Was It “The Good War”?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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“Yes, it was a good war,” writes Richard Cohen in his column challenging the thesis of pacifist Nicholson Baker in his new book, Human Smoke, that World War II produced more evil than good.
Baker’s compelling work, which uses press clips and quotes of Axis and Allied leaders as they plunged into the great cataclysm, is a virtual diary of the days leading up to World War II.
Riveting to this writer was that Baker uses some of the same episodes, sources and quotes as this author in my own book out in May, Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”.
On some points, Cohen is on sold ground. There are things worth fighting for: God and country, family and freedom. Martyrs have ever inspired men. And to some evils pacifism is no answer. Resistance, even unto death, may be required of a man.
But when one declares a war that produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust a “Good War,” it raises a question: good for whom?
Britain declared war on Sept. 3, 1939, to preserve Poland. For six years, Poland was occupied by Nazi and Soviet armies and SS and NKVD killers. At war’s end, the Polish dead were estimated at 6 million. A third of Poland had been torn away by Stalin, and Nazis had used the country for the infamous camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.
Fifteen thousand Polish officers had been massacred at places like Katyn. The Home Army that rose in Warsaw at the urging of the Red Army in 1944 had been annihilated, as the Red Army watched from the other side of the Vistula. When the British celebrated V-E day in May 1945, Poland began 44 years of tyranny under the satraps of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
Was World War II “a good war” for the Poles?
Was it a good war for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, overrun by Stalin’s army in June 1940, whose people saw their leaders murdered or deported to the Gulag never to return? Was it a good war for the Finns who lost Karelia and thousands of brave men dead in the Winter War?
Was it a good war for Hungarians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Rumanians and Albanians who ended up behind the Iron Curtain? In Hungary, it was hard to find a women or girl over 10 who had not been raped by the “liberators” of the Red Army. Was it a good war for the 13 million German civilians ethnically cleansed from Central Europe and the 2 million who died in the exodus?
Was it a good war for the French, who surrendered after six weeks of fighting in 1940 and had to be liberated by the Americans and British after four years of Vichy collaboration?
And how good a war was it for the British?
They went to war for Poland, but Winston Churchill abandoned Poland to Stalin. Defeated in Norway, France, Greece, Crete and the western desert, they endured until America came in and joined in the liberation of Western Europe.
Yet, at war’s end in 1945, Britain was bled and bankrupt, and the great cause of Churchill’s life, preserving his beloved empire, was lost. Because of the “Good War” Britain would never be great again.
And were the means used by the Allies, the terror bombing of Japanese and German cities, killing hundreds of thousands of women and children, perhaps millions, the marks of a “good war”?
Cohen contends that the evil of the Holocaust makes it a “good war.” But the destruction of the Jews of Europe was a consequence of this war, not a cause. As for the Japanese atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, they were indeed horrific.
But America’s smashing of Japan led not to freedom for China, but four years of civil war followed by 30 years of Maoist madness in which 30 million Chinese perished.
For America, the war was Pearl Harbor and Midway, Anzio and Iwo Jima, Normandy and Bastogne, days of glory leading to triumph and the American Century.
But for Joseph Stalin, it was also a good war. From his pact with Adolf Hitler he annexed parts of Finland and Rumania, and three Baltic republics. His armies stood in Berlin, Prague and Vienna; his agents were vying for power in Rome and Paris; his ally was installed in North Korea; his protege, Mao, was about to bring China into his empire. But it was not so good a war for the inmates of Kolyma or the Russian POWs returned to Stalin in Truman’s Operation Keelhaul.
Is a war that replaces Hitler’s domination of Europe with Stalin’s and Japan’s rule in China with Mao’s a “good war”? We had to stop the killers, says Cohen. But who were the greater killers: Hitler or Stalin, Tojo or Mao Zedong?
Can a war in which 50 million perished and the Christian continent was destroyed, half of it enslaved, a war that has advanced the death of Western civilization, be truly celebrated as a “good war”?
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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1 Comment by pablo H on 5 April 2008:
I’m looking forward to reading Pat’s book, and of course he’s right. The problem is people can’t handle the truth. After 400,000 dead Americans they want it hear what a glorious struggle it was, and how we saved the world, not that it was a big mistake.
Except for accident of history, the A-bomb, WW II would have been followed either by WW III with the USSR or a communist takeover of all of Europe. FDR’s policy of unconditional surrender was a disaster.
Which is why instead of praising FDR we should be criticizing him.
2 Comment by John Press on 5 April 2008:
“Good” here is not meant to indicate that it was good for someone. Good it being used in an ethical sense. The other side was extremely evil. We did not ask for this fight; we were not the aggressors. We defeated the bad guys. Rather than exact revenge after the war we helped rebuild Japan and Europe.
The fact that bad guys continued to exist in the world, in China for example, should not cloud the picture. We did not fight WW II to stave off Mao. Our extreme bombing of our enemies would not have been necessary had they given up. But, no one means good in terms of the war being enjoyable or beneficial to those fighting it; no war is good in that sense. Nobility does not come from doing that which benefits you, but sacrifices at great cost.
Why do we need to trash the memory of this war? In U.S. history courses it provides a moment where we can see America as benevolent. If praising this war led us to an increased tendency to fight, I’d understand. But our very late entry into combat, our reluctance to fight is integral to making this a war without evil intent. What is the benefit of attacking the nobility of a war in which so many still living fought, from which we get good lessons and a source of honor?
3 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 5 April 2008:
No way was it good, but then most wars aren’t. The moral corruption is well illustrated in #2 above, which justifies “our extreme bombing of our enemies”; i.e. the intentional mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in order to terrorize them into surrender. And indeed, it did lead to “an increased tendency to fight”. It would be hard (maybe impossible) to find a country which has waged more wars or killed more people outside its own borders in the post WWII era than the US. And the process continues with two direct conflicts and several proxy ones underway and McCain running on a platform of more wars and longer occupations.
Sad how the US has made idols of its two great killer presidents, Lincoln and FDR. The US Civil War is the next “good war” which needs to be debunked. Maybe Pat Buchanan can take that on as his next project.
4 Comment by james on 5 April 2008:
World War 2 was planned after WW1 with Versailles
treaty and the massive debt created by the control of Germany by the international bankers after WW1. Nazis came to providence because they feared a judeo-bolshevik takeover of Germany as they did in Russia where most of the leaders of communism were jewish. Hitlers speeches at the time denounced the Versailles traety, and the threat Soviet Russia posed to germany. In regards to Jews they were constantly referranced in regards to communism not because some ancient hostility between Europeans and Jews.
In fact WW2 would never have been realised if it wasn’t for the fact the years Western back New York communists with aid of media and private bankers lead the assualt on the Czar and installed communism in Russia.
5 Comment by pablo H on 5 April 2008:
Note how #2 never addresses any of the issues. Instead its just the standard, “Hitler was evil – we had to destroy him, no matter what the cost”.
Well, we didn’t have to “destroy” him or Germany no matter what the cost. We could have contained him – just like we did with Stalin in Mao. Or we could have tried to separate the Germans from the Nazi regime, instead of proposing the Morgenthau plan and killing 500,000 women and children in useless terror bombing. Or giving Stalin 1/2 of Europe and unlimited supplies with no strings.
