The mediocrity of America’s far-right was on display again this week as Tucker Carlson hosted a podcaster by the name of Darryl Cooper, whom he called the “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Already viral in far-right circles for his revisionist far-right views, Darryl spent the podcast excusing the Holocaust as a necessary evil - and painted Winston Churchill as the bad guy of the second World War.
Like many on the far right, Tucker and Cooper are empowered by their belief that they have discovered the secret knowledge behind the shibboleths of the modern liberal order. They gravitate towards authoritarians like Adolf Hitler, or Vladimir Putin - romanticizing these monsters as champions of traditionalism and order against the chaos of communism and ‘the woke’. In their false dichotomy LGBTQ politics, immigration, and the racial tensions of modern society mean the allied victory in WW2 was fruitless. Sinking into revisionist history and conspiracy theories, they convince themselves that they are special. They have it all figured out. For them, the decadent, corrupt West is the root of all the world’s problems - and dismantling our historical assumptions is the first step in creating a new political order.
In the segment on the Second World War, Darryl claims German success on the Eastern front inadvertently led to the holocaust because the Wehrmacht was unprepared to deal with millions of prisoners, forcing the army to put them into camps. Due to lack of food they were eventually executed instead of slowly starving.
This vague description of genocide by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe is disgusting revisionism. The Holocaust was a well-planned project of the fanatic Nazi state to eliminate Jews, Slavs, and other undesirables - and it did not stop until Allied forces ran into the extermination and concentration camps. It deprived Germany of a pool of soldiers, conscripts, workers, money, and material that could’ve been used in the war effort. But Nazi dogma overruled all considerations. An entire system of industrial mass extermination had to be built. Bureaucrats, industrialists, engineers, and lawyers all worked diligently to support this mission of judenfrei. “Without German custom-built crematoria, the death camps would never have reached daily kill rates approaching eight to ten thousand in May and June 1944.”
Hunger was a weapon: By forcing the Jews of Eastern Europe into ghettos, and putting POW’s into concentration camps, the Germans were ensuring the deaths of millions simply through malnutrition, starvation and deprivation.
The ‘Commissar Order’ instructed the Wehrmacht to shoot any Soviet political commissar on sight. The ‘Barbarossa Decree’ explicitly stated Hitler’s wish that the war against the Soviet Union was a war of extermination, which gave carte blanche to the Wehrmacht to execute anyone they liked. These and other orders explicitly singled out Jews. The men going to war on June 22, 1941 were unprepared to take prisoners, because they expected to take NO prisoners. Labor shortages inside Germany in 1943 countermanded these orders. Victor Davis Hanson: “it was more economical to work occupied peoples to death rather than to kill them outright.”
Lebensraum was Hitler’s policy from the early days of his political career. (something Darryl later blames on Churchill as well). As enacted by the Wehrmacht, Lebensraum was the wholesale murder and genocide of the slavic populations of Eastern Europe to make breathing room for the German people. “The purpose of the Russian campaign is to decimate the Slavic population by thirty millions,’ Himmler told colleagues at a weekend party just before Barbarossa” Even in regions that had felt the wrath of the NKVD and Soviet pogroms, extermination plans were carried out with German efficiency. And it was in those regions later in the war where retreating Germans were attacked by the surviving partisans with the same brutality.
Cooper’s claim is that Hitler didn’t want to fight France or Britain, and sent peace overtures to Britain via Mussolini, which showed he was a man of peace. This assumes a lot on Hitler’s part, who had always raged against the Treaty of Versailles as an unfair imposition on the German people. Hitler’s reluctance to fight was more of a military and political calculation than any imagined alliance with Britain to fight global ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. He was well aware that neither the United Kingdom nor France would accept a revival of Prussian militarism. His own generals were wary of the military might of the British, Czech and French armies. Hitler, however, was itching for a war. During the negotiations for the occupation of the Sudetenland, it was agreed among the Germans that upon any disagreement by Chamberlain “The Führer will show Chamberlain his map, and then – end (Schluß), basta! Only in that way can this problem be solved,” said Goebbels. The real war was to begin in Czechoslovakia.
That it did not begin there was due to an intervention by Mussolini and Göring. For the first and only time, Hitler pulled back from the brink. After Munich, he seethed at the joyful celebrations of Neville Chamberlain as the man who had brought peace to Europe. Robbed of a chance to humiliate the British, he sidelined the porcine commander of his Luftwaffe in favor of the hawkish von Ribbentrop, and soon the war began in Poland. In 1940, the French surrender to the Germans occurred at Compiegne, in the same train carriage where the Treaty of Versailles had been signed - which shows exactly how Hitler felt about France.
It’s foolish to believe that a man such as Hitler would be amenable to terms that were favorable to Britain in any way. After violating the Treaty of Versailles, the Anschluss, annexing the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland, and the fall of France no competent British Prime Minister would have entertained the thought of a peace with a leader who had proven he would not honor a treaty.
The escape of the BEF from Dunkirk is frequently retconned as Hitler letting the British escape because he wished for peace. Far from it. The BEF escaped because the Blitzkrieg was running on fumes. Few know, or comprehend that the Wehrmacht as a whole was still not fully mechanized, still relying on pack horses to haul artillery in the field. Hitler had fought in the muck of Northern France - he was afraid that his valuable panzers would be vulnerable to a flanking maneuver. “The Fuhrer is terribly nervous.. afraid of taking a chance” wrote General Halder in his diary in May 1940.
