Progress Pond

MSNBC Must Fire Buchanan

“I believe that no decent human being should ever sit down at the same table with Pat Buchanan and I am shocked that otherwise responsible, respectable citizens share platforms with him on Sunday shows.”
–Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch

It’s no longer possible to disagree with Frank Perdue look-alike, Ed Koch. Pat Buchanan has left the reservation. As General Gorman said in Apocalypse Now, “he’s out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.”

Buchanan’s most recent column makes some astonishing assertions. Among them, that World War Two was not worth fighting because:

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.

The German people did not vote Hitler in. That’s a myth. He was appointed Chancellor. The most votes the Nazi’s ever got was 37%. But even if they had, so what? Did they vote to set up a police state? Did they vote to invade Poland? Did they vote to commit the worst genocide in European history?

Buchanan’s argument is that Communism, or Leninism, was a worse menace than National Socialism. As he sees it, the Western Powers failed to liberate Poland or Czechoslovakia, because they fell into Stalin’s grip. Therefore, the Allies did not accomplish anything by defeating Germany.

When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?

Not once in his entire essay, does Buchanan even mention the Jews. He might have argued that Stalin’s treatment of the Jews was only marginally better. That would have been a specious argument, but at least it would have acknowledged that the Holocaust occurred.

Buchanan has been accused of anti-Semitism in the past. It’s clear that he has a special loathing for communism, and especially its official atheism. It’s clear that he found communism more repugnant than National Socialism. There is an argument that can made in defense of that judgment.

But Buchanan goes much further than that. By implication, he is saying that the Allies should have allowed the total destruction of world Jewry in return for Germany keeping communism out of Eastern Europe. That is a trade he clearly would have made. And by making this argument, he has lost the right to sit down with any decent human being. MSNBC must fire Buchanan.

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