I was reading Pat Buchanan's latest writing on Townhall, and I have to say that it is a bit bizarre. I haven't read his book, but if the article is representative of his thinking in the book, I have to say it sounds pretty bizarre.

His first claim is true, but I fail to see the significance. He claims that Hitler did not want war with England, and that neither did the Kaiser. Well, of course. No up and coming power wants war with the top power in the world. They want to slowly pick off little countries until they are strong enough to take out the top dog. But that is meaningless. So is his claim that Germany sought a truce with Britain after Dunkirk. Of course he did, he had everything he wanted for the moment, why wouldn't he want time to consolidate before taking on Russia, and, eventually, England.

Of course this is nothing new. Pat also likes to say Saddam didn't want war with the US, and says the same about Iran. Apparently, in Pat's mind we can just sit still and let other nations divide up the world, so long as they don't attack us. He fails to understand that nations often postpone difficult fights until they have taken out easier pickings.

And, in all honesty, this ignores a simple truth, admitted by Hitler and his generals. Had France stopped him in the Rhineland, his government would have collapsed. In other words, the earlier we attacked, the betetr things would ahve been. While PAt argues we should ahve let Hitler take Poland, and then whatever Balkan states he wanted, he would have had us fighting well into the 1950's.

Pat's second claim is equally bizarre. He claims that the west wall proves Hitler never wanted to take any French territory lost in Versailles. That is just not true. Hitler knew he was picking off nations in the east first, and France was his second strongest rival. So he built the west wall as part of a reverse Schlieffen plan, he was going to take the nations he wanted in the east while the French were held up by the west wall, and then turn back and hit France. (Which is pretty much exactly what happened, except the French didn't even bother to attack.) So the West Wall does not mean he had no intention to attack France, just that he worried about an Anglo-French attack.

Buchanan then claims that Hitler had no desire to take on the Soviet Union, which is equally inaccurate. All of the generals agree that Hitler planned to attack the Soviet Union, as did all of Hitler's public propaganda. There is simply no way that his attack on Russia was motivated by nothing more than a desire to "show England they couldn't win." To do that, he would have launched Sea Lion, not started a massive eastern front.

Has Pat never heard of Hitler's theories of lebensraum?

Finally, we get to Pat's most dotty theory, that the holocaust would not have happened but for British intransigence.

Well, sort of. German and maybe even western European Jews may not have died. Hitler had a little more respect for them. Had he not been at war with Britain, he may have pursued Eichman's plan for deportation to Madagascar. Or had Britain kindly ceded Uganda, they may have gone there. I will concede that the extermination of the western European Jews was made more likely by the closing of the sea lanes. But then again, you can hardly blame Britain for conducting a war properly. The blame for extermination is still Hitler's.

And Pat is completely wrong when it comes to eastern European Jews. Hitler looked down on eastern Europeans anyway, and the Jews there he saw as subhuman. Pat uses the date of Wannsee, but by the time of the conference mobile killing units and even gas vans had already been working in the east for months, as evidenced by the fact that there was already copious data on the use of gas vans which was presented at the conference. The infamous "Commissar Order" had already been issued. Hitler started extermination as a policy long before Wannsee, all Wannsee did was produce a more methodical approach.

And as far as Pat's strange claim that the stress of approaching defeat force Hitler into genocide, I can't really say much. The einstaztgruppen were operating behind the advancing lines all through 1941, while the Germans piled up victories, exterminating Jews and prominent communists. And even at the time of Wannsee, when Pat claims Hitler foresaw disaster, the conditions were not what Pat portrays. Rommel was still victorious in North Africa, the western front still ended at the English Channel, the US had only defeats to its credit outside of the Pacific, and the Russian front had stalled, but Hitler was still planning new offensives. 1942 was hardly the disastrous year Pat portrays.

It is sad, really. I used to have respect for Pat Buchanan. I disagreed with his ardent protectionism and some of his other economic positions, but I respected the man. But more and more he starts to sound like those neo-nazis, white supremacists and holocaust deniers who argue that if we just let Hitler regain land int he east none of this would have happened.

One can regret FDRs expedient decision to hand one third of Europe to communist slavery without having to try to vindicate Hitler. Unfortunately Pat appears to not understand that  reasonable people can despise both Hitler and Stalin at the same time. To Pat it appears to be an either-or thing.

Well, I was once willing to write this off as a quirk of an otherwise admirable man, but, like Reverend Wright, Pat insists on coming back to the topic again and again. And so, in my own Obama moment, I am saying that I am through with Buchanan. Better to dismiss him as a crank now before I find myself justifying his next book, on how the Freemasons and international Jewry caused the Watts riots, or something equally bizarre.