Germany’s behavior towards captured France (1.5+ million French POWs) should debunk any notions of Hitler allowing for a fair outcome for Britain- had it capitulated, or had the BEF surrendered at Dunkirk.
Cooper reserves a special hatred for Winston Churchill, whom he calls “the chief villain of WW2” - who is apparently to blame for every single catastrophe visited upon the German people since WW1. In this distorted vision of history poor, blameless Adolf Hitler was goaded into a second bloodletting of the German nation by the imperious, racist, diabolical Winston Churchill. Nothing could be further from the truth.
By 1939, Churchill had been in the political wilderness for 10 years. He was considered a spent force by his peers, especially after Munich when it was assumed a lasting peace had been achieved by Neville Chamberlain. Had Hitler waited a few more years to seek war with Britain, he might not have had to contend with Winston Churchill at all!
As Winston became Prime Minister in 1940, he was inheriting a war he hadn’t initiated, a war he was losing, and it was all his responsibility. It’s difficult to overstate the precarious situation of the United Kingdom in the wake of the fall of France. The continent belonged to Hitler. Stalin was content to sit back and supply Germany, and the United States would maintain its policy of neutrality for 2 more years. The pressure on Churchill to make peace with the Nazis was immense. Even a rumor of negotiation would’ve destroyed British morale. Churchill’s indomitable stance is perhaps understandable, when Britain’s survival was balanced on a knife’s edge.
If there’s anything Churchill can be criticized for, it's the post-war collapse of the British Empire. In this, he was too old-fashioned to realize the shifting tides. Both world wars had imposed massive costs on the British treasury, and the loss of prestige in the face of Nazi and Japanese aggression was palpable. So too was the obvious sense that the new world order was going to be decided by others - The United States and the Soviet Union. Most likely there’s nothing Churchill could’ve done to stop the future. But it is a fact that by Churchill’s second term in 1950, the British “had come to the end of themselves as they were.”
Later, Cooper continued his revisionist hot takes in a tweet thread again blasting Churchill. In one tweet he mentions the Allied blockade of Germany during WW1 - which continued after the November 11 armistice, causing starvation for the German people. Why would the Allied powers continue a naval blockade preventing supplies from reaching Germany? There are a few valid reasons:
Fear of revolution: Even before the armistice of November 1918, Germany was facing mutinies and uprisings in its interior from its working class population. Russia had fallen in 1917. The Austrio-Hungarian empire had collapsed, the Ottomans had signed an armistice in October 1918. When the Kaiser abdicated, Germany seemed to be the next front for a violent revolution.
The armistice was exactly that - an cessation of hostilities. It did not mean Germany had surrendered. The allied powers were fearful of a revolution leading to a Napoleon like situation, justifiable given that the various worker’s uprisings and strikes in Germany were ended by nationalist paramilitary groups like the Freikorps.
Cooper’s thread then devolves into more antisemitic speculation that Churchill only became pro-zionist after 1938 after being saved from bankruptcy by a rich Jew. As to that accusation, Churchill had always been a fiercely pro-jewish politician, thanks to his father’s influence. He was outraged by the Dreyfus affair calling it a ‘monstrous conspiracy’. Moreover, Churchill came to the defense of Edwin Montagu who was the Secretary of State for India and a practicing jew. Montagu faced anti-semitic attacks by far-right Tories for calling the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre ‘terrorism’, a sentiment Churchill shared with Montagu. This was in 1919, decades before Churchill became insolvent.
Darryl Cooper’s portrayal of Adolf Hitler as a victim of circumstance, and Winston Churchill as a cigar chomping Bond villain is a fantasy devoid of any basis in reality. By picking and choosing facts to support his ideological vision, he’s spreading a dangerous form of revisionist history that must be refuted. He whitewashes the crimes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, while vilifying the only person who held fast against fascism from the start. The debt owed to the Old Lion by the West is incalculable. Winston Churchill always remembered the motto of his father, “trust the people” - he stood aside when he was voted out of office in 1945. Some say the British public was tired of the toffs getting them into wars, but others believe he was that class of hero who is only called upon in the most dire moments to save civilization itself.
I hold close the memory of a white-haired teacher in middle school in Florida, who had been a veteran of the Second World War. He told us how his unit had found a train wagon full of jewish corpses, whose doors were held shut by a flimsy lock with the Nazi swastika on them. His eyes hardened as he recalled the anger of the American unit at the lies of the German mayor who insisted he had no knowledge of the train. He never forgot the face of that man, who insisted with perfect sincerity that he wasn’t allowed to break the lock on the train, and he didn’t know what was inside. He knew. They all knew. Later, their commanding officer made the entire town clean up and bury the corpses.
Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, those who remember it are fast fading from this world. The lessons of that terrible carnage should not fade with them.
In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn. For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet though their bones lie in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.
Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance.
Sources
A list of books I relied on for this article. I recommend these to better understand the Second World War.
The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson
The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts
Churchill, Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts
Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front by Jeff Rutherford
Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis by Ian Kershaw
Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings
My friend Andreas Koureas has done journeyman work in debunking many of the false and conspiracist claims about Winston Churchill. His thread, and twitter account are well worth following.
Despite Darryl’s abhorrent and historically revisionist views, I don’t agree with the calls to deplatform people like him. Twitter owner Elon Musk may have business reasons for boosting Tucker’s show with a tweet drawing attention to the episode with Darryl. The only way to fight ignorance and propaganda is with better arguments.