The Second World War still looms large in the collective unconscious. For many, Nazism is both synonymous with, and the epitome of, evil. Nazis represent evil in many films—as murderous sociopaths in prestigious dramas such as Zone of Interest and Downfall or as cartoon villains in entertainments like Captain America: First Avenger and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Casual comparisons with Hitler are ubiquitous in moral and political debates. There is even a term for such comparisons when they seem like a cheat: the reductio ad Hitlerem. It is not uncommon to hear liberals compare Donald Trump to Hitler; heck, even his own vice president did this just a few years ago.

The crushing defeat of Nazism in World War II deflated the prestige of the far right around the globe for decades. Any plausible accusation that one was resurrecting or emulating fascist forms of palingenetic ultranationalism and racism was the kiss of death for mainstream acceptability. So it should come as no surprise that many on the far right have tried very hard to repackage the Second World War and Nazism to blunt the cultural and political cost of association with it. Far-right online spaces have railed against the “WW2 myth” and the role they perceive it playing in legitimating liberalism. This “myth” treats Western liberal politicians as heroic forces who (with the help of the Soviet Union) defeated Nazism. The neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin has cautioned the reactionary right against overtly embracing fascism in a liberal state while insisting that the Axis powers were in fact the rebel alliance fighting the evil empire. And Tucker Carlson recently hosted Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist who claims that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the chief villain of the Second World War. 

One of the most influential exponents of this kind of World War II revisionism is Pat Buchanan. Buchanan was an advisor in several Republican administrations, where he developed a reputation for taking a hard line against all kinds of criminals except Nazi war criminals, for whom he seemed to have a soft spot. In 1992 and 1996 Buchanan ran for the Republican presidential nomination. As John Ganz reminds us in When the Clock Broke, Buchanan was convinced that the largest untapped political constituency in America was to the right of Ronald Reagan. After his political aspirations fizzled out, Buchanan settled in to write long books arguing that racism was a thing of the past (and that it wasn’t so bad, all things considered). The real problem now, Buchanan thought, was uppity minorities who no longer appreciated all that the white race had done for them. 

One of those long books was Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War (2008), whose core thesis is stated in the title: the Second World War was an “unnecessary” war at least partly caused by Britain’s intransigent warmongering. The long-term consequences of this unnecessary war were the decline of European empire around the globe, the ascendancy of Communism in the Eastern Bloc, and the fostering of interventionist myths about the need to spread democracy that would later inspire America’s own imperial overreach. As Buchanan put it:

The two world wars were fratricidal, self-inflicted wounds of a civilization hell bent on suicide…. [The First World War] would give birth to the fanatic and murderous ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism and Fascism, and usher in the Second World War that would bring death to tens of millions more. And it was Britain that turned both European wars into World Wars…. Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year war in which fifty million would perish.

In Buchanan’s telling, Hitler before 1939 was not as dangerous or threatening as Stalin and the Communists. Indeed, by 1939 Hitler was “a figure in German history to rival Bismark.” Hitler had taken backward Germany and turned it into the “first economic and military power in Europe”—all in “six years without firing a shot.” Left to its own devices, Germany would have conquered Poland before turning against its mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. Buchanan concedes that such a war would still have led to tens of millions of innocent deaths and quite likely to the occupation of the entire Soviet Union by the fascist states. But he insists that Germany would not have been a threat to Western Europe or the United States, which were guarded by oceans, fleets, industrial power, and the admiration of the Fuhrer for his fellow caucasians and anti-Communists. Buchanan fantasizes that “had Britain never given the war guarantee, the Soviet Union would almost surely have borne the brunt of the blow that fell on France. The Red Army, ravaged by Stalin’s purge of senior officers, might have collapsed. Bolshevism might have been crushed. Communism might have perished in 1940, instead of living on for fifty years and murdering tens of millions more in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A Hitler-Stalin war might have been the only war in Europe in the 1940s.”

Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is full of unpersuasive hedging and glib equivocations. Buchanan will make sure to acknowledge that Nazism is a “murderous ideology” and that Hitler bears responsibility for the Holocaust. But then he will argue that Communism was also a murderous ideology, in many ways worse than Nazism, posing a much greater threat to Britain and America in the long run. Readers are invited to conclude that it wouldn’t have been so bad to just let Hitler remilitarize, have his way in Eastern Europe, and attack the Soviet Union. The result would have been the fall of Communism, the survival of the British Empire, and a contained America that never tried to export democracy to the rest of the world. Buchanan concedes that this would have meant condemning hundreds of millions of people to Nazi oppression. But that doesn’t matter so much since in the end many of these same people ended up being subjected to Stalinist oppression. Buchanan even muses about whether the Holocaust would have occurred had Britain not intervened to broaden the scale of war. Since the “destruction of European Jews was not a cause of the war but an awful consequence,” Buchanan wonders if there “had been no war, would there have been a Holocaust at all?”  

