Tucker Carlson: Pat Buchanan squared
I guess it’s time for me to tackle the Tucker Carlson brouhaha involving the soapbox he gave to previously-obscure WWII “historian” Darryl Cooper, who appears to suffer from a bad case of CDS. That’s Churchill Derangement Syndrome.
You can read about Tucker’s interview with Cooper in this piece by Brendan O’Neill. I didn’t watch the interview myself, but I got to the point long ago of not being able to stomach Carlson or his guests when they talk about anything foreign-policy related. I long ago decided he was basically Pat Buchanan on steroids, and although I suppose now and then Carlson gets something right (particularly if he’s talking about domestic issues), on foreign affairs he’s been spending a great deal of time giving a platform to people who are wrong. And it’s a big platform because he has a huge following.
Here’s what O’Neill has written:
What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.
For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.
Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault on Western civilisation in history.
Much more at the link. O’Neill doesn’t pull any punches. He calls the group who like this sort of thing the “batshit right,” for instance. He’s not talking about the right as a whole, but he is talking about a small but loud segment who – and this is the reason I mention it at all – are very useful to the left. If the left wishes to promote the fiction that the right – and all Trump supporters – consist of neo-Nazis, secret or overt, then giving Cooper a bully pulpit feeds right into that fiction. And that fiction is very much believed by plenty of Democrats who are not leftists, and contributes mightily to their TDS.
O’Neill adds:
The crank right – with its war on the past, its philistine assault on truth, its vile obsession with race – is a mirror image of the woke left. Both rage with curious ferocity against Churchill: the woke leftists of the BLM era were vandalising Churchill statues years before Tucker had a Churchill hater on his show. Both relativise the Holocaust. The online right does it by suggesting the deaths of all those Jews was kind of unintentional; the crank left does it by calling everything it doesn’t like in the here and now, including Israel’s war on Hamas, ‘another Holocaust’. The former robs the Holocaust of its murderous intent, the latter robs it of its uniqueness: a right / left pincer movement of woke denialism that obscures the truth of what the Nazis did to the Jews.
And both seem hell-bent on upending our common history. On violating the truths and wonders of our past. On scrubbing away the wins of our civilisation that shape who we are. The online right’s intellectual lynching of Churchill is in many ways its 1619 moment.
I agree with that observation.
I’ve seen plenty of defenses of Cooper and Carlson in comments around the blogosphere, and many of them take the form of saying something like it’s important to be allowed to question the usual version of history, and people aren’t being allowed to do that.
However, of course people are allowed to do it. But if they make up a history that doesn’t match the actual facts and/or the nature of the people involved, and ignores or distorts what they had planned and what they actually did, there’s no reason to take the trouble to spread their thoughts further and further while leaving their assertions unchallenged. A host such as Carlson picks and chooses his guests, and unless he spends the time debating what a guest is saying (he did not debate or challenge Cooper to any appreciable extent, apparently) then we can assume he thinks the guest’s message is worthwhile.
As time has gone by, fewer and fewer people are alive who actually lived through World War II, and some day there will be none. Those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, and we need to do our best to keep to the truth.
NOTE: If Brendan O’Neill isn’t your cup of tea, here’s Victor Davis Hanson discussing Cooper’s appearance on Carlson’s show:
Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response. …
It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.
The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East. …
As for Cooper’s claim that the Allies were to blame for starting a world war, nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler may have been frustrated that Britain and France declared war on him after his unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. But he had been warned by some advisers that the two allies would be finally forced to war, given that he had broken almost all his prewar promises to them about ceasing his serial territorial acquisitions.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the article is available only to paid subscribers.
Andrew Roberts, “No, Churchill Was Not the Villain”, Washington Free Beacon: https://freebeacon.com/culture/no-churchill-was-not-the-villain/
I’d point out to Brendan O’Neill that the purveyors of wokery and transmania are embedded in the educational apparat at every level and to be found in corporate bureaucracies in marketing and HR. Darryl Cooper is Joe Blow off the sidewalks of Stockton. Richard Spencer’s outfit has one employee. They’re not exactly a symmetrical threat.
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An interview is not an endorsement. The only remedy for poor speech is better speech, of which the examples you posted are arguably that. And when have those who advocate censorship (except in the cases of obvious incitement) ever been the good guys?
Conventional wisdom, even and possibly exceptionally when it’s true, gets boring.
Something else, with gears rearranged to mesh cleanly ,might be attractive, especially given the dopamine rush of knowing the NEW AND TRUE.
Alas, Tucker, we hardly knew ye in the Fox golden boy days – not much at all as it turns out. Unthinkingly, we stopped our ears and looked away. Now the blessed reckoning has come, and we see the darkness.
Again I turn away, now with eyes open.
Thankfully, not all church-going Christians are anti-Semitic, but the seed of it is in the New Testament. Was this why the Book of Mormon was necessary?
The thing that gives an immediate body-check to Cooper is “Peace in our time”. There was no way that any politician would make a deal with Hitler after that. Except Stalin. And he did it to stall for time so he could build up his army. And, if I understand Cooper’s timeline properly, Hitler wanted that peace treaty during/after the Battle of Britain. More insanity.
Marisa:
An interview is indeed an endorsement when it magnifies and disseminates a message and the interviewer allows the interviewee to talk without being challenged. Free speech does not require us to promote someone else’s comments. They are free to talk, either on the street corner or online on their own site. We don’t have to help them spread their words on our site.
I always noticed that in previous flareups between Israel and Hamas such as 2010, 2012, and 2014 that Carlson never mentioned it on his show when he was on Fox. And I realized the reason why is that he knows that the overwhelming majority of viewers on Fox are pro-Israel and Carlson at best was luke-warm and was hostile towards the Jewish nation. Once he was no longer on Fox, the inner anti-semite was able to come out and he interviewed Jew haters such as Kanye West, Darryl Cooper, Candace Owens. and some Palestinian pastor who lives in Bethlehem, which is not part of Israel, who blamed all the problems of Christianity in the “holy land“ on believe it or not on Israel. Darryl Cooper is not a historian. He’s a crank conspiracy theorist and Tucker Carlson always gave me feelings that he was a Buchanan alt-right paleoconcon. The look on Carlson’s smarmy face when Cooper was enunciating on his World War II theories tells me that Tucker Carlson is not “just asking questions“ but fully believes in all the spit that Cooper was saying. Pat Buchanan wrote an odious book several years ago blaming Winston Churchill for World War II which I saw in the library because I would never put a penny in Buchanan’s pocket and was basically cribbed from Holocaust denier and Germanophile David Irving.
I first encountered Cooper’s work on an unrelated media group. Fans of a fairly based game streamer whose fanbase usually leans right. It popped up about the Israel-Palestine conflict and history, where another right winger glowingly cited him among a bunch of mostly anti-Israeli sources. The narrative there started out subtly but was horribly insidious and malicious, essentially whitewashing the fundamentally genocidal nature of the Al Husseini movement and people like Sheikh Qassem, and also peddling nonsense such as the claim that Israel cut a deal with the Hashemites of Jordan in 1948-9 using Golda Meir, and that ludicrously this is why Israel does not emphasize fighting Jordan in this time. Of course they misidentified who the Jordanian monarch of the time was and had no response to my pointing out the role of the 1948-9 Siege of Jerusalem in Israeli memory, and who the main attacker was.
Among other things. Apparently the podcast is fairly well received and supposedly “objective” but has a distinctly anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish bent. And worse his social media shittery indicates he identifies as a “non-racist Fascist” or the like while idolizing Franco (certainly there are worse people to idolize and not a Fascist but hey), demonizing Euromaidan as a Neo-Nazi Coup while shilling for Putin, and a host of other things. He was a well known Twitter troll who also pulled the “I lied bro” or “it was just a prank bro” excuses a few too many times.
So this really does not surprise me. He does not seem to outright endorse Nazism or Hitler but he sure as hell glosses them up and downplays their atrocities. And I will not even go so far as to say the Paris of the most recent Olympics is preferable in every way to the Paris of the Nazi occupation (if nothing else you did not have the perpetual issues of rioting and foreign colonies in the suburbs).
