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Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
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List Price: £15.99
albania.lehi.co.uk Price: £15.99
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Manufacturer: Potter Style
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5311
EAN: 9780307405159
ISBN: 030740515X
Label: Potter Style
Manufacturer: Potter Style
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 544
Publication Date: 2008-05-13
Publisher: Potter Style
Studio: Potter Style
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Churchill, the adventurer, Hitler, the ideologist
Comment: In this remarkable book about the origins and consequences of the great wars of the 20th century, Buchanan shows how the British Empire exhausted itself in two politically unjustifiable conflicts with the German Reich until Europe lay in ruins, with its eastern half enslaved by the Soviets and its western half leased out to the Americans. He describes, primarily by means of quotations, the state of mind of the persons strutting the international stage during that tumultuous period, centering on what went on in Britain.
First and foremost among these actors, he concentrates on Winston Churchill, who, early into the frightening game, had declared: "A European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and in the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors".
Why such a level-headed man, only a decade later, should go all out to bring about such a war and to maintain it for 30 years cannot be explained rationally and rather belongs to the domain of psychiatry - for the catholic scholar Buchanan it is perhaps a question of ethics as well.
In the eyes of Buchanan, Churchill was a man without moral restraints (as he was for many contemporaries), acting entirely on the spur of the moment who would have no qualms doing precisely that of which he accused his adversaries, a man like Shakespeare's Richard III who said: "Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, deceive more slyly than Ulysses did, and, like a Simon, take another Troy". At the end of his political career, he had, indeed managed to take another Troy, but ruined the British Empire in doing so; his country was relegated into the backrow of international powers, right next to its former enemy.
As opposed to that, Buchanan holds the sins of the German side against England to be rather venial citing many direct sources, but also the comments of famous historians like Keegan, Taylor or Kennan to prove his point. He underscores that in both of the Great Wars the German side went out of its way to avoid conflict with Britain, only to be rejected again and again, because London was loath to let go of the doctrine of "divide and reign" even though, in an expanding world,it was no longer applicable.
In order to appreciate the inertia of such political ideas, we can get a clue from Robert Vansittart - whom Buchanan rather neglects - in 1939 permanent head of the British Foreign Office, later to become chief of the propaganda machine. On the first page of a collection of articles and speeches from WW2, "Bones of Contention", Vansittart declares that, for him, the problem of Germany was "the problem of preventing her from gaining again in peace the victory she could not gain at war", and further along in the book he traces the origins of this antagonistic attitude "not to Adolf, but to Friedrich and Wilhelm".
Thus, what made Germany "utterly inexcusable" for Vansittart was the mere fact that the country existed at all and this made her the legitimate target of Britain's European policy - Germany was damned if she went to war, and damned if she did not.
In connection with WW2, the British assessment of Hitler is obviously a key issue for Buchanan. He tells us that many members of the political establishment, in the 1920s and 1930s, came to realise the stupidity and injustice of the document signed at Versailles which had upset the balance of Europe, and worse; the outcome was a number of agreements with Hitler which clearly ran against the spirit and the letter of Versailles, not to mention later agreements, such as Stresa.
One of the decisive issues of this period is, obviously the fate of Czechoslovakia which became critical when Germany, in the autumn of 1938, regained those areas that were largely inhabited by Germans. Six months after Munich, the Germans occupied what was left of the country and made it a protectorate. Buchanan spends a great deal of time on the discussion of the events that caused this move. He shows how complicated the situation of the country had become once the ethnic Germans had gained their independence: now the other parts of this artificial construct claimed equal rights. The Slovaks wanted a state of their own (they got it 50 years later). West-Ruthenia - in case anybody still remembers where it lay, after 1945, it eventually ended up as part of the Soviet union - wanted and obtained union with Hungary. The authoritarian government in Warsaw claimed the Teschen industrial area. Seeing such a chaotic situation arise without much interference from Berlin, the Germans seized the opportunity and occupied the land, thus keeping it completely out of the turmoil of WW2, oppressed, yes, but an island of peace in a continent at war. The other neighbours grabbed the leftovers.
