John Lukacs, historian and crank, has penned a strange review of Pat Buchanan’s most recent book. It is no surprise that Lukacs doesn’t like Buchanan’s book, since Buchanan has profaned Lukacs’ idol, Winston Churchill. The principal difference between the two men is that Buchanan sees Communism as having been a greater threat than Nazism, whereas Lukacs comes to the opposite conclusion. Buchanan’s view, of course, was the one taken by most American conservatives before the conservative movement became the neoconservative movement, but it should be possible to argue either case in a civil way, with more civility, at any rate, than Lukacs manages in his review.
But Lukacs’ conclusion is especially odd, when he says one cannot say that Hitler was evil and also say it was unnecessary to wage war against him. Lukacs maintained a similar view of Soviet Communism for many years. This magazine had a similar view of Saddam Hussein. Has Lukacs, in his eagerness to smite any dissent from the cult of Churchill, gone over to neoconservatism?
PAUL TAYLOR, PHD 
stanfordnick 
It’s odd that you should complain about Lukacs’ lack of civility when you call him a “crank” in your opening sentence. He’s cranky, but not a crank.
I think Lukacs is right when calls attention to the untenable tension in Buchanan’s book between the theses that “Hitler was evil” and “Hitler should not have been fought”. And I think Lukacs’ evaluation of the degree of threat posed by Nazism vs. Communism is entirely correct. Had Nazism not been destroyed by war, our evaluation of the dangers of a Europe dominated by a National Socialist Germany would rate those dangers very great, indeed…were we still in a position to carry on public discourse about such subjects.