Je dis «nouveau», ce n'est pas tout à fait vrai, mais - hasard de mes lectures ?- je trouve qu'il connait un surcroit de vigueur.
Plus subtile que le révisionnisme des chambres à gaz, il poursuit pourtant le même but : faire passer les fascistes pour des victimes et leurs opposants pour des fauteurs de guerre.
Il tient en deux thèses :
1) Coté britannique : Churchill, à travers son poste de Chancelier de l'Echiquier, a précipité la crise économique des années 30 et donc provoqué indirectement l'arrivée au pouvoir d'Hitler.
De plus, une paix séparée en 1940 plutôt qu'une résistance à tout prix aurait permis à Hitler de battre les bolchéviques, épargnant les souffrances d'après-guerre à l'Europe de l'est, et un Hitler vainqueur n'aurait pas exterminé les juifs, il les aurait tranquillement transférés, en Palestine par exemple.
2) Coté américain : Roosevelt a poussé le Japon à la guerre en refusant de livrer du pétrole et l'emploi par Truman de la bombe atomique a été criminel.
J'ai trouvé unanimité sur un forum du journal Le Monde, que j'imagine représentatif d'un certain gauchisme bien-pensant, pour considérer que le terme criminel de guerre appliqué à Harry Truman était approprié, nullement exagéré ou déplacé.
Comme tous les révisionnismes, ceux-ci comportent une petite part de vérité (Churchill lui-même a reconnu avoir été un mauvais Chancelier de l'Echiquier) qui sert à rendre crédible la grosse part de mensonge.
Ils ne résistent pourtant pas à l'examen des faits :
1) Mein Kampf a été publié en 1925, le programme hitlérien y était annoncé en termes on ne peut plus clairs.
Il ne semble pas que Winston Churchill ait dicté le moindre mot de Mein Kampf (sauf révélation des archives britanniques !).
De plus, il était dans la logique de Hitler et du nazisme d'en vouloir toujours plus. Il n'y a aucune raison de croire qu'une victoire du nazisme sur le bolchevisme aurait suffi à transformer Hitler en «paisible» dictateur à la Franco.
2) Les Japonais n'ont pas eu besoin de provocation américaine pour envahir la Mandchourie.
Si Roosevelt n'a pas joué l'apaisement avec le Japon, c'est justement parce que le récent passé militariste nippon ne lui laissait aucun espoir.
Le Japon a déclenché la guerre et le nombre de victimes anticipées en cas d'invasion du Japon était extrêmement élevé, des deux cotés. En tenant compte de ces deux facteurs, la décision de Truman était certainement la plus sage.
Inscription à :
Publier les commentaires (Atom)
Que répondre à de telles inepties?
RépondreSupprimerJe ne vois qu'une solution apprendre rester critique face à toute forme de propagande!
Pour ce qui est des 2 bombes atomiques, les bombardements conventionnels ont fait bien plus de victimes au total...
Une fois de plus, la théorie du complot - et quel complot! - frappe aveuglément... de là à y voir la main des sionistes...
A croire que tout ce qui s'est passé durant cette sombre période n'a apporté aucune leçon... que c'est triste!
Il n'y a pas eu, contrairement à ce qu'on lit partout, de débat sur l'usage de la bombe A contre le Japon. Tous les calculs comparés des victimes suivant les scénarios sont rétrospectifs.
RépondreSupprimerC'était la guerre, figurez-vous ! et cherchez quel pays, dans l'histoire, a sportivement décidé de ne pas utiliser son arme la plus puissante (hormis le cas où l'adversaire lui-même l'avait et s'en abstenait, le meilleur exemple étant l'arme chimique dans la SGM, utilisée tant et plus dans la PGM, abondamment stockée en vue de la suivante et pour cette raison demeurée au vestiaire).
Franck, où peut-on trouver des développements anti-churchilliens récents ?
Voici ce que j'ai retrouvé dans le Herald tribune qui m'avait alerté, mais j'ai lu d'autres articles en français sur le même sujet sur internet ou dans des magazines, je ne me souviens plus où. C'est pourquoi j'ai eu l'impression d'un regain de popularité de ces thèses.
