 After reading Clyde Wilson’s latest articles, “Hitler’s New Fans” and “The South and the ‘Alt-Right’” (and the comments), I must ride towards the sound of the guns! As a revisionist and as a “paleo-libertarian,” my view of the “Alt-Right” was that despite its vices, it was a vital and youthful revolt against a “Gerontocratic Obsolete Party” / “Stupid Party” and “Con. Inc.” / “Big Con,” passive in the face of an impending Cultural Revolution. Yet anti-American propaganda about the Second World War is neither how we learn from history nor how we rally “Middle American Radicals.” To be charitable, I would suggest that some of “Hitler’s new fans” are having a displaced reaction to the cynical politicization of the Second World War in the present. The “Holocaust Industry” is the Jewish equivalent of a shakedown á la Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The “Israel Lobby” is domineering in American foreign policy. Every empty-suit and hair-piece president styles himself “the next Churchill.” Every tin-pot dictator is hyped as “the next Hitler.” Any attempt at resolving even the pettiest of turf wars through diplomacy is denounced as “another Munich.” The “America First” foreign policy of the Founders (non-intervention and neutrality) is vilified as “Fascism,” and so on and so forth. It is all too tempting to view the deplorable condition of the “postwar order” and hate whence it came. Yet just because the legacy of the Allied victory in the Second World War is often used for evil, that does not mean that Allied victory was itself evil. So, whilst “Hitler’s new fans” may be having a healthy reaction against our postwar status quo, as our dysfunctional schools leave students illiterate and without critical-thinking skills, and as the Internet dumbs-down discourse, reinforces silo mentalities, and elicits anti-social tendencies, they lack both the knowledge and the language to express that reaction healthily. In other words, their knee is jerking when tapped, but it is jerking so hard that they are kicking themselves. Revisionism about the Second World War, as with all history and especially wars (when propaganda is most prevalent and perceptions are most distorted) is necessary, inevitable, and a never-ending process. New facts are always coming to light, and old facts may be seen in a new light with the progress of events in the present. Nor should “amateur historians” necessarily be disqualified from historical revisionism. That would be suicidal for authentic Southern history, which is now almost entirely outside of academia! What “Hitler’s new fans” are doing is not revisionism, however; it is not even history. They are taking a handful of “facts” that they learned online, all disconnected and out of context, sometimes only half-true if not entirely untrue, and filling in an alternative narrative around what amounts to historical trivia. As each generation spends more time online in virtual ghettoes, they have become more alienated from their families and communities, if not reality itself. Indeed, have “Hitler’s new fans” no shame at the thought of what their ancestors would make of them today? Of the relatives whom I had the privilege to know, on my bookshelf sits the war memoirs of one of my grandfather's older brothers (a cotton sharecropper from middle Tennessee) and on the wall hangs an official-issue map from my great-grandmother's brother in-law (a tobacco farmer from southern Maryland) of his route through Europe. There is no more effective immunization against online radicalization than simply to spend time with other human beings, especially your own flesh and blood. It is there that you learn “who you are” and “where you come from.” To be sure, some sympathy for a defeated enemy is not dishonorable. When I first watched “Letters from Iwo Jima,” I was moved to tears. To see the humanity in your enemy is to see yourself in your enemy, which brings us closer to morality of Christ, “love thine enemies,” “judge not lest ye be judged,” and the Golden Rule. Disowning one’s kinfolk for the stranger, however, is dishonorable. "If ‘The Greatest Generation’ could have seen what they were fighting for, then they wouldn't have fought, or would've fought for the other side!" is a popular refrain amongst “Hitler’s new fans.” As Arno J. Mayer (a real revisionist worthy of study) recalled of his experience in basic training, “I encountered fierce expressions of anti-black racism and anti-Communism, and was personally exposed to anti-Jewish outbursts.” Amongst his fellow recruits, “Once we have defeated the Krauts and the Japs overseas we’ll come home to kick the shit out of the Kikes and the Niggers!” was gist of it.[1] More wholesomely, in a recent interview with a Marine and WWII veteran in his home on his one-hundredth birthday, he trembled in tears as he pondered how the country has changed:
