James Edwards & Pat Buchanan Discuss Churchill, Hitler, & the Unnecessary War

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What follows is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by talk radio host James Edwards with Patrick J. Buchanan several years ago about Pat’s book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. This transcript has never before appeared online.

James Edwards: Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War might be your most provocative book. What compelled you to write it?

Patrick J. Buchanan: There were several things. First, it is a phenomenal story. What happened to the Western nation that ruled the entire world in 1914? Thirty years later, all of Europe was in ashes or aflame. Communists had half of Europe, and all the great Western empires had been destroyed. I went back to try and locate the historic blunders that were made, and I think we located eight of them.

Secondly, it’s a cautionary tale for the United States. The arrogance and hubris you see of these monarchs and all their retainers just before World War I, we see emulated and copied today, frankly, by some folks in post-Cold War America. So, it was to try and tell a cautionary tale to prevent what happened to Great Britain and the British Empire from happening to us.

Edwards: What are the parallels between the United Kingdom during the years between the world wars and the United States today?

Buchanan: One of the greatest is the British decision to alienate friends like Japan, which had been an old ally in World War I. The Brits broke the treaty with them at the demand of the United States for no good reason whatsoever. Japan was driven into isolation, anger, and rage, and eventually returned to her imperial policy and collided with Great Britain.

Even Benito Mussolini, who loathed Adolf Hitler, was driven into Hitler’s arms by the British/French decision to sanction them over a colonial war in Ethiopia. That was a mistake.

Finally, there is this war guarantee that the British gave to Poland, unsolicited, even though Poland had participated in the rape of Czechoslovakia – at least the regime had.

You see all these decisions replicated with the United States handing out war guarantees in this century to the Baltic republics and Ukraine and elsewhere. I see the same pattern repeating itself again and again. I believe the gentleman who said that people do not learn from history was right.

Edwards: What are some of the myths that hold up Winston Churchill as a hero?

Buchanan: There is no question that Winston Churchill was a heroic figure in 1940 when he took over the premiership in Great Britain, just as the Germans were breaking through in the Ardennes. He defied Hitler. He defied the Germans. He fought on and inspired his people. He was the leader during the Battle of Britain. Americans watched that from across the ocean and there was an indelible impression that there was a defiant bulldog who represented the British people at their best. That’s a true story. That’s not just a myth.

However, there was another Churchill who, in 1942, 1943, and 1944, slipped into Moscow to divide Europe with Josef Stalin and groveled to Stalin in a way that would make Neville Chamberlain look like Davy Crockett. He was writing off the Poles, for whom the British had gone to war. If you go all the way back to 1913 and 1914, he was lusting for war far more than the Kaiser who was trying to avoid war.

These are the myths we have been raised on since we were kids, and this is one reason I wrote the book. At least the new generation coming up, who is not saturated or marinated in these myths, can understand why it was that our grandfathers and fathers destroyed Western civilization.

Edwards: What is it about World War II that your detractors don’t seem to understand?

Buchanan: The book is dedicated to four of my uncles who were Greatest Generation Americans and fought in Europe, one of whom came back from Anzio with a Silver Star. But I think it’s the idea that this was a good war, a war where pure good fought pure evil, a war that had to be fought and was necessary, and there are no doubts or qualms about it. But that is not true.

And that’s why I, in effect, am dispelling some of the great myths by which Americans live when I say that Chamberlain and Churchill blundered serially, again and again, to bring about a war with Germany. Hitler didn’t want war with the West. He didn’t want war with Poland. He didn’t want a world war. He wasn’t even prepared for a world war.

To say that Hitler did horrible things in wartime is correct, but, as I say, had there been no war, there would have been no Holocaust, and I’m not sure there would have been a war if the British hadn’t issued this insane war guarantee to Poland.

Edwards: History is like a Sunday buffet. People take what they want and leave the rest on the table. Of course, it has been lost to antiquity that most Americans stood with Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Committee in opposition to our entry into World War II before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Buchanan: Well, good for you. Good for you for bringing up Col. Lindbergh’s name because his reputation has been blackened because of a single speech he made and a couple of paragraphs in it where he mentioned three forces are moving for war.

Of course, one of them is the Roosevelt Administration. The other is the British, which was clearly true. They had a man called “Intrepid,” William Stephenson, who tried to find ways to get the Americans into war by putting out propaganda and, frankly, blackmailing senators.

