US politician, * November 2, 1938, in Washington, D.C.

B. was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and had six brothers and two sisters. One sister, Bay Buchanan, served as U.S. Treasurer under Ronald Reagan. B. has English, German, Scots Irish, and Irish ancestry. He had a great-grandfather who fought in the American Civil War on the Confederate side, and is a member of the 'Sons of Confederate Veterans'. B. studied at Georgetown and earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia in 1962. He married White House staffer Shelley Ann Scarney in 1971. They have no children. 

B. joined the 'St. Louis Globe-Democrat' in 1961 and was promoted to assistant editorial page editor in 1964. B. supported Barry Goldwater's campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1964 Presidential election.The next year, he was the first adviser hired to Richard Nixon's presidential campaigns of 1966 and 1968. When Nixon took the Oval Office in 1969, B. worked as a White House adviser and speechwriter for Nixon and vice president Spiro Agnew. He accompanied Nixon on his trip to China in 1972 and the summit in Moscow, Yalta, and Minsk in 1974. When Nixon resigned in 1974, B. briefly stayed on as special assistant under incoming President Gerald Ford. Long after his resignation, Nixon called B. a confidant and said he was neither an anti-Semite nor a hater, but a decent, patriotic American. 

B. returned to his column and began regular appearances as a broadcast and TV host and political commentator. During the presidentship of Ronald Reagan 1981-1989, B. served as White House Communications Director from 1985 to 1987. He supported President Reagan's plan to visit a German military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985, where among buried wermacht soldiers, were also buried Waffen SS members. Over the objections of Jewish groups, the trip went through. In 1992, B. challenged the incumbent, President George H. W. Bush. He ran on a platform of economic nationalism, immigration reduction, and social conservatism, including opposition to multiculturalism, abortion, and gay rights. He later threw his support behind Bush who was not re-elected. 
 
During the 1996 Presidential Primaries, B. won primaries or caucuses in four states: New Hampshire, Missouri, Louisiana and Alaska. Having collected only twenty one percent of the total votes in Republican primaries, B. suspended his campaign in March. In October 1999, B. announced his departure from the Republican Party and won the nomination of the Reform Party. In his acceptance speech, he proposed U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations. In the 2000 presidential election, B. finished fourth with 0.4 percent of the popular vote. Prior to the 2004 election, B. announced he once again identified himself as a Republican, and reluctantly endorsed Bush's 2004 reelection.  

Opposed to American imperialism, B. rejected the invasion of the Iraq. He maintains the Republican party has largely abandoned traditional anti-war, anti-imperialist conservative principles for neoconservatism. He said "Interventionism is the incubator of terrorism.  

B. is a member of the traditionalist movement within Roman Catholicism. He charges the New York Times with Anti-Catholic bias and defends American traditions and the values of faith, family, and country. He said that the theory of evolution cannot stand the burden of proof, and endorses the concept of intelligent design. According to B., AIDS is a consequence of immoral sex. 

According to B., Adolf Hitler only sought to dominate Europe, making him no physical threat to the US. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a base appeaser of Stalin and his administration was shot through with Communist spies and traitors. While the West is busy erecting Holocaust museums, it has failed to study the history that produced it. Hitler was an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe. 
 
From the earliest days, consistent with his opposition to the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991, B. is an outspoken critic of the 2003 Iraq War. He argues it is largely fought to defend Israeli and American oil interests and is a useless war based on deception and imperialism. During Israel's conflict with Lebanon in July 2006, he accused President Bush of "subcontracting U.S. policy out to Tel Aviv, thus making Israel the custodian of U.S. reputation and interests in the Middle East. According to B., American meddling in the Middle East is not to protect the U.S. national interest but done to support Israel. B. has referred to Capitol Hill as Israeli-occupied territory. He wrote that Congress has become a Parliament of Whores incapable of standing up for U.S. national interests if AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is on the other end of the line. He said that there are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States. He also said that the Israelis wanted the Iraq war desperately because they wanted the United States to destroy their war machine. They don't care about our relations with the Arab world.

In March 2003, B. wrote that neoconservatives want to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interest. He claimed that Lawrence Kaplan, David Brooks, Max Boot, Robert Kagan and others used anti-Semitism charges to intimidate Iraq War critics. Polemicists and public officials were colluding with Israel to start wars, wreck the Oslo Accords, damage U.S. relations with Arab states, alienate Western and Islamic allies, and threaten the peace won by winning the Cold War.

Werke von / Works of B.: 

Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, May 2008, 544 pages, Publisher: Crown

Were World Wars I and II - which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction - inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men’s control? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? 

In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen - Winston Churchill first among them - the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.

Among the British and Churchillian blunders were:

• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo- Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hitler
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill’s astonishing blindness to Stalin’s true ambitions.

Buchanan argues that both world wars, which constituted a "Civil War of the West", were not necessary and would not have taken place had unwise diplomatic decisions not been made by the major European powers.

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, Germany had a chance to form an alliance with Britain, but let the opportunity pass, as the Kaiser did not believe that England would ever reconcile with France. However, Britain did reconcile with its longtime adversaries, France and Russia, and in 1906 the British secretly agreed to back France should Germany attack. Had the Kaiser known that war with France meant war with Britain, he would have been more conciliatory, as he never wanted war with Britain. On the other hand, had Britain not been pledged to help the French when World War I did come, and had they stayed out of the war, Germany would have defeated France as they had in 1870, but there would have been no Nazi Germany and no Soviet Union as a result the war.

In the interwar years, Britain alienated longtime allies Japan and Italy, who eventually formed an alliance with Nazi Germany.

The Second World War came about, Buchanan believes, as a result of Britain's disastrous guarantee to protect Poland (which it was incapable of doing anyway). Hitler did not want war with Britain, as evidenced by the fact that he never attempted to build a strong navy. If Germany had moved east and had the democracies not intervened, Buchanan opines, Germany would have run into the Soviet Union and the result would have been a Nazi-Soviet war that the democracies would have watched from the sidelines. The totalitarian nations would have pounded each other to death, while the democracies would have had a chance to rearm and become stronger relative to a decimated Germany and a decimated Russia (and China might not have gone Communist, meaning that millions might not have been murdered there). As it worked out in real life, however, America and Britain had to push all the way eastward through France and only then into the western half of Germany. By the time that they did, the Soviets had clamped down on Eastern Europe. Buchanan judges Churchill harshly - Britain was bankrupt and lost its empire shortly after WWII.

Literatur über / Writings concerning B.: 

Letzte Änderung / Last update: 13.07.2008 

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