Patrick Buchanan has written a historical argument on WWII. Adam Kirsh reviews it for the NY Sun, comparing it to Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke.”

When they look back to the 1930s, Mr. Baker’s role models are the Quakers and pacifists who believed it was better to lie down for Hitler than take up arms to fight him; Mr. Buchanan’s are the isolationists who believed that Nazi Germany was a necessary bulwark against the real menace, godless communism. But the net result of their lucubrations is the same. Both men have written books arguing that World War II, far from being “the good war” of myth, was an unnecessary folly that Britain and America should never have engaged in. And both have zeroed in on Winston Churchill as the war’s true villain — an immoral, hypocritical, bloodthirsty braggart whose fame is a hoax on posterity.

But where Mr. Baker’s book can be, and in most quarters has been, dismissed as the ignorant blundering of a novelist who wandered far out of his depth, Mr. Buchanan’s book is more dangerous.

By way of Frank Wilson, who comments on factory life.

What is this about Churchill being a villain? Here’s a bit of his argument for the war:

. . . if these great trials were to come upon our Island, there is a generation of Britons here now ready to prove itself not unworthy of the days of yore and not unworthy of those great men, the fathers of our land, who laid the foundations of our laws and shaped the greatness of our country.

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.

How can anyone not see that when the servant of Sauron raises his head, all the world is not safe until he is forced to bow it again?

On another matter, touching on American life as this book does, how do you see Americans or individuals as Americans? When in your mind does an immigrant become an American? Not technically an American, but truly or wholly one. I’ve had this conversation with my girls when they point out that people with skin color different than ours are not Americans. I tell them that Americans are not all the same. If they were born here, they are Americans just as we are. In fact, there are people who look just like us who are not Americans. Appearance has little to do with citizenship. I don’t mind saying those things to kids who are still learning about the world, but I wonder if some adults share their ideas. Those folks over there–they ain’t like us. If we are to be one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, we’re going to have to fight our own impulses to make it so.