Pat Buchanan, Churchill and Mussolini

I just came across this piece on townhall.com about “How the West Was Lost“. It focuses a large amount of criticism on Sir Winston Churchill. Now, I am not averse to looking back at historically idolized figures and seeing them for the fallible humans they were, but I don’t know where Pat gets off writing some of his tripe.

The article actually started out kind of interesting and plausible. He talked about Mussolini:

A fourth British blunder, which Neville Chamberlain called the “very midsummer of madness,” was the 1935 decision to sanction Italy for a colonial war in Ethiopia. London destroyed the Stresa Front of Britain, France and Italy that Mussolini had forged to contain Germany, and drove Mussolini straight into the arms of a Nazi dictator he loathed.

Now, I don’t know much about the pre-WWII politics of Italy, but I always thought Mussolini was a Fascist from the beginning. But I suppose it is possible that he may not have aligned with Hitler had Britain not opposed his Ethiopian invasion.

But the fatal blunder was not Munich.

It was the decision of March 31, 1939, to hand a war guarantee to a neo-fascist regime of Polish colonels who had joined Hitler in the rape of Czechoslovakia.

Britain gave Warsaw a blank check to take her to war over a town, Danzig, the British themselves thought should be restored to Germany. Result: a Hitler-Stalin Pact and a six-year war that left scores of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the British empire bankrupt and breaking, 10 European nations under the barbaric rule of Joseph Stalin and half a century of Cold War. Had there been no war guarantee to Poland, there might have been no war, no Nazi invasion of Western Europe and no Holocaust.

Now, hold on a minute, chum. You’re honestly trying to tell me that if England had not opposed the invasion of Poland by the Germans, Hitler would have been pleased as punch never to invade France or Belgium?

Sorry, I do not buy that at all. His was the “Third Reich” - called so because he saw his government as the successor to Rome, then to the Holy Roman Empire (founded by Charlemagne), and finally himself. All of these empires included France.

Besides, wasn’t Chamberlain still in charge, making that call?

He makes some thought provoking points about where the West began a “moral decline”, but doesn’t do a very good job of speculating where the West would have ended up if it had sued for peace with the likes of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.  It’s questions like these that make me doubt the validity of the whole argument.