Replying to Buchanan, Cambridge historian Richard Evans stresses the “widespread agreement” in the field that Hitler intended to subdue Western Europe while creating an enormous German empire in the east. Moreover, as Evans shows in his famous Third Reich trilogy, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, about which Buchanan characteristically has little to say, was a catalyst for an enormous expansion of Nazi violence against Jews and others. Operation Barbarossa was intended to turn the Soviet Union into a vast German colony that would be repopulated by Aryans. This plan entailed millions of Soviets starving to death. And, of course, throughout 1941 countless Soviet Jews were already being gunned down by the Einsatzgruppen.  

Senior Nazi officials mused openly about how the expanding hostilities against Soviet “Judeo-Bolshevism” necessitated a ramping up of antisemitic violence. Discussing the early days of the German invasion, Evans notes how Goebbels ruminated in his diary about how the “Jews are having to pay the price in the east; it has to a degree already been paid in Germany, and they will have to pay it still more in the future. Their last refuge remains North America, and there in the long or short run they will one day have to pay it too.” As Evans points out, this demonstrates not only the immense scale of the Nazi’s genocidal intentions but also the “global scope of Nazism’s ultimate geopolitical ambitions”—in sharp contrast to Buchanan’s lackadaisical assurances that the Nazis’ military ambitions threatened almost no one in Western Europe or America.

Buchanan’s misrepresentations of twentieth-century history, like Carlson’s, are very clearly motivated by ideology. In Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, Edward Ashbee claims that Buchanan does not have a “tightly structured worldview” in the sense of a carefully defended set of analytical principles logically applied. And it’s true that much of Buchanan’s writing is just a series of sloppily reheated rationalizations for the various resentments, fetishes, and grievances of the American far right. Still, there are certain core themes around which Buchanan’s worldview orbits. The most important is his rejection of equality.

Buchanan is committed to the standard right-wing idea that there are recognizably superior persons, races, cultures, and religions, and that these are entitled to more power, wealth, and allegiance. In The Death of the West, he describes “equality” as the first principle of the left, which rejects the idea that “one culture is superior to another, which leads to the murder of the other. Eradication of the idea of superior cultures and civilizations is thus a first order of business of the revolution.” Later, in Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan claims that the “Founding Fathers did not believe in democracy. They did not believe in diversity. They did not believe in equality.” He stresses that “where equality is enthroned, freedom is extinguished. The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society.” 

Buchanan likes to talk about abstractions like the nation, civilizations, Christendom, but he also likes to carve out arbitrary exceptions to these categories based on “feels” about who deserves to be part of the club and who doesn’t. So, for example, he will insist that “Christendom” must be defended against all threats and mourns the decline of belief in Western nations. But Christendom, it turns out, does not include the “third world,” where most Christians actually live. In Suicide of the West Buchanan expresses deep concern that Catholicism is on its way to becoming a “third world religion” since most of its growth is in the Global South. This trend will mean that the “Church may be more orthodox on theological and moral issues, but it will be far less receptive to capitalism and Western concerns.” This isn’t the only instance of this kind of fudging. Buchanan will often define the “West” to consist of European nations and a few former colonies like the United States. But it emphatically does not include the vast number of democratic countries that emerged from European rule in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It is hard to avoid the impression that, for Buchanan, “the West” is interchangeable with “white.” As Ashbee points out, for Buchanan the United States is “structured around a white, European, heritage.” Sometimes this is quite explicit. In Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan refers to the “emerging white minority” and insists that the “white population will begin to shrink, and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear.” This is followed by the claim that “Mexico is moving North” as the “verdict in 1848 is being overturned.” In his view, the United States’ predatory behavior toward Mexico in the nineteenth century is a “verdict” of history to be lauded, while the “invasion” of exceptionally vulnerable and often badly mistreated Latino migrants is the subject of shrill moralistic panic. 

Once one understands this ethno-chauvinist outlook, the motivations for his strange readings of twentieth-century history become very clear. In Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, Buchanan argues that German nationalists were rightly outraged over how badly their country had been treated by England and America after the First World War. This might seem to contradict Buchanan’s relentless nostalgia for the British Empire, the destruction of which he considers to be one of the worst consequences of the Second World War. But it makes sense when you recognize that, for Buchanan, imperialism was largely justified when carried out by the white “West” against everyone else, but unjustified when directed against the fraternity of European nations. Similarly, Buchanan seems ambivalent about the Versailles treaty’s emphasis on national self-determination: it’s good insofar as it accommodated the Germans’ demand for a unitary state for themselves, but it proved profoundly dangerous when non-European states later appealed to it in order to demand an end to Western empires. 

In short, the Second World War was unnecessary and tragic because it led to a decline of Western power that continues to this day, as the “third world” increasingly asserts itself. As Buchanan somberly observes in the opening pages of his book, “all the empires that ruled the world fell…. [T]he character of every Western nation is being irredeemably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the third world. We are slowly disappearing from the earth.” From Buchanan’s odd vantage point, the most important outcome of World War II wasn’t the defeat of a genocidal regime but the end of European supremacy and the beginning of the end for white civilization. No wonder his revisionism is now being echoed by a new generation of right-wing ideologues. It may be bad history, but it’s compelling propaganda for those who believe that, whatever his excesses, Hitler wasn’t wrong to identify national greatness with racial purity.