“For a taste of how inane and hysterical some of the discussion of this Brennan episode is on the Right, see this bizarre rant today from “Pajamas Media” — dramatically entitled:  ”How the Netroots Brought Down Obama’s Spymaster” — and duly promoted by Glenn Reynolds.  After excoriating me for having the audacity to opine on CIA policies even though I never worked in the intelligence community and then proceeding to defend both Brennan and the CIA’s policies, the author describes himself this way in his bio line:  “M. P. MacConnell is a novelist, historian and political analyst.”  

“Among the many perversely entertaining claims he makes, marvel at this assertion about Bush’s interrogation and detention policies:  ”American laws were not broken. . . . Nothing even slightly unseemly has been uncovered.”  Pardon me, but I have to repeat that:  nothing even slightly unseemly has been uncovered.  It seems that Chairman Reyes sees things generally the same way.  Hence:  ”continuity” is what we need.“

If this is a sample of Greenwald’s brilliance, I have to say, his reputation is undeserved.

First of all, it makes no sense whatsoever to turn around and say ‘well, if I’m not credentialled to sway national intelligence appointments, neither are you’ as I have never sought to sway a national intelligence appointment. He has. Hence my article.

The fact that I pointed out Greenwald’s lack of intelligence experience doesn’t automatically mean that I believe myself to possess the experience he lacks.  I never claimed that was the case and have made plain in comments that I do not possess sufficient experience.

Why would he make such a silly remark?

Then he compounds his silliness by taking part of a sentence I’d written in my article: “Nothing even slightly unseemly has been uncovered” omits the rest, and places it in a completely alien context – that of Bush’s enhanced interrogation and rendition policies.

The sentence in its entirety read this way:

“Nothing even slightly unseemly has been uncovered — indeed, Brennan has a proven history of complete candor in discussing his views on those subjects with the media.”

…which should make it abundantly clear (even to a constitutional lawyer) that I was talking about  Brennan and the attempts made by Greenwald and Sullivan to smear him with any impropriety or illegality they could dredge up. They uncovered nothing unseemly about Brennan – they “exposed” a man who spoke openly and calmly about techniques which he originally  felt had some utility, techniques which he felt should be used with great care and selectivity. Then later, upon reflection, he altered his views. He wasn’t ever a torture cheerleader, so perhaps a change in attitude isn’t completely inconceivable. 

A disappointing response from Greenwald. I had been hoping for so much more.

 I will deal with Buchanan’s article in two segments. The first deals with his ignorance regarding Hitler’s attitude toward France and Great Britain, the second with the Holocaust.

 Buchanan asks several rhetorical questions which he supposes proves his assertion that Hitler “sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain”. This is a basic misconception, one which confuses the often referred to admiration that Hitler supposedly had for the British Empire with the assumption that Hitler “liked” or had affection for the British themselves.

 Buchanan states:

“Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France. Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain — a war he never wanted. Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France? If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?”

 And so on. Buchanan believes that he is pummelling us with evidence for the idea that Hitler wanted to align his nation with Britain. Unfortunately for Buchanan, all of the examples he offers can be answered with a simple, far more realistic response.

 The simple fact is, Hitler did not want to fight a war with Britain or France because it didn’t suit his ultimate purpose.  Not because he liked them; sought “alliance” or “friendship” (though he would have no doubt made good use of such a false pledge) but because his designs lay to the east. He wanted to swallow up Russia, at least as far as the Urals. It is terribly difficult to do that when you are also fighting two major regional powers in the west.

 It is possible that Hitler may never have gone to war with Britain and France. It is possible that he might have been content with his Nazi hyperpower state, and he might very well not have sought to dominate the entire hemisphere, effectively reducing the British and French Empires to nervous satellite status. But the reality is, Hitler would not have lived forever, and his supposed affinity for Britain would have gone to the grave with him. Then, Britain and France would have to face an uncertain future set beside a massive, super-powerful, super-militant, morally-bankrupt state… and hope that they didn’t so anything to upset the Germans.

