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How Good Was the Good War?
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 Stuart Reid
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.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Buchanan makes a strong case against Britain giving a war guarantee to Poland rather than drawing a realistic line in the West that Hitler could not cross without risking war. George Kennan, as mainstream as they come, said so in a letter to Buchanan in 1999. And Ernest May, my old professor at Harvard, noted, “a government that a half-year earlier had resisted going to war for a faraway country with democratic institutions, well-armed military forces, and strong fortifications, now promised with no apparent reservations to go to war for a dictatorship with less-than-modern armed forces and wide-open frontiers.” A swashbuckling Polish regime was thus given the power to decide whether Britain would be drawn into war, a war Britain was absurdly unprepared to wage, much less win.
Ted Galen Carpenter
The argument that the United States could and should have remained on the sidelines in World War II is not entirely convincing—at least with respect to the European theater. It assumes that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would have exhausted themselves in a stalemated struggle, and the United States and other Western powers would then have been well positioned to pick up the pieces after the collapse of the two totalitarian giants. The situation might have worked out that way, but such a strategy would have been high-risk. It is equally possible that either Germany or the USSR would have scored a decisive victory and then dominated all of Europe. A Soviet-controlled continent would have been catastrophic; a Europe dominated by Nazi Germany and its volatile, extremely aggressive dictator would have been even worse. Roosevelt deserves criticism for the deceitful way in which he maneuvered America toward war, but his alarm at the danger a totalitarian Europe could pose to America was not misplaced.
Michael Vlahos
Just saying “World War II” is like scratching extra opinion on some great basalt stele. World War II was not a great event: rather, it is the American sacred. Invoking it is not retelling history but repeating homily. Its spare and tight four-year story is the heart of our national narrative.
The power of the World War II sacred comes across like a jolt: just feeling the passion from readers’ comments on Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War and the review here by John Lukacs is like underscoring with a razor.
We have seen the World War II sacred trumpeted in full during the 9/11 war. Its ancient rhetoric has been this administration’s neon rod and staff, its fire and brimstone: Munich, Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, the Battle of the Bulge. For seven years, political opposition has simply withered before the stainless authority of World War II.
This is the power of American holy war. Our great wars are crystallizing moments along the path of our religious nationalism: defining, reinterpreting, and celebrating ourselves.
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21 lipiec 2008
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