But I also know history and could point to things such as Hitler’s Second Book, never published, but which enumerated his plans to (among other things) build up a navy and destroy the United States in order to destroy capitalism. You can read it here and also how it underlines how Hitler fundamentally did not believe in lasting peace, especially not with ideological/racial adversaries.
https://archive.org/details/hitlerssecondboo00hitl
Moreover he ignores how the Nazis were able to deal with the actually unexpected influx of POWs from the collapsing West in 1940 (something none of the leadership expected) with RELATIVE efficiency and without the kind of gigantic death tolls we see out East, outside of fairly systematic murder of Black colonial troops (mostly fighting for France) and sporadic massacres of other Western Allied Prisoners. But the Axis actually captured far fewer prisoners in Barbarossa than they expected, but the death tolls were gigantic with more than half dying in months at rates worse than that of the famously cruel WWII Japanese handling of prisoners. But then the rates begin dropping off in the Winter of 1941-2 to “merely” very very bad rates and stay there for the rest of the war, never again reaching 1941 levels in spite of the continent increasingly starving. Which is the exact opposite of what we’d expect if Cooper’s bullshit was true. Why? Well because it became clear by then Barbarossa would not conquer either the Caucasus or Moscow “on the March” and so some Soviet personnel might need to be recruited.
TIK goes into more detail about this, and while I have some issues with him he is a much better scholar than Cooper ever has been.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OeRR100incE
Oh and of course Cooper tries to draw a comparison to the Israelis in Gaza by alleging this is similar. Because he is a fundamentally anti Jewish lying motherfucker.
For what it is worth his analysis on Jones and the Peoples Temple seems to largely stand up to my understanding and how Jones was a crypto communist in bed with many Progressive power brokers. but I am not an expert in that like I am military history.
I might do a more in depth analysis of his interview at some point, but the man is a bigoted liar and it shows. And I actually agree that we should not take received wisdom or the great myths of WWII or the like at face value, which is one reason I oppose criminalizing Holocaust Denial. And sure there are plenty of reasons to criticize Churchill and the other Allies.
But a lot of the great myths and narratives of WWII are solidly based on facts and Cooper has no explanation or even desire to acknowledge several of them.
Edit: this kind of nonsense also is why while I am grateful to Tucker for some roles like exposing much of the story on January 6th, I find much of his posturing and foreign policy stances to be not merely wrong but based on idiotic, toxic foundations. And why I have become far less fond of him.
Cooper is more concerned about communism, I included the link about what it wrought in Eastern Europe, yet there are still active Communist parties in France Italy Germany they have different names, it doesn’t really matter, the British labour party is as close to the Communists, as time would allow,
Sometimes Tucker reveals way too much of his inner crackpot. Otherwise he can be entertaining. Lately it’s been far too much of the former and not enough of the latter. I guess being raised, educated and employed in the belly of the beast can do that to a person.
@miguel Cervantes
I’m not sure I buy that he is. He is glaringly silent on vast swaths of Soviet and communist atrocities and conspiracies, in spite of how the outbreak of WWII makes literally no sense if you do not understand the Soviet desire for world revolution and the decision to prop up the German military as an “enemy of our enemy” to the West and other independent powers. He also downplayed how Hitler was the one to give vast swaths of Eastern Europe to Stalin, not the West (indeed the West arguably lost the very last chance they had to at least try and get Stalin on side in 1939 because – while hypocritical, short sighted, appeasing, and self interested – they would not submit to his illegal demands for the Baltics and Eastern Poland and the effective death of the League of Nations). Or how Stalin spent much of the early war fueling the Nazi war machine that probably would have been containable without Soviet resources. Indeed another friend of mine pointed out how remarkably tepid he generally was when addressing Stalin and the Soviets regarding WWII, probably as a cast off from the sources he is using.
Whatever my differences with BrooklynBoy on other things. I absolutely agree here. I do not believe an interview is necessarily an endorsement, but the grotesque flattery was.
In the US you can probably say or write what you like about WWII and stay out of jail, but the range of things you can say that won’t draw demands for cancellation from both Right and Left is quite narrow. And by engaging in anything outside that range, you will draw two sorts of people: those who want to accuse you falsely of anti-Semitism, and actual anti-Semites who will hope to draw you into saying something actually anti-Semitic. Who needs that noise?
There’s some pre-approved WWII criticisms you can make in this country and probably not get hassled: you can criticize the Japanese internment, the slowness of the Allies to do anything about the Holocaust or help those fleeing it, the segregation of black servicemen, the use of nuclear weapons on Japan, and the firebombing of civilians. Wisest to stick to them.
Another thing that has disturbed me about the crank right is that they hate Abraham Lincoln just as much as they hate Winston Churchill. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and they seem to be ashamed that he’s considered to be the greatest Republicans of all time. They keep referring to him as a tyrant and that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about “tariffs“ etc. and I think to myself, you people would’ve been happy to see this country split into two and then had that happened eventually what is the continental United States would most probably have split into like 4 to 6 other independent nations.
It was largely British writers and historians who revived WWII revisionism and forceful criticism of Churchill, something Brendan O’Neill (writing from Britain) ought perhaps to have acknowledged.
That is another point BrooklynBoy brings up that is worth noting. And I say this as someone who has criticized Lincoln before and will do so again and am somewhat disturbed by how he has been downright been the subject of icon worship (not entirely unlike FDR, Attlee, or others). I do think he set some very dire precedents such as growing centralization and the power of the Fed while using corruption politically.
However, he was a remains a Great American leader, even if with great American flaws and sins. He is one of the founders of the Republican Party and helped save the Union, and ultimately abolished slavery. I am also disturbed by how whitewashed the CSA and other secessionist fanatics are, especially given how the actual circumstances of the Charleston Crisis leading to Fort Sumter and the motivations of the Confederate leadership have been distorted. Even on their own terms, the Confederates acted with hideous high handedness and even criminality in an era where some various Greek Jew hating rioters burning down the store of a Jew with almost incidental British nationality led to the Royal Navy blockading Greece for damages. In particular Buchanan and Lincoln showed great restraint in holding out for a peaceful resolution as long as they did, and while they did not agree on much they did agree on the fundamentally criminal nature of the secessionists’ behavior and their actions.
I began fishing Razordist’s demonization of Lincoln about a year back and still am not finished. So this kind of stuff annoys the hell out of me. And worries me. I do think the U.S. needs greater states rights and devolution from the Federal Leviathan, but that is based on an accurate understanding of Lincoln and his enemies and their sins, not this kind of “Lincoln is Illinois Mussolini” horse crap.
I think Churchill is such a tempting target for historians because he not only persuasively wrote down HIS version of history, and got it mostly accepted before any other historian could, but he also had privileged access to the primary sources, and could see to it others didn’t. It probably seems a little unfair, and unbelievable that a man in that position wouldn’t be skewing things his way.
I’m a fervent admirer of Churchill the man, and I’ve read most of what he wrote. I am not, however, a worshipper of Churchill the demigod. He had to act in real time with limited information and probably did way better than most people would have. That said, there’s plenty that he did or allowed to have done that should not be repeated. And even after allowing for that, he’s still a greater statesman than just about any US President except maybe Washington.
yes I find that notion, a historical Lincoln was faced with an impossible situation, we saw what happened with Jim crow, now some think the diminishment of state authority, that would have happened anyways,
Re: Nikita’s Chionates and @Abraxas
I think another driver behind British critique of Churchill besides the man’s very real flaws and habit of tooting his own horn was his role as opponent of Attlee, who is sort of the architect of “Modern Britain” such as cradle to grave welfare, the NHS, an Arabist foreign policy, and so on. And managed to turf Churchill out in 1945. They had significant respect for each other and both played a significant role in the Allied victory, but Churchill not only knew Attlee was an appeaser early on while Churchill was not (at least to Hitler) but also believed Attlee’s world view would be disastrous and lead to a collapse of the empire and societal dependence. And I feel a lot of his statements in the 1945 campaign – roundly hashed at the time- have stood up.
