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.
