Hitler Studies
by Scott McConnell
New York Press
10/5/99

I often wish I had a video of Columbia historian Fritz Stern’s lectures on European and German history, which I attended as an undergraduate 25 years ago. I still have my notebooks. And my memory, in which remain dozens of snippets from the lectures, phrases that brought to life all the passion and tragedy of 20th-century European history.

One that has been popping up was Stern’s comment on A.J.P. Taylor, the leading British historian who created a firestorm in academia and beyond in 1961 with his publication of The Origins of The Second World War. It was near the end of the two-hour period, and late in the semester; Stern’s comments were after the bell and, I recall, a bit rushed. He called Taylor’s book – which asserted that Hitler had neither planned nor caused the war; that appeasement was not necessarily a bad thing; that the new totalitarian ideologies were less significant than the traditional aims of statecraft (such as Germany’s drive to the East) for understanding the roots of the conflict – "profoundly mischievous." The comments were designed to provoke controversy and succeeded without a doubt. Stern didn’t agree with Taylor’s argument, but urged us all to read it over the summer, if we hadn’t already. (It had, I think, been recommended but not required course reading.) The controversy Taylor generated with his little volume, for which he was accused of the "de-demonization" of Hitler, continued for years. For Stern, this kind of give and take was the essence of the "speculative richness of history" – a phrase he used often.

This memory is raised by the orchestrated pileup on Pat Buchanan for writing, in his A Republic, Not an Empire, a chapter on World War II that fell equally outside the boundaries of the conventional wisdom. There is some overlap between the Taylor and Buchanan theses (a subject too complex to be treated in this space) but in the main, they run parallel to one another. But while Taylor’s book gave birth to a substantial academic skirmish, Buchanan’s has resulted in the most venomous denunciation, demands that its author be banished from the Republican Party and pushed once and for all beyond the margins of American politics.

As I write, there are Internet reports of the book being removed from the shelves of large chain stores; on Sunday my wife went to a Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side to buy it and was first told by a clerk that there was a big pile of them on display near the front, then: "Gee, I don’t know what happened to it... We may have one copy in the political science section." (There wasn’t.) For a moment I had the dark thought that Buchanan’s foes might push for public burnings of the book.

Great Britain lost far more in World War II than the United States. But in 1961, the Brits could sustain a debate about the war’s origins, a feat Americans cannot manage in 1999. Perhaps one day a volume will be written on how this came to be. Of course Buchanan is being attacked because of who he is and the interests he challenges as much as for what he wrote: a liberal historian I saw over the weekend told me that Buchanan’s points had been put forth by Yale’s Bruce Russett (and have been amplified by the late Eric Nordlinger, of Brown) without causing notable convulsion on either campus.

I took a particular interest in the Buchanan firestorm because as it broke, I was talking with the campaign about a job. Last week I was offered the opportunity to come on board as senior policy adviser, and jumped at the chance. After a brief, long-planned and many-times-delayed trip to Europe with my wife, I’ll be moving to Virginia.

To those who might wonder, my own views on World War II are conventionally liberal internationalist. But I also believe the global system has changed fundamentally since 1939, and more since 1989, and without a Hitler or a menacing Soviet Union, the United States needs to rethink its role. As it is, we are a nation with a shrinking military that nonetheless keeps thinking up more reasons to insert ourselves in the middle of local conflicts, whether or not they directly affect American interests. Sometimes our actions as world cop and "only superpower" clearly contravene international law, as was the case in our attack on Serbia and our apparent support for creation of an independent Kosovo, to be eventually melded into "Greater Albania."

Surely when we shoot our cruise missiles hither and yon, puffed up with the rhetoric of our virtue, we are creating many enemies. As small states or terrorist groupings find it increasingly possible to acquire their own nuclear or biological weapons, ordinary Americans may one day pay a fearsome price for Washington’s promiscuous use of military power. While some senators and congressmen on both sides of the aisle are coming around to this view, only Buchanan is ready to carry these issues into the arena of presidential politics.

Then there is immigration, another grand issue, largely ignored by the leadership of the two major parties. A radical transformation of the American state is being carried out for no good reason. The net impact of immigration at current rates and according to current laws (some 1.3 million per year) – apart from the costs in crowding – is increased social inequality and redistribution of income favoring high-income Americans over the less skilled. In short, the federal government, through its policies, is waging a full-scale assault on America’s own working poor. The concept of assimilation – so necessary to this country’s success with past waves of immigrants – has been largely abandoned: even Clinton officials say that now America’s European stock population will be required to make the cultural adjustments. Whenever people are allowed to vote on the subject (as in California’s Proposition 187), they choose tighter border controls, and a reduction of the flow. Whenever nonbiased experts study it (as did the Barbara Jordan-led commission, appointed by Clinton) they reach similar conclusions.

But the left wants immigration rates high because it smashes up the traditional "Eurocentric" American nation-state, and the Beltway and business Right wants them high because the continuous flow of unskilled workers keeps wage rates down and the work force docile. So again, the two big parties are mute on the issue: only Buchanan will raise the banner of immigration reform and bring it before the American people.

The chance to be part of such an enterprise, which could have a huge and lasting impact on the American political system, is one of the greatest privileges I can imagine.

A column in NYPress/"Top Drawer" is one of the great slots of journalism, and I’ll miss it enormously. Taki’s sometimes spoken, always present admonitions to writers to leave behind their instinctive caution is a great spur – a kind of advice very rare for editors to give out these days. Russ Smith has created a unique product: one that gets read by the New York publishing community and by a impressive slice of other folks, from all over the political spectrum. Seldom in my many years at the Post did I receive the kind of detailed, sharp and especially unpredictable response from readers that I’ve had often in six months at NYPress. Warm thanks to all.