So I think at least some of this is Labourites taking aim at Churchill to knock him down.
Edit: should have been “fisking” not “fishing” in the previous comment.
I read Buchanan’s book several years ago and came to some conclusions about WWI, not WWII. I told an English friend, one time, that we should have stayed out of WWI. He was shocked and I continued that they should have stayed out, too. France was England’s traditional enemy and Germany was a traditional friend and ally. Churchill was no hero in that event. The switch from enemy to ally was largely because “Bertie”, also known as King Edward VII, was a drunk and whoremaster who loved Paris and hated the Kaiser.
I have read quite a bit of WWI history and believe that England was destroyed by that war. If Germany had conquered France in 1914, would Hitler have ever gotten power ? The French were determined on revenge for 1870, a war they started and lost. Wilson fumbled the Versailles conference and allowed Clemenceau to impose a ” Carthaginean Peace” on Germany. The rest we know.
I disagree with Buchanan about WWII.
@Turtler: One of Churchill’s less Churchillian moments, which probably went a long way to his post-V-E-day ouster, was saying that Attlee and Labour were going to establish something indistinguishable from Nazism.
I think the general public must have felt a great deal of revulsion at that, just as I do when reading that Truman said much the same about Dewey. At that point people saw Churchill as the huckstering politician and not as the world-historical leader.
well look at england in 2024, and tell me churchill was wrong, when Churchill came back in 52, he had some success but the NHS was firmly established,
I supposed the devolution of the colonies was likely inevitable, first India the Levant region, Egypt then Kenya Cyprus Aden I think thats the order of things,
Eden MacMillan Alec Home even continuing mediocrities, of course legislation dismantled much of British society as opposed to the way that the Courts did in this country
@miguel:look at england in 2024, and tell me churchill was wrong
He was, because 2024 is not 1944 or 1954. And Tories did as much of making England what it is today as Labour ever did. But it’s also oddly multi-cultural for Nazi Germany don’t you think?
I had enjoyed Tucker while he was on Fox. I’m not on X so I haven’t seen his podcast there. I began to have my doubts about Tucker’s judgment when he kept interviewing Col Douglas McGregor after everything McGregor said about the Ukraine War turned out to be untrue. IMO, you don’t keep interviewing a military expert when his opinions turnout to be so wrong.
I was sorry to see that happen, as I thought Tucker had some useful insights about domestic politics.
It’s striking to me that there are people out there who are trying to rewrite history. I thought that was only a regular practice of the Soviets. However, Eisenhower was right about the Holocaust. He made sure the camps were recorded for historians to see, and make sure we wouldn’t forget. Yet here we are.
Largely Orwell’s vision came through change my mind, Thatcher probably did as much to try to restore the time before, but there was too much inertia, Tony Blair’s cool revolution, Londinistan largely came it it’s own in that era,
did much to set the country into the place we find out selves, and her successors did little good, that would be Cameron May and Johnson,
Similarly Ike just furthered the leviathan in office, and the Democrats just hit the accelerator with the Great Society and Vietnam, what was the purpose of the latter,
i;;m still not clear, Nixon had some good points but some of his domestic policy was disastrous,
The French were determined on revenge for 1870, a war they started and lost.
Technically yes, France started it. But actually, no. It was, as Rachel Chrastil asserted, “Bismarck’s War.”
Chrastil’s new (2023) book Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe is definitive on the subject.
For what’s it’s worth, I believe we did the right thing by getting involved in the war, and that the peace “imposed” on Germany was nowhere near as harsh as it should have been. But that’s an argument for another day.
P.S. The outbreak of WW1 and the events that transpired in August-September 1914 (and subsequently) were not in the least consequent to France’s supposed “desire for revenge” for the 1871 war.
@Mike K
I think I addressed this before, including almost this exact comment.
I have read both, and I came to several conclusions about both. Mostly that Buchanan was a racist liar with a fondness for German speaking mass murderers and a boundless grudge against the British. And as someone who studied the matter it was ironic to see him regurgitating lies peddled by the German governments itself that we now know were blood libel.
And he should have asked you what Britain would have to do against a fundamentally anti-British and frankly unhinged German military establishment trying to seek continental dominance being given control of the North Sea and Channel Ports.
This is at best half true and missing a vast portion of the story. Moreover I will note that Britain had abundant reason to distrust German powers, and the idea of a united Germany. Indeed while it falls short of the extensive list of grudges with France, Britain spent about 200 years contesting the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria to prevent them from cementing power in the HRE, and trying to balance between the different German power blocs, sometimes with French help.
The reason France was Britain’s traditional adversary was because in addition to various dynastic issues France represented a chief competitor for hegemony of the Channel Ports and maritime power, as well as an autocratic threat to subjugate British much like the Norman’s had done and as the Bourbons had tried to do several times. “Germany” was a traditional ally in as much as it remained divided and amiable to recognizing British commercial and political rights.
Neither really applied by the middle of the 19th century. And indeed the decision to try and support Prussian led German unification was probably one of Victoria and Albert’s greatest political miscalculations given how they abandoned the French alliance with Napoleon III in favor of cultivating new ties with Prussia (literally even, given Wilhelm II’s mother) only to be ultimately snubbed. First politely by Bismarck (who nevertheless kept trying to provoke another war with a weakened France to cement German power over Western Europe, something Britain Could Not allow), and then not so much by Wilhelm II.
Completely disagree. Churchill failed many times during the leadup to and in the midst of WWI, especially Gallipoli. However he read the room very well in the leadup.
This gets it almost exactly the other way around. And moreover while Ed VII was all of those things, *he also was a world traveler and shrewd diplomat who was fluent in French and German so much he spent much of his life speaking English with a German Accent.* He also studied Bismarck and Wilhelm II very well and came to correspondingly bad impressions of them, such as criticizing his then-mother the Queen’s preferred pro-Prussian policy as threatening another continental war during the 1875 “War in Sight” crisis and its aftermath, and also Wilhelm II’s autogolpa and anti-British, anti-capitalist mania.
Moreover, before Ed VII’s successful political maneuver, the threat was not in rupturing an Anglo-German alliance. No such thing existed or had existed for decades. It was in pre-empting a Franco-German front against Britain during the Boer War.
The ultimate fault for the collapse in Anglo-German relations probably owes more to German official culture at Potsdam than anything and you see some early signs of it in Bismarck’s tenure, but proximate blame largely goes to Wilhelm II and a Camarilla of his favorites like Philipp Prinz von Eulenberg who favored an aggressively autocratic, expansionist, genocidal, anti-capitalist, and totalitarian conception of German Monarchy, as shown by the support for Tirpitz, which also fits with the timeline better than blaming Ed.
It did a lot of damage but frankly defeat or refusal to check Hohenzollern ambitions would probably have been even more fatal, and by design. It also would have meant absolutely nothing good for the U.S. given Wilhelm’s plans to launch basically a larger East Coast Pre Airplane Pearl Harbor on U.S., most famously Operation Plan III, and the ongoing one sided German-American Cold War.
But Buchanan “conveniently” downplays all of that when he deigns to acknowledge it at all. Gee, I wonder why?
I view this question as irrelevant at best and counterproductive at worst. People almost as awful as Hitler were already in power, were indoctrinating Hitler and many others, and got worse with more power. Wilhelm II was not as nihilistic, ruthless, cruel, or Jew hating as Hitler, but he still embraced offensive war on a grand scale, publicly praised racial genocide by decorating von Trotha and shuttering the Reichstag’s attempts to bring him to justice, sanctioned widespread abuse of German citizens such as vetoing punishment for German troops beating up or robbing German citizens (see: Zabern Affair) and the racial segregation and internment of an entire demographic (in this case the Gypsies/Romani, though he had some input with the anti Jewish “Field Census” of mid war$ and helped try to goad his Allies to war, most famously with the Blank check but also the gunboat diplomacy with the Panther. To his credit he loved his family and Germany more than he did his power and apocalyptic visions and so he abdicated before making the entire country die, but that is faint praise.
And while he was not as bad as Hitler, some such as Ludendorff probably were.