I wonder when the “Lets kill em all and let God sort em out” crowd will show up. Or as I call them, McCain supporters.
6 Comment by Pole on 5 April 2008:
Was World War II “a good war” for the Poles?
I’ll try to answer that. The war between Germany and the Soviet Union would have happened anyway because both of them wanted it and were preparing for it. Sandwiched between Germany and the Soviet Union, Poland would become a battlefield.
Given that a war was inevitable, whose victory was a lesser evil?
For Poles, Stalin was a lesser evil because unlike Hitler he did not consider Poles a subhuman race. For example, one of the first acts of German occupiers was to close Polish universities. And one of the first acts of Stalin’s puppets was to reopen them.
7 Comment by Allen Wilson on 5 April 2008:
If we look at how Roosevelt imposed embargoes on Japan in order to provoke war, it is easy to see that we were the aggressors against Japan. They attacked us because they had to, and Roosevelt made it necessary. That’s a simple fact that #2 either is not aware of or chooses to ignore. Starting a war in the pacific in this way way evil. Getting America involved in a European war we could have stayed out of by using Japan as the back door to war with Germany (Roosevelt’s real target) was also evil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was an evil man, as was Abraham Lincoln.
With the firebombing of German cities, the Morgenthau plan, the Atomic bombing of Japanese cities, etc., America showed every bit as much moral wickedness in that war as either the Nazis or Soviets or the Japs. If we were willing to do such evil things, then we were no better than the Nazis or Soviets. The claim that it was a moral crusade to ’save the world’ is a flat lie.
8 Comment by Jack Gates on 5 April 2008:
Nobility actually means aware of *all of the forces arrayed against one in the fight for life which therefore includes the international bankers. Thomas Jefferson (unless he wasn’t ‘good’) pointed out that history has shown since money became a commodity like corn or anything else ‘bankers are MORE dangerous than standing armies.’
When bankers further consolidated internationally, their light or star was Baron M.A. Rothschild. His point was honestly stated by himself: “Give ME control of any nation’s *currency and I care NOT who makes its laws.” Shortly after this strategy was under way the illegal national *income tax was instituted here in the U.S. (many say it was never actually ratified as an amendment to the Constitution), inorder to underwrite the Fed after the Federal Reserve Act GAVE the U.S. Treasury to international bankers formalizing THEIR cartel.
So that was the dawn of our new highly centralized system of STATE-Capitalism wherein the wealthiest people in the world are publically funded, publically insured, publically *LEVERAGED (and as of last week with *no downside) and yet PRIVATELY owned. That’s what “America” became but wasn’t originally. Get it?
Are you trying to tell me that’s not a bought and paid for Slave System? If it is not I would llike to know what is the definition of ’slavery’? Do words have any actual meaning anymore? Jerusalem vs. Athens is still playing out TODAY culturally speaking with Rome in the middle.
More things change more they remain the same!
9 Comment by pablo H on 5 April 2008:
It looks like this is another Chronicles thread that has veered off-topic into silliness and goofiness.
I’d delete my posts if I could, but since I can’t – adios.
10 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 5 April 2008:
Buchanan is almost invariably interesting, knows his history, and to his credit doesn’t mind assailing conventional wisdom; in fact, he seems too enjoy it.
It cannot be repeated enough that the head of this particular snake was Woodrow Wilson, whose ill-considered intervention in WWI and foolish conduct at Versailles set the world up for Bolshevism, Naziism, and the Second War, as well as authoritarian federalism. All the assumptions of Wilson now are repeating themselves as farce, in addition to tragedy–the crusade for democracy, reckless and bloody self-determination, the pretense of American exemption from ancestral sin.
To this cardinal error one must add the Allies’ insistence on unconditional surrender in WWII, which contributed to the Russian conquest of Central Europe, the bloody island-hopping battles in the Pacific, the decision to use the atomic bomb twice, the postwar ethnic cleansing in Europe, and the return and subsequent slaughter of the Soviet prisoners of war.
Pat may have learned from history, but our leaders have not.
11 Comment by G. Clark on 5 April 2008:
@ #8
You sound surprised?
The comments sections at Chronicles online is one of the places where the loony right comes to ventilate its ravings. It is sad but no surprise that most threads here devolve into conspiracy theories, jew-baiting, white separatism and the like.
12 Comment by Brock H. on 5 April 2008:
G. Clark @11:
We only attempt to point out the problems that America has experienced in her time and to discern, with the best of our abilities, who is at fault for these problems, and how those at fault should be held accountable. Yes, we often find that Jews have caused a lot of problems for the United States in terms of their seemingly insurmountable influence on American foreign policy. We then come to the conclusion that the solution is for them to be taken out of their positions of power and influence. We find that blacks are a huge part of the problem of family dissolution, eating up a very large portion of federal welfare services. So we find that Great Society services and affirmative action and civil rights measures were quite a mistake. We find that 3rd-world immigrants are coming here in far too large numbers, so we need a moratorium on immigration. As for conspiracy theories, I can only plead astuteness. It seems no matter who we elect to public office, all these aforementioned things still stay in place. Some of us, including myself, do conclude that there is a conspiracy being carried out by our ruling establishment to further carry out America’s status as an all-powerful empire, no matter what the people mandate in elections or in Congress or in whatever electoral body.
13 Comment by James Newland on 5 April 2008:
I don’t quite understand Pat’s argument here. I think it’s fairly clear that most people (from the Allied perspective) view WWII as a “good war” because they view it as a defensive war. Certainly it was not good for the threatened and conquered countries in any sense other than that it was fought for a good purpose: to try to prevent subjugation by foreign, authoritarian regimes. For America, too, it can only be considered “good” in the sense that she contributed to the liberation of said countries and threatened peoples.
It’s true that some view WWII as a good thing for America because it led to our emergence as a world superpower, that it ended the Great Depression for good, etc., and contra such amoral people Pat has a point. But I don’t see, in the case of the European and Asian countries at least, how defending oneself against unjust aggression can be considered a bad thing. It’s a good thing, and therefore makes the war one is fighting to achieve that a “good war.”
14 Comment by Flavius Claudius Julianus on 5 April 2008:
The ‘Good War’ was just a re-incarnation of the Peloponnesian War. Two great powers went to war; a short time later, they were both former powers. Anyone have a guess at what shall be the ultimate fate of the United States of America. If I was to hazzard a guess I should say that shortly, they shall be united–no longer. They shall be inhabited by mongrels with a mongrel code…
Damned shame…
What could have been…
15 Comment by Brock H. on 5 April 2008:
pablo H. @1:
“Which is why instead of praising FDR we should be criticizing him.”
He should be a subject of unyielding condemnation, a dark stain on the fabric of America.
16 Comment by Tomislav Milosevic on 5 April 2008:
Good article from Mr.Buchanan as usual. However, it seems that American public needs over half a century to start feeling reality.
Please note that Yugoslavia was not “behind iron curtain”. Regardless, full extent of “good” generated during WWII culminated in recent decade or so. This story is also far from being finished.
