“Joachim Fest, Hitler’s most astute biographer, thinks that the German army would have overthrown Hitler if the Rhineland gambit had led to war with France. Fest, an old-fashioned conservative, may have been engaging in wishful thinking.”

…….I agree with you about Fest……quite the best and most insightful biographer of Hitler……however he is widely considered in Germany as something of an apologist for the traditional ruling classes in the country who conspicuously failed to come together and stop Hitler…….I know this from both my own reading and it’s confirmed by my son in law who is a member of the trad German ruling class…..so maybe Fest is giving them the benefit of the doubt…….I just find it difficult to believe that the German army who had sworn a personal oath to Hitler and to whom an oath was sacred would have overthrown their leader in the middle of a war with the traditional enemy who had vanquished them only 18 years before and against whom they were itching for revenge…..does it seem likely to you?

…….When the British went to war in 1939 they were voting for the end of Britain as a world power……Chamberlain and Halifax were much more clear eyed about this than Churchill who had an element of fantasist about him…….Ultimately Hitler crossed the bridge that had been at the heart of British foreign policy since Elizabeth I……just as the Kaiser did in 1914…….no single power could be allowed to dominate the Western European land mass and control the ports of the low countries…..at the end of the day it was that simple

WW1 was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century due to all that came out of it.

If only the war had been avoided altogther, or, had ended quickly and not turned into trench warfare…

(*SIGH*)

But history is what it is. Such is human existence.

(*SHRUG*)

BILL

I generally agree with you about Chamberlain. I would add that many conservatives show their ignorance of the situation in 1930s Europe, Munich and especially Chamberlain. Many conservatives, especially neo-conservatives, seem to forget that Europe experienced a depression about as bad as ours. Your average Frenchman, Briton, Belgian, Dutchman and the rest much preferred to spend less money on arms rather than on butter, so to speak. Due to the realization of the pointless destruction of the Great War, the sentiment was very much against war, especially in the democracies. Another point lost on many conservatives is that Chamberlain’s delay of war allowed the building of the Spitfires and Hurricanes, which I believe just got on line in 1938. Those planes came in handy in 1940.

I think you will agree that it was unfortunate that the French did not go to war with Germany when Hitler decided to militarize the Rhineland. I think Hitler would have been ousted from power if the French Army would have routed the small German force in the Rhineland.

……….The British and French govt’s didn’t guarantee Poland until the spring of 1939 essentially in reaction to Hitler’s occupation of the remainder of Czecho…….it was hardly an “empty” alliance since when Hitler invaded Poland both France and Britain honored the guarantee and declared war on Germany……I can’t say they did it with great enthusiasm since France knew that any war with Germany was going to be fought on their territory and the British knew that the British Empire and France which had combined GDP that was about 75% of Greater Germany’s couldn’t defeat Germany unaided. ………As for the US you’re wrong there too………while opinion moved in the direction of the British the American public never accepted that war with Germany was inevitable…..lease lend passed by a whisker, the draft law passed by one vote I think, and as late as the fall of 1941 there was a majority against entering the war………this is why FDR who did want to enter the war on the side of Britain maneuvered the Japanese into a position where they had no option but to start a war……..and even then a declaration of war against Germany was by no means certain but Hitler took the problem away by declaring war on the US on December 11th.

………more likely manning the non sequitur mills…….Buchanan was only one of these people and his slightly loopy views on world war 2 and other matters have have zero connection with the Iraq war……I find Buchanan(rather like you actually) to be something of a schizophrenic……most of the time off the wall but occasionally with very shrewd insights which just proves that even a broken clock is right at least once a day

Not entirely. Some of those “radically alienated” conservatives, like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, are still way more extreme than the rest of the nation.

Pat Buchanan has written books and articles suggesting that it was a mistake for the U.S. to have ever fought the Nazis in WW2. (He has stated that might have been better for the West to give Hitler a free hand in the East.)

He blames WW2 on Churchill’s intransigence, not Hitler’s “Lebensraum” expansionism. So he actually ends up claiming that it was Churchill, not Hitler, whose actions got the Jews slaughtered!

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=67578

While “80% of the nation” now agrees that the Iraq War was a mistake, they are not blind isolationists like Buchanan who are sorry that we didn’t “allow” Hitler to destroy the USSR. Or like Ron Paul, who thinks we should recall our military forces to our own borders and huddle behind a Maginot Line of defensive forces.

And I don’t think you are either.

Just setting the record straight, like I always do.