Again, stuff Buchanan lies about blatantly, as well as claiming Churchill intentionally starved Germany after surrender (while completely ignoring the rogue German army in Latvia).
Leaving aside Bismarck literally conning the world with the Ems Dispatch making the latter dubious, the French Socialist governments generally favored downplaying Alsace Lorraine during the “first interwar” period, hence things like the brief Franco-German front over The Boer War. Made worse by how the Revanchist Left went proto-Communist around the Paris Commune and were crushed, then went Proto-Fascist around Boulanger and then were crushed again, leaving “respectable” French public opinion unable to completely repudiate Alsace Lorraine but committed to regaining it diplomatically until the 1914 Crisis.
True, but not in the way you say.
No, no we do not. And any claims Versailles was a “Carthaginian Peace” is horseshit, especially since we now know the documents the German government hid away in the Prussian State Archive. Including deliberate financial fraud about reparations, a continent sized campaign of looting, ethnic murder, and enslavement of POWs and “enemy” civilians for war labor under atrocious conditions, and illegal rearmament. Clemenceau also got the least he wanted out of the competing Big Three (Lloyd-George, Clemenceau, and Wilson$.
When we talk of a Carthaginian Peace after the apocalyptic destruction of Carthage and genocide, we do not usually think that would entail a Carthaginian “Mercenary” Army operating in – say- Spain couping the local government and trying to create a Carthaginian Ethnostate with the support of the Carthaginian Government.
Yet that is pretty much what happened in the Baltic in 1918-1921.
https://www.pygmywars.com/rcw/history/latvia/historylatvia1919.pdf
Frankly, Versailles being more “Carthaginian” would probably have had better results, in much the same way that the coalition definitively smashing down Louis XIV’a France the 1690s probably would have.
I guess one question I have is: you know Buchanan has an unhinged pro-Nazi and anti-British, Anti-Churchill viewpoint. You know he is prepared to soft pedal blame for genocide and warmongering from the Third Reich and WWIi. Why would you assume he is more trustworthy about WWI?
Tucker’s voice bothers me. He talks like he is bringing the tablets down off the mountain. “You ain’t Moses” pops into my mind, and I click away.
@ Niketas Choniates
I agree Churchill was blistering and too crude by half there to turn on the loyal opposition like that, and the Tories bare much of the blame, but his talk about Labour creating a police state and economic dictatorship were prescient. 1945 and 1954 are not 2024 but they were bad enough as it was. And for whatever his good intentions or legitimate boons Attlee did create a rather repressive and centralized rationing system that continued for most of a decade after the war and indeed went harsher, and had many in Labour title themselves “Gosplanners” due to their self admitted admiration for the Soviet Union, which continued onto some degree until the great anti-rationing Sweep of 1950-1.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619460008581604
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/abs/problems-of-socialist-planning-evan-durbin-and-the-labour-government-of-1945/D9E538F3980455B0EE01901D749E07AB
I still have a fair amount of respect for Attlee in spite of my fierce disagreements with him, and I believe he would be preferable to many establishment “conservatives”, but he did a lot of damage even in his own time and faced repudiation from the electorate for it.
Churchill on one of the two possible outcomes of the war, “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States and all that we have known and cared for, will descend in the abyss of a new dark age.”
Beautiful wordsmanship resting upon solid substance.
I don’t think he claims to be, he looks at things in this world that are horribly askew, people black brown and white, who are suffering, one segment had gil scott Heron, re Baltimore and the moon shot, these pantomine horse characters who are beyond ridicule, the people who consistently fail upwards while they wreak havoc upon the body politic, look at the sad tale of the last 20 years, I outlined on the last thread, tell us what we won, and the same people without a beat say lets go all in for a war in the Steppes,
there is a deeply antihuman streak in this regime and the archipelago of support that Schwab and co sustain it, its not just Christianity and the flag not jingoism,
but they are at war with agriculture with normal social interaction with the very idea of childbearing, why he felt so strongly about Brazil, all of this seems to redound to China’s benefit
I totally agree with you about Carlson, Neo.
I used to like him in the past, but his take on foreign issues, and even his current ideas about what one should care and be interested in as far as international policy is concerned (namely, only your country’s interests), are just wrong.
Five minutes ago, I’ve heard him saying that he does not care what China does, “they just follow their interests”. Appalling.
Frankly, Versailles being more “Carthaginian” would probably have had better results,
==
No.
}}} This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.
LOLZ.
That’s going to be the end-result of France’s immigration policy, if it doesn’t get changed, and fairly quickly. I’d guess that if the “Far” right does not get control over France, Germany, and England in the next 5y, those nations will be murdering Jews inside of 20y more.
:-p
}}} Richard Spencer’s outfit has one employee.
While the University of Florida is leftoid Central, the counties around it tend to be quite conservative, and almost uniformly go for the GOP in the PotUS elections.
Spencer managed to get a speech scheduled at UF on the campus about 10y ago.
He had less than 300 people show up, out of about a million people or more within a 90m drive — and I personally know that one person went to see it not because he was right wing, but because he was from India and wanted to know what the fuss was about (he was a co-worker).
There were — literally — 2x to 3x as many people outside protesting the speech.
The number of actual far-right people in this country is a fraction of the number who are far-left.
@Art Deco
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Belgians, French, Poles, and Romanians deported to the Reich for slave labor or otherwise displaced by the war (and towards the end of it intentional scorched earth destruction) and who had to try and pay their way for their own recovery or rely on their co-nationals to pay it, or the thousands killed in Eastern Europe as a result of Baltic Freikorps misadventures like the coup in Liepaija, the fratricide at Cesis, and the failed attack on newly liberated Riga.
Or for that matter Germans hunted down by literal government sponsored death squads for daring to report on illegal German rearmament or state sponsored terrorism.
And if nothing else, putting guards at the German reserves and shooting anyone trying to print money would have done wonders to limit the damage of Imperial Hyperinflation that the early Republic continued without the looting necessary to make it kinda sorta pay out.
In any case, the German Military and much of the government certainly used every loophole they could find or punch in the peace to do shit like print blood libel through the “War Guilt Office” of the German Foreign Ministry and illegally rearm.
Germans are not inhuman demons and during the interwar they suffered greatly as victims as well as aggressors (and notably the British and Italians do not get much credit for helping to stave off Polish attempts to conquer all of Silesia), but the atrocities of WWII tends to make us overlook the magnitude and cost of the atrocities of WWI, and how deeply responsible many in the higher echelons of the Reich were, including the Republican ones for lying about them and committing fraud on people and countries their predecessors had murdered, enslaved, and robbed from.
All under – I might add – blatantly false pretenses of “Da Russians are Attacking Us Mensch, so we must declare war on them first and invade half of Western Europe, including two neutral countries.” A lie we now know the Imperial Cabinet and General Staff knew was such, as did important observers such as the disowned Philipp von Eulenberg.
I have said in the past that Tucker is an Isolationist, of the worst kind.
Interesting comments on the history here of things in Europe, re WWI and WWII. Several here are well read. But, reading a lot does not in and of itself lead to understanding.
I will add that I have two degrees in History, not a PhD.
Since someone brought it up, I’ll note that the Fed does have a right and a responsibility to act if a state denies the basic civil rights of *anyone*, citizen or non-citizen. Even more so if it refuses to allow said individual to leave the state so they can “vote with their feet”, a much more modern term but central to the idea of states as policy testing grounds.
The slavery states were not only denying blacks their basic civil rights (not necessarily those due to citizens, only, but due to everyone by the nature of their being human), but they also denied them the capacity to leave the state in objection to those denials.
Hell, they even got Fugitive Slave Laws passed to prevent other states from granting them “sanctuary” (this was a key, primary thing that Jury Rights was central to… Jury Nullification essentially rendered the FSL moot by refusing to convict in the North, much as it did decades later with Prohibition, and, honestly, ought to be doing with many drug laws).
The primary civil rights we ack, particularly those from the first 10 amendments, MUST necessarily devolve down as restrictions on the states as much as they are restrictions on the Federal government.
