Counterknowledge’s Michael MacConnell has an excellent takedown of Pat Buchanan and his latest hobby horse, a sort of squishy Holocaust revisionism: ‘For the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust’: Pat Buchanan flirts with revisionism.

If the option had been available to him, would Hitler, instead of commit genocide, simply have expelled all such “undesirables” from Germany and the areas he occupied? I suppose he might, but such a question is moot, because it introduces an element which was not open to the German leader. It was not open to him because he had chosen to wage an aggressive war on two fronts. Buchanan seems to believe that if only Britain had been more compliant with militant German expansionism and the British Navy not quite so powerful, Hitler would have simply sent all the Jews to Madagascar, where they’d have lived happily ever after.

This is unsupported by the available evidence. Hitler had every opportunity to remove the eventual victims of the T4 program from Germany. He had been killing them from the beginning of 1939 – before the war with Poland, Great Britain and France. He could have shipped them off to Africa or wherever, but it was cheaper to kill them. There is no reason to believe that Hitler would have accorded the Jews, Gypsies or Slavs any greater degree of consideration. That is the kind of man Hitler was. It is perhaps time Buchanan realised that.

Buchanan in fact seems unable to recognise Hitler as a supreme sociopathic murderer. Surely any study of Hitler’s actions must originate with the basic moral consensus that ethnic cleansing is wrong. In the same way he blithely overlooks the right of non-Europeans to live independently of European Imperial overlordship, Buchanan overlooks the basic criminality of genocide and cheerfully goes straight to the mechanics of ethnic cleansing. The logic seems to go like this: Hitler can’t just ship them out; those horrid allies are making that impossible by fighting back against his war of aggression, so therefore it is the fault of the western allies that Hitler decided to kill off millions of civilians. That is patently absurd and morally reptilian.

Hey, that’s an insult to reptiles.

For our past entries about Pat Buchanan and his paleocon antisemitic agenda, here’s an LGF search.