On the most important issue of the day, Pat Buchanan isn’t even on our side. Why, oh, why do conservative outlets keep giving him a forum? His latest effusion isn’t just a straw to break the camel’s back; it’s a cluster bomb dropped on the caravanserai. After a paean to Hitler’s peaceful intentions, he insinuates that the Holocaust was the fault of the countries that resisted Nazi aggression.
That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. “Mein Kampf” is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
Would Hitler have refrained from implementing the Final Solution if England and America had stood aside as he dominated Europe? That doesn’t strike me as the way to bet, but imagine that we could know it with certainty, as Buchanan thinks he can. The Holocaust was the Nazis’ gravest atrocity but hardly their only one. Mein Kampf explicitly looked forward to starving or enslaving the entire non-Germanic population of Eastern Europe, a program that was carried out wherever German arms prevailed. Pitchfork Pat has surely read enough World War II history to be aware of how the Nazis oppressed Poland and the Ukraine. If he nonetheless portrays Winston Churchill as the great villain of the Twentieth Century, he either lacks the capacity for moral judgement or affirmatively sympathizes with Hitler’s goals and methods.
Either explanation helps clarify why he supported Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003, and purveys Iranian propaganda today. What is inexplicable is that Townhall and WorldNetDaily and Human Events still carry his column, and he appears as a commentator on Fox News. His natural home is Daily Kos, the Puffington Host, BarackObama.com or Keith Olbermann’s shriekfest. As Little Green Footballs laments, Has everybody forgotten William F. Buckley, Jr., who labored to keep the conservative movement free of Birchers, antisemites (he specifically repudiated Buchanan) and other free-loading thugs?
We don’t expect the Left to police its ranks. Michelle Obama can get a pass for saying that University of Chicago medical researchers are indistinguishable for Jim Crow era bigots. The Right ought to be more fastidious. It is time for every conservative columnist, commentator or blogger to declare firmly that Pat Buchanan is not one of us.
The Einsatzgruppen were hard at work in the train of the conquering armies. At Rumbula in Latvia they murdered between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand, in November and December of 1941.
Pat has been hand in glove with Taki Theodoracopulos in publishing the paleoconservative American Conservative. Just as paleolibertarian Lew Rockwell, of the self-named website of the Mises Institute, wrote a lot of the less savory parts of Ron Paul's infamous newsletter. Murray Rothbard strove for a union of these. Maybe we should, and then close the hatch.
Posted by: Joseph T Major | Saturday, June 21, 2008 at 06:10 AM