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This is a must read for every "Baby Boomer" and all of "The Greatest Generation". It talks to the corruption of power in politics and in ALL the leadership at the time. FASCINATING, FRUSTRATING READ.
Pat Buchanan is one of the few authors who proclaims to be Catholic who has had the courage to publicly attack legal contraception in his thought provoking The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. Certainly this is true of the Second War. Hitler was able to play on very real cultural anti-semitism in his rise to power, and the Jews suffered terribly. No one who is sane can argue that the U.S. I find it hard to imagine that peace loving German citizens and normal "folk" would have engaged in such aggression. No one can argue that the "peace" to end the Great War was a good thing. President Geroge W. And, of course, Buchanan's analysis begins, as it must, with World War I.
The Second World War was an essential battle given those who rose to power (Adolph Hitler). On that much I am certain. However, we shouldn't judge Pat guilty of the same crime simply by association. A glance at some of these five star reviews, some of them penned by the most vitriolic of holocaust deniers and revisionists, shows that many who profess to be "traditional" need to read Belloc and Chesterton and other traditional Catholic authors who were actually alive at the time before spouting their opinions. In fact, Belloc argues that the Allies must totally defeat Germany in the Great War (and by extension the flawed ideology that drove her).
That is sad, and such people should be shunned and avoided. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. However, I was surprised by Belloc's strong stand because I have always bought into the notion that World War I was a war of questionable justice, a war that resulted in an unjust peace, which in turn led to the rise of Hitlerism and the evils of the holocaust. His critique of Churchill is in MANY ways a critique of Bush. I wish that this occurred.
However, the vast majority of English speaking traditional Catholics have GREAT respect for the incomparable Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Our civilization is Judeo-Christian in its roots, and if we loose our roots, we risk losing ourselves. And, the subject of Judaism, and Israel, is attached to both situations. This is probably not surprising as Belloc was an Englishman with French roots. The root of Nazism was, in part, a jingoistic view of German racial superiority that was very present in German culture before the Great War. I, for one, am not convinced that PJB's analysis of the European war, and the present conflict, is correct.
Belloc's book has challenged all of my conceptions, although it is clearly a product of its time and is not without its own weaknesses. Non-Catholics may find this uninteresting. Most importantly, Belloc clearly mocks and marginalizes those who would believe in any form of "Teutonic superiority." Here I must add a qualifier that Belloc fails to add, and his work suffers as a result. Nowhere does he deny the holocaust. He clearly communicates to the audience the argument he is trying to make, and it is rooted firmly in the present. "The fight, in a word, is not like a fight with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property, or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half inclined; it is like a fight with man who says, 'So long as I have life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you.' And fights of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction of offensive power in one side or the other.
Specifically this book: Elements of the Great War, The - The First Phase (It is available for free online as it is in the public domain)Firstly, I admit that I have a motivation in reviewing this book. Buchanan wants to argue that the first war would have ended everything if the British weren't quick to get involved and, failing that, the Second War would also have turned out better, specifically for the Jews, had the allies pursued a more peaceful foreign policy. I think this is poppycock, and Belloc would agree with me. In World War II we have the Holocaust. As such, I respect him. This is clearly supported in the primary source documents.
For English speaking Catholics these two authors give us an excellent place to start.Unlike Buchanan, Belloc sides strongly with the Allies. Two of the best of course are G.K. Buchanan out of the way, I want to state my partial preference for Hillaire Belloc on this topic. It is worth noting also that Belloc had "skin in the game." He lost a son "over there" who died protecting the West from the anti-Christian view of Teutonic racial superiority and Germanic hyper-nationalism and this may have colored his understanding. As Pope Benedict XVI has pointed out, there is no excuse for Holocaust denial and anti-semitism. When Paul VI gave us Humane Vitae the predictions he made about the future if contraceptives became the norm have all come to pass.
I expected that Belloc too therefore would view World War I as a war of questionable justice, somewhat like Pat Buchanan does. So too, Belloc predicted that German's jingoistic self-conception would lead to war again if they were not totally and utterly kept unable to wage another war. It is worth pointing out how these two men reacted to German nationalism and to the war, as they were alive at the time. This defense of Mr. When one reads a text critically one looks for the hand of the author at work. He was right. Furthermore, sadly, among Buchanan's admires are truly twisted individuals who are holocaust deniers and revisionists. Buchanan opposed these efforts, seeing in them a dangerous interventionism that threatened the US itself.
I am convinced that his arguments on contraception in the Death of the West are rock solid. Having read both Buchanan's and Belloc's work on Germany and the war, it is easy to see that Belloc would have some choice words for Patrick Buchanan's philo-German analysis. In reading Buchanan I find that some who are anti-semitic find aid and comfort in his work, and also quote from him during arguments. and the allies didn't do civilization a service by defeating Facism, and then peacefully defeating communism afterwards.
Having read Buchanan's analysis, and being challenged by it, I decided to see what authors known for their commitment to the faith had to say at that time. It is true that based men faced charges of anti-semitism in their careers. Churchill is the focus here. He was obviously right. The blame for German aggressiveness rests with the German state, the ideas of racial superiority and militaristic self-concept resting largely with the elite and the powerful.
Furthermore, I want to defend Buchanan against the charge of anti-semitism in this book. However, it didn't occur, and discussion of this issue happens early in Buchanan's book. The persecution of the Jews led to G.K. But Buchanan's view is very different than that of perhaps the greatest traditional Catholic historian to write in the English language. Chesterton saying that the Jews were being treated as a scapegoat. But when the rubber hit the road, and the persecution of the Jews began, they were on the right side of history, and this is important to point out. Chesterton. I think he is, in many ways, a brilliant man.