 This seems to be Buchanan’s lofty assessment. My counter-assertion is simple. Chamberlain and Churchill, both somewhat more astute and successful statesmen than Buchanan ever was, knew that this future (the best possible future, remember) wasn’t terribly advantageous to Britain and they set about making certain that the balance of power in Europe didn’t shift to an anti-democratic regime. If they had not done so, Hitler might have been able to act in an unchecked manner and by definition, that is not something that any sane person should consider desirable.  

 Buchanan anchors his assertion that Britain’s intervention was self-defeating by pointing out that the war lead to the loss of their Empire. Is Buchanan, a citizen of the United States of America, the land that acts as a beacon of freedom to the entire world, honestly asserting that the independence of India, Burma, Malaysia and other Commonwealth nations from British overlordship was a bad thing?

 Perhaps it lowered the coffers a little in London, but really, is that sufficient cause for a descendant of rebel colonists to start thinking like a Tory Loyalist? I think not. The break-up of the British and French empires was, by any definition, a welcome revolution.

 So too, dictators who repeatedly break pledges, invade and annex neighboring nations and then set about committing ethnic cleansing within those nations are not to be trusted or befriended. Whether they seek alliance or friendship with you, or not, is irrelevant. Such people are to be defied and resisted. I would have thought an American conservative would understand such a basic necessity.

 Now I shall move on to the more significant topic of the Holocaust.

 How does Patrick Buchanan define the Holocaust? Most historians, including those who trained me, would define it as the systematic efforts made by the Nazi state to eliminate racial and political undesirables within the lands held or occupied by the forces of the Third Reich and its allies.

 Buchanan is not a professional historian, and it is to this fact that I attribute his naïve and ignorant assumption that the holocaust really only began with the Wannsee Conference and the genocidal efforts made after it.

 Buchanan states:

“Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.”

 This seems to assert that the Wannsee Conference was the genesis of Nazi efforts to eradicate the non-Aryan populace within their living space and the areas they had occupied.

 Not so. As Buchanan himself points out in this article, Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The SS-Einsatzkommando units went across the Russian border at the same time and were in full operation one week after the invasion. By the time of the Wannsee Conference, most expressly in western Russia and the Baltic regions, SS-Einsatzkommando units had already shot, bayoneted and beaten to death hundreds of thousands of Jews and other ethnic/ideological undesirables. By any reasonable definition, this must be viewed as an integral part of the Nazi Holocaust, and it was certainly treated as such by the post-war prosecutions held in Nuremberg.

 However, Buchanan’s ignorance on this matter goes further still. If we are to view the Holocaust as a systematic effort made by the Nazi state to eliminate racial and political undesirables within the lands held or occupied by the forces of the Third Reich and its allies, we must go back even further in time, to the infamous German T4 program (erroneously referred to as a “euthanasia program”) which was responsible for the systematic murder not only of the mentally ill, the physically deformed or disabled, but even those subjectively assessed as suffering from “mongoloidism” or “idiocy”.

 After September of 1939, the criteria for selection was eased even further, was applied to all ages, was applied to those with “limited impairments” and yes, simply being Jewish fell within the new parameters. In 1939, under the T4 program, a special department within the wider program was set up expressly to kill “minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds” most of the intended victims being children. Thousands were killed by that department and hundreds of thousands more of the other “undesirables” who threatened “German racial hygiene” were murdered by the program as a whole.

 These people were not “euthanised”. They were not killed mercifully because they faced incurable disease and lingering suffering. They were not even killed in a painless manner. They were murdered in line with the same genocidal philosophy and by the same genocidal machine that operated the death camps in Poland. Hundreds of thousands more were also sterilized under the T4 program, which to an ardent Christian, as Buchanan claims to be, ought to likewise be viewed as an act of genocide.

