On Lukacs And Buchanan
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Tom Piatak is right to challenge Prof. Lukacs’ review of Mr. Buchanan’s book, but it seems to me he is quite wrong to pose the question: “Has Lukacs, in his eagerness to smite any dissent from the cult of Churchill, gone over to neoconservatism?” Of course nothing of the kind has happened, and I think even the question is an unfair one. I don’t think Tom seriously means to suggest that John Lukacs is neoconservative, which would reduce that term to meaningless nonsense. However, if there is a view that this is the case, I would argue that there is nothing in the least neoconservative about how he has critiqued the book. Neoconservatives were from their beginning the most obsessed with magnifying the Soviet threat and denouncing arms reduction treaties as “appeasement,” while Prof. Lukacs and George Kennan were basically correct in seeing the limitations of Soviet power and its eventual collapse under the power of the nationalisms of the subject peoples of eastern Europe. Like Kennan, he has also correctly identified nationalism as the more powerful force in modern history.
It remains debatable, however, that German rule over the conquered lands of eastern Europe and Russia would have been more enduring; one nation’s empire could inspire nationalist resistance among its subjects perhaps with even greater ferocity than a communist empire did. Comparisons between Stalin and Ivan the Terrible may express a certain dislike of Russia, but they are not at all instructive. The brutality of the Soviets had no meaningful precedent in Russian history, either. It is likewise debatable that Russia was not “part and parcel of European culture, civilization, and tradition,” and this is seems to be one of those undesirable half-truths once we come to the early 20th century. Metternich thought that Asia began on the east side of Vienna, but we know this to be a misguided view. All of Europe dominated by Germany does not sound terribly pleasant to those who would have had to live under German hegemony, but it has ever been the mistake of the British at least since the time of Walpole to think that it mattered to Britain whether a nation dominated the rest of Europe. Churchill’s view may have been consistent, but it may still have been wrong. There is no contradiction between recognising a regime as evil and believing that war against it is unnecessary. And if it is unnecessary, the war is therefore also wrong, particularly as it relates to one’s own national interest.
P.S. I incorrectly identified the Lukacs review as part of the 5/19 issue in a previous post. This is a preview from the 6/2 issue.
Filed under: foreign policy, history, politics
[...] At Taki’s Magazine, Marcus Epstein makes quite a lot, indeed too much, out of the publication in the forthcoming TAC of the fairly negative Lukacs review of Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War and explains it in terms of the magazine’s difference from paleoconservative outlets. That must be why Tom wrote a post attacking the review…on TAC’s main blog. If that weren’t enough, the editors have been very cunning in masking this distance from paleoconservatism when they brought Eunomia in to be part of their website as recently as three months ago, and I then went and confused things even more by writing a critical post against the review. As ever, I hope my views on Churchill and Lincoln, among other things, remain anything but boring or conventional, but this is hardly the first time that an argument in support of a more conventional view of American, to say nothing of British, involvement in WWII has appeared in TAC. Prof. Andrew Bacevich wrote an article (sorry, not online) on FDR and WWII back in June 2005 to which I took great exception, but I never supposed that his argument demonstrated anything about TAC other than the intellectual diversity of the magazine’s contributors that has been one of the great qualities of TAC and also something that I believe is fairly typical of paleoconservative outlets.  Certainly, that is something to which we ought to aspire if it isn’t always the reality.  Both Takimag and TAC publish Austin Bramwell, yet he has in the past written things far more critical of paleoconservatives as a group than anything that Prof. Lukacs has ever written, and so what if he has?  Healthy criticism and pushback are vital to making our arguments better and keeping us from drifting into intellectual torpor. The last thing the right needs are additional echo chambers in which we congratulate one another on our purity of belief.  [...]
“It remains debatable, however, that German rule over the conquered lands of eastern Europe and Russia would have been more enduring; one nation’s empire could inspire nationalist resistance among its subjects perhaps with even greater ferocity than a communist empire did.”
This ignores a breathrough measure the Nazi had come up with to undermine nationalism and its tendency to undermine empires: extermination not just of nationalist leaders, bu of the entire human population of the subject nations. Hitler’s plan for England, for example, was total extermination of the English peoples. He has similar plans for the Slavs of eastern Europe and Russia. Lebensraum was not a metaphor, or a slow process of taking control of foreign lands through immigration. It was a fully genocidal program of mass murder that would leave no possible nationalist opposition remaining.
Now, it remains true that not all evil needs to be opposed. Much evil self-destructs under its own internal contradictions. But many lethal viruses, like Nazism, do not self-destruct on their own, but only under the pressures of massive defeat. It seems like an awfully risky policy to have counted on Nazism to self-destruct without a massive attack by its enemies, including the US.
[...] My posts this week at Taki’s Magazine continue the discussion of Lukacs and Buchanan that started with the review from the 6/2 issue. One expands on my earlier critique of the review, and the other addresses Lukacs’ critics. [...]