This review is an attempt to put these faithful Catholic authors into dialog with each other while analyzing Buchanan's work. Far too often people who have never read this book have commented on it in this review section. Bush kept a bust of Churchill in the oval office, and saw Churchill as his model for the war on terror. This indicates that Paul VI was right. War can never be prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent." And Belloc clearly and logically argues that Germany was a country that was in "moral error," a country at war in many ways with Christian civilization itself.
Buchanan is unapologetically a Catholic author, and his critique of Bush is also rooted in the Just War Doctrine. Belloc argues that this prejudice and vanity was among the primary causes of the War. I am a traditional Catholic and, sadly, there are some who self-identify as traditional Catholic who are pretty serious anti-semities. One of the many things I admire about Buchanan is his straightforward style.
In fact, he seems more interested in exploring whether or not the holocaust could have been avoided by a more peaceful foreign policy. The end of the First War resulted in German prejudices and self-definitions become more ingrained than they were before. A civilization without roots is a civilization in danger. Dhimitude is a real threat in the West (see Death of the West by Buchanan). Still, morally speaking, while it isn't black and white I still think the allies had the high ground in the first war. I read this book in its entirety and found it competently argued and well written. Today we have Muslim aggression towards the Jews (and towards Christians).
The world is a better place because the allies won that war. I think Buchanan's arguments about the second war are much weaker and are pure conjecture. However, Belloc's call for a "total defeat" of Germany during the first war may have resulted in a self-fulfilling prophesy. If the German economy were not burdened by the horrible reparations and punitive peace at the end of the first war, if the treaty at Versailles sought not to punish, but encourage a successful German republic, history may have been MUCH different.
It is a cancer that hurts a movement that could do much good. I think Buchanan, in his attempt to discredit Churchillian interventionism, may in the end be oversimplifying and engaging in simple conjecture that is in fact dangerous. After summarizing the German self-understanding, Belloc states "We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and twisted perspective so much vanity pre-supposes. A peace not affirming the complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no more than a truce." It is true that this statement ends up being prophetic, and prophetic statements are most often made by historians who were right.
Buchanan's point is not proven, all though he makes a compelling argument. And the fact is that Germany during the wars, and the anti-semitism present in that culture, exacerbated as it was by the "peace" at the end of the first war, was a dangerous and immoral force that needed to be opposed.
Everytime someone fails to bring up the fact that 6 million jews died in any book about WWII they are labeled antisemite. Many people are bringing up the 6 million jews who died in WWII. That is not the premise of the book. Buchanan is an antisemite, which he is not, is irrelevant. Two and a half million Germans died AFTER WWII at the hands of the Allies but no one ever hears about that. It is plain and clear that the book is about the diplomatic efforts or lack thereof during the time span before, during and after WWI & WWII and how those efforts, if 20/20 hindsight was used could have prevented both wars and the obvious shortcomings of Churchill who was only worried about how much territory the British Empire (You know, all those third world countries at the time that Britain ruled with a heavy hand) was going to loose and their subsequent lack of prestige after the fact that now makes Britain a second rate world power.
Get over it, this is not a book about Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and so forth. I believe 40 million Russians died, 17 million Germans and so on. Pretty soon it is like the boy who cried wolf. . Whether Mr. Thousands of books have been written about those horrible places.
So to all you critics out there stick to the facts about the book and read between the lines.
A very informative book. Mr. Buchanan impresses with a clear analytical mind. A 'must read' for anyone interested in history.Werner Brach
Buchannan's prose is very readable, despite very liberal use of quotations from other authors/sources (nary, if any, a page can be found without a quote from someone else). Buchannan, better known to American readers as a conservative politician, Presidential speechwriter and political commentator, shows considerable chops as a historian of the 20th Century with this book. As one might expect if anyone has seen, heard or read any of Mr. That World War II was an `unnecessary war' is Buchannan's main thesis, and that it lead to the downfall of the British Empire and dominance of the West followed from this mistake.
But alas these beliefs Mr. The bulk of the book seeks to address the validity of these theses, and if `true' to lie blame on the shoulders of those who deserve this judgment. Buchannan argues, effectively, that Winston Churchill, who rose to prominence as a great war-time leader, failed as a statesman and precipitated the demise of the British Empire as a price for his personal ascension.Clocking in at 423 pages of formal text, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World reads like a much shorter book. Pat Buchannan's Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World is a thought provoking and solid, if non-conventional look at the First and Second World Wars, or what Buchannan says historians will look back on "as two phases of the Great Civil War of the West". But where Buchanan truly sets himself apart from others is in not allowing his thesis to rest as merely a look backwards, but he applies his findings to current events to take shot at American foreign policy of George W. But again, this subtle `annoyance' passes with continued reading.
Buchannan's stuff before, he is not shy about wearing his beliefs on his `shirt-sleeves'. Buchannan's strong Christian (Catholic) beliefs are present, as is his near worship of former President Ronald Reagan.
Bush's Presidency that has the 21st Century `American empire' (or New World Order) overextended and seemingly following the path taken by the British empire in the 20th Century. The main title gives a good sense of the construction of Buchannan's book: Churchill (The Man of the Century) and Hitler being the two main protagonists, and the Unnecessary War being a rhetorical question in the author's mind.
Buchannan has such passion for do not deter from the strength of his book, rather they may actually enhance the seriousness of his topic and his belief in it.In the end Buchannan does a fine job conveying a coherent and convincing story to the reader. This repetitive use of passage quoting is initially a bit awkward but soon the style grows on the reader, or at least becomes unobtrusive.
The only other literary styling that may upset some readers is Buchannan's repetitive use certain thoughts and even short passages (his own) to provide recurrent emphasis to ideas. Sure it is always easy to look back in time and say what if.
Overall 4 solid stars.
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