Yet how and why is modern Weimerica, as “Hitler’s new fans” call it, “what they fought for”? Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Although our ancestors did lament how our country has declined since, I never heard any of them wonder, “Were we the baddies?” On the contrary, what I have always heard them say is that we failed to preserve what they fought for. There is no doubt that the Second World War revolutionized America, for better or for worse according to your point of view, but it did so by accelerating trends that were already extant. To quote Garet Garrett, an Old-Right and America-First foe of the New Deal and the World War, “There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.” The Communists had literally infiltrated the White House long before the White House abetted their invasion of postwar Europe. It is true that after the war a few Allied leaders, such as General Patton, horrified at the vengeance which the Red Army was wreaking upon Germany—for instance, the gang-rapes which a Captain Solzhenitsyn was exiled to a gulag for mentioning in a letter home—revolted over yielding the eastern half of Germany to the Soviet Union. “We defeated the wrong enemy” is a popular misquotation of Patton by “Hitler’s new fans.” What Patton wanted was for the Cold War to be a hot one then and there in Berlin, 1945, but he never disavowed the war that it took for him to be in Berlin in the first place. Just as Scipio Africanus wept at the downfall of Carthage, so too Patton felt bittersweet over the downfall of Germany, but even as he concluded that the peace had been lost to the Soviets, he did not conclude that the war against the Nazis had not been just. Moreover, insofar as Second World War did ultimately cause the “Death of the West,” is Hitler not just as much to blame for his share in starting the war? Perhaps it was imprudent of Churchill to issue a war guarantee to Poland, but no one forced Hitler (in cahoots with Stalin) to invade Poland! Was it worth risking a world war to make Danzig a German city again? Likewise for Imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor. To defend my revisionist bona fides, it is my belief that, in accord with America’s longstanding moral need to be seen as never firing the “first shot” in a war, the FDR administration, eager to intervene in the war but faced with a resolutely non-interventionist public, was using economic pressure to provoke Imperial Japan into firing such a first shot, and suppressed intelligence of an impending sneak attack.[2] This blew up in their faces at Pearl Harbor, which very nearly lost them the entire Pacific fleet and in turn the war, but despite this bungling it did justify American intervention and shift American public opinion. Insofar as I am critical of FDR for baiting Imperial Japan whilst pledging, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars!” I am no less critical of Imperial Japan for blindly taking the bait, thereby starting a war which was to cost millions of lives on both sides. There is zero moral equivalence between the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor and the Confederate bombing of Fort Sumter.[3] Trusting the pacific assurances of the outgoing and incoming U.S. presidents, Charleston was downright hospitable to the garrison, keeping it supplied until the crisis was resolved. Intermediaries of the Lincoln administration in Washington D.C. and Charleston had confirmed that the fort was to be evacuated. It was only when the duplicity of the Lincoln administration revealed itself that the decision was made to “reduce” the fort. Notified in advance, the garrison suffered no casualties. After the surrender, the garrison was permitted to march out with honor and was saluted by their former countrymen. Nevertheless, both were “first shots” that backfired catastrophically and thus have something to teach us. The dire prophecy of Confederate Secretary of State Robert A. Toombs, who resigned soon afterwards, is haunting. “The firing upon that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen,” he warned. “Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountains to ocean. Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.” In another article, Dr. Wilson expresses skepticism towards the revisionist argument that the use of the atomic bomb against Japan was unnecessary to end the Second World War. “I would like to see the evidence for this,” he asks. There is quite a bit of criticism from the Third-Worldist Left, which tactically moralizes against the bombing but would not hesitate to use such bombs to “de-colonize” the world if it had the opportunity. For more judicious criticism, however, I suggest the interview of John V. Denson by Lew Rockwell, which references Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy. Mr. Denson, who is cousins with the famous WWII veteran author Gene Sledge, has also written an article on this controversy, “The Hiroshima Myth.” Even if the calculation that the bombing shortened the war and thereby saved more lives on both sides is correct—the same logic used by Lincoln’s generals to justify total war—there is a moral question of whether human lives should even be calculated in such a way, especially when the lives to be sacrificed are those of civilians. In truth, the atomic bomb, due to its extreme destructiveness, was but a vivid exemplification of the moral problems of “strategic bombing” in general. By 1945, the Allies had Japan surrounded by sea and air. Japanese