I would leave FDR alone though. Being the only, both smart and lucky guy among bunch of idiots in chaotic situation is not a sin. Quite contrary, I would say. The man died leaving behind the greatest legacy ever seen in history of human kind. How that inheritance had been wasted and for what purpose, would not be my competence since I am not American. Being sorry for it is my moral right and privilege. I still believe that humanity deserves a chance. Let’s all pray that America had not opted out as a provider/promoter of that chance as it seems. Or it was really shot dead in Dallas…………………
17 Comment by Allen Wilson on 5 April 2008:
Mr Newland, your point is valid as far as it goes, but that’s the problem: the people’s warped perception of the war. If we take as valid the claim that it was indeed a defensive war on America’s part, how can you still excuse the war crimes we committed? Bombing German cities which were not even military targets, murdering hundred of thousands by burning them alive? Atom bombing Japanese cities? It was madness, and shows how morally corrupt America and Britain already were at the time. Gas chambers, atom bombs, napalm, it doesn’t matter. Murder is murder.
Aside from that, Roosevelt was chomping at the bit all along, looking for some way to manoeuvre America into a European conflict, ultimately using Japan and it’s alliance with Germany to drag his own countrymen into the slaughter when he didn’t have to. Just in that sense, he was a mass murderer.
The American people need a big dose of reality, perhaps a slap in their collective face to wake them up, so they’ll stop being so ignorant and naive. This ridiculous idea that WWII was a just war for us in which we ’saved the world’ is as ridiculous as the absurd Lincoln myth and the lie that the yankees selflessly ‘laid down their lives to set other men free’. The whole country is now nothing but a big rip off, a con game built on historical mythology concocted by court historians, a hugh chain of lies. All that mtyhological lying is what fuels American arrogance all over the world today, and has led us to the situation we are now in, which appears to be an end game for us now.
18 Comment by Frank on 6 April 2008:
John Press,
“We did not ask for this fight; we were not the aggressors.”
you don’t believe FDR provoked Japan, as well as Hitler, while aiding the allies?
19 Comment by Jack Gates on 6 April 2008:
“The whole country is now nothing but a big rip off, a con game built on historical mythology concocted by court historians, a hugh chain of lies. All that mtyhological lying is what fuels American arrogance all over the world today, and has led us to the situation we are now in, which appears to be an end game for us now.” -Allen Wilson
It’s unbelievable how true that statement is and this stuff in terms of its getting worse ‘just keeps rolling through us like a ball and chain.’
Today’s example – your tax dollars (rip off) hard at work within the context of the dumbing down of america. On Fox News Broadcast today Sunday April 6 with Chris Wallace (son of Mike Wallace/60 Minutes) reporting … :
Well, guess what – our taxes just opened another Museum in Washington D.C. called the “NEWSEUM” to commemorate our tradition of a free press. Commemorate is really the word isn’t it since on account of the corporate media monolith, and congress’s rolling over for their absolute centralization of the mainstream discourse, they have effectively done away with any sort of ‘watchdog’ press. As there yet had been to some extent as recently as in the 1960’s & 70’s. … Wasn’t there?
So, how else would we ‘remember’ our own tradition these days except in a museum?
Of course it’s funded too by the corporate outlets as cover in further hiding from the average person the accomplishment of having done away with a diverse and free mainstream discourse, here, within America. Myth works: since the average mentality is more easily DECEIVED when ‘believeing’ they do have a free and diverse mainstream discourse happening. And the likes of Chris Wallace can continue to feel smug showing his face on t.v. to the nation. Funny.
Here’s a protest lyric from the 60’s or early 70’s I read today … it’s about trees (but it’s today also about the press):
‘Take all the trees (or freedom of the press) and put them in a tree musem…
‘And charge ‘the people’ five dollars and half just to see’Em…
‘Don’t it always seem to go but you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone –
‘They took paradise (& freedom of the press) and put up a parking lot (for the NEWSEUM.)’
And this stuff just keeps on rolling through us all – like a ball and chain… No? Funny too. I guess it really does ’stem’ from the culture of the letter of the law is sufficient without its spirit or essence – coming now to ascendancy (i.e. Jerusalem not Athens.) BOOOOOOOOOOO. And they don’t realize it sufficiently – it’s so close to their Bone.
Here’s the bottom line possums: ‘the merely correct is not yet true until it includes its essence. Only the true brings us into a *free relationship with that which concerns us from OUR essence.’ = paradise. Truth outs – or only at the point where such an uncovering happens (i.e. role of watchdog press) does the true flourish.
Way it is, dudes. But their culture has always took paradise and put up a parking lot of the soul? Truncated in other words usually at what is simply correct. Only their Essenes had it on the right track. The rest of it is glittering MYTH… and the parting of seas for the cameras. HAHAHA. Funny too. 60 Minutes…the old man made the museum, said Chris seeing his own dad in a video there. Wow. Hi Chris how’s your neo-con buddy Bill the even more smug Kristol and his commical side-kick Freddie the Insect Barnes?! How’s the War Boat doing – that going to be in the Museum soon?
You guys can post here even though we just can’t get on t.v. … Freddie the Insect can – he must be crawling appropriately.
20 Comment by John Press on 6 April 2008:
Frank, I do not believe that FDR forced Japan to attack us. They were on a maniacal rampage well before the embargo. Our embargo wouldn’t have mattered much if they were not on one. Our continuing to supply marauding armies with oil would have been immoral.
The same argument gets made about inner city crime. People steal because of poverty. I don’t buy it. You are responsible for your actions. In this case the analogy is worse. They stole because we stopped providing them oil with which to carry out their drive-by shootings. Were I a judge in court when that defense got put forth, I’d move the electric chair into the court room and sit the lawyer in it.
I also don’t think Hitler needed much provacation. He seemed to come by aggression in the name of the German people pretty well on his own. We aided the allies, but they were not expanding, Germany was! If you are going invoke his dubious claim to the Rhineland you must then also explain his claim on Poland. Hitler was not fighting a defensive war.
PS, In case there is any misunderstanding, I am against our empire. I would have hurt Japan and Germany with all I had until they said uncle, then I would have retreated back into my domestic shell. Ron Paul is my foreign policy guru. Out of Korea and NATO now!!!
21 Comment by James Newland on 6 April 2008:
Allen Wilson @ 17 wrote: “If we take as valid the claim that it was indeed a defensive war on America’s part, how can you still excuse the war crimes we committed?”
I don’t excuse the war crimes we committed. Whatever made you think that? Mr. Buchanan has asked the specific question, why anyone would call WWII “the good war?” I think I’ve answered that. They call it that because it was a war fought in self-defense. They do not call it that because they think war in itself is good or that evils were not committed in the war.
Pat’s contention that no war is unequivocally “good” is such a painfully obvious observation that one wonders why he bothered to make it. Of course war, or at least the consequences of war, is an evil. War brings death and destruction, heartache and loss. However, some wars are, as Pat himself admits, necessary, and insofar as they are necessary–for example, to defend oneself against unjust aggression–we call them, from our point of view, “good.” A “bad” war would be an unnecessary or unjustified war.
Now, people can argue about whether WWII was neccesary or justified for the United States to fight in, but Pat didn’t limit himself to talk about Americans. He asked whether the war was a “good war” for Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, etc. I think it’s pretty hard to argue that those countries’ fighting, however vainly, to defend themselves from the Nazis should have been considered by them to be “bad” or “evil.”
