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Paperback
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
ISBN13: 9780307405166
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment?
In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen–Winston Churchill first among them–the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.
Among the British and Churchillian errors were:
• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War
Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.
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| Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War - A Fair and Balanced Review |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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Patrick Buchanan takes a lot of liberties with this albeit well written book.
Ultimately his primary aim is to identify the greater evil of the 20th century - Stalin or Hitler. As an American, a nation far more threatened by the Soviet Union and the threat of intercontinental nuclear war, Buchanan takes the position that the West would have been better off to leave Hitler alone to run rampant in the East and thus initiate the mutual destruction of his and Stalins regime.
He seems to forget that Hitler desperately wanted revenge for Versailles which meant not only the defeat of France (which he barely touches upon) but the forced occupation of all previously 'German' territories regardless of the true ethnic mix and history.
Buchanan almost condones many of the Nazi leaders actions even in essence blaming Churchill's defiance as a cause for the Holocaust.
Buchanan insists that Churchill alone was the instigator for the Second World War and the Cold War after it.
It is fortunate that Buchanan's justification of appeaseement with all its repurcussions was not the ultimate tone of the day.
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| Sober thinking |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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After reading this book I wish I could say I can never take anyone talking about "the good war" seriously again but I never did anyway. Both WWI and WWII were totally pointless and caused more problems they tried to solve.
Mr. Buchanan does a good job pointing out in layman language that we have been fed history written and white washed by victors. I know it is not a common opinion but I think he actually writes too cautiously.
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| An instant classic: Politically incorrect and Challenges conventional wisdom |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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After a brief introductory chapter the book goes right to the point. It is written with great clarity and intensity and it reflects Buchanan's vast knowledge and keen interest in European history, over 1500 notes and references speak for themselves and every single one of them is so carefully and painstakingly chosen.
I feel when the dust settles, this book will go down as one of the 10 great books on World War I and World II which combined to make up the cataclysmic 30 year civil war of Europe.
Buchanan has also been very candid and honest and perhaps due to his mixed heritage (being English, Irish and German) he maintained a pan-European unbiased view which is free from false adulation and sycophancy.
The book is 1/4 part WW-I and 3/4 part WWII. The WWI part begins with Britain's splendid isolation and how despite some its statesmen, it hurled itself into a needless war with Germany to help France, and the villain was Winston Spencer Churchill, whose leadership was most calamitous to his country and the entire European continent than any leader in European history.
His decisions led directly to the emergence of four of history's greatest mass murderers, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Hitler who ravaged Russia, Germany, and eventually entire europe like a swarm of locusts.
Buchanan makes a solidly convincing case that the treaty of Versailles mutilated, ravaged and humiliated Germany, one of the most talented and culturally rich nations in human history, the land of poets, philosophers, composers and scientists, into a third rate wasteland, which made the rise of Hitler possible.
Although the book focuses on Churchill and Hitler the most, other personalities, such as Mussolini, Stalin, Kaiser, Lord Salisbury, Lloyd George, the polish Junta, Austrian conservatives, etc etc everyone has gotten a place in this magnum opus by Buchanan.
Buchanan pinpoints the utterly foolish war guarantee by Britain to Poland, which emboldened the Polish fascists to refuse the handover of a 95% German city of Danzig to Germany as the key event which triggered the World War II.
By allying itself with Stalin a far more murderous monster than Hitler, Churchill clearly displayed his moral and strategic bankruptcy.
The end of world War-II meant Europe was in ashes, half of Europe was under the brutal grip of Bolshevik mass murderers, Germany lay in ruins, and Britain, the greatest empire since Rome, became an island dependency of America.
Buchanan also cites several irrefutable sources to reveal that Hitler never wanted war with western Europe, and he never had any plans for European conquest let alone world domination, and whatever ambitions he had were perhaps and mainly in the east, Russia and Ukraine. He built his own Siegfried line on french border for defensive purposes, never asked to return German lands like Alsace etc in the west, and was trying to build an anti-communist alliance against Bolshevik terrorists.
The holocaust would never have happened, since it was a war crime, and had there been no war, instigated by Churchill, there would have been no holocaust.
On the eve of World-War II, Hitler's victims were no more than a few hundred, whereas Stalin had murdered 10s of millions with whom Churchill and Roosevelt eventually fornicated.
A fine book with so many interesting details, answers to so many ifs, buts and whys, that any free thinking person would profit immensely with a copy in their collection.
With so much fraud, lies and deception propagated by the propaganda outlets, this book gets as close to the truth as possible without being banned, forbidden or excommunicated by the thought police in this country.
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| Not all that "good" a war after all... |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Exactly how much of what Buchanan has gathered here is actually new information, or how novel is his interpretation of it, I couldn't say, but this book is a devastating indictment of the "good guys" of
World Wars 1 & 2.
To put it simply: it was wolves against wolves with the sheeple, as usual, caught helplessly in the slaughter.
