I found this book when I was searching about the alternative history of World War II.
Previously, the widely-accepted narrative was pretty simple: Hitler triggered World War II after Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on Poland 1 September 1939, which prompted a response from the Allied power (which consist of Britain, United States, Russia, China, and France). And when the Allied power won the war 6 years later, the good guys prevailed.
The common narrative will also say the moves by the Allies was necessary, to bring down Prussian militarism in Word War I that threatened to dominate Europe and the world, and to stop a fanatic Nazi dictator in 1939 who “would otherwise have conquered Europe and the world, enslaved mankind, massacred minorities on a mammoth scale, and brought on a new Dark Age. And thank God Britain did declare war. Were it not for Britain, we would all be speaking German now.”
But the recent events in world geopolitics 2023-2024 made me questioning this narrative. Were the good guys really won the war? After all, post World War II was the period of time when the biggest winner of the war, United States, became the dominant imperial power in the world, where everything from the UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, were all created for the benefit of the US and allies, which they frequently abuse by “opening up markets” abroad while still imposing tariffs domestically. And guess who are the permanent members of the UN Security Council (with veto power), the supposedly “police of the world”? Exactly, Britain, United States, Russia, China, and France, all the Allied power.
The ongoing genocide by Israel is also an eye opener, where no sanction imposed on Israel, even though the ICJ has declared that their actions are war crimes and an intent of genocide, simply because the West is funding them and supplying them with the weapons. Is international law no longer applicable, even when Israel is starting to attack their neighboring sovereign countries? Of course it is still valid, but only when Iran and Lebanon retaliate, or If Russia (who has since the 1950s became the enemy of the West) is the one who is doing the war crimes.
So, why this book? The author, Patrick “Pat” Joseph Buchanan, was an assistant and special consultant to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. He was also a presidential candidate at one point in 1992. But perhaps he is more famous for being fired in 2012 from his job as a political commentator at the MSNBC network after he said minorities in the US will soon outnumber white Americans and that the country “is disintegrating, ethnically, culturally, morally, politically.” He is also labelled as a racist due to his open affiliation with white supremacist (allegedly, as claimed by Anti-Defamation League) and for blaming non-white immigrants (Hispanic in particular) for destroying white European heritage. Nasty human being, by the look of it. Some even said that if we want to understand Donald Trump politics today, we just need to see what Pat Buchanan did in the 1990s.
However, while his tone and intention look racist (at least through secondary sources), unlike Trump he did wrap this racist opinion based on solid data. And the data shows that in this rate of growth white Americans will indeed be a minority in the 2040s with Hispanic community taking over, that America’s white European heritage could be affected (with Latin culture could become the dominant force instead, which is nothing wrong, but I guess for a white racist American it would be a disaster).
Moreover, in 1999 he predicted that NATO expansion could cause Russia-Ukraine-US war, which is exactly what’s going on right now. And he also correctly predicted an immigration problem from Muslim refugees especially in Europe, although, again, he delivered the prediction in a borderline Islamophobic tone (at least from the way it was written on a report about him) and ignored the cause of the immigration: US atrocities in the Middle East.
So, why do I bother reading this kind of American-centric xenophobia? Because if we remove the bigotry, we’ll likely to find the harsh truths.
Pat Buchanan has also predicted that the sovereignty of the United States will be undermined by Israeli control, which turns out to be true and being revealed massively this year. Buchanan also criticized then-Vice President Biden in 2010 when he visited Israel, where Buchanan commented that Biden “was played for a fool” when Israel decided to build new settlement homes anyway in disputed area, something that didn’t change 14 years later when Biden keep supplying Netanyahu with billions of dollars of aid and weapons supplies in their genocide in Gaza (a place where Buchanan was vocal about lifting the siege there) despite Israel keep on doing what Biden administration warn them not to do.
Another Buchanan’s prediction can be traced back to 2005 when he said that Israel’s control over US foreign policy will drag the latter to the next war: the unnecessary war with Iran. Which is all too real today, where a lot of things that he predicted also came true today, down to the minor details such as his 1990 comment that the Congress is an “Israeli-occupied territory”; which got a backlash back then, but just look at the openly AIPAC-bribed Congress right now (not to mention Biden cabinet’s full of dual Israeli citizenship). In 2009 he also commented that the hundreds of Palestinians killed in the Gaza “concentration camp” will create a bunch of new Hamas fighters who want revenge on Israel; something that many in the West refuse to acknowledge and instead sticking to their tired old “Islamist jihadist” doctrine.
