Pat Buchanan has provided the lefties with some nice ammo. He, like Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times, believes that Hitler was reasonable in demanding territory from a sovereign country. First, he distinguishes appeasement and indicts Chamberlain for committing it in Munich.
Appeasement is the name given to what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in September 1938. Rather than fight Germany in another great war — to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised — he agreed to their peaceful transfer to German rule. With these Germans went the lands their ancestors had lived upon for centuries, German Bohemia, or the Sudetenland.
Chamberlain’s negotiated deal with Hitler averted a European war — at the expense of the Czech nation. That was appeasement.
Then he goes wildly off the reservation.
German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson’s 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.
Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.
But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.
From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.
The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.
Poland was a sovereign nation. Treaties following a war routinely redefine boundaries. For Hitler to unilaterally decide, after Germany started, and lost, World War I, that he didn’t like the deal, does not justify redrawing the map by force. By Buchanan’s logic, Mexico would be justified invading Texas because they didn’t think that war worked out all that well for them either.
So we have the Buchanan Doctrine: If you don’t negotiate with an adversary for territory he thinks is rightfully his, then you should expect to be invaded.
Buchanan makes a lot of sense a lot of the time, but not this time.
Bill Dupray at The Patriot Room