Below The Beltway

That really is the only conclusion you can draw after reading dreck like this defending the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939:

German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson’s 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.

But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.

From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.

The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.

In other words, all of World War II was Poland’s fault for refusing to believe that a man who had violated every treaty he’d entered into and made mincemeat of Germany’s obligations under the Treaty of Versailles would actually live up to any agreement they entered into with him. Already, the Third Reich had violated a Non-Aggression Pact entered into between the two nations back in 1934, what confidence should the Poles have after having witnessed Hitler’s claims against Czechoslovakia expand from just the Sudentland to the entire nation ?

Of course, Buchanan gets Munich wrong as well:

Appeasement is the name given to what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in September 1938. Rather than fight Germany in another great war — to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised — he agreed to their peaceful transfer to German rule. With these Germans went the lands their ancestors had lived upon for centuries, German Bohemia, or the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain’s negotiated deal with Hitler averted a European war — at the expense of the Czech nation. That
was appeasement.

What Buchanan fails to mention, of course, is that even the supposed anti-Czech sentiment among Sudeten Germans was a fraud stirred up by years of Nazi propaganda.

Of course, should we really be surprised to see something from this from a guy with Buchanan’s history:

Buchanan asserted that six men accused of Nazi-era war crimes were innocent: Iwan Demjanjuk, Karl Linnas, Arthur Rudolph, Frank Walus, Ivan Stebelsky, Tscherim Soobzokov.^[100] Ukrainian born Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker accused of operating the gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp, received the most attention. Buchanan called his trial a witch hunt and said “Demjanjuk had never even been at Treblinka”.^[100] After a highly publicised trial, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death by an Israeli court, but his conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel on the grounds of mistaken identity. Buchanan wrote at the time that this spared Israel the disgrace of hanging an innocent man.^[100]

In a 1990 column defending Demjanjuk, Buchanan also claimed, “Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. In 1988, 97 kids, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, D.C., tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes. Demjanjuk’s weapon of mass murder cannot kill”.^[116] When asked for his source, Buchanan said, “somebody sent it to me”. Critic Jamie McCarthy says this claim may have come from the German American Information and Education Association’s newsletter, a publication he accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. He also argues that “unlike the locomotive engineer in Buchanan’s example, who was concerned with saving the lives of trapped people, the Nazis had no qualms about opening the engine’s throttle and restricting the air intake”.^[117] The Washington Post reported in 1989, before the controversy, that, “An Amtrak train had been stalled in a tunnel for half an hour, and smoke from the diesel engine had filled the first car, where there were 97 fifth-grade pupils and 27 adult chaperones. [EMT Cynthia] Brown boarded the train, guided the passengers — most of whom suffered from smoke inhalation — from the car and assisted those who needed immediate attention.”^[118]

Continue making your excuses Mr. Buchanan, stuff like this column just reveals you for what you truly are.

H/T: Bearing Drift