What if Hitler had won the war?That’s the question that Pat Buchanan never explicitly asks in his book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, but it’s also the question for which the author provides a thought-provoking answer. Here’s what Buchanan says on page 301:Had Britain never given (Poland) 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 1940’s. Tens of millions might never have died terrible deaths in the greatest war in history. Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2008Looks to me like Buchanan would have preferred a different outcome than the one that actually unfolded. The author seems to think that a Nazi victory over communist Russia would have been better for almost everyone involved. And he has a point, too, after all, most of eastern Europe wound up under Stalin’s bootheel while the US was bogged down in a fractious Cold War for the next 45 years. Was that the outcome they wanted?Not likely. But does that mean that Buchanan is right, that Nazi rule in Russia have been better than communism?Here’s Buchanan again:Even had Hitler come West after crushing Stalin’s Soviet Union, how could it have been any worse than it was for the Jews? Or the gypsies? Or the Slavs? Or the Christians, tens of millions of whom would die, and hundreds of millions of whom would end up slaves in an empire that was the most brutal and barbaric enemy Christianity had ever known? Had Britain not given the war guarantee, and not declared war over Poland, Western Europe might have avoided war altogether. And was it worth it? Let’s give the last word to Churchill. Three years after the victory, he wrote in The Gathering Storm:The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.What did Churchill mean by “even worse perils” than Nazism and Hitler? He meant Stalinism and Stalin a mass murdered whose victims exceeded even those of Hitler. By 1948, all of Stalin’s promises about elections had been broken and he was crushing all opposition to communist tyranny in the eleven countries now in his grip, including Czechoslovakia, for which Churchill had wanted to go to war, and Poland, for which Churchill had demanded Britain go to war. If the West faced “even worse perils” in 1948 than 1939, what had it all been for? Yes, Hitler was dead and Nazism exterminated, but at a cost of 50 million lives. And Britain had lost 400,000 men and was broken and bankrupt. Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, page 315, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2008What do these comments tell us about Churchill?They tell us that he was moving in Buchanan’s direction. They tell us that he understood that he created an even bigger mess than existed before. To say that “….we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted”, is to admit that his efforts had failed, that they hadn’t produced “peace and security” but something much darker and more menacing. These aren’t the proud words of a triumphant leader celebrating his victory. These are the grumblings of an old man overcome by self-doubt and regret. Churchill is acknowledging that his own misguided strategic decisions and bad judgement have made the world more contentious, more polarized and less safe. It’s an admission of failure.Hitler didn’t want a war with the West. He wanted to reclaim German territories (seized under the terms of Versailles) and he wanted to remove the Bolsheviks in Russia which he regarded as an existential threat to Germany (which they were! The communist party in Germany had already launched revolts aimed at toppling the government and had direct links to Party leaders in Moscow who issued them directives. German communists were committed to a classless society and strongly believed that taking over an industrial hub like Germany would greatly accelerate the revolution. The growing popularity of the Nazi party probably had less to do with Hitler than it did with the widespread fear of a Bolshevik-type revolution in Germany.)So, did Hitler want a war with the West? According to Buchanan:“Looking back at each of the crises before 1939, and how he responded, the answer would seem to be “No”. (Page 318)The author bases his judgement on his reading of, “Mein Kampf (and) the shape of the forces he constructed for war, what he did and did not do given his opportunities, and the plans Hitler wrote down but never implemented. (page 319) Here’s Buchanan again:“On some issues all agree. Hitler’s first goal was absolute power in Germany. A second was to overturn the Versailles Treaty that denied Germany equality of rights, especially the right to rearm. A third was to restore lands severed by Versailles and bring Germans home to the Reich. A fourth, was the Drang nact Osten, the drive to the east to carve out a new German empire. Finally, Hitler intended to cleanse Germany of Jews, smash Bolshevism, and make himself a man of history like Frederick the Great and Bismarck. The antisemitism in which Mein Kampf is steeped was his most consistent conviction. As German historian Andreas Hillgruber ….contends, to Hitler the Jews the Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same enemy:The conquest of European Russia, the cornerstone of the continental European phase of his program, was thus for Hitler inextricably linked with the extermination of these “bacilli” the Jews. In his conception they had gained dominance over Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia thereby became the center from which a global danger radiated, particularly threatening to the Aryan race and its Germanic core.” Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, page 320, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2008So, if Hitler had already expressed his hatred of Jews in Mein Kampf, and already imposed blatantly discriminatory laws in Germany, (The Nuremburg Laws) and already made aggressive attempts to resettle German Jews in other countries, and already indicated that he thought Marxist communism in Russia was a Jewish conspiracy that posed an existential threat to Germany, then why was Churchill convinced that Hitler wanted to conquer Western Europe? Was he incapable of seeing the facts that were staring him in the face?Hitler was implementing a plan he had put-to-paper in 1925. Doesn’t anyone read??Here’s one last tidbit from Buchanan that sheds even more light on Hitler’s real motives:In the second volume of Mein Kampf, published in 1926, Hitler lays out his agenda with great clarity:Germany will either be a world power of there will be no Germany. And for world power she needs that magnitude which will give her the position she needs in the present period, and life to her citizens. And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of the pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west of Europe and turn our gaze to the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period, and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.” Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, page 323, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2008I don’t know how it can be stated more clearly than that. Hitler wanted to create a German empire in central and eastern Europe. (western Russia) And to that end, a German-British alliance was critical to avoid a two-front war. (Hitler believed that fighting on two fronts had cost Germany WW1.) That’s why he wanted to mend ties with England, so he could gather all his forces for an invasion of Russia.Why does any of this matter?Because it’s the truth, that’s why. Hitler did not want to rule the world; he wanted to ensure that Germany would be a global power into the future. That’s it. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a bad guy who killed tens of millions of innocent people. He did. We don’t deny that. But it doesn’t make him more or less evil to spread a bunch of lies about him. That’s just stupid and infuriating.One more thing before we end this:We read so much about Greater Israel these days that it’s worth noting that Hitler had the same objective: Greater Germany. That was the ultimate strategic objective. Check out this question I put to Grok about Greater Germany:Question– Did Hitler want to topple the Bolshevik regime in Moscow and seize Russian territory in order to create a Greater Germany that would have the resources and landmass to be a global power that could compete with an industrial giant like the United States?Grok— Yes. That accurately describes a central part of Hitler’s long-term strategic and ideological goals. Hitler repeatedly stated (most clearly in Mein Kampf and his unpublished Second Book) that Germany needed vast new territory—Lebensraum (“living space”)—in the East. He identified Russia and its borderlands as the primary target for this expansion. Key elements of his thinking included:Destroying the Bolshevik regime: He viewed “Jewish Bolshevism” as both an ideological mortal enemy and a racial threat. Toppling the Soviet government in Moscow was essential to eliminate this danger and open the way for German domination of the East.Seizing territory and resources: The goal was to conquer large parts of European Russia (Ukraine’s agricultural lands, the oil of the Caucasus, raw materials of the Urals and beyond) so that Germany could become economically self-sufficient (autarky) and no longer vulnerable to blockade or dependence on world trade.Creating a continental empire capable of global power status: Hitler argued that Germany, confined to its existing borders, could never be a true world power on the scale of the British Empire or the rising industrial might of the United States. Only by acquiring a massive contiguous land empire in the East—settled by Germans and exploiting the resources and labor of the conquered territories—could Germany achieve the demographic, economic, and military strength needed to compete as a global power.These aims were not improvisations of 1941. They formed a consistent core of his worldview from the mid-1920s onward. Operation Barbarossa was the attempt to realize them through a rapid war of conquest and annihilation. While tactical justifications (preemptive defense against Bolshevism, securing resources before the U.S. fully entered the war, etc.) were also used, the deeper objective was the creation of a Greater German empire with the landmass and resources to stand as a peer to the United States and other world powers. GrokThere it is in black and white. Hitler did not want to rule the world. He wanted to make sure that Germany would be a world power for the foreseeable future.Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.The post If Hitler Won appeared first on LewRockwell.