Undoing the Myth of the “Good War”

Part I

Editor’s Note

The following essay originally appeared in serialized form on X, where it was published as a thread to reach a broader audience. For the sake of clarity, coherence, and long-term accessibility, it is now presented here in full. While it remains divided into its original sections, it has been edited lightly to improve flow, rhythm, and formatting. No substantive changes have been made.

What follows is both a reading guide and a polemical intervention: a structured account of the books and arguments that confront the official mythology of the Second World War and its lingering moral authority over the modern West. These are not fringe speculations or contrarian provocations, but serious works of historical scholarship that have been ignored, dismissed, or suppressed because they challenge the theological narrative of the so-called Good War. The goal is not to defend every decision of the era, but to expose the ideological distortions that have transformed a tragic geopolitical catastrophe into a permanent rationale for Western civilizational decline.

This selection of books focuses specifically on the European origins of the conflict, with particular attention to British responsibility and diplomatic miscalculation. Next week, I will turn to the American role—its path to war, the actions of the Roosevelt administration, and the enduring controversies surrounding Pearl Harbor.

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The above quote comes from Patrick J. Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.

As more people awaken to the realization that the twentieth century was not a march of progress toward a utopian end of history but a carefully managed illusion, the official narrative begins to unravel.

Beneath its polished veneer lies a record not of moral clarity but of deception, betrayal, and orchestrated catastrophe. Among these illusions, none is more sacrosanct, more zealously defended, than the myth of the Second World War, the so-called Good War.

But what did that Good War truly achieve? In the words of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose reflection is shown above, the Second World War extinguished the last embers of Western ascendancy. All the great houses of continental Europe fell. The empires that once ruled the globe vanished. Birthrates collapsed. Peoples of European ancestry have been in demographic decline for generations. The spiritual confidence that once drove the West was replaced by exhaustion and disinheritance. The Allies may have won on the battlefield, but the civilization they claimed to defend did not survive the victory.

With this in mind, it becomes easier to understand why a serious body of historical work emerged after 1945 and was immediately subjected to suppression, censorship, and denunciation. These books, written by generals, diplomats, journalists, defectors, and independent historians, challenge every sacred premise of the official narrative.

For decades, they were buried or discredited by a powerful alliance of media monopolies, academic gatekeepers, and ruling elites whose institutions were driven by a wide range of financial, political, and ethnic interests, often converging in their shared determination to preserve the mythology of the Good War.

Only with the rise of social media and the weakening grip of legacy power structures has this alternative historiography begun to reach a broader audience. Its revival is not accidental. It reflects the slow collapse of the ideological consensus that once rendered dissent unthinkable.

To understand the ideologically driven mythology of the so-called Good War, we must turn to the books that have dared to challenge it. In the thread below, I examine works that trace the origins of the conflict in Europe and the political choices made in Great Britain that transformed a regional dispute into a global catastrophe, shaping the trajectory and character of a Western world now visibly in decline.

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The first serious fracture in the orthodoxy surrounding the Second World War came not from a dissident writer or political radical, but from within the British academic establishment itself. In The Origins of the Second World War, published in 1961, A. J. P. Taylor, then the most widely read historian in Britain, offered a meticulous, document-based account that contradicted nearly every moral and strategic justification used to explain the outbreak of war in 1939.

Taylor did not write as some sort of partisan ideologue. He was a liberal, a former supporter of the League of Nations, and a staunch opponent of fascism. Yet his research led him to a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: that Hitler did not plan a world war, that he was often improvisational and opportunistic, and that the road to war was paved largely by diplomatic blunders and deliberate misjudgments in London and Paris.

Taylor’s thesis directly undermined the Eternal Nuremberg interpretation of history that had come to dominate Anglo-American public life—the notion that the war was the result of a premeditated and uniquely evil conspiracy. Moreover, Taylor showed that Hitler’s aims, particularly from 1933 to 1939, were not significantly different from those of previous German statesmen: the reversal of Versailles, the recovery of lost territory, and the reintegration of Germans stranded in foreign states by postwar border arrangements. The evidence for this lay in the archives themselves. Taylor carefully studied internal German memoranda, the minutes of cabinet meetings, and diplomatic telegrams, finding no coherent long-term plan for world conquest.

