FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
July 26, 1999
BUCHANAN: ARGUMENTS
BASED ON HISTORY
MCLEAN, VA -- In response to the controversy over A Republic, Not an Empire, Patrick J. Buchanan sent the following letter to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner.
To the Editor
San Francisco Examiner
Chris Matthews' review of my new work, A Republic, Not An Empire, proves again that there are some books that simply should not be given to children.
My argument that it was a mistake for Britain to give a "war guarantee" to Poland in the spring of 1939 is based on history. Not only did the guarantee fail to save Poland, it led to total disaster for Poland and to a Nazi invasion and occupation of Western Europe.
What happened when Poland relying on its British guarantee, defied Hitler in 1939? Hitler attacked from the west, Stalin from the east. Poland was raped and crucified, while Britain and France sat behind the Maginot line.
The Nazis then set up the camps like Auschwitz, as Stalin proceeded to murder the entire leadership of Poland at places like Katyn. Under Nazi rule five years, Poland was then abandoned by Churchill and FDR at Teheran and Yalta, and left under Stalinist rule for forty-five years. By one estimate, six million of Poland's people, including its entire Jewish population, perished in the war.
How then did Britain's war guarantee save Poland?
As for Britain and France, their declarations of war on Hitler in 1939 caused him to turn West and attack the democracies first, before setting out on his long-planned road to Moscow. Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France were thus overrun, and their Jewish populations locked in, to await the trains.
As I write on page 266, "Had Britain and France not given the war guarantee to Poland, there might have been no Dunkirk, no blitz, no Vichy, no destruction of the Jewish population of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France or even Italy."
An alternative Allied strategy-advocated then and since by British and American historians, scholars, and statesmen-might have kept Britain and France out of the first stage of the European war, saved all of Western Europe's Jewish population, and enabled Britain and France to decide when and where to strike Hitler.
But to urge the heroic Polish people to rely on a war guarantee that Britain and France had neither the will nor power to honor was not only "demented," as Lloyd George said, it was immoral.
Oh, yes. Observing Mr. Matthews on his CNBC show last night, discussing my book, I am afraid you are going to have to put him back on the Ritalin.
Patrick J. Buchanan
Republican Candidate for President
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