communist Russia was a threat to the security of Western Europe.
But rather than merely confronting and dealing with these legitimate issues, he used them as a springboard to launch a massive war of conquest and genocidal extermination. Buchanan would have us believe that the war and the genocide were forced upon Hitler by outside forces when he tried to deal with Germany’s legitimate grievances. But really, war and genocide were his intent all along. The fact that legitimate grievances existed merely allowed him to mask his true intentions until they were so blatant it was obvious to everyone.
Eva Braun?
While I think you make good points, I don’t think it’s fair to say Buchanan is saying that Hitler was forced into doing what he did. Or that anything was “forced upon” him. I take it as Buchanan saying that this what lead Hitler to* feel he should take the course he took.* I don’t think any sane person would attempt to say that the course of action he took is in any way justified by whatever predicament he believed himself, or Germany, to be in.
Also, you make a good point about him being insane. I see what you’re saying and agree with it, but I do think that anyone who decides that the holocaust he perpetrated is a reasonable course of action must be at least somewhat deranged.
I disagree. The Holocaust is eminently rational once you adopt certain premises. The *sanity *of the Holocaust is one of the things that makes it so evil and dangerous.
Since the “plummet” dates to 1918 or so, it’s hard to see what terrific ideas Adolf might have had. His political career started on a low note and one could view his subsequent career as more of a gradual slide into the lowest depths rather than “plummeting” from some loftier plane.
Don’t sell yourself so short.
It didn’t end well, though. 
Buchanan doesn’t know anything about Hitler, or if he does know anything, he’s chosen to lie about it. He is either a fool or a liar.
The column wasn’t some minor bit of revisionism about some trivial aspect of Hitler’s character–“dialing the evil of Hitler in one tiny area back a scintilla of an iota”–Buchanan either misunderstands or chooses to conceal something fundamental about who Hitler was and what he wanted:
If Hitler never wanted war with Poland, why did he wind up going to war with Poland? (Perhaps Pat still thinks the Poles started it.) War to the East was the whole point, and of course Hitler needed to start with Poland precisely so that he could get to Russia. Hitler’s most fundamental and basic policy aim was conquest and empire and genocide in the East.
No one “forced” war on Hitler. He deliberately started a war, with no provocation (except for the ones his goons staged on his orders); he deliberately arranged for the annihilation of the Polish state and deliberately implemented genocidal policies against both the Jews and the Poles. He deliberately attacked the USSR–regardless of whether or not Stalin was himself a monster, again this was done without provocation–and began spreading mass murder on a continental scale through as much of Russia as his armies could conquer.
It’s true Nazi Germany had no immediate plans to invade the USA. I’ve never really heard any credible evidence to suggest that the USSR ever had any plans to invade the USA either. Buchanan’s “if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia” is simply a strawman; no one who wasn’t playing a game of Risk has ever actually drawn up plans to conquer “Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia”–not Hitler, not Stalin, not Osama bin Laden.
If Pat isn’t actually a Nazi, then he’s simply a complete and utter moron–which may well be the case.
Henry Ford? Charles Lindbergh?
Hitler was not insane, but he was pretty freaking dumb. He seriously thought that England would agree to let Germany have their empire - i.e. run all over Europe conquering lands and people - and let them have theirs. Why would England risk that? He thought it was eminently reasonable that the world we have empires (England, US, Germany, Japan) and Germany would be one of them. Of course the German empire would be Jew free, by any means necessary. So in that sense, sure he didn’t want war with England, he just wanted to rule Europe and rid it of Jewry.
In all seriousness, wasn’t this the subject of one of Hitler’s speeches? He ran through a whole list of countries and said the same thing: “If Germany wants to conquer the world, how come we haven’t done anything to these guys?”
Here. He’s clearly playing it for laughs.
That was actually Rosenberg smiling. You don’t want to know what he looked like when he was angry.
I take it that by “sees” you mean “feels” but Hitler’s Vienna period preceded WWI. I have not read the book so I don’t know if it is the period you have wrong, or the impetus for his anti-Semitism, but clearly something is wrong.
I’ll go with definition 3 c : Stop being an asshole playing semantic games.
Of course. But some people have to be jackasses and play games.
It’s remarkable that Hitler managed to sell the line that post-WWI Germany was so unfairly treated by the Allies, having to pay war reparations and all.
Leaving aside the extreme probability that a victorious Germany would have inflicted even worse penalties on the defeated Allies, there’s a historical example to consider.
After beating up on France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Prussians saddled the French with an enormous war indemnity that was supposed to cripple them for a generation, plus they had to give up Alsace and Lorraine. The French however made a huge effort, paid the reparations bill in a short time and regained national strength. And while they didn’t entirely avoid ethnic scapegoating for their troubles, they managed not to elevate any megalomaniacal cranks to power and to avoid precipitating global conflict and genocide.
Buchanan and some fellow apologists like to play up the idea that the Allies brought the miseries of Hitler’s Reich on themselves - but this represents a gross distortion of history.
I’m sure Göring gave a handjob every time Hitler asked for one.
A lot of what he’s playing for laughs there is that Roosevelt had sent him a letter, which he’s reading, asking him to certify that he doesn’t have any desire to take over a list of “independent countries”, and at the end, a bunch of English and French protectorates are listed.
That’s not that remarkable. Every German politician, regardless of where they stood on the political spectrum, had that same line, and it was widely believed by the Germans.
Actually, they’re asking you to describe why you feel the arguments are reasonable, or perhaps just what you think makes a reasonable argument. At this point, it seems to be “convinces a bunch of people of something they wanted to believe in the first place.”
So, given that Hitler bases his arguments on contrafactual premises[1], pseudoscientific ranting[2] and appeals to emotion[3] and obtains some interesting conclusions[4] what makes you think they are reasonable? You said that you didn’t want to air Hitler’s anti-Semitic arguments because it would give them too much credence, but they form one of the cornerstones of Hitler’s argument in Mein Kampf.
For comparison, do you think that Glenn Beck is reasonable when he natters on about communist art in New York? He has a long train of reasoning that leads him from start to finish and demonstrates that Obama and John D Rockefeller are cryptofascists (or something) and millions of people believe him when he says it. Is it reasonable?
1] eg the backstabbing and the mythic rise and fall of the Aryan race
2] social Darwinism at its most crude, crackpot economics (interest slavery?)
3] Germany used to be so perfect, before those damned Jews messed everything up (see 1 and 2)
4] The Germans have been forced by the European powers to annex pretty much everything between Paris and the Urals in order to obtain lebensraum, which they shouldn’t complain about because they have colonies, too. Oh, and those lands are now in the hands of a bunch of lesser races who should be eliminated to make room for the Aryan conquerer, reasserting his bloodright to dominance. If they didn’t want to get killed, they shouldn’t have polluted our blood back in the good old days.