Instead, he showed that Hitler’s decisions were often made late, subject to change, and reactive to the moves of other powers. For example, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 was conducted with fewer than 30,000 lightly armed troops, many of them instructed to retreat at the first sign of French resistance. Hitler took that gamble only after being assured that the Western powers were distracted and unwilling to act. Similarly, the Anschluss with Austria in 1938 was not imposed by military invasion but welcomed by vast crowds and arranged with the cooperation of pro-German factions within Austria itself.

Taylor argued that the final crisis came in March 1939, not because of Hitler’s escalating aggression, but because of Britain’s uncharacteristic and poorly calculated guarantee to Poland. This move, made in response to Germany’s absorption of the remaining Czech lands after the collapse of Prague, committed Britain to defend Poland’s borders, borders that had been drawn arbitrarily by the Versailles Treaty and which included millions of Germans under foreign rule, especially in the so-called Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. Taylor emphasized that Germany had made repeated proposals for negotiation on Danzig, including autonomy under German protection and the construction of a road and rail link between East Prussia and the Reich. Poland refused all overtures, relying on British backing. Britain, in turn, offered a blank check it had neither the intention nor the military capacity to honor, and which effectively ended any hope of peaceful settlement.

One of Taylor’s more striking revelations was that Hitler had not expected Britain to declare war over Poland, and that his staff had drawn up a range of alternative plans that included prolonged talks, joint commissions, and guarantees of minority rights. Taylor noted that Hitler did not order total mobilization or shift the economy to a wartime footing in 1939. The Wehrmacht itself was underprepared for prolonged hostilities. The decision to invade Poland was not part of a global design but a response to a local impasse, one made irreconcilable by British guarantees.

Relatedly, he also demonstrated how France, paralyzed by internal division and political instability, essentially followed Britain’s lead while possessing far less strategic interest in Eastern Europe. The diplomatic drama was not one of appeasement failing to contain aggression, but of incompatible ultimatums, nationalist posturing, and bluff diplomacy turned deadly.

The academic and political reaction to Taylor’s book was swift and punitive. Though written in a restrained tone, and grounded entirely in publicly available government documents, the work was denounced as irresponsible, dangerous, and even treasonous. Taylor lost editorial positions and speaking engagements. His public standing was damaged, and major media outlets attempted to cast him as sympathetic to Hitler, despite his long history of “anti-totalitarianism.” Yet the book could not be dismissed outright. Its prose was lucid, its reasoning meticulous, and its evidence drawn entirely from the official archives of Britain, France, and Germany.

By refusing to mythologize the war and instead treating it as a tragic outcome of failed diplomacy and misjudged alliances, Taylor restored history to its proper terrain: a human record of choices, mistakes, and consequences. He showed that the war was not a moral necessity, but a political catastrophe, one that might have been avoided had European leaders acted with prudence instead of pride. His book remains a landmark, not for what it says about Hitler, but for what it exposes about the democracies that claimed to oppose him.

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If A. J. P. Taylor reopened the question of who wanted war, Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof expanded the dossier. A former Bundeswehr general and military historian, Schultze-Rhonhof brought to the table what Taylor lacked: fluency in German primary sources, an intimate knowledge of military strategy, and access to materials either ignored or suppressed in Western academia. In 1939: The War That Had Many Fathers, he offered one of the most exhaustive chronological reconstructions of the years leading to the Second World War, grounding his conclusions not in polemics but in state papers, newspaper records, diplomatic correspondence, and official archives.

His central thesis was stark but carefully built: that the war was not a single act of German aggression, but the culmination of complex and deliberate provocations by multiple states, with Britain, Poland, and even the United States playing more active roles in provoking the final conflict than is commonly acknowledged. Schultze-Rhonhof showed that far from planning a war of conquest, Hitler’s foreign policy through much of the 1930s remained cautious, reactive, and limited in scope. Until late 1938, the German government’s strategy focused overwhelmingly on revising the Versailles boundaries, especially in regions with clear ethnic German majorities, while avoiding any confrontation with the Western powers.