The significance of this throws sand in the face of those who attempt to classify Lincoln as a tyrant for rejecting the Right of States to self-determination when it came to slavery. Particularly given that Lincoln did not favor overt rejection but the slow, gradual neutralization of slavery over time, which was essentially the idea of the Founders as well, when they outlawed the importation of slaves in the Constitution after 1808. I am more than certain that they intended slavery to die out, not thinking that the children of slaves would be bred to be slaves in substantial numbers.
Lincoln, like Teddy Roosevelt, has much positive to be said for him and his Presidency, but they also both added massively to the centralization of the power of the Federal government.
I never watched enough Carlson to get the hang of him. Sometimes he sounded pretty smart. Other times … well.
He’s dead to me now.
The comments on the linked O’Neill article (admittedly a small number) are 4 to 1 pro Cooper. Pretty depressing.
Friday picked up at used book store a 1,000 page biography of Churchill, didn’t start it yet.
Regarding German and French relations brings to mind our experience when visiting the Alsatian region of France. Our wine guide pointed out that her grandmother, then 99, was a life long resident of Strasbourg and had been during that time twice a German citizen and twice a French citizen. Many of the villages there have German names.
Turtler
Churchill’s comment on Attlee is classic “He is a modest man, and he has much to be modest about”.
As for the Treaty of Versailles, Germany ultimately wound up paying reparations to herself. As far as “cruelty” you should read abut Germany’s plans (The September Program) for France, Belgium, Holland and Russian had she won World War I. France pretty much would have been turned strictly into an agricultural nation.
The “September Program” which was in anticipation of Germany winning the war would have been something that the Nazis would have approved of.
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Belgians, French, Poles, and Romanians
==
A. They’re all dead, Turtler, so you and I are not telling them anything.
==
B. I tend to doubt if you tally up the suffering during the 1st World War that the balance works out quite the way you suppose, but it’s not a subject with which I am familiar.
==
C. You want revenge for peculiar sorts of violence by German and Hapsburg troops, insist they disgorge the flag rank officers responsible and the ministers to whom they reported.
==
D. There is no such thing as international law and nothing is ever illegal in politics among nations. There is international convention. There are things that are imprudent or nefarious.
==
E. The name of the game should have been to establish a satisfactory post-war equilibrium and contain the efflorescence of revanchist sentiment in the former Central Powers.
==
F. Counter-factual speculation is generally idle. However, you can see what the Allies did after the war did not work out for them. That’s not the only vector operating. Another was poor economic policy-making by most of the world’s more affluent countries, Germany in particular.
Not mentioned (as far as I can tell) is the role that Bolshevism played in fomenting the fascist reaction in the 1920s and 30s.
One may well wonder, what reaction the current incarnation of Leftist madness—wokeness and WEF/WTF-style totalitarianism—will wreak.
(A taste of this reaction is the remark of the “well-known” cum “popular” “historian” on Paris…)
Not mentioned (as far as I can tell) is the role that Bolshevism played in fomenting the fascist reaction in the 1920s and 30s.
==
Indubitably a vector, but so many other actors and so much else going on in the countries involved. The Communist Party was a minor force in Italy in 1922. It was much more consequential in Germany (encompassing about 12% of the electorate), but the Nazi Party did not begin to prosper until the economic crisis in 1929, a decade after the Communist Party emerged. The reaction to Bolshevism in Spain was a reaction to a whole mess of cultural, social, and political tendencies and those reacting were a broad spectrum of which the Falange may have been the least important. Hungary’s interwar regime was a reaction to Bolshevism. The Hungarian right had unappealing features, but it was not until around 1935 that a specifically fascist party emerged. The preference cascade in favor of fascism in the Bohemia-Moravia borderlands seems to have owed more to German chauvinism than a reaction to Bolshevism. Ditto Nazi sentiment in Austria ca. 1938.
Tucker Carlson has really gone off the deep end. He now joins Candace Owens in this regard.
I used to pay attention to these two, but they say such crazy things, you can’t but help wonder what happened to them.
Tucker interviewed Putin a few months back.
Really now, what did Tucker or anybody think Putin would say?
It would be like interviewing Hitler at the end of 1940 and asking him why he invaded much of Europe. Would anybody think Hitler would admit, “yea, well, I really F’d up; my bad.”
No, he would justify everything he did.
Jeez, who would have thunk it.
Unfortunately, many non-thinking people will believe folks like Cooper.
You just wait and see; wannabe totalitarians – esp. democrats – will point to Cooper’s interview and claim that certain forms of “free speech,” should be regulated/controlled/prohibited.
By the way, Hitler promised in 1938 that if Germany was given the Sudetenland, it would be the last territorial demand he would make. Recall that he was given the Sudetenland which led to Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” statement
Yea, sure.
I used to share in this type of thinking. Years ago, visiting paleoconservatve websites.
One powerful pull of this kind of thinking is it enables non-intervention ideology. If fighting and winning WW2 was right, then intervention is right in some cases.
I think this is the proper way to handle dissenting views. It appears JD Vance is going on Tucker Carlson. Push back against bad ideas.
Tucker has good guests with valuable information. He has had some guests pushing narratives/false history. Challenge Tucker to have guests to counter these alt history “historians”. That would do much to determine where Tucker is in his worldview.
We are awash in alt history/revisionism of all kinds. Tucker’s megaphone is bigger than most.
JUST IN: JD Vance Asked Point Blank About Appearing With Tucker Carlson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SbBj40SinA
Turtler, I disagree with much of what you wrote but that is a topic for another day. I am very disappointed with Tucker right now and see little value to following him more.
If Vance will, when he is talking with Tucker, make it clear that he does not agree with Darryl Cooper on WWII and the holocaust, then getting Vance on such a large venue is good.
I’m not throwing out the baby with the bath water, tucker ventured where many cared not to look like the travesty of January 6th, propounded by the son of an actual Soviet front man, Mark Raskin, I disagree with Cooper’s view on World War 2, Italy was one of the victors of the previous war, but as Niall Ferguson pointed out in the Pity of War, there were no winners just more agregious losses,
Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Spaces, covers his similar tableau, Keynes as usual was wrong about much, it took Galbraith to be that wrong in the next two generations, the Hapsburgs Fell, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollern (sic) the first and second still abided by the dirigiste economics of Wagner and Zoller till the Creditanstalt bank (ht Caldwell’s masterful bio of Hayek and Von Mises)this lead to Dolfuss and eventually the reunification with Germany, Havenstein’s financial juggling scheme, played havok with early Weimar financing even though the Dawes plan, stabilized the hyper inflation, till the Depression and the Young plan, which was a bete noire of most parties, again I don’t see the happy ending where things would have gone with the generational wreckage with the economic mismanagement of German government,
and this general chaos was seen in most of the European participants of the war, an Old Hapsburg Horthy rose out of the Bela Kun revolution, the Ustache arose in Croastia, settling scores as far afield as Paris,the OUN in the Ukraine, in the aftermath of the Holomodor, of course Stalin was another
slouching beast that rose not toward Bethlehem, but the other place,
The Left can and will believe what it wants to.
without missing a beat
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/h1riq8ohc
A bunch of things here.
1. Yes, it’s true that no one is saying it should be illegal for Cooper to say what he says. And it’s fine not to give him a platform. But attacking someone else for doing so looks too much like cancel culture for me to detect a difference.
2. The notion that Churchill was the prime villain is just silly, but what Niketas says is true “I think Churchill is such a tempting target for historians because he not only persuasively wrote down HIS version of history, and got it mostly accepted before any other historian could, but he also had privileged access to the primary sources, and could see to it others didn’t.”
He did write it up (and brilliantly). And he did set the terms of debate. But in fairness he does give you a lot of evidence to use against him on matters of detail. Read the Appendix to The Grand Alliance, where he shows (a) that he had no clue about ship design, but could never admit it, and (b) shows how foolish his views on the Prince of Wales/Repulse deployment were.
3. Then go to the chapter “The Romance of Design” in The World Crisis. There are many flaws there. I’ll point out one: WSC is proud about the speeds he demanded for the battleships, light cruisers, and destroyers. He doesn’t mention that not one of those ships actually made her designed speed. (HMS Malaya MAY have just made 25 kts, at a very light loading.)
