Un. Be. Lievable: Casting the Allies as warmongers

Book reviewer Richard Bernstein (New York Times Company) cobbles together some things he has read into a presentation of a "respectable" view that the Allies were warmongers.

The first two "respectable" proponents of this view, as mentioned by Bernstein, are novelists. Now, nothing against novelists, for certainly it's possible for a novelist to have secure knowledge of his topic, but by the same token the novelist might not know what he's talking about, either. Is this the best he can do? Apparently not. There's also Pat Buchanan.

More is coming along the anti-Churchillian lines. Patrick Buchanan, the conservative commentator and two-time presidential candidate, launches a sustained attack on Churchill in a new, lengthy book, "Churchill, Hitler, and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World," which will be out later this month.

[...]

Buchanan goes further, arguing (as numerous others have on this point) that had imperialist France and Britain not forced an unjust peace settlement on Germany after World War I, there would have been no rise of Hitler in the first place, no World War II, and no resulting Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

(International Herald Tribune)

Buchanan is essentially accurate regarding the point that the Treaty of Versailles did much to motivate the Germans to wage war to regain what they had lost. But that does not remotely provide sufficient rationale to fuel the notion that Churchill and the Allies were therefore warmongers who instigated the war intentionally.

It is not controversial that far earlier appeasement might have prevented Hitler from ever coming to power. The weight of the restitution demanded under the Treaty of Versailles ensured a weak and pathetic German economy. But the truth is that the Allies were utterly tired of that first world war, which had jarred the contemporary expectation that wars would be short and civilized. War, it turned out, could still be long and ruinous if neither side possessed the types of clear technological advantages that enabled Otto von Bismarck to achieve his notable successes.

Once a person of Hitler's mind-set had taken power, however, any negotiation not made on the basis of power simply fed his sense of being able to achieve any ends to which he set his mind.