A major portion of the book is dedicated to the Polish government’s intransigence during the Danzig crisis. Schultze-Rhonhof documented how Poland, under Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły and Foreign Minister Józef Beck, rejected every single German proposal, including extremely moderate ones that would have returned Danzig to Germany while preserving Polish access to the sea and full economic autonomy in the corridor. Hitler even offered international oversight of the rail corridor and guaranteed Polish sovereignty elsewhere. These proposals were not vague or informal; they were transmitted repeatedly through diplomatic channels and backed with detailed memoranda. Yet Poland, counting on the Anglo-French guarantee, refused all negotiations.

The author also placed heavy emphasis on the role of the Polish military in escalating tensions. From early 1939 onward, Polish forces were mobilizing along the German border, conducting raids into German territory, and persecuting the ethnic German population within Polish-controlled areas. Schultze-Rhonhof cited dozens of documented cases of physical violence, property confiscation, and local pogroms against Germans in the months before the invasion, acts largely ignored by British media at the time. The German invasion, he argued, came not in a vacuum, but as a response to escalating hostilities and the total diplomatic deadlock created by Polish confidence in British support.

Perhaps most controversially, the book catalogued Anglo-French behavior during the summer of 1939, arguing that Britain’s war guarantee to Poland in March was given not to preserve peace but to ensure that Germany would be trapped in a two-front war. According to the documents cited by Schultze-Rhonhof, the British cabinet knew they had no means of projecting power east of France, yet extended a commitment they could neither enforce nor withdraw. Instead of deterring Hitler, this guarantee emboldened Poland and removed all incentive to negotiate. Simultaneously, both Britain and France increased pressure on the Soviet Union for a military alliance, which resulted in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact only after Western overtures had failed.

In terms of structure, Schultze-Rhonhof’s book is methodical. It begins in the early 1930s and tracks each nation’s foreign policy chronologically—Germany, France, Britain, Poland, the Soviet Union, and the United States, treating them as active participants rather than passive observers. He highlighted lesser-known events such as Czech-Polish clashes, Polish territorial ambitions in Czechoslovakia following Munich, and French incitement against Germany in Eastern Europe. His contention was that Britain’s policy shifted from appeasement to provocation not in response to German aggression, but in accordance with deeper, and historic geopolitical aims, namely, the containment and destruction of Germany as a continental power.

Though Schultze-Rhonhof’s findings were based on publicly available records, the reception of his book was predictably hostile. Major publishers refused to handle it in English. The German media either ignored or vilified it, despite the author’s reputation as a respected former general. Academic reviewers dismissed it without direct engagement, relying on insinuation rather than refutation. The book circulated primarily through small presses, translated editions, and online platforms, kept alive not by institutions, but by readers seeking a fuller understanding of the war’s origins.

1939: The War That Had Many Fathers is not an exercise in apologia, but a clearheaded study in the tragic arithmetic of power, diplomacy, and mutual distrust. Its message is clear: the war could have been prevented. What brought it into being was not merely one man’s ambition, but the compounded folly of multiple governments, and the triumph of rigidity over reason.

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While most wartime histories paint Winston Churchill as the defiant savior of Western civilization, David Irving’s Churchill’s War (Vol. 1: The Struggle for Power) strips the myth to its roots and reconstructs the man from his own words, actions, and financial records. Drawing from private diaries, unpublished documents, and declassified archives across Europe and North America, Irving reframed Churchill not as the reluctant wartime leader thrust into history’s path, but as a calculating political outcast desperate to return to power, one who understood that war, above all, could restore his relevance.

Irving documented in detail how Churchill, largely excluded from political office after the First World War, was increasingly marginalized during the 1930s and reliant on private financial backing to sustain his lavish lifestyle. He was a man of letters, not a statesman, and depended heavily on income from newspaper columns, book royalties, and speaking tours—many of them sponsored directly or indirectly by interest groups eager to promote rearmament and confrontation with Germany. Irving’s research, drawn from Churchill’s unpublished financial papers and confidential correspondence, revealed a pattern of secretive and often foreign funding. Chief among these was Sir Henry Strakosch, a Jewish South African mining magnate who paid off substantial Churchill debts in 1938. This patronage helped keep Churchill solvent, and it aligned with his increasing hostility toward Germany, a hostility that suited the interests of his benefactors.