22 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 6 April 2008:
John Press
“Frank, I do not believe that FDR forced Japan to attack us. They were on a maniacal rampage well before the embargo. ”
Fair enough, but then why were we already fighting Japan, in an illegal undeclared war, in 1940? (Flying Tigers in China)
23 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 6 April 2008:
EDIT: The Flying Tigers flew in 1941. My mistake.
24 Comment by Jack Gates on 6 April 2008:
I think Gore Vidal disagrees with John Press in terms of FDR’s prodding of Japan. But they were still cut anyway from a rather SAVAGE cloth. Myth Works & back then you probably could not find one in a thousand Japanese who thought any non-Japanese were actually also human. They have a word for ‘us’ non-Japanese – gaijin. Like Jews have a word for non-Jews – gentiles. Today Japanese in this regard are more chilled out generally speaking but consumately tribal nonetheless. Just like the Jews are more chilled out but yet consumately tribal nonetheless. Look at the free nation of Israel. How would you like to live therein if Christian or Muslim and look up every day at a flag with just the Jewish religion [myth] on it – the Star of David. … That would be like being from the myth of the Green Lantern and living in a country with only the superman insignia on its flag. Poor superman he’s such a victim. Beat me, whip me, make me write bad checks – we’re from the Green Lantern myth – we’re so, so, so, so sorry. We’re sorry.
25 Comment by Allen Wilson on 6 April 2008:
Mr Newland, of course you are right, and I never meant to imply that you condoned the war crimes. In that regard, I could have used a better choice of words. I understood your post to which I responded, my point was simply that people’s perceptions are still dominated by what was originally dishonest war propaganda and is now historical mythology.
Partly, all this misperception, this glorification of the war and continuous justification of it, is because many future historians are raised on the propaganda and myth, and then seek to perpetuate them as historians, partly because they are emotionally attached to those beliefs, often because they serve the interests of the current establishment which uses the mythology to serve it’s own ends, etc.
A great example of this, of which I’m sure you’re aware, is the portrayal of the war by Stalin as the ‘Great Patriotic War’. I would never consider Stalin a patriot, nor give that name to any filthy Communist thug in Russia at that time. Additionally, Stalin provoked that war with Hitler in a big, stupid miscalculation and thus brought the war on Russia. Regardless, Russians only knew, and only know today, that they were invaded, so for them it is indeed the ‘Great Patriotic War’.
One may argue that Hitler would have attacked the Soviet Union at some point anyway, regardless of Stalin’s moves or lack thereof, and one may counter that this was because Stalin was going to attack Germany and conquer Western Europe anyway, regardless of Hitler’s moves or lack thereof. It doesn’t matter. To the Russians, it was ‘The Great patriotic War’. Never mind the evil machinations which turned them into cannon fodder, nor the vicious evil of the leader of their ‘Great Patriotic War’.
In America, the myth making stemming from the dishonest, venomous wartime propaganda is serving to perpetuate aggression and war crimes all over the world today, and is being used by our stupid rulers to further their evil, murderous agendas, and in their madness they are dragging us to disaster.
26 Comment by Brutus on 7 April 2008:
I can go out to my hot tub naked and not be seen by any neighbors here in the United States. I can get in my car and head west, and once past Illinois drive for literally hundreds of miles without seeing over 30 homes, those far off in the distance.
I travel to Germany and if I cut a fart ALL my neighbors will hear it.
It is easy to moralize about the evils of desiring “living room,” if you live here in the United States.
I knew a wealthy woman who was puzzled about why the men who worked for her husband dreaded the winter months. She wanted to know what the big deal was with them about buying heating oil and food for their families. “Heck,” she said, “you just write out a check.” After all, she had just been to a Cadillac dealer and could not decide between the white Escalade or the brown one. So, logically, she just bought both.
She just wrote out a check, you see.
It was, literally, beyond her comprehension that not everyone can do that. And she was, by general agreement, the snobbiest woman anyone had ever met. But it just never sank in that the “riff raff” (her words) cannot underwrite $120,000 checks when they can’t decide which color they like best. She had been doing it for so long it was natural to her.
P.S. About Hitler’s heavy handedness:
Many of you on here and elsewhere do not like a good many things, e.g., obnoxious homosexuals pushing an agenda, tens of millions of, um, let us just say undesirable peoples steadily encroaching upon our territory, anti Christians seeking to either undermine your religion or eradicate it completely, the ever increasing hostility of persons and groups who wish to abolish America, etc. Well, let me know how you fare when you ever so politely ask them to stop.
27 Comment by NGPM on 7 April 2008:
Most nations engender some sort of mythical moralism to light the flame of their identity. In one context the memory of World War II could be seen as one such myth for the United States. Is there any harm in that? Murder is evil, but deconstruction is equally evil.
But, we may rightly argue, the root of the problem is not so much that bad things went on during the war as the philosophy that underlay its conduct and which became universal in the global political order once it was won.
Fr. Seraphim Rose wrote that “it is not enough to condemn Naziism and Bolshevism for their ‘barbarism,’” and neither is it enough to condemn the U.S. for entering the war, not the least because that was in itself not really evil. What was evil was its unabashed commitment to conquering and rebuilding what part of Europe had survived the flames of the Revolution, of Napoleon and of the Great War in the image of soft-social democratic capitalism.
28 Comment by Allen Wilson on 7 April 2008:
NGPM: You are doubtlessly right about the evil of deconstruction. Even so , there is the issue of whether the myth is in itself harmful to the nation, and I would argue that the WWII myth is very harmful, as is the Lincoln myth, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. The myths must be deconstructed in order to help redeem what’s left of the national character, which has been warped by the myths. This warping, in turn, fuels much of our arrogant, destructive crusading all over the world.
29 Comment by roger on 7 April 2008:
In Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines Speech, he explained which groups wanted to drag the US into World War two:
“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.”
It is quite obvious why the British and the Jewish wanted war. As for the Roosevelt administration, Lindbergh said:
“The Roosevelt administration is the third powerful group which has been carrying this country toward war. Its members have used the war emergency to obtain a third presidential term for the first time in American history. They have used the war to add unlimited billions to a debt which was already the highest we have ever known. And they have just used the war to justify the restriction of congressional power, and the assumption of dictatorial procedures on the part of the president and his appointees.
The power of the Roosevelt administration depends upon the maintenance of a wartime emergency. The prestige of the Roosevelt administration depends upon the success of Great Britain to whom the president attached his political future at a time when most people thought that England and France would easily win the war. The danger of the Roosevelt administration lies in its subterfuge. While its members have promised us peace, they have led us to war heedless of the platform upon which they were elected.”
http://www.charleslindbergh.com/americanfirst/speech.asp
As we now know, these groups were strong enough to pull the US into WWII, even though 85% of the American people were against American involvement in the war.
30 Comment by NGPM on 7 April 2008:
@28: I would only advise anyone wishing to deconstruct any nationalist myth to be extremely careful not to play into the hands of postmodernists, who relish any opportunity to call for the destruction of a unique, distinct and great people.
31 Comment by robert m. peters on 7 April 2008:
NGPM @ 30,
Let us not confuse abstract ideas such as “naitionalism” with a people or a culture. The Bavarians, the Franks and the Saxons, among others, could attest to the dangers of nationalism “German” to the destruction of unique, distinct and great peoples. The very unique , distinct and great peoples of the separate and sovereign republics associated with Southern culture can also attest to the very destructive nature of “nationalism” as it was fostered under Mr. Lincoln, with his myth of a nation having been born in 1776.
