So that's what happened . . . or . . . History as Politics

I have spent the last couple of days struggling to find some pithy and deep-basined way to tie up all the nonsense that was spewed this past month in commemorations, or simply recognitions in print, of the start of WWII marked by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. After Russian President Medvedev signed a decree establishing a "commission to counter attemts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests", it really came as little surprise that while Prime Minister Putin was praising the bravery of the Polish soldiers at a September 1 commemoration in Poland, the Russian government was releasing what it said were previously unreleased confidential documents detailing prewar cooperation between Poland and the Nazis. Frankly, it stands to reason that there are to be odd, even painful, moments as the memory of WWII - as individually constructed in Western Europe, Central Europe, and Russia - is merged into a single whole (even if not seamless) narrative. But anymore on this should wait - it's more domestic issues that have burrowed in and become a bother.

Pat Buchanan has never been one to shy away from idiotic comments but this month, on the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, he simply took the cake as he insisted that "Hitler had never wanted war with Poland"! In fact, in an odd echo of the Russian government, according to Pat, it was essentially Poland's fault that the war started at all. If only the Poles would "negotiate" the hand-over of Danzig/Gdansk a "town the size of Ocean City, Md." -- WAIT! Stop, Gdansk is not the size of a now broken-down and kitschy town in the marshes of the Maryland seaboard (no offense to the citizens of Ocean City), it has long been one of Poland's largest and most important cities and has long played a large role in trade in the Baltic and North Seas - in short, an important part of any economy in that region and one that was central to a Poland caught between an aggressively rearming (and threatening) Germany and an evermore sure-of-itself Soviet Union under Stalin. For now we'll leave aside much of the weak-as-water evidence marshalled to continue the farce that Hitler did not want war and land on Buchanan's insistence that once it had begun "Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." The implication here is simply that the Final Solution, the Endlösung vorgesehen in the German, was the fault of first the Poles for not giving over Danzig and then the Brits for not agreeing to peace, and perhaps even the Americans for getting involved at all. Not only is this absolutely ridiculous, it is patently absurd and borders on dangerous. Buchanan's comments championing the skills of good old Adolph as a leader, while recognizing his nasty, nasty antisemitism, have now - with this - become too leaden to be laughed-off* with a simple guffaw and an old-boy shrug. Not only is his history patently bad but he is, if not a denier, then an apologist.

-fp

*when first published the sentence read "too leaden to be supported . . ." - coming back for a reread "support" is not at all what was intended, "laughed-off" is at least a bit better.