This financial dependency shaped his politics. Churchill, who once supported détente and praised Mussolini, pivoted sharply to championing intervention. Irving showed that Churchill used every diplomatic crisis—Abyssinia, Spain, Austria—as a theatrical stage to revive his public role. He fostered ties with Fleet Street editors, leaked documents to generate panic about German intentions, and used Parliament to position himself as Chamberlain’s most vocal rival. By 1938, Churchill had already opened unofficial channels of communication with Roosevelt’s inner circle, including ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s rivals, and urged the United States to resist neutrality in Europe. He was not merely awaiting a war; he was helping to engineer it.

Irving’s title refers not to the clash of nations, but to Churchill’s personal war for control of British policy. His rise was not the natural result of public demand, but the fruit of tireless private maneuvering. When Chamberlain resigned in 1940, it was Churchill, not Lord Halifax, who took power, largely because of his cultivated image as the voice of resistance and his backroom dealings with Labour and elements of British intelligence. Once in office, Churchill rejected every German peace offer, including the multiple proposals delivered through neutral channels in 1940 and 1941. These included full German withdrawal from Western Europe, restoration of Polish sovereignty (minus Danzig and the Corridor), and guarantees of British imperial holdings. Churchill refused to consider them. He insisted on total victory and unconditional surrender, even though Britain had no means to achieve such ends without American intervention.

The book also addresses Churchill’s psychological profile. Irving included testimonies from ministers, secretaries, and physicians, painting a picture of a man whose judgment was increasingly erratic. Churchill began each day with brandy, continued with whisky, and ended with champagne. His drinking was not social; it was habitual and heavy, bearing the marks of clinical alcoholism. Cabinet colleagues routinely commented on his inability to focus, his mood swings, and his detachment from material consequences. At the same time, he indulged in apocalyptic rhetoric and romanticized war as a stage for personal greatness. His belief in history vindicating him was not ironic, it was literal.

Irving also covered Churchill’s early approval of terror bombing. As early as 1940, long before the Blitz, he advocated for striking German civilian centers to break morale. He instructed RAF planners to maximize destruction and was briefed daily on the tonnage dropped and lives lost. This strategic shift, explicitly targeting civilian populations, represented a break from traditional rules of war and was, in Irving’s view, a moral decision for which Churchill bore full responsibility.

Churchill’s War was the product of a decade of archival research, including access to documents previously unpublished or unavailable to earlier biographers. It did not apologize for Hitler or endorse Germany’s policies. Rather, it asked whether the war was truly inevitable, or whether it had been maneuvered into existence by a man for whom war offered personal salvation.

Although Churchill’s War was not as immediately incendiary as Irving’s earlier Hitler’s War, it played a significant role in accelerating his marginalization within academic and media circles. While some reviewers acknowledged the book’s archival depth and provocative arguments, its central thesis—depicting Churchill not as a noble savior of the West but as a self-interested opportunist—fueled existing efforts to discredit him. A campaign was already underway to ruin Irving professionally, financially, and reputationally, and this work added further ammunition. As his research increasingly challenged the sanctified narrative of the war, especially regarding British motives and Allied conduct, the pressure to silence him intensified.

The most surreal phase of this campaign unfolded during Irving’s high-profile libel lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in the early 2000s. Irving sued over Lipstadt’s characterization of him as a Holocaust denier and falsifier of history, but the trial became a show trial of his life’s work. A large legal team was granted full access to his personal archives. Tens of thousands of pages of handwritten diaries, private notes, and correspondence were subpoenaed and examined line by line, down to trivial marginalia and offhand remarks, in a sweeping effort to discredit him. Despite this unprecedented level of scrutiny, only a small number of factual errors were identified—fewer, in fact, than in many widely accepted academic texts. Nonetheless, Irving lost the case, was bankrupted, and a few years later was arrested and imprisoned in Austria for a speech delivered nearly two decades earlier.

As an aside, it is worth stating plainly: no other historian, perhaps in the entire history of civilization, has faced such sustained and coordinated censorship, financial ruin, legal persecution, professional ostracism, and exhaustive historical scrutiny as David Irving. At the height of his career, he published with major presses, was invited to lecture across the globe, and was widely praised for his unparalleled archival skill. His early books, such as The Destruction of Dresden and Hitler’s War, were once cited in mainstream academic and journalistic publications. But as his research began to challenge the sacred pillars of wartime memory—particularly Allied conduct, motives, and propaganda—he was systematically erased from polite intellectual life.