The consequences of these events are described in a chapter entitled "A fatal blunder". In line with other historians, Buchanan critcises the British decision to press a guarantee upon Warsaw to bolster that country's position in the ongoing negotiations with Germany about Danzig and the corridor. Such a guarantee had no real substance, because London could, in no way, protect Poland, but in doing so, Britain tied her hands and gave to the Poles the power to decide about peace or a new war in Europe. Poland promptly overplayed her hand
The further development of WW2 allows Buchanan to follow Churchill's incoherent actions, taking as an example the British Prime Minister's vacillating attitude towards Stalin and the Soviet Union; the reader is left with the choice between almost criminal opportunism and unbelievable political blindness. Churchill had carried out his aim to "set Europe on fire" in order to beat his adversary, he sat among the victors at Potsdam, but he had to acknowledge at Fulton, a year later, that there had been a minor slip-up, now that it was no longer an admiring German dictator who stood on the other side of the North Sea, but the unscrupulous leader of a world power which the western Allies had nurtured in order not to leave continental Europe under the influence of a single nation. A Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.
The conservative thinker Buchanan, at the end of his book, sees the present United States in a position quite similar to Britain's 100 years earlier: over-extended in military and economic terms, with its limited means squandered all over the globe. The reader cannot help but feel that the fate of the US may be decided in Afghanistan - the third nation, after Britain and the Soviet Union, to be defeated in the land beyond the Khyber pass.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Folly and Fratricide
Comment: It has often been said that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. It might be added, that those who learn the wrong lessons from history will be punished by it. Such folly is the key theme of this striking work of revisionist history - one which will be of interest to every individual who wishes to learn from the past in order to avoid the errors of others.
The author, Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan, is an American Christian conservative - and his book reflects his inherent biases, (such as a tendency to overstate the crimes of Nazi and Soviet regimes, a wild exaggeration of the benefits of the British empire, and a failure to appreciate the damage and destruction inflicted by European imperialism, etc...) If one is prepared to overlook these prejudices and inadequacies, one is rewarded with one of the most radical historical treatises of the decade. There are few books that challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the World Wars as effectively and extensively as Mr. Buchanan's.
The tome's thesis is quite simple: it was primarily British folly, not German wickedness, that unleashed the two World Wars upon the globe and led to the ruin of Europe and the collapse of the British Empire. In the United Kingdom, this perspective is hardly new: it had been expounded and defended for decades by the late Professor A. J. P. Taylor among others. In the United States, however, World War Two is sacrosanct - for it is the archetypical 'good war', which is regularly employed to justify subsequent wars in the name of 'humanitarian intervention'. By challenging the myth of the 'good war', Mr. Buchanan implicitly skewers the justification for Kosovo, Iraq and other imperial crusades.
It is to the author's credit that he commences not with the Second World War, but with the First, and demonstrates how it might have been averted, or at least mitigated, had British Foreign Minister Edward Grey and a certain Winston Churchill not manoeuvred Britain into an alliance with France and pressed for confrontation with Germany. Misunderstandings on both sides (the German naval build-up that was meant to impress Britain, alarmed her instead) led to a conflict that Berlin sought to avoid. (Curiously, Mr. Buchanan fails to mention the role of the Zimmermann telegram - Germany's main diplomatic blunder - in sealing Berlin's defeat.)
The Treaty of Versailles is exposed as a blueprint for future strife, but the author goes further and explores the errors and injustices of the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon as well. This is followed by an important chapter on the failure to renew the Anglo-Japanese naval agreement (a subject hardly mentioned in most history textbooks). Then Mr. Buchanan enters into the central subject of the book: Europe's slow but steady descent into the Second World War. The folly of London and Paris - in alienating Italy, appeasing Germany when she should have been opposed and opposing Germany when she should have been appeased, is skilfully narrated in these pages. The sheer stupidity of Britain's guarantee to Poland is emphasized as the key cause of World War Two - a war which would cost both countries dearly.
The two main victors of the war, were of course, the United States and the Soviet Union - led by the leftists President Roosevelt and General Secretary Stalin respectively. Each was able to keep his country out of the war for roughly two years - and thus entered it in a relatively stronger position than either Britain or France. Neither hesitated to exploit the weakness of the British Empire to extract gains at London's expense - as the author demonstrates.