 Buchanan, a simple fellow, compounds his misunderstanding by associating “the Holocaust” with only the work of the larger extermination camps, which went into full operation only after the dates he describes. This is, however, completely overlooking the fact that the Chelmno extermination camp had been in full operation since 1941!

 Over the course of the war, around 150,000 Jews, Gypsies and Slavs were killed in Chelmno, many from the Polish Ghettos. They had been shipped to Chelmno, mainly from Lodz, and we know that the extermination program was in full swing in 1941, long before the Wannsee Conference. We know that in late 1941, the Jewish population of Kolo (a town near Chelmno), some 2,000 Jews were sent to the camp, where they were gassed to death. That, even by Buchanan’s extremely selective definition, is the very core of the Nazi Holocaust.

 If the option were open to him, would Hitler, instead of commit mass genocide, simply expel all such “undesirables” from Germany and the areas he occupied? I suppose he might, but such a question is utterly moot, because it introduces an element which was not open to the German leader.

 It was not open to him because he had chosen to wage an aggressive war on two fronts. Buchanan seems to believe that if only Britain had been more compliant with militant German expansionism and the British Navy not quite so powerful, Hitler would have simply sent all the Jews to Madagascar, where they’d live happily ever after. This is stunning self-delusion and remarkably free of basic moral considerations.

 It also is unsupported by the available evidence. Hitler had every opportunity in the world to simply remove the eventual victims of the T4 program from Germany. He had been killing them from the beginning of 1939 – before the war with Poland, Great Britain and France. He could have shipped them off to Africa or wherever, but it was cheaper just to kill them.

 There is NOTHING to indicate that Hitler would have accorded the Jews, Gypsies or Slavs any greater degree of consideration. That is the kind of man Hitler was and it is about time Buchanan grew up and realised that.

 But I’m not sure that immaturity or mental simplicity is the source of Buchanan’s inability to recognise in Hitler a supreme sociopathic murderer. Rather, his problem seems to be a moral one.

 Any study of Hitler’s actions must originate with the basic moral consensus that ethnic cleansing, regardless of the reasons behind it or circumstances surrounding it, is wrong.

 In the same way he blithely overlooks the right of non-Europeans to live independent of European Imperial overlordship, Buchanan overlooks the basic criminality of genocide and cheerfully goes straight to the mechanics of ethnic cleansing. The logic seems to go like this: Hitler can’t just ship them out; those horrid allies are making that impossible by fighting back against his war of aggression, so therefore it is the fault of the western allies that Hitler decided to kill off millions of civilians. That is patently absurd and morally reptilian.

 As for his constant and bizarre attacks on Mr. Churchill, I can but ascribe them to jealousy. Churchill – no admirer of Stalin or Stalinism – in 1940/41 saw the realities of his situation in regard to Russian involvement in the war more clearly than Buchanan does, even with the benefit of hindsight. Either the Nazis took all of Europe, or the Russians became involved in the war and they took eastern Europe as a buffer. Either all of Europe would be doomed to dictatorship, or half stood a chance of remaining free. Churchill chose the lesser of two evils. Perhaps Buchanan might have chosen differently. The thought both alarms and dismays me.

 Buchanan states:

 “…for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.”

 I answer by stating that for at least one year before Britain declared war, and throughout the entire course of the conflict, Hitler consciously sought to kill those people within the German sphere of influence who he regarded as subhuman.

 I don’t know why an alleged American patriot like Buchanan seems to be trying so very hard to “root cause” the Nazi extermination program to the western powers which resisted Nazism. I wrongly assumed that it was only in vogue for the American left to find fault wherever and whenever possible with the western democracies. I suppose blinkered isolationists, right or left, enjoy a lot of common ground.

 The answer to the question Patrick Buchanan poses isn’t elusive, it is quite uncomplicated. The holocaust was brought about by a man who thought a good number of our fellow human beings weren’t human beings and thus deserved to die. It wasn’t inevitable and the shame of the western nation lies only in the fact that we did not act sooner.