Former Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has a new book out which argues that both world wars were unnecessary, and that the empires of Europe could still reign supreme
Former Nixon aide and three time Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has a new book out, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World. The book continues in Buchanan's refrain for the last few years, that the western world is dying, and has been dying for the last half century. He has talked about this before in a number of ways in the past, including his book Death of the West.
Mourning the Lost Empire
Buchanan's views on Empire seems to be one of nostalgia. He does recognize that in this day and age, an empire is not possible or practical (see his book A Republic Not an Empire). But throughout his career he has spoken very highly of the British Empire of the past, and defended crumbling ruins of the Empire of the present.
He opposed the UN sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s and has disparaged former South African president Nelson Mandela, saying placing a statue of him in Trafalger Square would be to "rub the noses of the British in the reality that their empire is dead and gone and the heroes they were raised to revere are to be displaced by the gods of globalism."
The Britons alive today are not to be ashamed of their history, but who exactly are the heroes that Buchanan is saying they used to revere (and should still revere)? Leander Starr Jameson, whose raid against the Boers of South Africa in 1895 inspired Rudyard Kipling's poem "If-" and precipitated the Second Boer war, the most disastrous war the British had fought in nearly a century?
Or General Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar? Or Jan Smuts, a staunch supporter of segregation and who staunchly opposed the enfranchisement of black South Africans? Or the repulsive Cecil Rhodes or Rudyard Kipling (who Buchanan quotes in his introduction to the book)?
Buchanan also compares Mandela to Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe, who overthrew the government of Rhodesia in a military coup and has ruled the country as a dictator for the last 28 years. He compares the two not by their methods or beliefs (Mandela was elected and achieved his ends through non-violence), but compares them because they were both Africans who overthrew white governments, a tragedy in Buchanan's view.
Buchanan spends the first few pages of his new book describing how wonderful things were at the beginning of the twentieth century, when missionaries and conquerors had been sent from Europe to all four corners of the Earth. He goes the entire length and quotes from that wretched hymn of Empire by Kipling "The White-Man's Burden":
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
Ironic he should quote that exerpt. Buchanan oppossess "savage wars of peace" like the ones NATO waged in Yugoslavia and the one the US has fought in Iraq. Some have argued that the current War in Iraq is being fought so that the US can do to Iraq what Britain did to others. To "wait in heavy harness...[our] new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half child," as "The White-Man's Burden" says.