So, it got me thinking, is this guy really crazy, racist, and all that, or is he just being shunned by the status quo? And what else is Buchanan telling the blatant truth about but perhaps delivering it in a wrong way (or made it look wrong in the secondary sources)? Enter this book, where he shed a light into what really happened in World War I and World War II.
Buchanan made it very clear from the start that the focus of the book is not questioning whether Hitler and Nazi Germany is evil and whether the British were heroic (both are already established as such), but instead it is questioning whether the British’s statesmen were wise PRIOR to the wars and subsequently DURING the war after their failure to prevent a war have led to disastrous decision makings that made things gotten out of hand? As Buchanan explains, “[f]or their crimes, Hitler and his collaborators, today’s metaphors for absolute evil, received the ruthless justice they deserved. But we cannot ignore the costs of Churchill’s wars, or the question: Was it truly necessary that fifty million die to bring Hitler down? For World War II was the worst evil ever to befall Christians and Jews and may prove the mortal blow that brings down our common civilization. Was it “The Unnecessary War”?”
And this is his thesis, which cover World War I and World War II: “Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.” In other words, there would be no WORLD war.
World War II was also an unnecessary blunder by Winston Churchill that led to the rise of Soviet Iron Curtain (which would proceeded to kill much more people than the Nazis). Previously, Britain had a choice between 2 tyrants in Hitler’s Nazi (that control Central Europe) and Stalin’s Bolshevik (that control Eastern Europe), and they chose to be ally with Stalin and fight Hitler. Which was a strange decision, because as Buchanan remarks, “neither the Kaiser nor Hitler sought to destroy Britain or her empire. Both admired what Britain had built. Both sought an alliance with England. The Kaiser was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. Thus the crucial question: Were these two devastating wars Britain declared on Germany wars of necessity, or wars of choice?”
Britain did so by creating an alliance with Poland. As Buchanan elaborates, “[h]ad Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.” Which prompted Buchanan to question in other chapter, “[i]f Hitler’s ambitions were in the east, and he was prepared to respect Britain’s vital interests by leaving the Low Countries and France alone, was it wise to declare war on Germany—over a Poland that Britain could not save?”
Yes, a lot of what ifs. However, Buchanan is constructing his arguments using primary and secondary sources, which makes the narrative of the book iron clad with facts. Narrative that gives us the big picture of the geopolitical map before World War I, the behind the scene politicking in the interwar period, and the diplomatic and military strategies used during both World Wars. Which is all very gripping to read. Of course, I had to be careful in reading it, in differentiating between historical facts and his opinions. And I concur that it wasn’t always clear. But when it’s clear, it reveals a lot of new things.
Such as Churchill’s many sins: “Churchill was unafraid to break the rules of war. As he had been prepared to blockade Antwerp before the Germans invaded, so he brushed aside international law, mined the North Sea, and imposed upon Germany a starvation blockade that violated all previous norms of civilized warfare. In the war’s first week, Churchill had wanted to occupy Ameland, one of the Dutch Frisian Islands, though Holland was neutral. To Churchill, writes Martin Gilbert, “Dutch neutrality need be no obstacle.” Churchill urged a blockade of the Dardanelles while Turkey was still neutral.”
Moreover, Buchanan continues, “[i]n December 1914, he recommended that the Royal Navy seize the Danish island of Bornholm, though Denmark, too, was neutral. Yet it had been Berlin’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality that Churchill invoked as a moral outrage to convince Lloyd George to support war on Germany and that had brought the British people around to support war. When the Germans accommodated Britain’s war party by regarding the 1839 treaty as a “scrap of paper,” the relief of Grey and Churchill must have been immense. The declaration of war was their triumph. And when British divisions crossed the Channel, the troops were sent, as the secret war plans dictated, not to brave little Belgium but straight to France.”