Arthur Marder – no Churchill hater – wrote that WSC never understood seapower, however convinced he was that he did. That was his worst feature as a leader. He was always unshakably convinced he understood everything better than anyone else. He sometimes did. But when he didn’t, it was a full time job to keep him from disaster.
4. Calling Versailles a “Carthaginian Peace” is a bit much. That’s what we made them submit to in 1945, not 1919. Many countries have faced worse.
!) i’m sure the left could be easily convinced to take up the bullhorn, perhaps not Elon, you saw the whole Mediamatters exercise, we have seen how they went after Cummings and Farage, after Bannon here in the states, Navarro before him
2) there have been some very silly takes on Churchill, throughout the years, no doubt he was a blunt instrument
3) Churchill wanted to hang on to India, others like Halifax did not
4)that might have been the Morgenthau plan, but pragmatism, some might say cynicism, dictated the release of Krupp Deutsch bank, Schacht et al*
*maybe he genuinely had a change of heart, Graham Greene had him as the doctor character in Our Man in Havana, whose paradigm has endured through Stephen Hunter and Paul Vidich, he was on the opposite end of a deal that Aristotle Onassis had in the 50s, trying to corner the tanker trade out of Saudi, that came from Hougans Spooks that I read in the 80s
(cont)
5. I don’t think Buchanan is a Nazi. I think that belief simply ignores the fact that Irish – especially Irish-Americans – are VERY Anglophobe. Or at least they were, at least as late as the 70s. I remember hearing them insist they were just as oppressed as the Jews.
6. While I certainly don’t endorse it, there is a clear tendency for people to stop listening about oppression of others. That does apply to Jews, too. Orwell wrote of this, as (much later) did Fr Neuhaus. I don’t have either to hand, but I do think that clumsy uses of this are less than useful. (Clumsy always is that.)
7. It is also natural to react against the clear hagiography engaged in by such as Andrew Roberts. He falls in love with his subjects, always. I’d love to hear him arguing with Churchill about Napoleon.
8. It’s a small point, but the Nazis were not the German Fascist party; there was one, and didn’t fare better than other parties. It should be remembered that Englebert Dolfuss was an Austrofascist who suppressed both Communists and Nazis, and was killed by the latter. Also, Mussolini was actually ready, in 1934, to go to war defending Austria against Germany.
The whole situation was more complicated than people realize.
9. Just for the record, Victor Davis Hanson is not actually a military historian. He is a classicist (as his podcast says.) IMO, what he writes about classical Greece is superb. But I also believe that the farther he gets from that, the weaker he gets. He tends to ignore the Mongols, who 180 degrees from his model of a successful military. And his work on modern seapower is just bad. (I cannot recall him writing about classical navies much.)
10. I want to repeat my point about Churchill’s prose. It is superb, and it does tend to blind one to its (and his) faults. There is a precedent in Shakespeare’s histories. They tend to drive in a vision of history which really is weaker than it looks. Nonetheless, I would say of him what he said of Adm Jackie Fisher, “He was right more often than he was wrong.”
Would it be fair to say that Churchill was the best prime minister/president/ruler-writer since Marcus Aurelius? Guy had a way with words.
What’s the competition?
“If fighting and winning WW2 was right…”
(!)
Ah but “right” for whom? And WHY? (And for how long…?)
…Which would seem to be the crux of the issue…
File under: YMMV???
“…a blunt instrument…”
He saved the West.
He favored a Jewish National Home.
He made mistakes—IOW he wasn’t PERFECT.
Three strikes (with “made mistakes” encompassing many, many more).
CANCEL him!!!!
File under: The IMPERFECT is the ENEMY OF HUMANKIND (New Woke Bible)…BUT Knew Ye’ Well that it’s perfectly fine to make “mistakes” if you’re on the Left.
“…That does apply to Jews, too….”
Which is no doubt why they promoted building so many Holocaust Museums and memorials, whose purpose is not only “NEVER FORGET” but to try to prevent future genocides of any group of people.
(Thought it does indeed look like they still haven’t built quite enough. Perhaps a few hundred new ones will do the trick… Or thousands, maybe?)
he was always brash from the time he escaped from South africa, during the Boer
war, voted down the armament biill in parliament his switch to the tories, Gallipoli might have been one bridge too far, as colonies secretary after the war, he was not a shrinking violet, he was the equivalent of TR even though they were almost 20 years apart, and their philosophies were someone distant, by comparison everyone in the American or British panoply seems rather gray
he was half American who gave Boris Johnson, hope but he didn’t live up to that billing, sadly he was a transitional figure,* in many ways not positive to the UK’s health, brexit being the exception
*something andrew marr picked up in 2015,in his roman a clef about brexit, but hes also pro israel that the last mannequin turned out not be now starmer is rather an unprinciole lout and dangerous to boot,
then again Hard circumstances force hard challenges, see Thatcher and the time of troubles, she inherited that conflict which escalated quickly, facing the Sovieticized Labour Party at the end of the Cold war, when their standard bearers were more distasteful
Barry Meislin on September 8, 2024 at 4:44 pm said:
“…That does apply to Jews, too….”
Which is no doubt why they promoted building so many Holocaust Museums and memorials, whose purpose is not only “NEVER FORGET” but to try to prevent future genocides of any group of people.
(Thought it does indeed look like they still haven’t built quite enough. Perhaps a few hundred new ones will do the trick… Or thousands, maybe?)
________
None of that is relevant to what I wrote.
@stu
Indeed, and it is also darkly fascinating when you go back further. The French originally appeared as Allies of the various city states and town leagues in Alsace against the likes of France’s prodigal rebel child Burgundy and the gradual Habsburgization of the HRE over the course of the 1400s and 1500s, but the turmoil of the reformation (which made decent headway in the region) and a mixture of Catholic crackdowns and French desire to fully absorb the region resulted in them becoming less as “Allies” and more as rulers. And ironically around the time the HRE had a chance to do something about this during the War of the Spanish Succession, they refused and while maintained military occupation continued anti-Protestant persecution (which was probably one of the reasons why the anti-Bourbon alliance frayed and then fell apart, and why the Sun King could reassert control).
@BrooklynBoy
Indeed, he had a way with words, even when harsh. I also feel somewhat more generous towards Attlee (though also more cutting, he was not *nearly* the modest man he often made himself out to be), and Churchill’s other, less quippy analysis of him does seem to have realized he was an accomplished, formidable customer.
At least financially. And ironically in some cases I’d have felt that was generous (since many of the Imperial Dictatorship’s victims were German subjects, and not just “the Other” like Alsatians, Posen Poles, the Herero, or so on; the unfortunate Armin Wegner is a good example of the costs of being both loyal to the Kaiser and Volk but having a conscience that would not gloss over mass murder by the Reich’s allies; man was detained and tortured by his own government with much of the evidence he collected destroyed in order to help safeguard the Ottoman Empire’s atrocities during the war).
Also I feel what tends to get ignored when talking about the reparations is what they were meant for. Versailles and interpretations of it have remained in the public mind to some degree in a way that things such as the continent sized looting of occupied Europe during WWI has not, such as the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Belgians, French, and Romanian civilians and a slightly less military POWs were sent to places like the great industrial centers of the Rhineland to work as basically slave labor (and which the German leadership knew full well included illegal conduct). And while you can argue about it partially being a product of its times, it really doesn’t fit; while most other powers (including the Allies) screwed with POWs (with the French setting aside extremely harsh camps for pro-German POWs of Schleswig and Alsatian heritage that involved quite a lot of beatings, and the Russians becoming justifiably infamous for a lot of their treatment) the differences are close to an order of magnitude in scale.
To quote a friend of mine and published author (albeit largely on WWI Submarine warfare, but with an acute knowledge of the history and the law):
Back to BrooklynBoy
Agreed indeed, and this needs to be talked about more. The Central Powers tried to run their economies off of inflationary money printer nonsense (gee, eerily close to home), to be sustained by basically mass looting of occupied territories.
