MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — First, apologies for the infrequency of my contributions. I suffer from a seemingly terminal case of poor time-management abilities, but I promise that I’m working on rectifying this. I hate to leave my favorite agitators without reason to engage me. With a few drafts saved and ideas running through my convoluted mind, I should have something more substantial to offer soon; a couple of alternative forms of taxation have been on my mind lately, as has, for some time, President Obama’s mass-transit vision.

For now, though, I direct readers to Paul Gottfried’s riposte to VDH-cum-defense of Buchanan:

Note all of this is lead-up to going after the name that dare not be mentioned, that of Pat B, who has treated the Second World War as a confrontation that could have been limited to Germany and Russia. Although I for one have expressed some disagreement with Pat’s argument about the likelihood of Hitler’s going directly for Russia after occupying Western Poland, I would like to make one point crystal (pardon the pun!) clear. Buchanan has every right to argue what he does without being called a Nazi or Nazi-sympathizer. Further, everything he has written about World War One is entirely correct, although Pat may understate the role of the British government (and particularly of Churchill) in greasing the skids for the Great War.

Pat’s assignment of at least some responsibility to what Hanson calls “neutral Poland” in fanning hostilities with Germany seems indisputable. The Polish government in the mid- and late 1930s went on the rampage inciting violence against Germans and periodically closing off Danzig and the “Polish Corridor,” a strip of land through which Germans by agreement with the victorious Allies were allowed free access between East Prussia and Central Germany. As former German major general and military historian Gerd-Schultze Rhonhof demonstrates exhaustively (although not to the satisfaction of the obsessively antinational German press) in 1939: Der Krieg, der viele Väter hat (1939: The War that Had Many Fathers), Hitler’s bargaining position in dealing with Poland’s military dictatorship up until September 3, 1939, was actually quite reasonable.

The most Hitler demanded from the other side was joint German-Polish control over Danzig and assurances that Germans would be permitted to move through the Corridor without Polish military harassment. It should be possible (although perhaps it is not) to document Polish abuses of German minorities, without being accused of being in love with Hitler. In the same way it would be reasonable (and perhaps even helpful to an ambitious journalist in his leftist profession) to point out that what Stalin devoured after the Second World War was what Churchill and FDR had helped put on his plate.

Needless to say, I could make this observation, unlike discussing Polish provocation in September 1939, without running the risk of being called a Nazi-sympathizer.

Rhonhof and the Russian (Jewish) historian Dmitrij Chmelnizki, both of whom deal with the outbreak of the war in the East, do not deny the brutality of Hitler’s regime. Their conclusion, however, is that other belligerents had something to do with inciting the war. And the unwillingness of the Allies to address the wretched treatment of German minorities in the successor states they supported after World War One added to the tensions contributing to the next European war. Had the German head of state in 1939 not been Hitler but any patriotic German, he too in all likelihood would have pressed the Polish government on the same grievances Hitler raised.

Filed under: ideas, war