The book also reveals the injustice imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, which put the war reparation cost of World War I on the Germans: “Men who believe in the rule of law believe in the sanctity of contract. But a contract in which one party is not allowed to be heard and is forced to sign at the point of a gun is invalid. Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles only when threatened that, should she refuse, the country would be invaded and her people further starved. Though Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had been invited to Vienna to negotiate the peace of Europe, no German had been invited to Paris. Francesco Nitti, the prime minister of Italy when Versailles was signed, in his book The Wreck of Europe, expressed his disgust at the injustice.”
As a result, the implementation of the Treaty wrecked havoc Germany’s economy, caused the lost of purchasing power due to hyperinflation, and the overall drop on quality of living, which paved way to the rise of a populist figure who wanted to get the demoralized Germany back to its glory days (and even took revenge to the perpetrators). As Buchanan remarks, “[a]t a London dinner party soon after Adolf Hitler had taken power in Berlin, one of the guests asked aloud, “By the way, where was Hitler born?” “At Versailles” was the instant reply of Lady Astor.” In fact, Hitler first caught the public attention by delivering again and again a speech that he titled “the Treaty of Versailles.”
Just look at Hitler’s speech that mentions Jews for the first time. As Buchanan describes, “[t]hree months after Kristallnacht, on the sixth anniversary of his assumption of power, January 29, 1939, Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag, publicly threatened the Jews of Europe. America, Britain, and France, he charged, “were continually being stirred up to hatred of Germany and the German people by Jewish and non-Jewish agitators.” Hitler then issued his threat: In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it.… I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
But the Nazis didn’t prosecute Jews in 1939, also not in 1940. Instead, “[t]hey began after Hitler invaded Russia, June 22, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen trailed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union exterminating Bolsheviks, commissars, and Jews. Writes Ian Kershaw, “[T]he German invasion of the Soviet Union triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews.””
Hence, one of the big questions in the book, “[h]ad there been no war, would there have been a Holocaust at all? In The World Crisis, Churchill, the Dardanelles disaster in mind, wrote: “[T]he terrible Ifs accumulate.” If Britain had not issued the war guarantee [with Poland] and then declared war on Germany, Hitler might never have invaded France. Had he not, Mussolini would never have invaded France or Greece, or declared war on England. With no war in the west, all the Jews of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece might have survived a German-Polish or Nazi-Soviet war, as the Jews of Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland survived.”
But why invade France, you might ask? Because Poland is at Germany’s eastern border, which is now backed by Britain, and Germany will be attacked by Britain from the west. Hence, the need for Germany to create a buffer at France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to prevent Britain to get close to Germany (and not, as the common misconception suggest, due to Hitler’s imperial ambitions).
And why invade Soviet? As Buchanan remarks, “[o]n January 8, 1941, Hitler clarified and expanded upon his reasoning for attacking Russia: Britain is sustained in this struggle by hopes placed in U.S.A. and Russia.… Britain’s aim for some time to come will be to set Russia’s strength in motion against us. If the U.S.A. and Russia should enter the war against Germany the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very outset.” Buchanan then continues, “[i]n early June, Hitler spoke to General Fritz Halder, who wrote in a diary entry of June 14: Hitler “calculates ‘that the collapse of Russia will induce England to give up the struggle. The main enemy is still Britain.’””
Indeed, the key to trigger a WORLD war, it seems, is the alliances and their war pacts. Which is why the Britain-Poland pact was crucial in triggering World War II. As Buchanan elaborates, “[b]ut because Britain issued the guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany, by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans. By 1942, after invading Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic states, and Russia, he held hostage virtually the entire Jewish population of Europe.”
Is that what the Jews were for Hitler, hostages for leverage against the Bolsheviks?? But what’s the significance of the Jews for the Bolsheviks, that made Hitler think it’s important to hold them hostage? This line from chapter 14 shed a little light into this: “Though a philo-Semite and supporter of Zionism, Churchill’s views on the roots of Bolshevism seem not markedly different from those of Hitler. In the Illustrated Sunday Herald of February 8, 1920, after the failed Allied intervention in Russia, Churchill wrote that in the “creation of Bolshevism” the role of “atheistical Jews … probably outweighs all others.”