And honestly as bad as the September Programme and German actions were I find they honestly aren’t even the worst stuff that tends to get overlooked. Austria-Hungary had state sponsored musical jingles including “All Serbs Must Die” and while there was never any kind of coherent policy of extermination, they managed to kill a higher proportion of the Serbian population than Hitler, the Ustasha, and Mussolini did in WWII (albeit to be fair they had sizable help from typhus, but anyone who has seen the images of entire villages being strung up on shallow nooses by the roads so they would slowly suffocate to death should be under no illusions of what this entailed). Bulgaria outright tried to destroy the concept of a Serbian nation and culture in pursuit of its Tsar’s odd ambitions of being a New Bulgarian-Byzantine Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, well…. that’s one that actually has bled over into pop culture a fair bit..
As high as the reparations payments in Versailles etc. al. were, even if taken at face value (and even the treaty signatories did not, since they expected they would be reduced), they were just a fraction of the damages for the war, and while not all of that was due to intentional malice, mass murder, attacks on civilians, and so on a lot of it was.
And when you graph the wartime and economic policies of the Second Reich in WWI and the Third Reich, they really appear strikingly similar in so many ways. And ironically they also helped go on to influence the Soviets, since Lenin praised Ludendorff’s “Kriegsocializmus” – War Socialism (some of you might have heard of Lenin’s “War Communism”, but many don’t realize that was an intentional echo of the Central Powers).
I do not hate Germans or Hungarians as a whole, far from it. Indeed, while I am something of a Francophile I will happily talk about things such as the atrocities of Napoleonic France (which often tends to be forgotten or downplayed even today and even by many German and Spanish classical liberals or romantics at the time in spite of the PenninsularWar being a regular shop of horrors), and particularly things like the High Bourbon French armies in the 1600s and early 1700s (where they desolated the Rhinelahd in campaigns of extermination against entire communities, and which gave plenty of Germans every justification and right to hate and fear French invasion).
Indeed I think what often gets overlooked is how the lies and atrocities of their leaders often hurt them as well, whether in petty matters like the Zabern Affair or more substantial ones. They deserved better, as did the world.
but that was way before German unification, about 200 years, I suppose of you have a contentious border like the Shatt al Arab, or the Rio Grande anything could happen
Bismarck had flawed economic principles, I think that Wagner and Moller sought to counter Marx as did other philosophies, in addition they tried to go for an expansion phase, in Africa mostly on steroids, hence confrontations over Agadir and other places,
they made arrangements in the Berlin to Baghdad conflict which would eventually end up with the contentious campaigns in the libya
in the levant, the problem with reparations, against a people instead of the Government that cooperated with the Hapsburgs in the foolish endeavour against Russia and other parties is the people suffer, the command staff maybe some of the magnates that supported the war like those mentioned above
i did hear about the allied control commission from manchesters arms of krupps
one assumes he was much more diligent about that,
I somewhat similar thing happened re post Gulf War Iraq on a smaller scale, the sanctions didn’t do any better in this case than others, the Tikriti mob that ran Iraq
fared well, the oil for food relief, ended up the palace building exercise, as we would discover in the Next War, it didn’t endear us to the population, that could be charitably said, to what degree they rebuilt their military well thats more dubious,
I’d say the most compelling argument against Cooper’s position on Churchill is that Churchill was not a dictator and Hitler was. Hitler had the sole decision about peace and war and Churchill never did.
Churchill was excluded from the government while the people of Britain wanted peace. He was brought in when they found themselves at war anyway. He was not made Prime Minister until the war started to go very badly, and he was Prime Minister of a coalition government.
Had Churchill tried to accept any of Hitler’s peace offers he’d have lost a vote of confidence and the new Prime Minister would be someone who wasn’t going to listen to Hitler. Because the people of Britain had been brought to that point by Hitler’s behavior up until then. Hitler had made it very clear that peace treaties with him only bought time until he was ready to invade you.
It’s been said that if France had resisted Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the German command would have dumped him.
Might have meant the war would have been run more professionally.
Brilliant films like Ungentlemanly Warfare are the stuff dreams are made of. Why not forget about fictional agents like Bond and Bourne dashing to save the world from disaster and forget about CIA and MI6 officers reclining on their couches dreaming up espionage scenarios to thrill you. Check out what a real MI6 and CIA secret agent does nowadays. Why not browse through TheBurlingtonFiles website and read about Bill Fairclough’s escapades when he was an active MI6 and CIA agent? The website is rather like an espionage museum without an admission fee … and no adverts. You will soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won’t want to exit.
After that experience you may not know who to trust so best read Beyond Enkription, the first novel in The Burlington Files series. It’s a noir fact based spy thriller that may shock you. What is interesting is that this book is apparently mandatory reading in some countries’ intelligence agencies’ induction programs. Why? Maybe because the book is not only realistic but has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. It is an enthralling read as long as you don’t expect fictional agents like Ian Fleming’s incredible 007 to save the world or John le Carré’s couch potato yet illustrious Smiley to send you to sleep with his delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots!
See https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2023_06.07.php and https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2022.10.31.php and
https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2024.08.31.php.
Even more exciting than watching over 50 CIA agents actively trying to subvert American elections?
(…And then there’s John—“Imagine”?…or should that be “Mind Games”?—Brennan…)
You really need better pitches bill contact john stock in cornwall charles cummings maybe mick herren do i have to do all the work for you
Can we punish poisonous distortions of history by having all Marxist history professors fired?
Oh, I forgot, lifetime appointments with academic freedom. Darn. Universities, hosting nonsense about “mein Klassenkampf” and by not speaking out against Marxist professors, endorse Marxism.
Somehow the status quo always protects the hard left.
It’s true that leftist historians have been calling Churchill a villain for at least 50 years now. The Left gets to say whatever it wants, it’s only the Right that needs to be policed.
I thought it was settled history that Churchill was a committed colonial racist! Obama returned the bust!
Along with Robert E. Lee, George Washington and others of their ilk, they must be scrubbed from the side of the brain that holds them in esteem.
History is so messy.
@Art Deco
So you do understand blunt, intentionally unironic answers. Good, so do I.
I might disagree on spiritual and religious grounds, but that is another subject.
Well kudos for acknowledging the limitations, as I try to. But suffice it to say many people are not familiar with the balance of WWI in general, and particularly the horror show that happened behind the lines (of much of the language I have seen written on the Somme or portrayed about the bloodshed of the 1916 campaign, I’ve seen the First Day and its horrors portrayed – and for good reason – but not the last days, when the ravaged but triumphant Allied troops crossed over their trenches and saw a hellscape of poisoned wells, burnt villages, and the rotting carcasses of civilians who would not agree to be deported to Germany as Ludendorff directed the army to kill and destroy everything on the way out; the movie 1917 is pretty much the only thing that portrays Operation Alberich and while admirable it doesn’t do it justice. And that wasn’t even the worst).
But the magnitude of the suffering and it is fairly well documented if you know where to look.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/forced-labour/
https://www.americanheritage.com/belgians-deported-slave-labor-camps
And the sad thing is that it is most readily observable among those who were outright deported from their homes to work in Central and Eastern Europe for the Central Powers; reliable records for the number of those forced to work in place are hard to find and analysis of them even harder.
I agree, and I believe that should have been done more vigorously and that it was not is one of the great shames of world history. What passed for pursuit is even worse, given how the trials were often given over to the civilian governments and judiciaries of the former Central Powers, who unsurprisingly had incentive to be generous with sentencing and charges (indeed, the “Only Following Orders” defense was so widely used in part because it was viewed as an almost absolute defense, with acknowledged war crimes being pardoned so long as the defendants could prove – and in the case of some like Stenner even allege – that they had been issued by “legitimate” authority).
But while the leadership for these regimes deserved to pay most of all, as in many if not most cases they not only were party to the crimes but acted with mens rea (as we now know from things such as the systematic burning of transport records and mortality rates in places like the Rhineland), it was frankly nowhere near enough.