Whatever one thinks of his conclusions, the institutional force brought to bear against Irving speaks volumes about the fragility of official memory. Churchill’s War remains one of the most detailed and exhaustively documented accounts of Britain’s entry into the Second World War. Its arguments may be contested, but its sources remain, silent yet immovable.

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David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money is not a political biography, but it is indispensable to understanding Churchill the man, and Churchill the statesman. Where David Irving approached the subject through private archives and wartime records, Lough, himself a financial adviser and historian, reconstructed Churchill’s entire financial life using newly available banking records, personal ledgers, and correspondence with accountants, brokers, publishers, and friends. The result is a study of a man who lived his entire adult life on the edge of bankruptcy and whose political decisions must be viewed in light of his persistent financial dependency.

Lough traced Churchill’s fiscal instability back to the early 1900s. Though born into the British aristocracy, Churchill inherited neither a large estate nor reliable wealth. He was a man of immense ambition and few material limits, maintaining a grand country estate, employing secretaries, servants, and private staff, purchasing fine clothes and luxury goods, dining lavishly, and drinking imported champagne and brandy daily. This was not supported by a steady income. Churchill depended primarily on journalism, book advances, and public speaking, none of which were guaranteed or sufficient. By the mid-1930s, he was deeply in debt and struggling to meet the basic costs of maintaining Chartwell, his estate in Kent.

In 1938 alone, Churchill’s debts exceeded £18,000 (well over £1 million in today’s terms). Lough documented not only arrears to the Inland Revenue, but substantial sums owed to tailors, wine merchants, publishers, printers, and various private lenders. His literary agents were instructed to secure as many advances as possible, often for works he had not begun. Churchill’s publishers, in turn, were pressured to provide emergency payments to cover expenses unrelated to any current publication. He wrote essays and newspaper columns not for influence, but because each one was urgently needed to pay a creditor. His day-to-day solvency was built on credit, deferrals, and the goodwill of friends.

That goodwill came with consequences. Lough showed in precise detail how Churchill’s most serious financial crisis was averted in 1938 when Sir Henry Strakosch, a wealthy Jewish financier and former chairman of the Union Corporation of South Africa, stepped in to settle large portions of Churchill’s debts. Strakosch not only paid off Churchill’s outstanding margin calls but also provided him with economic research and talking points, particularly on Germany’s industrial expansion. Much of this data later appeared, almost verbatim, in Churchill’s public speeches and press articles. These interventions were not known to the public at the time. They were private transactions between a man in need and a man of means.

At the same time, Churchill’s writings on German rearmament began to dominate the press. Syndicated articles, often published in the United States, emphasized the danger of appeasement and the urgency of resistance. These columns generated income and positioned Churchill as the moral voice of anti-Nazism. Lough does not argue for conspiracy. He presents the evidence plainly: Churchill was financially dependent on men who had political and strategic reasons for encouraging confrontation with Germany. Their support allowed him to maintain his lifestyle and fund his return to political power.

Churchill’s financial habits remained unrestrained. Despite pleas from his advisers to cut costs, summarized in the now-famous note, “No more champagne,” he continued to buy vintage Pol Roger by the case, keep a full staff, and entertain in excess. He took out life insurance policies against future speaking fees. He requested advances on books he had no plan to complete in the near term. He borrowed from fellow MPs and sought assistance from aristocratic friends. His financial secretaries spent more time renegotiating debts and shielding him from creditors than they did managing any budget.

Lough’s narrative is balanced but clear. Churchill’s political resurrection coincided directly with the period of greatest financial distress. He needed a platform, and war gave him one. He needed an income, and agitation against Germany, both in Parliament and the press, made him valuable again. The benefactors who helped rescue him, such as Strakosch, did so in a context that cannot be disentangled from policy.

This does not prove motive. But it establishes dependency. Churchill’s public image as a prophet of war was sustained, in part, by the private funds of men who viewed his return to power as a strategic asset. His rejection of German peace overtures, his refusal to countenance a negotiated settlement in 1939 and again in 1940, and his immediate call for a war of unconditional surrender, all must be read alongside this financial record.

Lough’s book does not explicitly condemn Churchill, but it dismantles the illusion that he stood alone, guided solely by principle. He stood, instead, on a platform of financial precarity, and increasingly narrow options. Lough’s achievement lies in making this clear without moralizing.

