70 Years Later.. : Hitler has become a Man of Peace!

In relation to our previous post, here’s another example of a political pundit re-writing history, and on this 70th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, it is worth pausing upon it.

This time, it is Pat Buchanan who wrote a column on MSNBC website entitled "Did Hitler Want War?" in which he claims that Hitler didn’t really want war and that the British are really to blame for WWII. (It is also the thesis of his latest book, called “The Unnecessary War”.). His theory is basically that if Britain hadn't aligned itself with Poland, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. Seriously!

Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia.

As often before, he also makes dubious parallels between WWII and the war in Iraq, and as much as one can be critical of the motivation for the war in Iraq, making such historical comparisons is idiotic, and worse, it is dangerous. (the same can be said about arguments using WWII to support the war in Iraq).

Now in case you are not familiar with Pat Buchanan, the man is not just any one, he’s an influential American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. He was a senior advisor to American presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was a host on CNN's Crossfire. And today, he's a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network including the show Morning Joe and a regular on The McLaughlin Group. (He also ran for the Republican presidential ticket in 1992 and 1996).

Interestingly, his views are unlike those preached by L. LaRouche, the wingnut who provided the health-care Town Hall protesters with Obama=Hitler signs this summer. Beneath the deceiving innocuous, respectable guise of a simple foreign policy debate, one must remember Buchanan is an isolationist in the (American) tradition of immigrant-bashing nativism which blames everything wrong on the Jews, Hispanics, blacks, the media and large corporations.
Recently, Jonah Goldberg told us that Adolf Hitler was of the Left, and now Buchanan says Adolf Hitler was a man of Peace….

Such historical revisionism would never be tolerated in (Western) Europe and there would be an outcry over this sort of things… but in America, it took The National Jewish Democratic Council to release a statement in which they implored MSNBC to remove the article from their Web site for MSNBC to react and do it.

However, it is not the first time that Buchanan goes off the wall with bigoted speech, yet MSNBC continues to employ him. Maybe they want to show that they are open to a diversity of ‘opinions’ and that they are more “fair and balanced” than FoxNews but this sort of historical revisionism is not another ‘opinion’, it is a dangerous re-writing of history which ignores facts and selects whatever fits a right-wing agenda, but unfortunately not enough Americans know enough about WWII to see that.