32 Comment by Pole on 7 April 2008:
Is Pat Buchanan truly an America Firster?
It seems odd that Pat Buchanan has on many occasions criticized Britain and United States, but never did he criticize Germany.
Any errors of Versailles Treaty (one of Buchanan’s favorite themes) pale in comparison with Germany’s greatest foreign policy blunder of all times, namely granting free passage to Lenin’s gang (the infamous sealed train trip) and providing Bolsheviks with initial funding.
Likewise, one might debate the merits of British and French decisions to declare war on Germany on September 3, 1939, but surely Germany deserves some criticism? The rest of Europe was perfectly willing to accept incorporation of Austria and Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) into Germany in 1938. Far from being satisfied with these concessions, next year Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, two countries which did not threaten Germany in any way. Was it good for Germany?
And in 1992 Pat Buchanan proposed that Germany and United States jointly intervene on the side of Croatia in the Yugoslav civil war.
Which one is it – America First or Germany First?
33 Comment by Bill Wilder on 7 April 2008:
To Pole @ 32:
I think the errors and evils of the Nazi regime are a given, at least in our country’s discourse on WWII, which is why Buchanan would not mention them. (The US does not emulate the German regime. I think his concern is it emulating the errors of the British regime.)
As to his 1992 comments on the Yugoslav conflict, I’m not aware of that comment, but perhaps Mr. Buchanan’s Catholic fealty was speaking there.
Best
34 Comment by james on 7 April 2008:
@32Pole
Actually most of the blame for the bolshevik revolution in Russia steams from US and Britian specifically London and New York were they were financed and allowed to organise companied by a sympathetic media. When the Soviets came to power there major industrial projects were financed through the Federal Reserve System with high interest loans.
35 Comment by Chris on 7 April 2008:
John Press,
>I would have hurt Japan and Germany with all I had until
>they said uncle, then I would have retreated back into
>my domestic shell.
Keep in mind that it was the Russians that destroyed Germany.
Some statistics to put things in perspective:
- Germany used 85% of her military resources fighting the Russians.
- Germany lost 88% of her military men fighting the Russians.
The Americans didn’t give eastern Europe to the Russians. There was nothing that the Americans’ paltry divisions could have done to the Russians besides nuking them at the end of the war.
D-Day was nothing but to get a foothold in Europe before the Russians took all of it.
36 Comment by Chris on 7 April 2008:
James, if you want to be taken seriously, use reasonably proper grammar and spelling, capitalize your name and provide sources for your assertions.
Otherwise you’ll come off as a wacko.
37 Comment by Pole on 7 April 2008:
James,
US and Britain tolerated the Bolshevik monster, but it was Germany that created this monster by giving Lenin free passage from Switzerland and giving him funding through their Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Then there was the infamous 1922 Rapallo treaty, which the two pariahs, Germany and the Soviet Union, used to defy the sanctions and Versailles restrictions. Soviet Union even allowed Germans to train their tank crews on the Soviet soil.
In contrast, US did not even grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition, at least not until FDR.
38 Comment by Pole on 7 April 2008:
Bill Wilder,
You don’t know what goes in Pat Buchanan’s mind any more than I do. When you write “errors and evils of the Nazi regime are a given, at least in our country’s discourse on WWII, which is why Buchanan would not mention them” – that is merely your guess – maybe this is the reason why Buchanan never criticizes Germany, but there could easily be another reason.
39 Comment by Edward on 7 April 2008:
Pat has written on WWII before, and I appreciate his candid questioning of textbook history. The picture usually painted is one of pure victory and celebration on the part of Europe and America. The truth, however, was that, while America did emerge victorious, communism ended up taking hold throughout much of the world.
The reason writing on this topic is so controversial is because most people see it as an attempt to soften the demonic image of Hitler, but, in reality, Pat is just refusing to narrow his historical focus. I would hardly question his intelligence or his patriotism on this or any issue.
40 Comment by Flavius Claudius Julianus on 7 April 2008:
Pardon… ‘Won’ the war…must watch the grammar…haha
Just thought a little joke would be good for the conversation…
41 Comment by james on 8 April 2008:
Actually I dont know why there focusing so much on WW2 all of a sudden when our modern day mistake was our support of the terror regime in Bosnia during the early 90’s. From that we got 9/11 and even the first WTC bombing were Ramzey Yousef features in a jihadi “Martyrs of Bosnia” recruitment video.
42 Comment by Flavius Claudius Julianus on 8 April 2008:
James @ 42
Do you mean WWI…You must, because the Czar was gone thirty years before WWII…
43 Comment by Flavius Claudius Julianus on 8 April 2008:
James @ 43
We surely made a grand mistake supporting the muslims in Europe…Big mistake…
44 Comment by NGPM on 8 April 2008:
@30, Mr. Peters, good point. Of course history would read much more nicely had Germany never been united under the Prussians. However, the fact is that Germany is united now, *probably* will not be broken apart anytime soon current leftist prescription for undoing that mess is to indoctrinate their children with self-hatred of the worst sort and to cheer for unlimited Third World immigration, both of which only hasten the death of whatever unique identity they have retained. I have a special grudge against postmodernists and finding common ground with them is something I admonish any conservative against: I’m just saying be wary of any statement with which a postmodernist is likely to concur.
@Pole: “maybe this is the reason why Buchanan never criticizes Germany, but there could easily be another reason.”
True, we cannot know Buchanan’s motives, but there is no objective reason to suspect an ulterior motive (anti-Semitism and/or Holocaust denial come to mind). It is the leftist and neoconservative media that tars him with that brush with no positive evidence against him, just to shut him up. Are we to say that anyone who wants to criticise the USA has to start by firmly condemning Germany? We might as well say that you cannot condemn the Nazis without in the same breath condemning the Peace of Versailles, Anglo-American war crimes, Austria’s war against Serbia, the Black Hand’s assassination of the Archduke, the unification of Germany, the Napoleonic Wars, the French Revolution, the Encyclopédie and the English Revolution, Louis XIV the “Christian Turk”…
… shall I go on?
There is plenty of evil in all times and places. I don’t know what Buchanan’s motives are, but I applaud him for not falling into the overqualification trap. It is very tedious.
That said, I am very glad you are posting here. I don’t think American conservatives give enough consideration to the perspective of their European counterparts, and apart from neo-Nazis (who aren’t so much conservatives as idiots), from what I have seen most of the European traditionalist right would balk at the idea that their continent would have been better off half-Nazi than half-Bolshevist. There is no question what the National Socialists had in store for religion, and yet their clashes with the Catholic Church are scarcely touched upon in history–and to our detriment.
Furthermore, at the time, even European “far-right” organisations like Action Française and the Chetniks were aggressively anti-German, and quite rightly viewed the powerful central European state as a menace to their survival from very early on.
(However, times change, and contemporary Germany is indispensible in European power politics, which is why I would encourage German pride and self-confidence; before Hitler theirs was a multifaceted, heroic and fascinating tale. And Angela Merkel, for all her faults, seems to be a far more palatable leader than Bush, Blair or Sarkozy. Let’s hope she proves me right during the storm that’s about to come.)