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One of the most formidable challenges to the mythology of the Second World War emerged not from the fringe, but from within the ranks of mainstream American conservatism. Patrick J. Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is an extended indictment of the decisions that led Europe into ruin and the West into terminal decline. Published in the aftermath of America’s disastrous campaigns in the Middle East, the book functions both as a work of historical revisionism and as a political warning: that the errors which destroyed the British Empire are being repeated by the United States under the guise of liberal internationalism.

Buchanan’s principal aim is to dismantle the sacred illusion that the Second World War was a righteous struggle fought on behalf of universal freedom. He argues instead that it was the product of a series of avoidable diplomatic and strategic blunders—chiefly by Great Britain—beginning in 1914 and culminating in the destruction of the European order by 1945. The war did not preserve civilization. It shattered it. It did not usher in peace. It gave rise to Soviet domination in the East, American hegemony in the West, the loss of imperial sovereignty, and the beginning of Europe’s demographic and spiritual eclipse.

Central to his analysis is the argument that the road to disaster passed not through appeasement, but through hubris. The Treaty of Versailles, imposed on Germany in 1919, is identified as the original crime. It dismembered a great European nation, imposed punitive reparations, and violated the very principle of national self-determination which the Allies had invoked to justify war. In sowing humiliation and instability, it laid the foundation for the rise of radicalism. Hitler was not an accident. He was the logical consequence of Versailles and the sanctimonious refusal of the Allies to amend its injustice.

Buchanan’s sharpest criticism is directed at Winston Churchill, whose reputation as a defender of liberty he subjects to exacting scrutiny. Far from a prophet or statesman above history, Churchill is presented as an opportunist, shaped by empire, class, and personal ambition. His public career is shown to be marked not by prudence but by a record of disasters: from Gallipoli and the Black and Tans to the failed gold standard and the Polish guarantee. Churchill did not view Germany merely as a threat under Hitler, but as a perennial geopolitical rival. His determination to crush it—regardless of circumstance, leadership, or possibility of peace—was driven by a vision of British supremacy that had long ceased to reflect reality.

Buchanan offers particular attention to the Munich Agreement of 1938. Conventional historiography treats this moment as the shameful pinnacle of appeasement. Buchanan disagrees. He regards it as a rational act of statesmanship, undertaken by a Britain exhausted from war, unprepared for renewed conflict, and isolated on the world stage. The agreement bought time to rearm and stave off disaster. The true folly, he argues, occurred in March 1939, when Britain extended an unconditional war guarantee to Poland. This reckless commitment encouraged Poland to resist negotiation over Danzig, transforming a local crisis into a European war. Britain had no vital interest in the Polish corridor. It had no means of enforcing its pledge. The result was not moral clarity but strategic suicide.

Churchill’s later conduct only deepens the tragedy. He refused every German peace overture, even those transmitted by neutral states. He pressed for total war, not merely against Hitler, but against the German nation. The bombing of civilian centers, the starvation blockade, and the unconditional surrender demand prolonged the conflict unnecessarily. His alliance with Stalin, and his acquiescence to Soviet demands at Tehran and Yalta, consigned half of Europe to communist tyranny. Far from saving the West, Churchill helped dismantle it. Britain emerged from the war victorious in name alone: bankrupt, dependent on American aid, and shorn of its empire.

Buchanan draws the lesson forward. The same pride and moral absolutism that animated Churchill’s war policy reappears in America’s postwar crusades. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Ukraine, each is justified by appeals to “democracy” and “freedom.” Each ignores limits, dismisses diplomacy, and demands total victory. The strategic result is always the same: instability abroad, decline at home, and the erosion of the very civilization that these wars claim to defend. The Cold War, in Buchanan’s view, was not a triumph of the West, but the extension of the same tragedy, now institutionalized.

Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is not an attempt to shift blame or absolve, but to confront the history of the Second World War without illusion. It demands that we examine the causes, decisions, and consequences of the conflict with sobriety, rather than sentiment. The war that is so often portrayed as the high point of moral clarity appears, under Buchanan’s analysis, as a civilizational disaster—one whose consequences shattered Europe, empowered its enemies, and accelerated the decline of the West. His book is a work of rare defiance: a statesman willing to challenge the most sacred myth of the modern age in the name of truth, and in the hope that such errors will not be repeated.

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