Right Wing Reading Rainbow III: Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War

This is state policy by other means. Your life ends in terror, this is now decreed.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the entire developed world revolves around WWII. Every political or philosophical debate, on a long enough timescale, become about the philosophers on either side arguing about which position will best prevent the resurgence of Hitler and his National Socialism. All political arguments which have ever occurred in the past 75 years have been about the Reich. It haunts the nightmares of the entire political class.

So, now we’re getting to the really good stuff.

The Book

Pat Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is the book that you as a serious person need to be reading about World War II. It compiles the work of a great many other previous works which were all revolutionary, if they weren’t foundational, including:

• The Collapse of British Power by Corelli Barnett

• America’s Second Crusade by William H. Chamberlin

• Europe At War by Norman Davies

• Germany and the Two World Wars by Andreas Hillgruber

• History of the Second World War by B.H. Liddell Hart

• Wilson’s War by Jim Powell

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer

• Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer

• A History of the First World War by AJP Taylor

• The Origins of the Second World War by AJP Taylor

I want to draw particular attention to AJP Taylor at the end there. You may have heard good things about Taylor. Those good things are correct. You may think that you should read his book on WWII. Murray Rothbard loved it after all. The reason you don’t need to read AJP Taylor’s book is not because it is bad, but because Murray Rothbard died in 1994, before Buchanan’s book came out in 2008. Buchanan’s work may not make Taylor’s book literally obsolete, but it absolutely supplants it as a first-time guide to the World Wars.

I should also note that the book is not about the wars as such. There will be no glory-stories about Gallipoli or the Somme or D-Day or Midway or the Battle of the Bulge here. This book is about the causes and the effects of what Pat Buchanan calls “The Great Civil War of the West.” He goes through the lapsing of the Reinsurance Treaty, the construction of the German High Seas Fleet, and the Morocco Incident before the First World War. Then he thoroughly explains Versailles, Trianon, the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty, the Washington Naval Conference, Rhineland, the Anschluss, Munich, Molotov-Ribbentrop, and of course, Danzig.

You really come out of it realizing that Neville Chamberlain was the real hero of the whole story.

If I thought anything was missing from this book, it would be in the very beginning. He discusses the publication of the book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History by Alfred Taylor Mahan in 1890, and how it influenced Wilhelm II to begin the construction of a German High Seas Fleet. The ensuing naval arms race proved an absolute disaster. One book which went unmentioned was the article The Geographical Pivot of History, by Halford John Mackinder.

Mackinder’s book advanced Heartland Theory: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” The influence of the book goes a long way towards explaining how British elites, who controlled an Empire on which the sun never set, could seem to honestly and steadfastly believe that the Kaiser, and later Hitler, aimed to “take over the world” by dominating Poland. Carl Schmitt would later indirectly respond to these claims with his 1942 book Land and Sea: A World Historical Meditation.¹

Follow Up Readings

One reason I like Buchanan’s book is because it’s more ad bellum then in bello. Of fifteen chapters, only two cover the wars themselves, and barely. More about the Schlieffen Plan than the Somme. The rest is about politics and diplomacy. If you want to learn about the conduct and progression of war, I recommend these. They’re on the longer side, and even I myself use them primarily like an encyclopedia to search by the index, rather than having read them straight through:

• Stalin’s War, by Sean McMeekin. A more developed understanding of the Soviet perspective. A very long book, but well worth reading. McMeekin’s main thesis is that World War II was primarily willed and orchestrated by Stalin, whereas Hitler was only tricked into it. Some readers will notice that this is similar to Suvorov’s Icebreaker thesis. Well, it can’t be, because McMeekin only mentions Suvorov a single time to insult him, despite agreeing with practically all of his relevant conclusions. McMeekin also demonstrates the absurd degree to which the American and British governments were penetrated with Soviet sympathizers, if not outright agents.

• Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. A very thorough and unpleasant elaboration of what it means to be caught in between two powers hell-bent on the systematic destruction of the other’s way of life. Expounds on the “Double Genocide” thesis: The idea that the Reich and the USSR both originally intended to enslave and deport their enemies, without genocidal intent, but no plan survives contact with the enemy. For example: The Lemberg Massacre. After the initial partition of Poland, 3 full NKVD divisions occupied the city of Lemberg/Lwow/Lvov/Lviv, intending to deport the city’s large ethnic German population to Siberia. Partway through this operation, Operation Barbarossa begins, so NKVD Commissar Lavrenti Beria orders the city’s political prisoners be shot on site. By the time the Reich takes the city, seven thousand have been killed in this way. The city then celebrates the arrival of the Germans with a pogrom killing five thousand local Jews. Or for another example, the Warsaw Uprising, where the Soviets encouraged the Polish resistance to launch a major operation against the occupying Germans, only to hang back and let the Wehrmacht destroy more than 80% of the city in retaliation.

