Taki Theodoracopulos:

LE MAÎTRE

Bad Rubbish

IF Pius XII was Hitler's Pope, I'm Monica Lewinsky. Leave it to an Englishman -- one John Cornwell -- to come up with such crap, and Vanity Fair to publish excerpts. After all, it was a fellow English self-publicist and lunch-bucket pilferer, Christopher Hitchens, who libeled Mother Teresa in the same magazine three years ago. Now, yet another Brit who never feels bound by the despotism of fact wants us to believe that Pius XII was anti-Semitic and soft on Hitler. Better to be raped by a Transylvanian leper than to have to listen to such crap, says poor little me.

What I love about the English is the extent of their hypocrisy and deviousness. To avoid accusations of a hatchet job, Cornwell's spin doctor tells us that the author set out to defend Pius XII, and was so horrified by what he found in the Vatican archives that he wrote an angry denunciation. Cornwell, like the Clintons, is a bald-faced phony and a liar to boot. The title of the hatchet job is appalling, and nowhere borne out by the evidence. Profit and publicity aside, Cornwell's reasons for publishing such rubbish is the attempt to have Pius XII declared a saint by the conservative wing of the Catholic Church, and by branding him "Hitler's Pope," Cornwell is aiming a dagger at the heart of this campaign.

Here are the facts, although, as Pat Buchanan is finding out, they no longer count when they stand in the way of a good yarn. Hitler was determined to do what he did and no pope, or power for that matter, would have deflected him. Churchill and Roosevelt are open to the same criticism as Pius XII, and the latter had no military divisions with which to persuade the Fuhrer to change his mind. Pius XII knew the German-speaking world very well. He knew that it was full of well-meaning people who were both Roman Catholics and supporters of National Socialism. He had two choices. Try to sway the Roman Catholics to think again about their allegiance to Hitler -- and risk putting millions in jeopardy if he issued a denunciation of the Nazis -- or speak sotto voce and try to help as best he could. He wisely chose the latter option.

It is easy for an opportunist like Cornwell to judge 60 years on. And even easier to bash Catholics, as seems to be the order nowadays. (Giuliani cannot be more correct about the Brooklyn Museum. The Saatchi collection has absolutely no merit, and what I'd like to see is Saatchi -- an Iraqi Jew who made his fortune in advertising -- exhibit the equivalent of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung but substitute the Prophet Mohammed in her place. In no time the Muslims would put out a fatwa on his ugly head, and like Salman Rushdie he would have to give up the London high life. I will not, alas, hold my breath for a Catholic fatwa to be declared.)

Pius XII bore an intolerable burden, and threaded the needle throughout the war. Let us not forget that he had in his flock the neutral Irish (de Valera was an open admirer of Hitler), plus the neutral Spanish, Portuguese and pro-Axis Italians.

Calling someone anti-Semitic has always worked wonders since the Holocaust. Abe Rosenthal smeared me with it because I admire the fighting qualities of the German army and have said so. When our house was occupied by German officers, who, incidentally, behaved impeccably, we had a Jewish man posing as my mother's brother living in our midst. Just before the Germans arrived my father told him to shave his beard. No sooner had he shaved than Daddy told him to grow it again: "You look more Jewish without it." Just before he left for the Middle East, Capt. Murgen told my mother he knew very well that "Nico" was not her brother. "Not all of us are monsters, cher madame..." (Murgen used to take me in his lap and I would sing "Ach du lieber Augustine" to him. I am writing a memoir of all this, which should make the professional anti-Semite watchdogs very happy. The German officers particularly admired my mother, because the day after war was declared she saw five brothers and a husband leave for the front. No Clinton she.)

The complexity of true historical judgment is mind-boggling. Yet the burden of proof against Cornwell's argument is overwhelming. The bad reputation of Pius XII owes a great deal to the notorious Hochhuth play of 1963. Cornwell's book is simply the coup de grace. The truth is that the Vatican was one of the first to denounce the evils of Nazism, in Pius XI's encyclical of 1937, an encyclical that Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, helped write. In 1937 the West was still trying to make up its mind about Herr Hitler. So much for the facts.

Which brings me to Pat Buchanan. I am sorry we are losing Scott McConnell to his campaign, but proud that Pat knows a good man when he sees one. (If I were Buchanan I, too, would switch parties; he went to the Republican National Convention in 1996 with three million votes and 200 delegates and wasn't even allowed to speak.) Although MUGGER will never lunch with me again because of my defense of Buchanan, I must nevertheless defend him in the cause of truth.

All Buchanan said was we should have fought Hitler in 1942, after he and Stalin had exhausted themselves. And it is preposterous to suggest that Hitler could have threatened Uncle Sam after he had lost the Battle of Britain. Pat did not say anything worse than what George Szamuely suggested a month ago in this space: England and France went to war over Poland and nevertheless seven million Poles died. We did not go to war over Czechoslovakia, and not only did Prague remain intact, but only 100,000 Czechs perished.

Many historians agree with Pat, starting with Niall Ferguson and the great, late Alan Clark, who believed to his dying day England could have made peace with Hitler in 1941 and saved European Jewry. Buchanan wants a foreign policy that is undistracted by various ethnic groups who plead their cases in Congress, starting with the Israeli lobby, and if that makes him an anti-Semite pigs may fly.

The media, needless to say, has been disgraceful. Let me give you an example of the yellowness and shallowness of American television. Last week on CNBC, Geraldo Rivera, the Clinton shill who has managed to trivialize even a downmarket program like his, allowed Alan Dershowitz to slander Buchanan and rant nonstop about anti-Semitism. Dershowitz called Pat a liar because Pat wrote that the American national anthem was booed in a soccer match between the U.S. and Mexico. This was reported in the Los Angeles Times. Rivera, of course, did not want to know. Dershowitz ranted on, his eyeballs protruding behind thick glasses, his mouth twitching like a blowfish on cocaine, obviously someone conceived by a man with a dose of the clap. If this is a serious professor, I'm Hillary Clinton.

And it got better when Pat came on. Rivera is such an ignoramus he told Buchanan that England and France were under attack when they went to war over Poland on Sept. 3, 1939. The fact that hostilities didn't break out until May 1940 is immaterial to the man whose breathless autobiography named the women (Marian Javits, Margaret Trudeau and Bette Midler among others) whom he'd bedded. A gent of the old school, obviously.

When Pat denied being an anti-Semite since hundreds of Jewish editors picked up his column, the Puerto Rican sage came up with, "is that another way of saying Jews control the media?" Last but not least, he asked Pat "Is it true that you never met a Nazi war criminal you didn't like?" Pat had defended Demjanjuk, a man whom an Israeli court judged innocent, but also said he thought Barbie should've been shot or hanged. Watching that program I realized why Clinton keeps getting elected. Too many Riveras and Dershowitzes pulling the wool over the eyes of the people.

[Related story: We Jews were at the leading edge of communism, the most murderous movement of 20th Century]