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Columnist Patrick Buchanan Has Some Dangerous Ideas

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By DALE L. GILLIS

Guest Column

Published: January 24, 2009

Since Patrick Buchanan is such a prominent commentator, who is he and what does he stand for? He is largely a Catholic reactionary who has little use for Vatican II. He grew up in Washington, D.C. As a student at Georgetown University, he was expelled for a year in 1960.

In his autobiography, right from the beginning, in 1988 he advocates repeal of the amendment limiting the president to two terms. He said that the U.S. should stand behind South Africa, long before reforms made Nelson Mandela president of the country.

As an adviser to President Reagan, he sponsored Reagan's controversial visit to the SS Cemetery in Bitburg Germany. Buchanan secured the presidential nomination of the Reform Party in 2000. By 2004, he had abandoned the Reform Party and endorsed the re-election of George W. Bush. Despite endorsing Bush, in his book "Day of Reckoning," Buchanan spends a surprising amount of space denouncing the Iraq war. He does not advocate immediate withdrawal. In the same book, Buchanan summarizes his philosophy with four principles: Republicanism, Federalism, localization and democracy. Unfortunately he is not particularly clear about what these points mean.

Republicanism and democracy seem to say the same thing. To Buchanan Federalism means limiting the federal government, so Federalism and localization again says the same thing twice.

Publisher's Weekly says that Buchanan's book "A Republic, Not an Empire," "offers a ringing defense of isolationism." Kirkus reviews thought it odd that Buchanan questions the need for American involvement in both world wars but defends Vietnam as a war of containment.

Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist, we are told on page 62 of "Day of Reckoning" and the Gettysburg address was just wartime propaganda. In his book "Death of the West" Buchanan portrays Lincoln as a despot who moved too fast to end slavery.

Germany was involved in no wars from 1871 to 1914, Buchanan tells us. In fact, Germany took Paris during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and withdrew in 1873. The Germans waged colonial wars in Africa and the Pacific during the 1880s.

Buchanan's attempt to rewrite the history of World War II is extremely controversial. He takes a dim view of Winston Churchill and makes excuses for Hitler and the Nazi regime. Britain was hasty in declaring war on Germany. Hitler's overriding objective was to conquer Russia and Buchanan thinks the western democracies should have let that happen. The Holocaust was the result of the stresses of Germany's two front wars. These views are in Buchanan's book "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War; How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World."

As the title implies, Buchanan believes that the World War II led to the end of the British Empire. India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were granted independence in the next few years. This came about as the result of events that had been building for decades and had nothing to do with World War II.

Churchill is blamed for wanting war with Germany, but Chamberlain was prime minister when Britain declared war on Germany. If Hitler's overriding objective was the conquest of Russia, why did Germany take France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland and Greece first? Why did fighters clash over the English Channel?

We only need to look at the customer reviews on Amazon to know that many do not find Buchanan persuasive. One says the book is "intellectually dishonest" while another says it is not history, but fiction. It is capsulated as "dangerously delusional" and "disinformation" in another response. A reviewer says that Buchanan is "astonishingly optimistic" about what would have happened if the British had held off. Another titled his rebuttal "Poor old Hitler, they just made him do it."

Pat Buchanan opposed the first Persian Gulf War; on Nov.10 1990 he argued that Kuwait was never our ally. In addition, Buchanan has a distinctly negative attitude toward Israel and even toward American Jews. In 2004 he wrote columns expressing suspicion about a "nest of Pollardites" in the Pentagon. Jonathan Pollard was the American Jew convicted of passing military secrets to Israel. In 1982, Buchanan advocated the abolition of the Justice Department's Office of Strategic Investigations, OSI, which investigates crimes related to the Holocaust.

As an adviser to Richard Nixon, Buchanan called Martin Luther King a "fraud" and a "demagogue" even after the assassination.

In 1992, Buchanan ran for the Republican nomination against President George H. Bush. After a speech in Marietta, Ga., on March 3, Republican Chairman Richard Bond said that Buchanan was "heading toward a low road message of anger, hate and race-baiting." This quote and the column quotes can be found on the Web site of the Anti-Defamation League.

Dale L. Gillis lives in Sebring.

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