Bari Weiss: The War on Our History

If you ever find yourself defending Adolf Hitler and demonizing Winston Churchill, you should probably question the decisions you’ve made up until that point. 

That’s the situation that Tucker Carlson and his guest—the pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper, who goes by the internet handle Martyr Made—found themselves in on Carlson’s podcast earlier this week.

I urge you to watch the whole thing and see for yourself lest you imagine Carlson had Cooper on to grill him about his views. He billed the episode with Cooper as a conversation with “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” Carlson added: “I want people to know who you are and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States.” 

Over the next two hours, Cooper asserted that Churchill was a “psychopath” and the “chief villain” of World War II—and that Hitler really wanted peace but was forced into war because Churchill wanted that. 

There was more: Cooper argued that the Nazi death camps, where half of the more than six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were systematically murdered, were the result of the Germans taking too many “prisoners of war.” (Nazi Germany “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war. . . and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”) Yes, indeed, millions of people “ended up dead.”

Many people are surely being exposed to these ideas for the first time, and perhaps they think Cooper has uncovered some kind of forbidden knowledge. But none of these ideas are new; they’ve just been debunked or rejected. They are mostly a regurgitation of Pat Buchanan’s view of that war, captured most concisely in his book Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War.

The only difference now is that the purveyors of this pseudo-history—one that dishonors America, the sacrifices of World War II, and history itself—enjoy audiences of many millions.

Tucker Carlson—who is hosting and disseminating this—is not some fringe figure on the American political right. Last month, Carlson had a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention and was seated in the rostrum on the first night of the convention next to Trump. And that’s to say nothing of his tremendous popular appeal: He has one of the largest, most passionate audiences of any influencer in the country. 

He is also a very intelligent person and I presume he has a very strong internet connection at his podcast studio. So, like me, he surely has seen Cooper’s recent musings. 

Here, for example, was Cooper’s reaction to the Olympics opening ceremony in July: 

And here, also in July, was Cooper suggesting that Hitler is in heaven: 

Here he is a year ago, in August 2023, claiming that God sent the Romans “to destroy the leprous temple and put an end to the Israelite religion for all time.”

There are more.

It is unclear if Cooper’s disgust toward Judaism has inspired him to turn Hitler, the monster who declared war on the free world—a war in which 400,000 Americans died fighting, and that led to the deaths of 50 million people—into a misunderstood figure. Or perhaps he sincerely believes that if the West had only appeased Hitler, “people wouldn’t have died.” 

If there is a criticism I’ve gotten over the past several years it’s that I pay too much attention—and apply too much scrutiny—to the excesses of the illiberal left at the expense of the illiberal right. Wasn’t I ignoring the elephant and allowing myself to get distracted by the gnat?

My response to that is twofold.

The first is that there is no shortage of writers, reporters, and outlets focusing on the dangers of the far right. I saw the far left as conspicuously overlooked by people who otherwise take a great interest in political extremism. And I understand why they were averting their gaze: The social cost of noticing this subject is very high. Given that the job description of a journalist is to observe the world, uncover things in the public interest, and then tell the plain truth about it, choosing topics where others fall silent seems wise to me. It still does.

The second is that I have been concerned for years now that the illiberal ideology that has become increasingly mainstream on the political left—one that makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project—would inspire the mirror ideology on the right. 

And that is exactly where we find ourselves, with an illiberal left that defaces Churchill statues—and an illiberal right that defaces Churchill’s legacy. With a left that insists 1619 was the year of the true founding of America—and a right that suggests the Greatest Generation was something closer to genociders. With a left that sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—and a right that sympathizes with the original ones. 

Tucker Carlson is scheduled to take the stage with J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr. in the coming weeks. His views may be alarming to most Americans, but it is hard to ignore that Carlson seems to have positioned himself as a vector of influence in the Republican Party.

The fringe these days has a way of making its way to the mainstream with the speed of Starlink. Crazy ideas on campus came careening into the center of the Democratic Party’s belief system. Do not pretend this away.

For more on this crucial subject, I recommend three illuminating pieces published today by The Free Press.

First, the historian Victor Davis Hanson systematically reviews the false claims made about Churchill, the Allies, Hitler, and more. Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials on Greek, agrarian, and military history. He has written or edited 24 books, including The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. 

Read Victor Davis Hanson: The Truth About World War II.

The second is by Sohrab Ahmari, someone who once embraced a pugnacious brand of Trumpian populism, and who now is horrified by what he sees emerging from the darker corners of the right. Sohrab argues that odious views like Cooper’s Nazi apologia threaten to make their way from the fringe to the mainstream. 

Read Sohrab Ahmari on Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right.

The third is by Free Press columnist and historian Niall Ferguson. “It is surely the epitome of professional failure to have spent more than three decades writing, teaching, and speaking about these matters, and to have achieved so little that a nasty little Nazi apologist like Darryl Cooper can win an audience of millions,” he writes. “But that is apparently what happens when podcasts drive out books and anti-history drives out history. 

Read Niall Ferguson on The Return of Anti-History.

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