45 Comment by robert m. peters on 8 April 2008:
NGPM @ 44
The is, to an extent, a sidebar to this thread; however, a “positive” prejudice of mine has been activated so I herewith respond. Your line “had Germany never been unified under Prussia” has conjured it up.
I see Prussia a bit more nuanced and could wax unto utter slipperiness about it. I promise to struggle against that penchant.
Bismark, quite prior to the founding of the socalled “second Reich,” had misgivings about some movements, notions, ideologies or religions which he saw to threaten his little Prussia. One might note that Bismark was descended from the very old Germanized Slavic noblity, whose roots went much further back than in the region than did those of the Hohenzollern whom he served, and I am talking about the area in and around Berlin (slavic name) and not the region of the Baltic called Prussia. The movements about which he had misgivings were the following: Roman Catholicism, Marxist socialism in all of its emerging forms, Judaism – the culture and the religion, and nationalism, particularly German nationalism. He was concerned about them because each of them had allegiances which went beyond the borders of that, for him, unique entity of Prussia. How Bismark attempted to deal with each of those elements I will not go into. They are matters which anyone with interest can find, particluarly in the age of the Internet.
Prussia, particularly prior to 1866, was a unique state knitted together as a synthesis of Germanic and Slavic culture, much better knitted together than the Austro-Hungarian counterpart to the south. Yet, as Bismark realized, it was fragile. I will not go into detail about the eastern regions of Prussia prior to 1866 or 1871, none at all; however, Bismark rightly feared German nationalism. He feared that if Prussia entered into a union with the other German kingdoms and principalities, a federation, which is what the “second Reich” was, that the leveling forces of German nationalism would finish what Napoleon had started – the sweeping away of the uniqueness of these Kleinstaaten; yet, he also understood that the rise of nationalism and imperialism in France, Russia and Great Britain were an equal threat and that Habsburg Austria was no real solution. So, he did his usual – he accommodated and hoped for a better time: a federated Reich which he hoped might placate the nationalists but which would be a bulwark, at least in the short run, against them. It seems that even as he and Old King Wilhelm brought this act to fruition in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles he knew that he would fail, for they privately acknowledged that the rise of Germany meant ultimately the end of Prussia.
If I may fast forward to Hitler and the Nazis. You probably know that European political parties, particularly in Germany, rank their members by importance. While thousands of Germans who lived in Prussia were members of the Nazi Party, for whatever reason, only seventeen Prussians were in the top 500 members; of those top 500, however, were nearly three hundred from Austria and the march regions of Germany, the “Heim ins Reich” guys, the top Nazi, despite his German citizenship being Austrian. I find it an irony that the Allies chose to end forever Prussia but chose to give the Austrians the status of “victim” of National Socialism.
After the July, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life, the editor of the SS newspaper “der Schwarzerkorps” asked in an editorial who the enemy of Hitler and the Reich might be. He came to the following conclusion: Preußen!
46 Comment by Allen Wilson on 8 April 2008:
NGPM is quite right about the danger of coming to conclusions which postmodernists might find common ground with. I have worried about this before, more than once. Even so, we mustn’t let that keep us from speaking the truth, or what we believe to be the truth. History is so complex, and the current mythology of American history built on such a shaky foundation, that it may be hard or impossible to keep from agreeing with some postmodernists on some things, but of course for vastly different reasons and from opposite motives.
Regarding Prussia, I’m not quite so sure about it being so unfortunate that germany was united under Prussian control, and I find much to be admired about the Prussian state, even though there is much I dont like as well, and would never wish to live in such a state. Nor am I so sure that German unification was any more unfortunate for Europe than was the centralisation in other European countries, or necessarily was destabilising to Europe the way so many believe, even though it did change the balance of power in Europe. War was not necessarily the inevitable outcome of German unification, but war was likely the inevitable outcome of the centralisation of all the great powers and the rise of nationalism.
47 Comment by Jack Gates on 8 April 2008:
I suspect that more than providing the human mind with imagery which war certainly does, we enter into it yet so easily (gleefully?) or rush to it ‘rush to war’ recall the invasion of Iraq bogus reasons or not. Because [the essence of] War – and for the Greeks ‘essence’ meant what the thing is in toto, and not some esoteric and isolated aspect of it – may be required of us when we are not yet able to get it met peacefully. Well give me that as a given, for the purpose of this blurb. Namely that that is one compelling facet or cause of the phenomenon of human warfare!?!
A quick look at Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes. Here’s where we miss the boat on moving forward from the times of the Greeks – without being waylaid from the source and detoured through the Romans and further diluted in what they transmitted to our own particular peoples/cultures. Cause and effect: for Rome which rose to power and empire primarily on account of its talent for inculcating and harnessing human discipline. Cause and effect simply meant a will to bringing into appearance what one desired to be, and the means to do so. That predominant meaning is today the general understanding in the West. … But the meaning for the Greeks was much more organic and connected and so what cause and effect predominantly meant in the going back and forth between the the two (cause effect) was indebtedness and responsibility; because although it is generally understood that the cause precedes the effect (yes in one sense) the need for the effect in the back and forth, left to right, right to left also calls out for the cause and in that sense is prior in occasioning the eventual consequence. So you can see what the Greeks meant, by the essence in that [its whatness] is the thing itself. Not merely some isolated or flimsy aspect when identifying soemthing’s essence.
1.) causa materialis or briefly the material or matter the clay 2.) causa formalis the form for it to take its shape i.e. aspect 3.) causa finalis – in the West (and East) we would think or assume it’s the function or its ‘purpose’ but for the Greeks no that means the occasion for the first two causes e.g. the occasion for which matter & form are to be co-responsible [i.e. the greek aition, telos] and finally 4.) causa efficiens once the ‘effect’ is whole or finished given the correct understanding of # 3 causa finalis. So the fourfold process of ’cause and effect’ is understood as one of indebtedness and subsequent responsibility which sort of has very little to do (or nothing at all?) with the more linear Roman notion of bringing about and effecting using the instrumentally of human discipline as proxy for the implementing of one’s will [i.e. the roman causa.]
Now positing for a moment if the Greeks were correct or in particular Aristotle (as he no doubt was correct except he also included essence; so it was not just ‘correct’ but the truth of the thing itself). … {Later: “Know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”} … And positing then that ontologically speaking in terms of who we are as human beings, we are *required subsequently by our place within the larger reality of which we are a part and within which we find ourselves to be. To fulfill – as a part of the requirement of who we are (inclusive of essence or its totality) – to fulfill our so to speak whatness (i.e. what we ARE.) … If we aren’t doing that and are therefore troubled or frenzied in our own comportment among others both domestic and foreign – perhaps then it manifests as an equal and opposite urge toward random and/or organized violence (WAR) to ‘get to the bottom of it’? -?-
LOOK – The morality so to speak you may notice is organically already built into the Greek way or understanding of the fourfold process of ’cause and effect’. But because we have *separated the two currently in the West you may notice today in the West we even (and perhaps rightly so) *question morality itself as something sort of fake or fabricated which one does or *must do usually disingenuously in order to have a certain desired ‘effect’ on another. You know – so we automatically – perhaps in knowing ourselves, [speak evil of good] and say or think, I wonder what ‘they’re really up to?’ I wonder why he or she did that [apparently good] thing, but you know, we ‘know’ better. In other words we even overlay our INCOMPLETE understanding of the fourfold process of ’cause and effect’ onto morality itself. Right? I.e. what were they trying to *accomplish (effect), what was the ‘real’ agenda is the knee-jerk attitude today in the West. (Right?) Or, am I being too honest? Are people now getting on buses and leaving town in order to get further distance between themselves and me!?! Fine by me, good! Go.
