The article below is only one of many my readers have shipped me in the last few days. As I always do with long articles of this sort I want my readers to study, I am interspersing it with brief comments. The right-wing presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has ignited a historical firestorm with a new book claiming that Britain saved Stalinism and may have expanded the Jewish Holocaust by going to war with Hitler in 1939. Buchanan had lots of time to reflect on whether to include these paragraphs in his book - or to more prudently refrain from using them. A book is not a speech - or a press conference where there has to be instant reply.
Books reflect more.
They are statements of principle, known to be around for decades, even centuries. Buchanan knew what the consequences would be. He is throwing down the gauntlet to the enemies of America. Mr. Buchanan is expected to quit the Republican Party to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, and his bizarre interpretation of modern history has prompted outrage among historians, Jews and his political rivals. He also asserts that Hitler posed no threat to the US after his initial victories, that America had no stake in the war even after the Nazi occupation of France.