Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"

Fülszöveg

IN THIS EXPLOSIVE BOOK, PAT BUCHANAN SHEDS NEW LIGHT ON THE CAUSES OF THE TWO WORLD WARS THAT MADE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE BLOODIEST IN HISTORY AND BROUGHT AN END TO 500 YEARS OF WESTERN DOMINANCE—AND HE ASKS:
• Were these two world wars of necessity—or the inevitable consequences of colossal failures of judgment and diplomacy?
• Was the British Empire fated to collapse in ruins as it did, or was this the result of strategic blindness and blundering on a historic scale?
• Should WInston Churchill, Man of the Century and hero
to hundreds of millions, be castigated as well as celebrated for his indispensable role in the decline and fali of his beloved British Empire?
CHURCHILL, HITLER, AND "THE UNNECESSARY WAR" IS A MASTERFUL, CONTRARIAN WORK OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS.
Drawing on the work of more than a hundred historians, Buchanan's insight to the true cause of Britain's collapse has been embraced by strategic experts, among them the dean of Cold War diplomacy George Kennan,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

IN THIS EXPLOSIVE BOOK, PAT BUCHANAN SHEDS NEW LIGHT ON THE CAUSES OF THE TWO WORLD WARS THAT MADE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE BLOODIEST IN HISTORY AND BROUGHT AN END TO 500 YEARS OF WESTERN DOMINANCE—AND HE ASKS:
• Were these two world wars of necessity—or the inevitable consequences of colossal failures of judgment and diplomacy?
• Was the British Empire fated to collapse in ruins as it did, or was this the result of strategic blindness and blundering on a historic scale?
• Should WInston Churchill, Man of the Century and hero
to hundreds of millions, be castigated as well as celebrated for his indispensable role in the decline and fali of his beloved British Empire?
CHURCHILL, HITLER, AND "THE UNNECESSARY WAR" IS A MASTERFUL, CONTRARIAN WORK OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS.
Drawing on the work of more than a hundred historians, Buchanan's insight to the true cause of Britain's collapse has been embraced by strategic experts, among them the dean of Cold War diplomacy George Kennan, who concurred with Buchanan's central argument, at the heart of this book, that it was Britain's 1939 war guarantee to Poland that sealed their fate and doomed the Empire.
Dear Mr. Buchanan:
. . . you make a strong case, in my view, for the thesis that the British guaranty to Poland . . . was neither necessary nor wise. The British government could not improve anything by ojfering to the Poles a support they were quite unable to give. They woidd have done better to shut np, to rearm as speedily as possible, and to avoid further formai commitments ofany sort, while waiting the further turn ofevents.
George Kennan
Ub/WÖ
Y
9780307405159

Were World Wars I and ll-which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction-inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men's control? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monu-mental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen—Winston Churchill first among them—the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Commu-nist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe's central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.
Among the British and Churchillian blunders
• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade Francé
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that muti-lated Germany, leaving her bittér, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hider
• Britain's capitulation, at Churchill's urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hider
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill's astonishing blindness to Stalin's true ambitions
Certain to create controversy and spirited
argument, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary
War" is a grand and bold insight into the
(continucd on back flap)
(continuedfrorn front flap)
historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.
PATRICK J. BUCHANAN was a senior adviser to three American presidents; ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1992 and 1996; and was the Reform Party candidate in 2000. The author of nine other books, including the bestsellers Rightfrom the Beginning; A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; State of Emergency; and Day of Reckoning, Buchanan is a syndicated columnist and founding member of three of Americas foremost public affairs shows: NBC's The McLaughlin Group and CNN's The Capital Gang and Crossfire. He is now a senior political analyst for MSNBC. Vissza