Used to be in prior, more quaint or naieve times in our recent past over the last 1,500 years, we were so fixated on morality even if our understanding was incomplete therein as well, we were as it were ‘trying’. Today in moving away from the more religous fixation in this matter and into the more ‘aware’ in some regards, and more baldly corrupt as well secular domain or perspective, we still err profoundly (meaning without even realizing it) when on the other hand the standard is the completeness or wholeness of the Greek. … We’re creatures of habit, conceptual creatures of habit and therefore we are PREDJUDICED toward our more linear (one directional –>) and therefore less complete Roman and today Western ways. Until now we have entered the *absurd, have we not?
Perpetual WAR of course ‘in search’ of peace. Maybe we’re ready finally to begin again, where the Greeks actually left off!?! There’s a lot of the Greek in Christianity. It’s not actually either/or but both.
We’re older now – that’s Ok.
“And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, by verse distils your truth.” -W.S.
Carry on old chaps! Carry on, I say.
48 Comment by Rusty on 8 April 2008:
“Poland began 44 years of tyranny under the satraps of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.”
If these men were only satraps, then who, pray tell, was king? The Bolshevik leadership? The international bankers who financed the revolution?
49 Comment by NGPM on 8 April 2008:
@45: I do appreciate your perspective, and as it is a sidebar to the thread I won’t go into lengthy detail replying, but thank you nevertheless for raising an important point. I also agree with Mr. Wilson, and hopefully I did not come across as demonising the Prussians (although Bismarck’s kulturkampf against the Catholic Church will forever stain my visceral reaction to his name, however much else there may be to admire about him). In fact, given the unification of Germany as a fait accompli, I think it would have been a much better world had the Germans and Austrians won the first World War.
I cannot remember who it was who said that “If we had left a Hohenzollern on the Prussian throne, a Wittelsbach on the Bavarian throne and a Habsburg on the Austrian throne, Hitler would never have come to power!”
My hatred is for revolutionary ideology, but even if we reverse all the philosophical and political poisons in Christendom, we will still have the old tribal, confessional and territorial disputes. But it would be a miracle if we could just get back to the balance of power.
@46: Try not to worry too much about what you cannot control; I don’t want to drive anyone into some sort of intellectual Jansenism. But I have in the past made the mistake of attempting to impress postmodernists, and whether I won their respect or not (in most cases I am sure I did not) I came away hating myself for ever wanting it in the first place. I am referring to a situation where a conservative was writing, for example, a magazine article that deals with demolishing some sort of national or tribal myth, in which case he must be careful to retain a traditionalist thematic integrity that would not leave an impression on a less-educated lay reader that might result in him swallowing something similarly stated by a self-hating leftist.
To put it more simply, if you are going to demolish something that is so tightly wound up in a person’s sense of being, you have to at least hint at a positive alternative, or you risk falling into nihilism.
50 Comment by Flavius Claudius Julianus on 8 April 2008:
Since we are bringing into the conversation Hellenic ideals, then one should not forget this wise old maxim…
–ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ–
The West has lost site of the ancient truths so well thought out by men greater and wiser than ourselves. We need to get back to the old ways of thinking… Once again, conquer or be conquered… This is the way of the world…and right now, we are on the wrong side of the conquering…
51 Comment by Brutus on 8 April 2008:
The censorship in the West is way over the top.
I always thought Fred Reed was off base when he said the U.S. was in the grip of feminism. He was far too right for comfort.
52 Comment by G.S. on 9 April 2008:
@NGPM – Another sidebar …. rock-and-a-hard-place:
“But I have in the past made the mistake of attempting to impress postmodernists, and whether I won their respect or not (in most cases I am sure I did not) I came away hating myself for ever wanting it in the first place.”
I get the impression that as more and more people become more and more steeped in modernist ideology — Left or Right — it becomes more and more difficult to communicate any sane or intelligent observation to them, however basic or small.
Be blunt …. and they get offended, oversimplify your words into strawman-form…. and hence they tune out what you’re really trying to convey.
(“You’re a racist,” or “You’re an anti-war pacifist,” etc….)
Be diplomatic …. and they assume you are just reiterating what they already think anyhow ….. and hence they tune out you’re really trying to convey.
(“Oh, sure we need to worry about Muslims taking over the West … which is why I’m glad I voted for Bush!” or “Oh, sure, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake… which is why I pine for the good ol’ days of Clinton…”)
Trying to share even the most meager crumb of truth becomes a tightrope-walk.
53 Comment by NGPM on 10 April 2008:
@52: Well, since the discussion is about over, I suppose the diversion can’t hurt. To cite only the most notorious figure of the Catholic right wing in the entire world, I think it was Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre himself who said something to the effect of the mentality of people who don’t believe in absolute truth is so alien that it is a futility to attempt to reason with them.
At one time I thought Dr. Fleming was something of a grouch. But as I’ve grown older I’ve lost my temper a couple of times with people of stupid persuasions (I hesitate to call them “stupid” myself because breaking out myself was quite a nightmare. Other times I’ve tossed a statement based on an assumption that (almost) everyone posting on this site would know is sensible, and the horror I provoked from passers-by was frustratingly dramatic.
Of course, what’s more frustrating–and what leads to those inappropriate outbursts–is that feeling of stalemate, like you reach a point where you can no longer confide in or vent to anyone because no one around you speaks your language. But we shouldn’t complain: personally, I wouldn’t start speaking NARAL or RNC for the world.
54 Comment by Jack Gates on 11 April 2008:
“NGPM: You are doubtlessly right about the evil of deconstruction. Even so , there is the issue of whether the myth is in itself harmful to the nation, and I would argue that the WWII myth is very harmful, as is the Lincoln myth, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. The myths must be deconstructed in order to help redeem what’s left of the national character, which has been warped by the myths. This warping, in turn, fuels much of our arrogant, destructive crusading all over the world.” -Allen Wilson
I understand NGPM’s concern. Deconstruction or destructuring is important and inevitable in order to ascertain if the component parts of a relative whole contain the essence of themselves essential to truth…When it is felt or suspected the relative whole in question is hollow or bogus i.e. in this case the good war/bad war, etc.
Go back to the Greeks for guidance because afterward the Latin notion that myth destroys logos or word in the process and so it was either myth/ or logos [not both] became the standard in philosophy yet with us today – more, than less. {Another mistake held as a standard is to avoid contradiction in order to arrive at truth but that is false as well. Truth is a double-edged sword, but that is for another discussion.}
The Greeks understood that myth is also process, just as logos is not only word but process and so myth is also logos intertwined along the way in TIME. … Until the point at which the most pristine essence of each can’t remain a tandem and they separate. Thus the appropriate combination in time and separation at the appropriate time are necessary, (it’s the human/divine factor walking hand in hand), and when appropriate not evil. Then to force connection after the Fact in time, would lapse into that being an evil.