RépondreSupprimerRethinking Churchill and the Allied warmongers
By Richard Bernstein
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
NEW YORK: World War II, we know on good authority, was unnecessary, the authority being none other than Winston Churchill. By unnecessary Churchill meant that if the Allies' appeasement of Hitler hadn't taken place earlier, the war wouldn't have to have been to fought later.
Now, in this country at least, a current of opinion is gaining strength that stands Churchill on his head. It wasn't appeasement that brought about the disaster of the conflict, but warmongering on the part of the Allied leaders, Churchill first and foremost among them.
The new revisionism makes no excuses for Hitler, but it sees the war through a lens of moral relativism: Yes, the Nazis were evil, but so were the Allies, whose leaders were mendacious, committed unspeakable atrocities and hoodwinked the public into believing that the war was a noble one, fought on behalf of decency and against an evil more colossal than any previous evil in human history.
For those of us, including myself, who have long believed that the Allied war effort was indeed noble, it might seem that such a point of view could only emanate from the dank quarters of some lunatic fringe, perhaps holed up in a Rocky Mountain redoubt and eating conspiracy theories for breakfast.
But on the contrary, the view seems to be the province of entirely respectable and thoughtful people of literary bent. The most visible proponent of the unnecessary war theory is the novelist Nicholson Baker, an accomplished, gentle and entirely civilized man, whose book "Human Smoke" has made him a darling of leftist critics of the American role in the world.
"Baker shows, step by step, how an alliance dominated by leaders who were bigoted, far more opposed to Communism than to fascism, obsessed with arms sales and itching for a fight coerced the world into war," Mark Kurlansky, whose own books include cultural histories of codfish and salt, wrote in a review of "Human Smoke" that appeared in the entirely mainstream Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Similarly, another novelist, Colm Toibin, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, highly praised Baker's work, calling it "a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate on pacifism."
More is coming along the anti-Churchillian lines. Patrick Buchanan, the conservative commentator and two-time presidential candidate, launches a sustained attack on Churchill in a new, lengthy book, "Churchill, Hitler, and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World," which will be out later this month.
Let's, in light of this trend, examine for a moment the idea that the United States should have stayed out of the European war. If that had happened, the Hitlerites surely would have conquered all of Europe, minus Britain. There would have been more mass murder of "inferior" peoples. There would also have been no morally tainted alliance with Stalin, no 40-year Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, no firebombings of German cities like Hamburg and Dresden, and no deaths among American soldiers.
Buchanan goes further, arguing (as numerous others have on this point) that had imperialist France and Britain not forced an unjust peace settlement on Germany after World War I, there would have been no rise of Hitler in the first place, no World War II, and no resulting Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
The Baker/Buchanan argument is a collective refutation of the views of more mainstream historians - presumably those taken in by what Kurlansky calls "one of the biggest and most carefully plotted lies in modern history" - namely, that the war was a good one encouraged by the weak-kneed appeasement that happened before Churchill came to power.
Among those historians is the Budapest-born John Lukacs, who has written several books on Churchill and the origins of World War II, including a new one called "Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning." (All of these books, plus one more, were the subject of a recent essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The New York Review of Books).
Lukacs charges that both Baker's and Buchanan's work is full of half-truths, partial and selective samplings of the historical record that, to those not in command of the facts, might seem convincing.
For example, there have long been those in Britain who have argued that, in fact, Hitler posed no direct treat to Britain or to the empire - yet Churchill's policy of total war and unconditional surrender ruled out any possibility of a negotiated peace.
It's true, Lukacs said in a recent telephone interview, that Hitler had no grand designs on the British Empire, but what Churchill understood, Lukacs continued, is that without the United States in the war, Hitler would have won it, and German domination of the rest of Europe would have meant a Britain that was "at best a junior partner of Germany."
To re-examine old assumptions, including almost universally held ones, is of course a good thing, a strength of democracy. But the most radical of the critiques of the Allied leaders - exemplified by Kurlansky's amazing characterization of them as warmongering, arms-selling bigots - seem to illustrate the old notion of the perfect being the enemy of the good.