And then he said the Jewish community was beating the drums for war, but this was going to be a disaster for the Jewish community if we got into war. That was verboten to say, but no one has claimed what he said was palpably untrue. Before December 7, 1941, the America First Committee wanted to put up a resolution in Congress saying, “We declare war on Germany,” and have it voted up or down, but don’t sneak us by a back door into war.

Edwards: Had Divine Providence seen fit for Pearl Harbor to have never occurred, the United States stays home, and Germany proceeds to defeat Stalin, what would have happened to America? Would Hitler have come over here and taken us out?

Buchanan: Hitler did not war in the West. That’s why he didn’t demand the return of Alsace-Lorraine from France whereas he did want the return of Danzig from Poland and the League of Nations. He did not want war with Britain. Never did. He wanted to see the British Empire preserved. He was a great admirer of it. He thought Britain was a natural ally of Germany because they had no conflicts. So, I think, if the British hadn’t given the war guarantee, I don’t know if there would have even been a war with Poland because the German offer was not outrageous when asking for political control of their city, Danzig, with the Poles having economic control.

I don’t even know if there would have been a war with the Soviet Union then because Germany wouldn’t have had a border with the Soviet Union. They would have had to get permission from Romania, Poland, or Hungary to invade the Soviet Union. If Hitler had not declared war on the United States, I still think he might have been stopped in Russia, but the outcome of that war would have been in doubt because all the equipment we gave to Stalin enabled him to sustain his war effort and mount that enormous offensive the Russians had coming into Europe. I do think that if Germany had not gotten into the war by 1943, Stalin would have been on the Rhine.

Edwards: Hopefully a lot of American blood would have been spared.

Buchanan: There was a wonderful thing that the America First people did, and I was criticized for saying it, but they kept us out of war until after Hitler made his fatal blunder of invading Russia. This meant the Russians bore the burden of battle, and hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of American soldiers lived who would not have lived if we had had to fight Germany from the west without the Soviet Union in the war.

Edwards: How did you go about researching for this book? Who did you primarily consult with and reference when writing it?

Buchanan: After I wrote A Republic, Not an Empire, I got that good letter from George Kennan, the great geo-strategist in the Cold War. He agreed with me on a point that I’ve been really torn apart for. I said that, after the Battle of Britain, if the Germans couldn’t get air superiority over the British Isles, they certainly couldn’t get it over the Atlantic. If they couldn’t land in England, they weren’t going to land in the United States.

It’s preposterous. There was no threat. I was attacked for that, and I sort of determined that, at some point, I’m going to expand on this argument because I think it’s true. So, I started reading more and more books. I was going to write a book on the war guarantee, and then you go back and ask, well, how did we get there?

Then you have to keep going back, and I had to cut it off in 1905. But I’ve got about 120 books, ranging from histories to biographies. I must have quoted six of Churchill’s books and six books by Andrew Roberts, a British historian and a friend of mine.

I just kept reading them and decided, here are the key decisions and pivot points that decided the history of the century.

One, of course, was the assassination of the archduke in World War I, Versailles was another, and I decided that the British breaking their treaty with Japan was yet another. Then I discovered that Mussolini allegedly despised Hitler and wanted an alliance with the West, so you had the Stresa Front agreement of 1935.

Then there are the familiar ones: Rhineland, the Anschluss, and Munich, but the key one is the war guarantee. That’s the soul of the book. If people can only read one chapter, read that one because it shows how leaders in panic, haste, and folly, who have been knocked on their heels by being humiliated, can make a horrendous decision that cost them everything. The whole British Empire and the British nation was put on the line in an insane war guarantee that the British could not honor and did not honor.

Edwards: If people want to learn more, they’ll have to buy the book, right, Pat?

Buchanan: Yes, sir.

Edwards: Last question. What might future wars look like?

Buchanan: In the coming world, I think the wars of race, ethnicity, and culture are going to replace the old wars of ideology, dynasty, and empire. I see that coming, and it’s not a pleasant sight. Pat Moynihan sort of saw it coming, and so did Dr. Arthur Schlesinger. I have read a number of columns on this, and you see the divisions in our society increasingly on the lines of race and ethnicity, and I don’t think it’s a pleasant prospect that our kids and grandkids will have to confront.

I am going to try to address it and see if there is any way it can be resolved short of some sort of Balkanization of America.

When not interviewing newsmakers, James Edwards has often found himself in the spotlight as a commentator, including many national television appearances. Over the past 20 years, his radio work has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide. Media Matters has listed Edwards as a “right-wing media fixture” and Hillary Clinton personally named him as an “extremist” who would shape our country. For more information, please visit www.thepoliticalcesspool.org.