Thus both gentlemen from their own perspective in time are accurate.
Another mistake is that myth is destroyed by ‘logic’ also associated with logos (and is one of the few mistakes in Plato’s work). But the Greeks found out and proved of course that logic is not absolute. … I called Plato’s few mistakes in that regad, when I posted as ‘george’ on the old sf site – the Platonic facade. And also referred to such similar mistakes when they cropped in conceptual perspective in modernity as the Semitic Facade. Plato was the greatest philosopher ever or neck & neck with Aristotle but it’s an imperfect world and he was not an exception in that regard.
Thus nothing religious (matters of faith) can ever be destroyed per se, and least of all by ‘logic.’ The only thing that can destroy the religious is the withdrawl of the God or the divine and that equates with such a tandem no longer being timely in terms of the preservation of the most essential of each.
So I agree with both gentleman except with the caveat that to indicate as NGPM did that all deconstruction or destructuring is flat out evil (as some’times’ it may be) ‘as if’ that were an absolute without the consideration of time is a mistake. … And one of the old mistakes too of Christianity under an imbalance toward the Latin at the expense of the Greek in toto. In the past [in time] such Latin proclivity (or imbalance) may not have been a mistake but something temporally fortuitous. And going forward needs an eye both toward the present as it unfolds and thus toward eternity as well. Yes.
It’s why the exoteric and the esoteric in religion (and the best ones have both) although different only at the level of their most pristine essence are along the way in time also Legitimately the same. Good.
We are all in time a sign that cannot be completely read only approximated. Until the garments of this world case by case are completely enfolded into eternity (we build for eternity by dwelling – therein along the way as Chronicles has pointed out in one of its issues). And is why we have no purpose per se but rather exist within an occasion always for indebtedness and responsibility which is the first not the last standard of our Christianity. ‘The first shall be last, the last first.’
‘What should I do, seeing thee so indeed,
That tremble at the’imagination?’ -W.S.
And that’s the way it is, April 11, 2008 – the place to be
P.S. that’s why I like to say Myth Works
55 Comment by Bill Wilder on 11 April 2008:
You are, of correct, that I am merely surmising as to Buchanan from the various writings of his that I have read. Of course, I am also not playing out my ethnic biases and foreign rivalries in this thread either, as I’m an American.
56 Comment by Michael Averko on 14 April 2008:
Pole
FYI, Pilsudski rejected an alliance with the Russian Whites, whose Constituent Assembly had recognized Polish independence.
Red commander Tukhachevsky is on record for believing that a Polish-White alliance could’ve very well resulted in a defeat of Bolshevism.
In 1938, Poland joined Nazi Germany and Hungary in ther dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Something which the West didn’t oppose. The USSR offered a united front with the West to opppse a nazi advance on Czechoslovakia. The West opted for the appeasement route; no doubt hoping that the Nazis and Soviets would beat each other to a pulp, with the Westy left alone. Albeit a monster, Stalin was diplomatically prudent in making his own deal with the Nazis.
It’s a great shame that many innocents die over such geopolitical board games.
57 Comment by Spiro on 14 April 2008:
Michael Averko,
I have no problem with Polish foreign policy (or any other country’s foreign policy) being subject to debate or criticism such as yours, as no country is perfect.
My objection is to a lopsided attitude of Buchanan, who still hasn’t gotten over Versailles, who constantly criticizes Britain, but never ever criticizes Germany.
58 Comment by Allen Wilson on 15 April 2008:
I think that one reason Buchanan seems so one-sided is because of the need to clear things up after decades of often rabid anti-German historicism. Pointing out the faults of other countries in order to balance things is not pro-Germanism or pro-Nazism. In order to obtain a clear view of the disasters of the twentieth century, we cannot continue with an ‘Allies good, Germans bad’ view of things.
59 Comment by Howard Sitton on 16 April 2008:
Mr. Buchanan:
A wonderful encapsulation of the war’s “unintended” (and sometimes not so unintended) effects. Of course, for millions, it was not a “good war”, at all. I am happy you are always ready to challenge the cherished beliefs which seem to override any rational analysis and appreciation of major world events. The Second World War was, as you noted, laced with harm being done to innocents by the “saviours”, and while the defeat of Hitler and Tojo is laudable, the time to take responsibility for what we – and our allies – did is long overdue. We need to admit it and try to redress it! Where it was reasonable “collateral damage”, say so . . . and where it wasn’t, admit it and assume responsibility. This isn’t “trashing a memory”, but standing against the “flight from responsibility” that characterizes so much of our modern thinking at all levels.
No. 6: When distinguishing between the Hitlerian view of Poles, and the Stalinist view, remember not only that the Russians re-opened the universities, but the fact that first, when the Poles greeted the Russian invaders in September 1939, coming in from the East three weeks after the Germans came in from the West, they thought the Russians were helpers against the Germans; they weren’t, but rather were in Poland to take the Eastern half of that 1939 country which had been negotiated for by them in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. And, they kept it; so, when the 1945 defeat of the Germans was complete, if you were a pre-war citizen of Lvov, Poland, for example, you were now a Russian, because Stalin made sure – in agreements with the Allies – that the half of Poland he got from Hitler would remain his. And: who egged on the Polish Home Army to rise up in Warsaw, and then sat by and watched it be destroyed? The same friendly Russians who killed the Polish officer corps at Katyn. So, they opened the universities? To teach what?
No. 20: Japan “. . . was on a maniacal rampage . . .” Please. Yes, Japan was on a program of conquest to establish its pre-eminence in East Asia; our provocation was mainly to curtail oil shipments, to allow a “private” air force to be raised among Americans to fight for Chiang Kai-Shek, and so on. “I don’t think Hitler needed much provocation . . .”: no, he didn’t. Hitler simply applied bluster and bullying tactics in international politics – sometimes they are (and were) successful, and sometimes not. But that doesn’t change the fact that he got a lot of provocation from us. The “Neutrality Act” was a sham, and the order for the U.S. Navy to “shadow German ships” and report their positions to the British, the “shoot on sight” order against German U-Boats prior to the beginning of the war (for us), Lend-Lease, etc., provided all the provocation anyone could ask for, even if the Germans had no idea of the existence of the Argentia Bay, (Newfoundland) Conference.
I hold no brief for the Japanese and Germans who committed atrocities against helpless people. Such acts themselves assured that any “gains” could only be repulsive to most of us and thus vainglorious achievements for the perpetrators. Likewise, any such acts by the Allies should be “owned up to”, and accepted for what they are, and to the degree possible, atoned for.
Finally, Mr. Buchanan, I am sure you are not perturbed by those who try to insinuate that you are somehow “Nazi”-influenced: this is the intellectual refuge of people who need a smear-crutch to bolster their arguments, because the facts do not support them.
60 Comment by Pole on 18 April 2008:
@59
During the Cold War, there were people in the West (mostly in academia) who lectured Poles (and others living with Soviet jackboot in their face) about what was good for them.
Fortunately, they were not taken seriously.
Neither should you.
61 Pingback by Pat Buchanan i svensk översättning - Var det “det goda kriget”? « Paleolibertarian on 22 July 2008:
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