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: Continue reading History Being What One Makes It