In a blog post today, noted crazy-person Pat Buchanan asks the simple question: Did Hitler want war?
The [British] war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative "to stop Hitler" after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.
If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro’s, was out to conquer the world?
Buchanan spends the rest of the article pointing out strategic decisions made by Adolf Hitler showing that he was planning to stop military aggression in 1940:
If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?
Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
The simple retort that Buchanan doesn't mention is that Hitler published a little-known book called Mein Kampf in 1925, where he outlines Germany's destiny to rule much of Europe and to occupy part of Russia (despite Pat's claim that "As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?")
What's worse is that Buchanan implies that the concentration camps (referred to simply as "the trains") were simply an afterthought of Hitler's, when he had been rallying against the evils of Judaism since the beginning of his political career.
It's truly baffling that a man with such a blatant disregard for history, coming to the defense of an indefensible figure, is not only taken seriously, but given plenty of TV time.