And here’s the dark truth, even with so many Jews were captured “neither the Allies nor the Soviets were focused on the potential fate of the hostages Hitler held. At Casablanca in 1943, Churchill and FDR declared their war aim was “unconditional surrender.” At Quebec in 1944, Churchill and FDR approved the Morgenthau Plan calling for the destruction of all German industry. Goebbels used the Morgenthau Plan to convince Germans that surrender meant no survival. Annihilation of their hostages was the price the Nazis exacted for their own annihilation.”
Did you capture that? The reason why the Nazis killed all of the Jewish [hostages] is because they’re not a useful leverage after all, because the allied powers didn’t really care about them. And then the Nazis proceeded to annihilate 6 million hostages in a tit-for-tat of the allies killing the Germans, all of which accounted as part of the death of 50 million civilians + 25 million military personnels in World War II. Of course the Nazis and Hitler are still evil for killing all of the Jews, but Britain, France, US, and Soviet are equally at fault for not giving maximum diplomatic and military efforts to save them.
There are so many more similar revelations in this book that I cannot possibly name them one by one, including one whole chapter about Hitler’s ambitions (including evidences that he never intended to invade western Europe), one whole chapter about Churchill’s track records, and the post-war events where the US took control over the world’s power. It is one of the clearest books that explains the background chaos behind World War I and II, with impressive details. It is as if Buchanan has read every single book about the World Wars, from the big picture by great scholars, to individual biographies, to even any letters and notes that he can find. It is one of those instances where I don’t have to like the author in order to appreciate his book.
It is a massive book about massive topics that is not necessarily providing us with anything new, but rather pointing us to the area of history that are publicly available but often ignored: It shows the diplomatic side of Hitler, the politician rather than only the warmongering dictator. It also shows that Churchill and the allied powers are also conducting many evil things when the war broke out, even provoking Hitler to conduct his own evil actions (which was then highlighted as arguably the most evil action anyone has ever done – more evil than Mobutu killing 20 million people in Congo, Mao killing 40-80 million of his people, the genocide of 56 million Native Americans, or indeed Stalin killing 20 million people – In other words, they showed the reaction but not the cause).
And it raised the ultimate question: were the two World Wars preventable? Yes, yes they were. Even the Holocaust was also preventable, because after Poland surrendered on 6 October 1939 Hitler made a peace offer to Britain and France, but it was turned down. Hitler also offered peace in July 1940 after he conquered France for buffer and before he attacked Britain, but again the offer was rejected by Churchill. And if you recall, these events were before any action taken against the Jews in 1941.
All of which make Churchill’s famous quotation a bit more sense: “history is written by the victors.” Because how come Hitler who killed 6 Jews is [rightly] labelled as evil, but Churchill who starved 4 million people in Bengal Famine, among his other atrocities in Europe, is labelled as a hero? In fact, not only Churchill is being celebrated as a war hero and the greatest Briton of all time, as the 20th century ended he was also rewarded the honor of “the man of the century.”
Meanwhile, as Buchanan remarks, “[a]sked how he could ally with Stalin, whose crimes he knew so well, Churchill answered “that he had only one single purpose—the destruction of Hitler—and his life was much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least have made a favourable reference to the Devil. Yet in his Ahab-like pursuit of Hitler “at all cost,” did Churchill ever reckon the cost of a war to the death—for Britain, the empire, and Europe? For as the war went on for five years after Dunkirk, those costs—financial, strategic, moral—mounted astronomically.” And Britain’s mighty empire crumbled because of that. This, is the main argument of this book.
So perhaps that common saying is not true after all, that Germany is NOT always on the wrong side of history. They only lost the wars and thus being put as the scapegoat for ALL the damages, in the history written by the winners (mainly Britain and the US). Conversely, if we take a look at the history of warfares and coups and conflicts, we would easily see that Britain and the US are behind almost every single atrocities in modern history, either directly or indirectly. Including, arguably, opting out of peace negotiations and instead provoking Hitler into war.
With this in mind, it is like that Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch where a Nazi soldier just realised that what they’re doing is a war crime, and proceeded to ask his friend “Hans, are we the baddies?” Only this time it’s the other way around. This book is making us realized that there are no good guys, and that the allied powers are also as (if not more) guilty as the Nazis.
THE CHAOS THEORY 