Sign up for our free Churchill newsletter: A Polemic Not A
History   Buchanan BookProfessor Freeman teaches history at
California State University, Fullerton.  Churchill, Hitler and
the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West
Lost the World, by Patrick J. Buchanan. New York, Crown, 518
pp., $29.95.  Although there is no indication in this book that
Pat Buchanan is familiar with the work of the late Harry Elmer
Barnes,1 he has nevertheless arrived at many of the same
arguments that Barnes first pressed more than fifty years ago.
His book is, then, the latest entry in the revisionist canon,
recycling old arguments, and using time-worn tactics so familiar
that The Churchill Centre long ago added a website section
devoted to “ Leading Churchill Myths”.  Pat Buchanan, who
earlier wrote A Republic, Not an Empire, might have made this
book part of a series by entitling it A Polemic, Not a History.
He describes it as “a battle of the historians,” but he has done
no archival research. Instead he has