Yet the key figures of Mr. Buchanan's masterpiece are, as the title indicates, Sir Winston Churchill and Führer Adolf Hitler. The conventional wisdom portrays the former as a perspicacious hero while the latter is perceived as an irrational warmonger. Mr. Buchanan does not merely deflate these stereotypes: his study, for all practical purposes, reverses them. It is Churchill who emerges as eager for conflict - being in favour of British participation in both World Wars and often displaying a fondness for war itself. It is Hitler who backs away from conflict during the Sudeten crisis, who delays military action in order to find a peaceful settlement with Warsaw, who launches a peace offensive after German armies have thoroughly defeated Poland. It is Hitler, not Churchill, who seeks to end Anglo-German conflict, well aware of the difficulties that the collapse of the British Empire could entail. It is thus Hitler, who increasingly appears as the tragic protagonist of the war, whereas Churchill seems to be little more than a bloodthirsty fool, sacrificing his country's future to his obsessive hatred of Hitler.
The book ends with the author's lament that after the Cold War, his own country, the U.S.A., has set about committing the follies that doomed the British Empire. But there is a greater theme here than the collapse of decadent empires. It is the tragedy of fratricide - of nations and peoples of the same blood tearing each other apart over quarrels that could be settled diplomatically. It is this folly - the folly of seeking conflict instead of evading it, of creating enemies where none exist, of celebrating war instead of shunning it - that is responsible for the fall of the British Empire in the past, and the decline of the American empire in the present. Mr. Buchanan's book will hopefully deter future generations from repeating it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Easily the most interesting history book I have read
Comment: When I read this book I realized I had been brought up on half-truths by people peddling the myth that fighting WWII was the best thing Britain ever did.
Buchanan's argument is that our we were led to war by a small number of warmongers (including Churchill), some strategic and tactical diplomatic blunders, and a failure to see how bad were the consequences of the path we were choosing.
Before you say, "That's preposterous, it's an insult to the pride of our nation and our war heroes", try to give it a go with an open mind. Most of us non-historians know little about the war except what our parents told us, popular opinion, and perhaps an official history book approved for use in schools but we think we know enough to conclude that a "revisionist book" has nothing to teach us. In fact the book is not revisionist, it just draws things together and makes some interesting, almost self-evident, arguments. Virtually everything in the book is supported by the statesmen of the day or professional historians. The book is cogently argued and comprehensively backed up by facts with about 1,500 references.
Unless you are a genuine expert on the war it is likely that you will find at least a dozen important facts that will make you say, "Wow, they never told me that!" Here are a couple of examples.
At the outbreak of the first World War, Germany had fought no wars in its 25 years under the supposedly warlike aggressive Kaiser. Churchill himself had seen more military action than nearly every soldier in the German army. In the century immediately preceding the war, Germany had fought 3 wars compared with Britain's 10, Russia's 7 and France's 5 (including attacking Germany in 1870).
In 1939, when Britain was courting Stalin and deciding to fight Hitler, Stalin had killed approximately 1,000 times as many innocent people as Hitler, including an enormous number of jews. (Hitler's death camps came a couple of years later).
The voting on the reviews of this book show just what a touchy subject it still is. More than 60 years on, it is still too painful for us to face the idea that the sacrifices we made, and the glory we achieved, came from a massive mistake that caused ourselves, and a lot of other nations, far more harm than good.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well worth reading
Comment: Having previously read Corelli Barnett's "Collapse of British Power" I was interested to read a contemporary American view on Britain's role in the two world wars.
The subject is immensely complex and it is nonsense to say "British resonsible" for X or "Churchill responsible for Y". Thankfully, unlike some of the other reviewers here, Buchanan does not do this but instead builds a picture from his perspctive as an American (with biases one would expect). The evolution of the disasters was a mix of misunderstanding, secret plots, blunders etc. as well as cool calculation and strategic moves. Churchill made horendous errors, but then so did just about every participant. (and let's face it - who doesn't!) The Polish leadership comes off very badly for example. If only Colonel Beck had seen sense then everything would have been different too!
However, Buchanan gives his account in a coloquial easily readable style drawing on the work of other historians, including Barnett. This leads to some errors, for example he states more than once that Churchill participated in the "last cavalry charge of empire" however, this is not the case as the last large-scale cavalry charge was the relief of Kimberley (and cavalry in WW1) He also talks about the Kaiser being fearful of the "grand fleet" though this did not come into existence until 1914. However, this doesn't concern me as he clearly quotes from other historians and in this context such errors are not that significant.
