Jun 21 2008

History isn’t just a story

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 11:26 pm

Pat Buchanan‘s recent book, Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War” has caused no little comment in the blogosphere and elsewhere, in no small part because it is revisionist history, running very much counter to the understanding of most historians about the events leading up to World War II.

I commented on Buchanan’s book earlier, quoting Victor Davis Hanson.

Buchanan riposted, asserting Hanson’s critical views of the book were not founded in fact, claiming Hanson hadn’t read the book, etc.

A fascinating conversation has developed between Hanson and Buchanan over Buchanan’s book.

Just Google “Buchanan Hanson” and you’ll see many links.

To no one’s great surprise, I’m siding with Hanson on this one, though I have appreciated certain of Buchanan’s earlier books, especially The Death of the the West, a sort of precursor to another favorite of mine, America Alone by Mark Steyn.

The sad part of this entire tale is that today’s recent college graduates mostly lack the tools to evaluate the arguments of either Buchanan or Hanson. Many of them literally know no more of Stalin than that he was some kind of dictator, maybe of Russia or something. They know somewhat more of Hitler, because our academic community is (ignorantly) proud of what it thinks was its position regarding Hitler, while being somewhat embarrassed about how many thought Lenin/Stalin might be pretty good guys stuck with a hard job requiring them, regrettably, to break eggs occasionally.

Our recent grads know more about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib than the Lubyanka. Indeed, the wiki article on the Lubyanka makes only a passing mention that it was an infamous prison/torture center. If they know of all three, they believe there is some moral equivalence between them…. about like equating the elementary school-age neighborhood bully with a professional hit man.

Generally, our recent college graduates believe Hitler was a bigger killer than Stalin, if they even know anything of Stalin. And when informed about Stalin’s murderous ways, they then believe he was the biggest killer, because they know next to nothing about Mao. A great many literally have no idea who Mao was, when he lived, where he lived, or what he did. Some of them think he might have been some kind of Japanese or Asian guy.

Generally, our recent college grads seem better informed about the depredations of the Crusaders than the Bolsheviks.

These students know more about diversity and non-“dead-white-male” authors than they do about the history which shaped the world in which they live, and which provides the frame for many possible future conflicts.

They know just about nothing about Islam, but they know how evil the Israelis are for holding the Palestinians in poverty, and sort of killing them for sport sometimes.

I don’t want to sound like I blame the colleges and universities exclusively. I was graduated from high school in 1969, knowing more history than most of our recent college graduates. I was not especially unusual in that, nor was I especially interested in it. It was just the expectation of the times.

The Howard Zinn effect has been absolutely deadly to our students’ understanding of history, and unfortunately many of its victims are now young teachers, passing along their ignorance to all and sundry.

I write this in the (probably forlorn) hope that young folk will get interested in knowing the real history that created their world, and will take the time to provide for themselves what school did not.

I’ll probably post a reading list at some point… for anyone who’s interested.

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Jun 05 2008

World War II: the Bad War?

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:34 pm

Victor Davis Hanson, the well-known historian, has written an article at Real Clear Politics, regarding recent revisionist attempts to criticize how the Allies got into World War II, as well as how they fought it, attempts being made both from the left and the right to create, without quite saying so, some kind of moral equivalency between the Allies and the Axis.

Essentially, the argument is that if the Versailles agreement that ended WWI had been more “fair”, and if the Allies had not made unenforceable security guarantees to Poland, and more or less let Hitler have what he wanted, the war could have been avoided. After all, what interest did France or England have in defending Poland? Buchanan makes other, somewhat more subtle arguments, but they boil down to assessing Hitler as negotiable, or implying that the unfair resolution of WWI was the real culprit.

This all reduces down to an enormous exercise in Monday morning quarterbacking, combined with myopic hindsight (not 20/20, since those looking back in this way seem to be missing essential points).

Hanson’s take on this:

Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.

Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 — or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.

The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never “stabbed in the back” at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II — and 60 years without war have followed.

Had Nicholson Baker been alive in 1942, I doubt he would have had better ideas of how to stop the Nazi and Japanese juggernauts that had ruined Eastern Europe, Russia and large parts of China and southeast Asia other than using the same clumsy tools our grandfathers were forced to employ to end fascist aggression.

A Nazi armored division or death camp stopped its murderous work not through reasoned appeal or self-reflection, but only when its fuel, supplies and manpower were cut off.

I am currently visiting military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, some of the most beautiful, solemn acres in Europe. The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German rail yard.

Instead, our soldiers were more worried that they had few options available to stop Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — other than their own innate courage. The dead in our cemeteries over here in Europe never bragged that they were eagerly fighting the “good” war, but rather only reluctantly finishing a necessary one that someone else had started.

They and those who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II while ignoring — or faulting — the intelligence and resolve that won it.

Read the whole thing.

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