Buchanan's primary target is Winston Churchill.
Churchill comes off here as a racist, power-hungry, borderline psychopath drooling before the feast of war, cooking up plans for the terror bombings of civilian populations and the use of biological weapons, and capping off his career by selling out half of Europe to the butchery of Stalin.
Ignorance, short-sightedness, tactical and strategic blunders, failures of diplomacy, of morality, of judgment, of both realism and idealism led to not just one unnecessary war--but two. For in Buchanan's estimation, neither World War I nor World War 2 need have been fought. And, indeed, given the exchange of fascism for communism, Hitler for Stalin (and, inevitably, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Il Sung, etc), the concentration camp for the gulag, there doesn't seem to have been much of an upside, after all.
By fighting two devastating wars for the so-called "good of democracy," Britain basically destroyed itself as an empire and left the world no freer than before, albeit at the cost of millions upon millions of lives.
Ultimately, Buchanan's position is one that is often called "isolationist" but, in fact, it is based on the unsentimental calculation of a nation's vital interests. This book offers his argument that if Britain and France had looked to their vital natural interests neither world war would have been fought, a lot of lives would have been saved, and, perhaps, the Nazis and Communists would have fought each other to irrelevancy.
No doubt many will disagree with Buchanan--both with his devastating deconstruction of Churchill and his legacy and the de-glorifying of the "sacrifice" made to win the two world wars--but in skewering the sacred cows and sacred causes we've been indoctrinated to honor, Buchanan renders us a valuable service if, by nothing else, playing devil's advocate to the accepted mythology of our unrivaled and unquestioned righteousness.
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| The Great Civil War of the West |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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This work combines meticulous historical research with Pat Buchanan's political agenda. The point of the book is that Winston Churchill, rather than being the indispensable Man of the Century and defender of the West was the man most responsible for the British involvement in World War I, World War II and the loss of the British Empire?
Buchanan highlights three monumental errors which lead to the Twentieth Century's Civil War of the West: The Treaty of Versailles which left Germany vengeful and receptive to Hitler's message, American pressure on Britain to abandon its alliance with Japan and Britain's war guarantee to Poland in 1939. Without those errors World War II may have been avoided or its destruction mitigated.
Buchanan challenges the conventional wisdom that German aggression against the West was inevitable and that Churchill alone focused the attention of the West on this mortal threat. He posits the idea that Hitler's ambitions were focused to the East and Southeast and that he tried to preserve the peace with Britain and France. Buchanan claims that Hitler reluctantly turned on the West only after it had declared war on Germany.
In contrast to many of our histories which present the story of the World Wars from the Anglo-Franco perspective, this one also includes the German one also. Buchanan makes the case that, as Europe tumbled toward war in 1914, it was the Kaiser who worked tirelessly to avoid war. Time after time during the inter-war years the West let opportunities to limit rising power of German or to channel its destructive path away from the West drift by. He proposes that Hitler did not have ambitions to conquer the world, but that he would have been satisfied to expand into Russia and leave the west alone. It was Churchill and likeminded Britons who forced conflict between the German and British people who shared so much. This book compares the Nazi atrocities with those of Stalin's Russia and asks the question of whether the defeat of Germany justified the Stalinization of Eastern Europe?
Churchill's motives are exposed as being hypocritical. After excoriating Chamberlain for not defending Czech freedom and insisting that Britain go to war to preserve Polish independence, Churchill meekly turned his allies over to Soviet tyranny. Buchanan contrasts the strong claim for alliance made by a democratic, industrial, militarily modern Czechoslovakia with that of a dictatorial Poland defended by an antiquated military. He presents 1939 as a reckless period in during which Britain gave war guarantees to countries, including Poland, in whom Britain had neither national interest nor the ability to defend. He contrasts the case of Belgium, whose shoreline was of vital interest to Britain, with that of Poland, in which Britain had never had much interest.
The depth of historical research which went into this book is staggering. That alone makes it a worthwhile read. Buchanan's conclusion advances his crusade against the use of American power in areas in which America has no vital interest. Although his political agenda drives this book, it is not totally outside the current of historical thinking. Although I have not read his work, I understand that British historian, Niall Ferguson, has advanced the theory that Britain made a horrendous mistake by becoming involved in World War I, a position which Buchanan seems to share. This book presents the reader with a viewpoint which forces one to rethink his or her own thoughts about the Great Civil War of the West.
Ultimately, this book, like so much of the history of the Twentieth Century, is tragedy. When we think about it we realize what terrible damage and suffering the West inflicted upon itself during this recent century. Books such as this make us stop to think that, maybe this half century of war and tragedy was not necessary. Maybe our leaders brought it upon us and maybe, just maybe, these self-inflicted wounds could have been avoided. Maybe the Decline of the West and Christendom was not necessary and, if so, that is the tragedy of the age.
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