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 Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2009 6:25 am Post subject: Was the 'Good War' Unnecessary? |
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory188.html
Anthony Gregory reviews P.J. Buchanan's book on "The Unnecessary War" and makes reference to conditions facing the world today, particularly from the point of view of the USA. Are they making the same errors as the British did in the 1930s?
| Quote: | Was the 'Good War' Unnecessary?
by Anthony Gregory
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008); 518 pages.
Of all the wars the United States has fought, World War II is the most universally celebrated. It was the “Good War,” despite being the bloodiest in world history. Only in the Civil War did more Americans perish. But World War II is seen as the best example of the nation mobilizing completely and righteously to combat evil itself.
In Britain and America, many consider Winston Churchill the greatest Englishman ever, perhaps the Man of the 20th Century, because he pushed for war against the Nazi regime when others favored appeasement. In America, Churchill’s belligerent foresight, in stark contrast to the “isolationist” Americans who wanted to avoid war, is treated as a lesson about the limits of nonintervention and the need sometimes to wage war, sometimes ruthlessly, sometimes before national interests are directly threatened. Had Adolf Hitler not been defeated, civilization throughout Europe and perhaps more of the world would have expired. Had Britain and the United States not been bold, Hitler would not have been defeated.
World War II acclimated the American Left to foreign interventionism. Eventually, the Left got an anti-war reputation by turning sour on the Cold War. But initially, among leftists it was mostly communists who strongly opposed the Cold War as inaugurated by Democrat Harry Truman when the dust was still settling from the war against the Axis Powers, a war they had backed once Hitler and Stalin had their falling out. Democrats today point to World War II as a just war, as the pinnacle of American power used properly to secure human rights abroad. Bill Clinton invoked the specter of Hitler when waging war on Serbia, although Slobodan Milosevic’s crimes, while severe, paled in comparison with those of the Nazis.
On the Right, the Second World War is similarly popular, and there is precious little remorse about the crimes committed by the U.S. government, from bombing civilians abroad to interning them at home. Franklin Roosevelt, who foisted upon America the most collectivist economy America had ever seen at peacetime, will remain a hero among conservatives as long as he is perceived as one of the greatest commanders in chief in U.S. history.
The narrative that Hitler was defeated because Churchill’s resolute belligerence won out over Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s acquiescence to Hitler – and, from a U.S. perspective, because the American isolationists lost the day – has become a staple neoconservative talking point. Capitulating to Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be reliving 1938, when Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich. (Paradoxically, Hitler is both an unparalleled evil and the equivalent of every foreign dictator the U.S. faces today.) ........
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continued at above link.
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