It may be true that Churchill was an arch-imperialist whose advocacy of tough policies on Germany after World War I was dreadfully mistaken (though, as Wheatcroft points out, recent scholarship indicates that the Treaty of Versailles wasn't actually as onerous as many have believed.) But Churchill and Roosevelt faced the very imminent prospect of a Europe conquered by a genocidal evil genius - not a social anti-Semite worried, as Roosevelt apparently was, that there were too many Jews at Harvard.
"Hitler and the Germans were an extraordinary people," Lukacs said, summing up the argument against pacifism.
"They would probably have defeated Russia, and they probably would have been unbeatable without the Americans in the war," he said.
As for the devil's alliance with Stalin, Lukacs said, "Churchill was very consistent. Either Germany dominates all Europe, or the Russians will dominate half of Europe, and half of Europe is better than none, especially the western half."
Another look at World War II; Diplomacy or appeasement?
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Another look at World War II
Regarding Richard Bernstein's "Rethinking Churchill and Allied warmongers" (Letter from America, May 22): As a historian, I tend to think that the appeasement policy of Chamberlain was in line with long-held foreign policy views among British Conservatives with regard to Central Europe. And the only "good thing" about Munich (with the benefit of hindsight) was that it unmasked Hitler as the warmonger that he really was.
If the Allies hadn't tried to appease Hitler (they had to view him as a rational "statesman" first), critics could have cl aimed that not all diplomatic means had been used to avoid a terrible war.
After 1939, it was clear, even to most appeasers, that Hitler was the real aggressor and should be stopped. This feeling of fighting evil helped to create a "Western unity" without which the war never could have been won.
Dirk-Jan van Baar, Amsterdam
In a culture in which provocation is a sure path to fame and glory, it comes as a shock but no surprise to read Richard Bernstein's article explaining that revisionism has come to the history of World War II. Nonetheless, whatever injustice the Treaty of Versailles represented for Germany, there is no acceptable rationalization in the civilized world for Hitler.
Hitler attacks the Spanish population with bombings and tank assaults and Churchill is a warmonger. Hitler is given a piece of Czechoslovakia and marches his army into the rest, and Churchill is a warmonger. Hitler attacks Poland, and Britain fulfills its treaty obligation to defend the Poles, and Churchill is a warmonger, while the French, equally obliged, pay lip service to it during the phony war, until Hitler, plowing through Belgium, attacks France.
All this, of course, could have been avoided, if somehow the warmongers had gently talked the Führer out of his ambition to expand the empire of the master race.
G.Y. Dryansky, Paris
Diplomacy or appeasement?
There must be something powerful in Barack Obama's message if critics are so busy setting up flawed arguments about his foreign policy ideas.
Regarding "Kennedy talked, Khrushchev triumphed" (Views, May 22) by Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins: Never mind that Obama has never suggested starting off by meeting face-to-face with the leaders of Iran or Hamas. Never mind that the world is vastly different than it was in 1961. And never mind that the administration of President George W. Bush has engaged in talks with "America's enemies" like Libya and North Korea. And rightly so.
If Thrall and Wilkins are so convinced that the mere act of talking brings huge risks of being considered too weak, perhaps they should suggest closing the State Department.
I think there have been enough of these "straw man" arguments, especially against Obama. Can we now have some serious political discussion instead?
Maurizio Morabito Orpington, England
Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins do not give good reasons to fear negotiating with one's adversaries. This look at history only shows that the meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev should have been held at a lower level.
Bianca Schlesinger, Tel Aviv
La gauche fait ce qu'elle faire de mieux : dénoncer en permanence chez les fascistes leurs odieux crimes pour mieux camoufler les siens (Cf le magnifique livre de Revel (J.F), La grande parade). Katyn, la famine en Ukraine ou pendant le grand bond en avant n'ont pas été décidés ni voulus par Churchill que sache mais bien par des dirigeants communistes. Et consciemment.
RépondreSupprimer