archived: 22 - 28 May, 2005         Back                 Next

UPDATED:  May 26, 2005 

                        PAT BUCHANAN’S ‘WHAT IF?’” 

A note to my readers.  I am sure that many of you will be pleased to know that for the time-being, at least, I am going off the “Coming 2nd Civil War Series.”  This is not because I have become any less convinced that a 2nd Civil War is possible.  Indeed, I think that the way things are going it is highly likely, unless a serious, capable, well-organized, and well-funded political opposition develops very soon.  However, I think that regular readers at least have had enough repetition of similar text on the same theme.  And so, while from now on most of my columns will relate in one way or another to that possibility, I am planning not to ram that thought, with that same intro., down your throats every week.  I can hear the hurrahs from here!  And now, onto today’s subject. 

Paul Vitello, a columnist for Newsday, began his commentary of May 12, 2005 with the following paragraph: 

“In a column he wrote yesterday, headlined ‘Was World War Two Worth It?’ commentator Patrick Buchanan swiped at the legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill – and millions of American and allied servicemen living and dead – by proposing that World War II was not worth fighting.” 

First, one could note the irony that most of Buchanan’s most loyal admirers severely attack any American critics of either the Vietnam War or the War on Iraq as “unpatriotic,” as “not supporting our boys,” as, in Ann Coulter’s terms, “traitors.”  But an in depth examination of that fundamental contradiction of the Republican Religious Right shall be saved for another time. 

The subject of this column, first in what will be a (planned for now) three-part series setting forth a “What If?” for Patrick Buchanan.  Just suppose World War II as it did occur historically had not been fought (although given the imperialist designs of both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan at the time, another war surely would have been).  What might the world, and especially our country, look like today?   

In developing the scenario below, I use a series of historical events that just might have gone in another direction than they actually did.  This direction is not simply guess-work, but could well have occurred in one form or another, given the facts as we know them.  It is a direction that easily could have led to the non-involvement of the powers that became the Western Allies of World War II in any war prosecuted by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe.  The Eastern Front attacks, beginning with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, would have occurred, however.  The scenario will be interspersed with parenthetical comments concerning certain real events, real people, and what really happened.  The story here is presented in the form of highlights.  At some future time, it the scenario that will be presented briefly in this current series might be developed in more depth.  

The alternate scenario that in fact could very well have meant no World War II, as we know it to have happened, begins in 1937.  Edward, Prince of Wales, is crowned Edward VIII, King of England, that spring.  Although there had been much talk of his possible abdication both because he had married an American divorcee and was an open admirer of the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, Edward persisted in mounting the throne as the first-born son of George V.  (In this column, this coronation is the only event that is fictional.  But it is essential to the story.)   

Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that had established William of Orange as the first constitutional monarch of Great Britain, British monarchs have not been supposed to take a direct hand in governmental policy.  However, certainly George III, Queen Victoria, and George V, Edward VIII’s father, himself did.  He played a significant role in getting Great Britain into World War I against his own cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.  Edward VIII (remember, fictional here) would play a similar role in September 1939, being a major influence in the non-response of Great Britain to the German invasion of Poland.  In fact, had a different person been on the throne, let us say Edward VIII’s younger brother, the shy stammerer, the Duke of York, things might have gone rather differently.  (In real life, it was the former Duke of York who, as George VI, was king at the time.)  But Edward VIII liked Hitler, liked the idea of his “going East,” and made of views and those of the people he represented, the ultra-rich of the “Cliveden Set (real),” known forcefully to the Chamberlain government.  For Chamberlain, who in real life continued to try to negotiate with Hitler for a truce and “turn to the East” after the real start of World War II, Edward VIII would prove to be a very powerful ally for a policy of not responding militarily to the Polish Crisis.  Against this power, Churchill and the people he respesensented could not carry the day. 

Turning to events that did take place and that form an essential part of the story, in 1936-39 the British government under the Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain refuses to come to the aid of the elected Republican Government of Spain, fighting for its life against the fascist general Francisco Franco, strongly supported by both Nazi German and fascist Italy.  Franco wins.  Without support from Great Britain, the government of France, even under socialist leadership, stays out as well.  In 1936, Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland, in violation of the Versailles Treaty.  At the time, France has the strongest army in Europe, Germany the weakest.  Neither France nor Great Britain responds.  In March 1938, Hitler, with the aid of the powerful Nazi Party in Austria, absorbs his former homeland into the German Reich.  For France and Great Britain, it is an “internal matter” for German-speaking people. 

In September 1938, Great Britain and France violate their treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia and in the Munich Agreement allow Hitler first to dismember and then shortly thereafter take over the whole country.  The offer made by Stalin to provide the Soviet Army for the defense of Czechoslovakia is turned down.  The Western version of these real events has always been termed “appeasement” on the part of Chamberlain.  However, the facts, as revealed by many government documents from the period that only came into the public record in the 1990s, show that Chamberlain’s policy was clearly to deal with Hitler to get him to follow through on his grand plans as laid out in Mein Kampf to undertake the “Drang Nach Osten,” the Drive to the East, to gain “Lebensraum,” Living Space, for the German people.  (It happens that at the time Germany had the lowest population density of any major European power, but what do facts matter when there are aggressive policies to be pursued and some, any, justification for them must be found.)  Chamberlain strove hard to give Hitler a “free hand” in Eastern Europe for what he hoped in return would be a hands-off policy from Germany when it came to the British Empire.  Although somewhat embarrassed publicly, Chamberlain is encouraged privately by the German moves in Czechoslovakia. 

Hitler’s next target is Poland.  There is a part of Germany called East Prussia that is separated from the main body of the country by the “Polish Corridor” which is, in fact, Poland’s outlet to the sea (the Baltic in this case).  Hitler wants the Poles to turn that piece of real estate over to him.  This would, among other things, put a significant number of Poles under German rule, at a time when Slavs were only slightly above Jews on the German list of “untermenschen” (underpeople).  The move would also cut off the Poland from the world’s oceans.  Again, the Soviet Union offers to provide the Red Army for the defense of Poland.  The offer is turned down both by the right-wing Polish Government and by the supposed guarantors of the existing borders of Poland, Great Britain and France.  On August 25, 1939, the Hitler-Stalin Pact is signed and on September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland from the west while the Soviet Union invades it from the east.  (To be continued next week, as they used to say in adventure radio when I was a boy.)

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Dr. Steven Jonas is a TPJ contributing author.  He is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author of over twenty books. Dr. Jonas is one of America's most perceptive Democratic political analysts.

In his book The New Americanism, Dr. Jonas presents his case that the Democratic Party has come adrift from its founding principles.  He urges the Party to turn to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to find the new vision and mission that it, and our country, so desperately need.  "The New Americanism: How the Democratic Party Can Win the Presidency  is available from Amazon.com (go to "Books;" enter the title) and BarnesandNoble.com (same).