? Pink Floyd: Point me at the sky | Main | It gets worse ?
June 09, 2008
Bottled piety
Victor Davis Hanson rebukes those who would, from a safe vantage, decry the Second World War as unnecessary.
Nicholson Baker and Pat Buchanan are almost right about the War, it need not have been so brutal, was in point of fact was an unnecessary war.
The Nazi party and its cretinous followers need not have been elected to power by a public consumed with hatred and self-pity, once in power the Nazis need not have introduced an Enabling Act as a first step down the road to totalitarian government, the Nazis need not have invaded and occupied the Saar, the Sudetenland, Austria or Poland. Not only that, Japan could have foregone its racist, imperialist and genocidal wars across southeast Asia. Fascist Italy might have found something more productive to do than use chemical weapons on the ancient Christian kingdom of Ethiopia.
And then there is the remote possibility a single democratic government might have lifted a finger to oppose any of this manifest evil before it got out of hand. But such is to ask too much even in the realm of the counter-factual; those few brave souls who called for action were denounced as warmongers by the same leftards and fascist fellow-travelers who blight our politics to this day.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 9, 2008 10:47 AM
Comments
>>>Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World." Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.
That was some good imperialist pushing by Winston, having only become First Lord of the Admiralty the day after Poland was invaded. Two books to be avoided for sure, me thinks; people buy and read this stuff?!
Posted by: The_Campblog ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.ghostofaflea.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 9, 2008 02:20 PM
Er, two days after.
Posted by: The_Campblog at June 9, 2008 02:40 PM
The Allies could also have intervened about a dozen times in the various conflicts between Prussia and Austria, squashed Bismarck like a bug, preventing the wars of unification and leaving central Europe a hilarious polyglot of minute German principalities in the dessicated framework of the Holy Roman Empire.
That would have been infinitely preferable to the Great War and its successor conflicts.
Posted by: Chris Taylor at June 9, 2008 04:04 PM
I have to wonder, though, whether it really was in America's pragmatic interest to take on Germany rather than simply ignore Hitler's war declaration and solely pursue Japan. Short of some cutting-edge weaponry like the America Bomber, what could Germany realistically have done to us? Maybe if we had stayed out entirely -- not even doing Lend-Lease -- the outcome would have been the Nazis and the Soviets smashing each other into oblivion, ridding us of two hellish ideologies in a single go.
Of course, that would probably have also entailed a Britain in ruins, a few million more dead Jews, and no free Western Europe to which my family could flee before getting crushed in the gears.
Posted by: Varenius at June 9, 2008 11:04 PM
Although this was post Lend-Lease and Atlantic convoy escort duty, as it stood, I think war with Germany was inevitable, Hitler declaration or no. FDR's 'shoot first' order was issued on Sep11'41 following German attacks on convoys, and the USS Reuben James was sunk in October. (But, as you say, this was with American involvement.)
I don't think much would have had to change for the Nazis to have reached Moscow in 1941. The Soviets benefited from Lend-Lease as well, with German forces being held in the West and also being diverted to the Balkans on their way East. Germany may well have come out of it with a massive navy, undamaged industry, the world leader in rocketry and an atomic power by the late 1940s.
But, without that happening, pragmatism and American interest did lie in the preservation of European democracy and global free trade. Even without leaving Hitler out of it, it is interesting that Roosevelt identified him as the greater threat.
Posted by: The_Campblog at June 10, 2008 07:31 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in. Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
