Pat Buchanan: Was WW2 Worth It?

Pat Buchanan is not my favorite commentator. His flavor of conservatism is generally not the one I adhere to, and his comments on the Jewish people which some find anti-semitic, I at least find troubling. But he does know how to ask the provacative question. And in this week's column he asks one so "provacative" as to be heretical: Considering the opression of the Soviet Empire afterward, was World War 2 really worth what we paid?

Bush told the awful truth about what really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe. And it was not freedom. It was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century. Where Hitler killed his millions, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Castro murdered their tens of millions. Leninism was the Black Death of the 20th Century...Other questions arise. If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war? ...If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

For the record, my opinion is that even considering the worst possible view of the Soviet Empire, WW2 was worth the cost. It does not make an effort useless, when you stop the land from being flooded by the Sea, only to have a wildfire arise the next day. It just shows the reality of the human experience - we can not see the future, and have to deal with each crisis as it comes. We fought WW2 to defeat fascism. Then we fought the Cold War to defeat Communism. Now we fight the War on Terror to defeat Islamic facism. The only irony is that the seeds of the next war, are always growing in ashes left over by the last one.