How Good Was the Good War?       PDF

Stuart Reid

Where would we be without Hitler? He is the indispensable bad guy. If you want to unite people in hate, Hitler is your man. Five years ago, Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. A couple of weeks ago in Parliament Square—where hard-core Marxists and clapped-out hippies were demonstrating against the farewell visit to London of the American president—George W. Bush was the new Hitler, again. Not so long ago, Ariel Sharon was the new Hitler. And Robert Mugabe actually refers to himself, with spiteful irony, as the “black Hitler,” as if being a regular Hitler were not good enough.

This obsession is a price we pay for Allied victory in World War II, though we might be equally obsessed, though less vocal about it, if we’d lost the war. In real life, Hitler was demoniac, a cruel and vicious tyrant and a racist of the most appalling depravity. One should not really need to make the point, but if you are going to bat for Patrick J. Buchanan, you really have no choice in the matter because Buchanan has challenged the postwar geopolitical consensus and by doing so has placed himself beyond the pale. Victor Davis Hanson and Sir Christopher Hitchens, two of civilization’s most formidable defenders, have expressed their grave displeasure.

The consensus Buchanan has challenged holds that World War II was the Good War, the necessary war, precisely because it was against Hitler. If, therefore, you suggest that the war was neither good nor necessary, as Buchanan does, you open yourself to charges of, at best, indifference to the suffering of Jews (and all other people murdered by Hitler) and, at worst, of Nazi sympathies. Or maybe, if you are lucky, of nothing more shameful than stupidity.

I like Pat Buchanan and I admire him. He is a brave and good man and a brilliant journalist. He is by no means the first to express skepticism about the propaganda of the victors, however. More than 40 years ago, in The Origins of the Second World War, A.J.P. Taylor observed that the Poles lost 6.5 million dead in World War II and the Czechs fewer than 100,000, and famously asked, “Which was better—to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?” Only a Pole would be crazy enough to answer without hesitation: a saved Pole.

Most of Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is devoted to a history of the origins and conduct of World War II, but Buchanan’s principal concern is with its long-term consequences. His message: the so-called lessons of the war years—that Munich was the ultimate betrayal and that you must never negotiate with bad guys—are a fraud, and a dangerous one, and it is because of that fraud that we are in Iraq.

If Bush’s enemies think he is the new Hitler, his friends—such as remain—think he is the new Churchill. There is a Churchill cult in the White House, writes Buchanan, which after 9/11 “helped to persuade an untutored president that the liberation of Iraq from Saddam would be like the liberation of Europe from Hitler. … In the triumphant aftermath of a ‘cakewalk’ war, democracy would put down roots in the Middle East … and George W. Bush would enter history as the Churchill of his generation, while the timid souls who opposed his war of liberation would be exposed as craven appeasers.”

It didn’t work out like that. Instead of a remake of “The Longest Day,” poor Bush got a horror movie. As Buchanan observes, “With all our braying about being the ‘indispensable nation’ and ‘Bring ’em on’ braggadocio, we exhibited an imperial hubris the whole world came to detest.”

So far so good, so far so true. But was World War II—the neocons’ all-time favorite war—a bad war in itself, as Buchanan maintains? It was, even though the destruction of Hitler and Hitlerism was an undoubted good. Not only did we reduce ourselves to the level of war criminals by killing hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians in our bombing raids, but, considered globally, the overall cost of the war was horrifying, and so were the consequences: 50 million dead, the triumph of Stalin in half of Europe and of the equally savage Mao in China.

Was it, as Buchanan insists, unnecessary? I can quite see that it could in theory have been avoided, but—and here’s the real question—so what if it could have been? It was not avoided. You can play “what if?” until the cows come home, and it will make no difference to what was, and what is, and what will be. Besides, the war does seem to me to have been necessary, at any rate, in the sense that it was unavoidable. It is hard to see how Hitler could in the end have been accommodated, which is not to say that the appeasers were wrong to have tried to avoid war. Chamberlain was hailed as a hero when he returned from Munich in 1938, and if I’d been living, I would have joined the cheering crowds.

It is, of course, possible—as Buchanan argues—that if there had not been a war in the West, many fewer Jews would have died: no war, no Holocaust is Buchanan’s line. And yet… There would have been a war in the East, come what may, and it might have been far bloodier than the one that brought us Stalingrad, with its 1 million dead. We can’t just shrug our shoulders at that possibility. Chamberlain behaved honorably in trying to avoid war, and he behaved honorably in going to war.

Buchanan has no doubt that the moral responsibility for the war rests with Hitler, but at times displays what seems like an obsessive hostility to Churchill and talks of the two world wars as “Churchill’s wars.” That’s not going to play well in my corner of England. As perhaps the only contributor to this symposium that Hitler tried to kill—I was a 2-year-old in London when the V2s were falling—I am forced to say, in my best Cockney: leave it aht, Pat.

That’s one difficulty I have with Buchanan. The other is that he remains a convinced cold warrior and has what strikes me as an unrealistically high opinion of Ronald Reagan. If you are going to oppose wars of choice—liberal imperialism, at any rate—you really ought to question the gung-ho, missile-wielding anticommunist rhetoric of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Buchanan believes we did not have to fight Hitler, but he sometimes seems upset that we did not fight Stalin.

As it happens, I was a keen cold warrior myself and still believe the communists presented a convincing threat: the Soviet Union, after all, really did have weapons of mass destruction. But Vietnam? It seemed a good idea to some of us at the time—I was a noisy supporter—but it now looks increasingly stupid and ugly. Over 58,000 American soldiers and 2 million Vietnamese civilians died, and the communists won. And the dominoes did not fall. Perhaps Vietnam should be chalked up as another success of the military-industrial complex Buchanan so rightly deplores. Perhaps Iraq is really the new Vietnam.  
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Stuart Reid writes from London.