I do not like beating on the “Good German” or “Average German” or their counterparts elsewhere too much. Especially since they were regularly lied to, exploited, and pushed to struggle in a great hardship by their own leaders. However, the fact remains that the citizenry of the Central Powers benefitted greatly and materially from the criminal activities of their own government, including large scale looting and redistribution of goods (sometimes confiscated legally as per the rules of war, increasingly not). As bad as the Turnip Winter was (and it WAS very bad) it was paltry compared to what would have happened had the OHL not been able to feed its people using resources taken at bayonet point and often without compensation from places like Picardy, Serbia, and especially Romania, as well as what those regions actually suffered. Those who vilify any concept of trickle down economics (beyond clearly not studying it enough in general) have nothing to say about the major inflows that came from wartime bonuses paid by companies like Fokker to their people, or by the government itself in compensation for gold confiscations. And sadly Germany was not even the most egregious offender of it, given our friends and allies Turkey and how Western Anatolia is largely the result of a massive, genocidal land grab and redistribution.
I am not egotistical enough to think any indemnity could bring the dead back to life, or that it would “make whole” those that survived. Nor do I favor reparations without end long past the judgement of the last perpetrator alongside the last victim before the gates of heaven. But neither did the Allies. They did, however, believe that Austrian, Hungarian, German, Bulgarian, and Turkish society had lived high off of ill-gotten gains on a magnitude that not even confiscating everyone with a form of address more laudatory than Freiherr and a rank above that of Major could do.
They also believed that those societies and their governments can and should pay back damages for what had been done to their victims, especially since this was not 200 years after the abolition of slavery but in the immediate aftermath, when many former slaves were heading back home and trying to rebuild their lives (and often dependent on government aid, much as we may dislike it, such as the French government’s funds for the dispossessed citoyens).
I find it hard to disagree with them.
Notably, they also did not expect miracles. They based the broad contours of the reparations (both the “On Paper/For Public Consumption” ones in the Treaty and the actual ones they planned to reduce to) off of successful repayment plans, such as those by France in response to the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. And while it was expected and hoped it would take longer for Germany to get out of that hole than it did France, it did not expect it to take nearly as long as it did. It did not reckon on the newly constituted German government deciding to shaft both their people and their victims by continuing to run the money printers in the Imperial fashion without imperial resources to support the bills, did not expect them to pause repayments at times, did not count on economic lunacy from our fellow Americans to plunge the world into a Depression that would upset the borderline house of cards contingency payment plans made by renegotiating the indemnities, and did not count on Hitler to declare them null.
And I think that the public in the Central Powers’ countries by and large supported these policies says a great deal about public responsibility. As much as I may disdain the Republican governments in Germany between the wars, they were the only democratic government to emerge from the defeated powers and they had broad public participation, and while the government did not always bend to the will of the public (and the “Deep State” in the bureaucracy and military even less) on reparations they largely did.
The other former Central Powers almost uniformly adopted one dictatorship or another, but not all shafted their creditors, and even there you had significant anti-treaty leeway (where in Turkey they basically took over the country and purged it).
Sophist word games. I have a dim opinion of international law in general and an even dimmer opinion of its enforceability and worth in a world where Israel is demonized for allegedly using hunger as a weapon but the PA can applaud the murder of Israeli children, but the fact is that nations can and do create or refine it as much as they can break it. You may wish to argue that is not “International Law” and acts condemned by it such as the use of asphyxiating gas are not “Illegal” but the fact remains is that – cynically or not, sincerely or not – the signatory powers agree that it is (even if you wish to argue it is just pretending).
And that has importance. Especially when Wilhelm II issues orders using his office as Kaiser and Supreme Warlord that Germany shall not even bother withdrawing from the Hague Conventions, it will simply violate their agreed upon strictures.
International Law and perhaps laws made by humans in general may be a Calvinball, but there are those that play it more horribly and in bad faith than others.
And there is vast overlap between those, and much though not all of that which is agreed to among nations as “International Law”, whether or not you wish to believe it is real.
Agreed, as well as deal with the spread of Communism and Islamist lunacy (largely in the form of the Wahhabis), preferably by snuffing them out. That more or less worked in the latter case, not so much for the former. And to their credit the Allies tried to get a satisfactory equilibrium, but life and reality get in the way of well laid plans.
This is a blog post, so a lot is “generally idle.”
But the ability to examine counter-factual and consider them is a very valuable and applicable skill, even if not all are equally useful.
Agreed, though in large part to try and help feed the beast that was a war machine.
Agreed.
Minor electorally, not so minor in the streets or propaganda. And moreover it could and did recruit or consider alliances with other groups, such as various camps of proto-Fascists (Lenin’s was one of the few governments to recognize the “Regency” of D’Annunzio in Fiume/Rijeka) and more “mainstream” and powerful Italian Socialist Parties. And they had a violent effect far beyond their electoral numbers, but the bigger problem was the violence among the more mainstream socialists and nationalists.
Agreed, though this is partially because of how the Communists got pounded so hard in the immediate aftermath of WWI and continued engaging in incompetent terrorism and attempted coups to an even greater and more egregious degree than the old Imperial Absolutists, but did not get off as easily as they did.
Agreed. And it is worth noting that “Conventional” Fascism and Bolshevism were among the least important ideologies in Spain before 1936, that the cycles of extreme anti-clerical and anti-religious “Republican Leftism”, the violent and creepily statist terrorism of the Anarcho-Syndicalists, and the oppression and anti-democratic tendencies of the various right wing parties helped feed into each other and made themselves far more important than their totalitarian sponsors were.
It was largely the outbreak of civil war and the need to curry support (which Italy and Germany could give in Spades, the Soviets and a radical anti-Clerical Mexico provided less spectacularly but still in earnest, and nobody else was as enthusiastic about) that helped catalyze the Republican Government’s descent into a crypto-Soviet dictatorship and helped turn the Falange into the only mass movement that could govern a Nationalist Spain, even if Franco had to defang and purge it of much of its actual identity.
Also the lines of affinity and relations aren’t always what we’d expect looking back. Jose Antonio spent much of his ill-begotten political life trying to form an alliance with Azana, as he believed Azana was the only leader that could bring a revolutionary Fascism to Spain.
Agreed, and it is worth noting that Horthy- while one of Nazi Germany’s longest standing allies – generally repressed the domestic Fascists and Nazis as threats to his power and going further than even he would. Ultimately that backfired because he failed to destroy them and they were there when Hitler decided to remove the Kingdom without a King in favor of something more pliant.
Agreed, though I’d also note that Austria had its own homegrown Fascist regime that was staunchly against integration with Germany (and indeed had the odd case of Hitler’s Nazis supporting Austrian Social Democrats in their conspiracies against the Fatherland Front dictatorship backed by Fascist Italy due to a greater Pan-German sentiment).
@Michael K
Fair enough, and perhaps we will talk that other day. I think Tucker has some benefit in cases such as helping expose the Left in domestic politics, but this greatly destroyed his credibility for me. And not just on international affairs. Cooper is a shameless liar and has admitted to lying on social media (on top of not being that competent a researcher). Tucker handled him very badly and credulously, and I think that undermines whatever value bringing him on might have had.
But on the subject of Ed VII, the collapse in Anglo-German relations, and so on, I think an analysis of proto-totalitarian and profoundly anti-British ideology and theory (and their influence on policy) help torpedo the idea that it was Britain that alienated Germany, and specifically after Ed’s ascension to the throne.
https://francis-press.com/uploads/papers/PTy3zhamYr0XpBfv1QMmLX8ks7C1C2Hl7cFVbFuN.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24402404
@Brian E
I would agree were it not for the extremely fawning and uncritical approach Tucker took, as well as what seems like him being just out of his depth. I can understand the value of not ambushing your guests or trying to “win” over them, and also that an interview is not an endorsement. But coming to the table ignorant and credulous is not the right way to handle dissenting views, or I’d argue any views.
Agreed, but I do think that Tucker should challenge any guest substantially, even those I agree with. And his praise of Cooper was both unwarranted and an implicit slap in the face of everyone better deserving of it, including VDH and others.
Yessirre! Nothing says saving western civilization like invading staunchly Catholic and anti-communist Poland and murdering a large percent of it’s population because reasons.