A lyric from an old pop song proclaimed “Don’t Know Much About History.” Many Americans could make that statement.
But the study of history isn’t merely for hobbyists who like to pose as Civil War or Revolutionary War soldiers.
Even as we debate the unpopular wars being fought with Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan, another crucial debate currently rages on bookshelves and television screens over something most of us had thought was not debatable: the wisdom of the U.S. involvement in World War II.
That there is any debate about the war the United States fought against the German Nazis and the Japanese imperialists seems absurd. Surely, no reasonable person could dispute the necessity of defeating German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
In recent months, two books questioning the justice of that fight have vaulted onto The New York Times bestseller list: “Human Smoke” by Nicholson Baker; and “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War” by Patrick Buchanan.
Baker is a quirky novelist who has written about a variety of subjects including voyeurism and a fictional attempted assassination of President George W. Bush.
Buchanan is a longtime far-right pundit and television personality, and one-time independent candidate for president. His views were once rightly labeled as anti-Semitic by the late conservative writer and editor William F. Buckley Jr.
Baker’s is the effort of a more accomplished prose writer (despite its fictionalized conversations involving world leaders it is sold as a work of nonfiction).
Buchanan’s retains the punchy style of a former political speechwriter. But they aim at the same target.
Bad but provoked
Both contend that, while Hitler was a bad guy, he was provoked into launching a war that he had not planned on.
Instead of blaming the Nazi monsters who launched the war and carried out unprecedented crimes that included the murder of 6 million Jews, each author sees British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as the real villain.
Had Hitler been left alone, they assert, the Holocaust would not have happened and the world would be a saner place today.
Though Baker concludes his faux narrative at the end of 1941, he clearly sees the Allies’ tactics in fighting the war as indistinguishable from those of the Germans. In his brief afterward, he dedicates his book to the tiny band of American and British pacifists who did everything they could to prevent their countries from resisting Hitler.
The theme of Allied perfidy is also echoed in a new PBS television series that features the work of a more respected source than either Baker or Buchanan — Scottish historian Niall Ferguson.
In his 2006 book “War of the Worlds,” Ferguson damned the Allied bombings of Germany as war crimes and dismissed the notion that World War II was in any sense a “good war.” These views are repeated in the PBS series of the same name, which recently began to be broadcast.
Unlike Baker and Buchanan, Ferguson is no apologist for Hitler. But he, too, derides the notion that the U.S. and British were liberators; after all, they used some of the same tactics as their foes.
Ferguson deplores that Western leaders did all they could to help Soviet Communist dictator Josef Stalin win. However, as with many of the other ironies cited in a series that seeks to change the way we think about the great conflicts of the 20th century, he doesn’t provide a reasonable alternative to the dilemmas Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced.
That lack of context is the problem with all this revisionism.
Buchanan quotes the historian and Cold War strategist George Kennan as asking whether the West would have preferred in 1950 to be still facing the relatively reasonable Germany of 1913, rather than having suffered through two world wars, and the rise of the menaces Nazism and Communism.
Yes, that would have been preferable. But given Germany’s dreams of hegemony, it was never an option.
Similarly, the notion that more “Munichs” — in which the West would have acquiesced to Hitler’s seizure of Central and Eastern Europe — would have left him satisfied is pure delusion and unjustified by any serious historical research.
The real point
But the real point of these writers is not to vindicate Hitler or even to trash the indispensable Churchill, without whose vision and courage Western civilization may have truly perished.
Rather, they question the more immediate notion that the West must still be prepared to defend its values against contemporary totalitarian foes.
Buchanan and Baker seek to undermine the willingness of post-9/11 America to battle the Islamists waging a new war on Western democracy.
But these new appeasers are just as blind — if not malevolent — as their World War II-era predecessors. And that important point transcends the battles of scholars and pseudo-scholars about history.
It behooves Americans to think long and hard about the “good war” now under attack and its importance to the history of their republic.
Like us today, the Americans and Brits who fought World War II were imperfect and made many mistakes. But they prevailed despite military blunders and scandals that eclipse in scale and cost those committed by the current administration and its military.
The revisionists who seek to besmirch their legacy offer us appeasement disguised as realpolitik instead of patriotism and principle. Their message must be rejected today, just as it was a generation ago.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
Are lessons of World War II applicable today? What do you think? Email your views here.
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