• Crimes and Mercies, by James Bacque. Did you know that, after the war, the Soviets perpetrated the largest ethnic cleansing in the history of the world, with the full endorsement of the Allied powers? 13 to 15 million Germans were expelled from homes they had lived in for centuries into the cut-down East Germany or into Austria. Furthermore, another ten million Germans were deliberately starved to death between 1945 and 1950, particularly during the Hungerjahr of 1947. The British extended their WWI starvation blockade for a year after the Armistice of Compiègne, killing a quarter million people, and the Americans repeated the performance after WWII for five full years. Worse still, the same Dwight Eisenhower who showed the world the Lamp Shades and Soap Bars of Buchenwald himself starved a further million Germans in concentration camps of his own in the Rhine river valley. The Germans in these camps were designated as “Disarmed Enemy Forces” rather than “Prisoners of War” on the grounds that the war was over and their government had ceased to exist. Somehow, this meant that they actually had fewer rights. Attempts by the International Red Cross to provide food shipments to the enormous Allied prison camps were repeatedly rejected, and notices were posted throughout the nearby German towns and villages that any civilian who attempted to smuggle food to the desperate POWs might be shot on sight. Even though the Soviets had released their last POWs in 1956 after a decade of slave labor, the Americans continued to insist that the “missing million” Wehrmacht soldiers actually killed in Eisnehower’s camps were secretly killed in Stalin’s custody. This is one crime for which Stalin is completely innocent, confirmed only after 1991, leaving only one perpetrator.

Buchanan’s book is pro-Chamberlain, and told primarily from the perspective of British decision makers and western newsreaders. Despite the accusations against him, Buchanan is not pro-Hitler. These books are pro-Hitler. Note that I did not say “pro-German”. We do not respect Junkers here, nor indulge in Clean Wehrmacht copes. You owe it to yourself to understand Hitler’s perspective on its own terms. You can’t say, what, that you’ve already heard it so you don’t need to? You’re some kind of Hitler expert? You’ve read a few select quotes from Mein Kampf and heard that Hitler was actually a socialist? No, that’s not enough. You have to read.

• Hitler’s Revolution, by Richard Tedor. A more developed understanding of the German perspective. Tedor has interesting elaborations on the NSDAP’s numerous bouts of self-reinvention. You may already know about how Hitler took the DAP from a socialist-separatist party to a revolutionary-right nationalist organization with an attached street fighting club. Then they rebranded as radical centrists after he finished writing about His Struggle and got out of jail. Tedor takes you through the logic of all of these adjustments, through to the end of the war. One example I found funny was how the swelling ranks of the Waffen-SS with, non-Germanic recruits (e.g. Belgians like Leon Degrelle) meant that the Reich’s anti-miscegenation laws had to be rewritten. Turns out that where women are concerned, Spaniards, Bosnians, and Ukrainians look just as dashing in those uniforms as any Aryan. It also contains explications of Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof’s The War That Had Many Fathers, which came out three years after Buchanan’s book. Tedor also thoroughly destroys the ridiculous idea of the Clean Wehrmacht. You know about Stauffenberg and Valkyrie, but you do not fully appreciate the depths of the profound treachery of the OKW until you read this book, the total failure to understand what was at stake in that war. Those generals were coward, traitors, and failures, just like Hitler said in that bunker scene.

• In His Own Words: The Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler. Exactly what it says it is. Each speech is preceded with historical commentary and context. You’ve never heard a Hitler speech. You’ve heard him screaming in German on the History Channel, invariably without subtitles. Maybe you’ve listened to a translation voiced by an AI replicating his voice, but you’ve never actually just sat and read one of his speeches. Do it. I consider this book a far superior introduction to Hitler’s thought over Mein Kampf. First, Mein Kampf is very long. Second, even Mussolini thought it was boring. Third, Hitler’s prison memoirs are less useful when interpreting his governing philosophy than the speeches he gave while running for office and in office.

• The Holocaust: An Introduction, by Thomas Dalton. Just read it. Don’t say that you don’t care if Holocaust happened. Don’t say that you dispute the numbers. Don’t say that the SS did the evil Nazi stuff but Stauffenberg and Junger were based and aristocratic. Don’t say that Hitler was cool whether he killed millions of people or not. Don’t say that the Holocaust has no relevance to your politics. Just read the book. It’s not even 30,000 words. Just read Dalton and stop being ignorant.

And Something Fun

The Domination, by S.M. Stirling. Almost the opposite of The Probability Broach from last week. A trilogy collection in a dystopian alternate timeline where South Africa becomes something of a “containment zone” for history’s Bad Guys. Starting with American Loyalists and Hessian Mercenaries, then French Monarchists, Confederate expatriates, and some others. They conquer Africa and a bunch of other places. During WWII, the Draka side with the Axis because they are fellow racists. After the Soviets are defeated, the Draka decide that there can only be one Master Race, so they launch a surprise attack on the Reich “from behind” by launching an invasion up from the Caucasus. That is, by Marching Through Georgia. Then things escalate even more from there.

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This is the third in a series of eight articles on right-wing book recommendations.

The next article will look at The Woke Left and how they Went Too Far.

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1. Watch this video for more details. You would think that this sort of thought would play a major role in the doctrine of the USSR, but actually “Eurasianism” is more common among Russian ultranationalists like Solzhenitsyn and Dugin.