The real thrust of the book concern the massive strategic errors made by British leaders. Not least of which was the failure to recognise which countries were the real threat. Buchanan does not shy away from confirming that the grand old US of A was the real and rapacious wolf in sheep's clothing. The US deliberatly destroyed and bankrupted Britain, as was official policy. The extent to which the US kicked and raped Britain while it was down is sobering. (All credit to Buchanan, as an American, for not glossing over this.) Yet, we went to war against a country that tried hard to avoid war with us and ultimately allied ourself with the most murderous regime of all- Stalin's soviet empire.
Buchanan does not in any way excuse the actions of the Nazi regime, far from it, but the key question was "was it worth it for Britain"? Read the book and judge for yourself!
Towards the end I felt Buchanan was rather over-doing the focus on Churchill. For example he holds him responsible for the policy of bombing cities. He asserts for example that the Germans would probably not have attacked British cities directly had we not done so. However, let's not forget that we were losing the "Battle of Britain" until we bombed Berlin and that the resultant shift of Luftwaffe focus saved the fighter bases, which in turn halted the invasion of Britain. There is no easy answer.
I would like to have seen Buchanan expand on the "what ifs" a little more. For example, if Britain had had an alliance with Germany (which the Germans were offering even in 1940), would Japan have attacked British colonies? Probably not? It was after all the US that was blockading and trying to criple Japan so it could dominant the Pacific - sound familiar?
The collapse of Empire led to the scramble to jetison the colonies, especially in Africa. Many would argue that his was not to their benefit (the speed of withdrawal that is, not the ultimate outcome) most African former colonies of Britain, France and Belgium are demonstrably worse off than they were at end of empire.
The Americans are making some of the same mistakes as Britain. China is the new rising power. Let's hope that the relative and inevitable American decline does not occur in such a catastrophic fashion. As I write, US support for the country of Stalin's birth looks ominous!
Read the book and judge for yourself:
Then read Barnett's book, mentioned above, for a fulsome account of British folly in seeing the US as an ally.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A tough read for middle-aged Britons....but quite superb
Comment: Like the other reviewers here, I wanted to hate this book. I'm one of the many middle-aged Britons watching their country lose its identity and sink into third-rate obscurity, compensated largely by the notion that Churchill led us to greatness by making the world free. Buchanan does not disagree with this view at all - in fact, he points out what a great war leader Churchill was. But Buchanan's analysis of the consequences of the war are incontrovertible. It broke Britain financially, made America, and replaced a psychopathic dictatorship which enslaved and murdered throughout Europe with another that did just the same. Britain never lifted a finger to save the country - Poland - that she went to war for. Churchill was not a great statesman. He made very bad decisions about Russia and the US, which he admitted himself, and which severely disadvantaged Britain and made it a very costly victory.
Buchanan's argument is that unlike Truman, Kennedy and Reagan, who all recognised the reality of what they could and couldn't defend, Chamberlain's Britain issued guarantees that were worthless bluffs. Britain could never have hoped to save the Czech Republic or Poland. He ponders whether NATO is doing the same thing right now, and what will happen if Russia decides that it wants to re-incorporate one of its old Baltic 'provinces'. As I write this, and Russia is invading Georgia, until recently a NATO candidate, I wonder how many of us would be willing to enter World War 3 because of the foreign policy of Georgia, or Latvia.Truman did't take on Russia over the Berlin blockade, and Kennedy did a deal with Krushchev to avoid frying us all over Cuba.
Buchanan links together the whole of twentieth century very carefully, so the whole historical context becomes clear. The victors of WW1 had dismembered Germany, creating a crippled country with major populations living in hostile neighbouring countries. From Britain, with an almost football-team-supporters view of history, anything which challenges our poorly-informed and childishly simple view of the battle of good over evil is patently nonsense. But where my daughter lives today, in the Czech Sudetenland, things are not so cut and dried. There, a terrible price was paid in ethnic cleansing, only for that country, like all Hitler's targets, to be occupied for a further 50 years by an equally barbaric regime.
This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging book. Unlike most modern histories it is not narrative entertainment ("... meanwhile, in a cellar on the other side of the city,..."), but a well-researched, well-argued presentation that has policy implications today. If you're happy with simplicity, then go ahead and dislike it. But it's hard to fault the history...
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