Buchanan and WWII

This is a mine field. I understand that. But I'm walking there anyway.

Disclaimer: I see Pat Buchanan's commentaries in WorldNetDaily, and much of what he has to say about US foreign policy--particularly Iraq--I disagree with. He strikes me as an isolationist, something I am not. That said...

On May 11, 2005, Pat Buchanan wrote a commentary entitled, "Was World War II worth it?" The focus of the column was on Eastern Europe and what they suffered under Soviet rule after WWII. Was World War II worth it for them? Probably not. These nations were free before the war, and afterward they wore the iron yoke of Soviet dominance and oppression.

Buchanan quoted a speech President Bush gave in Riga, Latvia, as he marked the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe: "For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end the oppression. The agreement in Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. ... The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs in history."

President Bush was right, and Buchanan was right to quote him. But the accepted lessons of history as it relates to WWII have become sacred, and God help the man who challenges them.

On May 12, 2005, Andrew Metz of Newsday challenged Buchanan's commentary. Metz opens his column this way: "Was World War II worth it?In the inflammatory world view of Pat Buchanan, the short answer is no. The war that stopped the Nazis' global campaign and the mechanistic extermination of European Jewry was actually not worth the effort."

Metz continues, "He did not mention Jews or the Holocaust - the most outrageous omission for Yaffa Eliach, a Holocaust expert and survivor. 'For me it is very important to present the truth, to show the murder,' Eliach said. 'The idea was to kill Jews.'"

This is the sacred history of World War II.

Metz and Eliach are right to criticize Buchanan for omitting the Holocaust from his commentary. But they are wrong to limit the Holocaust to Jews.

The accepted number of dead from the Holocaust is ten million people. The accepted number of Jews killed in the Holocaust is six million. What about the other four million people? Don't Metz and Eliach care about them? Hitler's idea was to kill all undesirables, especially the Jews. But he also killed millions of Poles, Gypsies, handicapped people, and people in the Resistance. Sacred history dismisses these other victims.

Sacred history also ends the analysis of WWII on V-E Day. It ignores the aftermath in Soviet-dominated Europe. According to Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gulag, at least 4.5 million people were killed in the Soviet gulag system. I don't have a count of how many people were victims of non-gulag Soviet oppression in the Iron Curtain countries, but these were also victims of the agreement at Yalta, an agreement that handed free countries to a man that both Churchill and Roosevelt knew to be a killer

Buchanan needs to quit forgetting the Holocaust when he analyzes the value of World War II. And Metz and people like him need to quit having their knee-jerk response of "they killed the Jews" and quit forgetting the other victims.

And all of us need to quit forgetting the past and present victims of genocide and mass bloodlust: The Armenians killed by the Ottoman Turks. The Holocaust victims of Hitler. The victims of the Soviet empire. The victims of Chairman Mao's revolution. The Vietnamese at the hands of the communists. The Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge. The Tutsis in Rwanda. The victims of government-imposed famine in Ethiopia, Chad, Zimbabwe. And the Christians and animists dying in Sudan in what the UN refuses to call a genocide.

We need to quit forgetting, because forgetting allows more murder and more genocide.