cities were fire-bombed nightly by Americans with impunity, incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians. Why was a ground invasion of Japan even on the table? Why not continue to besiege Japan with total naval and aerial dominance until it surrendered? The whole question of, “Invade Japan or drop the bomb?” has always rung untrue to me - a false dilemma. The Classical and Christian just-war tradition, which I believe Southerners are bound to uphold, is that wars must be “soldiers’ wars.” Even if this puts us at a material disadvantage in the modern world, morally it places us at a vantage point. “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul?” But enough about Tojo; back to Hitler. “Hitler’s new fans” may be interested to learn that in Mein Kampf he shared some thoughts on American constitutional history. In the chapter “Federalism as a Mask,” Hitler argued that the question, “Should Germany be a federated or unified state?” was a “mask” for Jewish scheming to divide Germany, and that the very concept of a federated state was chimerical:
Well, that is straight from President Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, which was itself straight from the oratory of Senator Webster and jurisprudence of Justice Story. Needless to say, this is a fable to anyone who is honest about the historical record—the debates of the drafting of the Constitution in the Federal Convention; the arguments of Federalists; the reservation of rights and recommended constitutional amendments in the states’ respective acts of ratification, etc.[4] Many of “Hitler’s new fans” have repudiated states’ rights, however. Indeed, I have heard them, sounding just like Mark Levin on FOX News, declaim that the question of states’ rights was “settled” at Appomattox—the way Stalin “settled” the Nationalities Question, presumably—and that President Trump must do to California what President Lincoln did to Maryland. By contrast, the Virginian Harry F. Byrd, Jr. recalls Churchill’s informed and insightful observations on American constitutionalism. “I thought the British Parliamentary system, where the leader of the government could be changed within a short time span, had much to commend it over the American system,” Byrd suggested to Churchill, who answered, “Ah, yes, Mr. Byrd, but don’t forget this—the great strength of the American system is that the forty-eight states, acting through their own legislatures, can, to a very considerable degree, determine their own affairs,” then adding, “You in America are not centralized like we are in England.” According to Byrd, “Never had I heard such an eloquent description and defense of States’ rights. I was fascinated that a world statesman 3000 miles from our shores should recognize and proclaim what so many Americans at that time did not, and even now do not realize: the danger of a government too highly centralized, something Thomas Jefferson warned against 150 years earlier.” Whither Southern man? Hitler with Lincoln, or Churchill with Jefferson? In his magisterial History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill was sympathetic to the South in the American Civil War, and in his creative counter-factual history, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” he speculated that if the South had won the war, slavery would have been abolished and reunification achieved in a reasonable amount of time. Consider Churchill’s views of the quintessential Confederate icons, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, whose embattled monuments the Alt-Right united with us “paleos” at Charlottesville to defend. Lee, in a disturbing act of malevolence, was ceremoniously melted down, and Jackson, still more disturbingly, was dismembered and grotesquely reassembled to be put on display as a “Frankenstein’s monster of itself.” Of Lee, Churchill heralded him as “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived, and one of the greatest captains known to the annals of war.” Of Jackson, “Lee’s famous comrade in arms,” Churchill remarked, “He might have stepped into American history from the command of one of Cromwell’s regiments”—high praise from an Englishman. Of the “comradeship” between Lee and Jackson, Churchill compared it to that of the Duke of Marlborough and the Prince of Savoy—high praise considering that the former was Churchill’s noble ancestor and Churchill his biographer. Hitler, by contrast, had a morbid fascination with what the great Union general William T. Sherman termed, eerily enough, “the final solution to the Indian problem.”[5] Hitler studied the population transfers, concentration camps, and mass murders carried out by the late Lincoln’s army, with U.S. Grant as president, Sherman in command, and the bullyboy cavalrymen Sheridan and Custer on the field. He was especially interested in how once the Indians were interned they simply died off without having to be killed. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children,” Sherman urged Grant. “I am charmed at the handsome conduct of our troops in the field,” Sherman beamed to Sheridan in 1874. “They go in with the relish that used to make our hearts glad in 1864-5.” Sheridan, who in 1864-5 had been setting the Shenandoah Valley ablaze, well knew whereof Sherman spoke. Whither Southern man? Hitler with Sherman, or Churchill with Lee and Jackson? John Lukacs, a historian's historian to whom I was first introduced through Mr. Wilson himself, perceptively evaluated Churchill and Hitler as a “patriot” versus a “nationalist” and a “reactionary” against a national socialist, respectively: Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal and new. Few things are as wrong as the tendency to see Hitler as a reactionary. He was the very antithesis of that. The true reactionary was Churchill. At that very moment in the history of mankind what Hitler represented was the brutal, and by no means illogical, efficiency of popularly supported and mechanically organized force. What Churchill represented was the reaction to that… One of the essential differences between Hitler and Churchill was this: the former was a nationalist, the latter a patriot. (During the last one hundred years these words have become regrettably confused, perhaps especially in American usage, where we speak of a superpatriot when what we mean is a supernationalist)…Patriotism is essentially defensive, while nationalism is aggressive…The former is deeper rooted than the latter. Patriotism is not a substitute for a religious faith, whereas nationalism often is. It often fills the spiritual and even emotional needs of uprooted men. It is often the result of hatred.[6] Change only the names and this could be about Lee and Lincoln, respectively. What Southerner with any degree of affinity for his traditions and heritage could side against the English “patriot” and “reactionary” and with the German “national socialist”? Patrick Buchanan and Peter Hitchens, the contemporary revisionists of the Second World War from the Right, are critical of Churchill for his blustering and blunders, to be sure—and I concur with their critiques—but neither were so asinine as to confuse Churchill for the villain or Hitler for the victim. It was not the second, but the first of the world wars in the twentieth century which caused the Death of the West. The second was but a sequel to the unfinished ending of the first, with the Communists who had taken over Russia surrendering territory that they planned to retake after consolidating power internally, and the victors imposing a “peace to end all peace” on Germany. To prevent another war would have been to navigate Scylla and Charybdis, given that Germany and Russia had from the fallout from the world war been revolutionized into totalitarian regimes under the rule of glorified gangsters. The First World War, however, was virtually started by accident—the “repressible conflict” of a “blundering generation,” to use language familiar to us Southerners. As well as saving 40 million lives, without the First World War there would have been no Lenin, no Hitler, no Bolshevism, no Nazism, and therefore no Second World War and no Holocaust. My wife, a native of Armenia, reminds me further that without the First World War there would have been no Armenian Genocide, which was committed in the fog of war. Yet if the Ottoman Empire had not been dissolved by the Treaty of Sévres, and Armenia thereafter annexed by the Soviet Union, would her family have emigrated after the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s? Would we have met when and where we did? What of our daughter, whose chances of conception were one in a billion? I could not be without her. Ultimately “what ifs” such as these demonstrate both the futility and the necessity of revisionism. We cannot change the past, and even if it were possible, how it would change our present is often unimaginable. All that we can do is learn from the past for a better future. Notes
[1] Mayer, Arno J. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in History. Pantheon, 1988. Ibid. Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel. Verso, 2008. [2] Denson, John V. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception.” Reassessing the Presidency, ed. John V. Denson. Mises Institute, 2001. [3] Ibid. “Lincoln and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception.” [4] As Thomas DiLorenzo has wryly noted, to argue as Lincoln did that a union can be older than any of the things it is a union of is logically equivalent to arguing that “a marital union can be older than either spouse.” Furthermore, to argue, as Lincoln did, that a voluntary union of states can be preserved by military force is logically equivalent to “how a man saves his marital union if his wife leaves him—if he goes out and finds her, drags her back into the home, chains her to the bedpost, and threatens to shoot her and burn the house down if she leaves again.” Mr. DiLorenzo gibed, “In Lincolnian lawyerly language, the union is back together again—it has been saved—but it’s not the same union that it was on their wedding day.” [5] DiLorenzo, Thomas. “Was Hitler Inspired by Lincoln’s Army?” LewRockwell.com. January 31, 2014. [6] Lukacs, John. The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler. Yale University Press, 1990.
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