A friend of mine in Mississippi was the first I heard use the name "Axis Pat" for Pat Buchanan. It sounded so appropriate I've been using it ever since.
Axis Pat has now provided us a good example of how the rightwing "isolationism" of the 1930s, to which he pays tribute with his America First slogan, was essentially the same kind of strident, xenophobic nationalism that lies behind the Bush Doctrine.
Buchanan, of course, has been very critical of Bush's War in Iraq. He's blatantly anti-Israel in his foreign policy, as opposed to the bizarre marriage of old-fashioned Christian anti-Semitism and support for the military policies of the Likud Party that goes by the name of "Christian Zionism."
But self-described "paleo-conservative" Axis Pat and Bush the Hammer of Righteousness found common ground in Bush's new theory of the Second World War that he articulated last weekend in Latvia:
Bush, Putin and the Hitler-Stalin pact by Pat Buchanan, WorldNetDaily.com 05/09/05
Was World War II worth it? by Pat Buchanan, WorldNetDaily.com 05/11/05
This is pretty much the old rightwing, pro-German America Firster position on the Second World War straight-up.
The destruction of Bolshevism was always the great goal of Hitler. And the Red Army eventually bore the brunt of battle, losing 10 times as many soldiers as America and Britain together. But were we and the Soviets ever fighting for the same things, as FDR believed? Or was Stalin's war against Hitler but another phase of Bolshevism's war to eradicate Christianity and the West?
It's clear from his presentation that he thinks the latter was the case. And that FDR (and Churchill) were, well, on the wrong side, in his way of seeing things.
As a result of this war, Hitler's 1,000-Year Reich lasted 12 years and Germany was destroyed as no other nation save Japan. Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden and Berlin were reduced to rubble. Between 13 million and 15 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the Baltic region, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Two million, mostly women and children, perished in an orgy of murder, rape and massacre that attended that greatest forced exodus in European history.
The latter statement, though expressed Goebbels-style, is true. The eastern European countries expelled most ethnic Germans, and the death toll was huge; if anything, he understates it.
Oh, there were some Jews killed in the process of the war, too. But they didn't make into Axis Pat's little list here.
As a result of the Great Patriotic War, Finland had its Karelian Peninsula torn away by Stalin and 10 Christian countries – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia – endured Stalinist persecution and tyranny for half a century.
His version of the wartime alliance of the Western democracies with the USSR is straight out of the old America First playbook:
Churchill and FDR rushed to embrace Stalin, gave him everything he demanded and more, and at Tehran and Yalta, ceded to him custody of all the peoples of Eastern Europe and of Poland, for which Britain had gone to war.
Buchanan is very impressed with Bush's rewriting of the history of that war:
Bush told the awful truth about what really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe. And it was not freedom. It was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century. Where Hitler killed his millions, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Castro murdered their tens of millions.
Whereas most people wouldn't think one example of tyranny mitigates the harm of another, these kind of Hitler-was-better-than-Stalin comparisons are standard fare on the far right. The Christian Right's America-has-aborted-more-babies-than-Hitler-killed-Jews is just another version of the same slogan.
This was always the slogan of the Nazis and their sympathizers, that the Western democracies had more to fear from the evil Commies in Moscow than they did from Hitler. Churchill in Britain was no friend of "Bolshevism." But he also warned for years in the 1930s that Nazi Germany was a far more immediate threat to the Western powers than Soviet Russia was.
The truths bravely declared by Bush at Riga, Latvia, raise questions that too long remained hidden, buried or ignored. (my emphasis)
The far right is always "bravely declaring" forbidden truths.
If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that was a monstrous lie. (my emphasis)
Secretly ceded? Well, no. They didn't "cede" them at all. They got the Soviets to agree to let those countries hold free elections. The fact that it didn't work out that way is a different story.
Goebbels would approve:As FDR and Churchill consigned these peoples to a Stalinist hell run by a monster they alternately and affectionately called "Uncle Joe" and "Old Bear," why are they not in the history books alongside Neville Chamberlain, who sold out the Czechs at Munich by handing the Sudetenland over to Germany? At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany. No Christian peoples of Europe ever embraced their Soviet captors or Stalinist quislings. (my emphasis)
This is also a little nudge-nudge wink-wink for those on the far right. After sneering at Chamberlain over the Munich deal, in the next sentence he supports it by saying the Sudeten Germans wanted to be part of Germany. There was much more to the Munich agreement that that, though. A critical aspect at that moment was the massive armaments works at Skoda, Czechoslovakia, which Hitler got to seize as part of the deal. It was that capability that gave him a decisive armaments production advantage which he was soon to use against the Western democracies.
In 1938, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain refused. In 1939, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Poland. Chamberlain agreed. At the end of the war Churchill wanted and got, Czechoslovakia and Poland were in Stalin's empire.
How, then, can men proclaim Churchill "Man of the Century"?
Get it? The whole war was a Roozevelt-Churchill-Stalin-Jewish plot to hand eastern Europe to the Commies.
If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.
For what it's worth, someone writing stuff like this in Germany or Austria would risk being prosecuted under those countries' anti-Nazi laws for glorifying Hitler and the Nazi Party.
This is why I tend to treat rightwing-isolationist criticisms of the Iraq War kind of like beef infected with mad-cow disease. Sometimes they make arguments that are good ones in a very specific sense. But they are often embedded in a worldview like the one Axis Pat articulates for us in those two columns.
It's worthwhile taking a glimpse at the original version of this stuff. A Fortune magazine reporter named John Roy Carlson did a long investigative project in which he infiltrated the far right in the United States. He published his findings in a wartime (1943) book Under Cover. It's a fascinating book in a number of ways. This is his summary of the pro-Nazi perspective in America among the hardcore far right in the middle of the war:
After more than four years in the Nazi underworld, I've summarized Hitler's program for the subversion of our Democracy and the overthrow of our capitalist order. It includes:
1) Anti-Semitism to serve as a social dissolvent; 2) Redbaiting to serve as a screen for Nazi propaganda; [the "reds" in 1943 were Communists, not the Republicans] 3) lies or half-truths to gain the support of the politically ignorant; 4) super-patriotism to arouse his disciples emotionally; 5) a perverted brand of nationalism which most frequently utilizes the slogans "America First" and "America for the Americans"; 6) anti-British propaganda to rally German, Irish, Italian. Spanish and nativist sentiment; 7) an attempt to undermine confidence in the Administration in order to facilitate the acceptance of revolutionary doctrines; 8) defamation of Democracy by exaggerating its failings as a device to "soften up" resistance; 10) the systematic cultivation of mass hatred as a means of blinding reason; 11) the pitting of group against group, race against race, religion against religion to break down national unity; 12) encouraging an attitude of ridicule toward the operation of Nazi propaganda in an effort to draw a red herring across its trail; 13) the adulation of Hitler as the deliverer from, and of Nazism as the panacea for, the evils of Communism, Judaism, unemployment, the national debt and anything else you choose to name; finally, 14) agitation for a "Third Party" or a "new leadership," native fascist in sentiment, to set up the American New Order by "Constitutional methods" and ostensibly in order to "preserve the Constitution," but which at the same time would be friendly to, collaborate with, or appease Hitler's New Order.
Josh Marshall ridiculed the Bush/Buchanan axis and their common position on the Second World War this way (05/12/05):
Bush puts Yalta on par with Nazi-Soviet pact to partition Poland. Buchanan calls war against Hitler "not worth it." Next up, Santorum to decry rough shake Francisco Franco has gotten at the hands of Juan Carlos [the Spanish king].
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