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September 5, 2024 - 2:30pm
The appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X interview series of Darryl Cooper, also known as “Martyr Made”, has set off an internet firestorm. The history podcaster claimed that Winston Churchill is “the real villain of the Second World War” as he declined a peace offer made by Hitler in 1940 and insisted on continuing the fight.
Cooper further asserted that the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity was a logistical failure rather than a deliberate policy. Cue a chorus of knowledgeable people challenging these and other points in the interview, and a great many more denouncing them as “Nazi apologetics” and “pure evil”, and Cooper as a “moron”, “sicko”, and “psychopath”.
I am not a WWII buff, and will leave critical commentary on Cooper’s factual assertions to those qualified to undertake it. Instead, what interests me about the discourse is the way it reveals an evolution among the Right towards an analysis of power and ideology broadly consonant with that already well-established on the “woke” Left.
“Woke” historical revisionism from the Left is a familiar trope in the culture war. Just last week we learned that the University of Nottingham has expunged the phrase “Anglo-Saxon” from its module on, erm, Anglo-Saxon England, in a bid to “decolonise the curriculum”. Across the pond, since 2019 the revisionist “1619 Project” has attracted conservative criticism not just for factual inaccuracies but also for the politically provocative move of challenging the received narrative of the American founding in 1776.
Cooper’s revisionism represents a Right-wing equivalent of the 1619 Project: a radical re-narrativisation, with a similarly tendentious relation to factual accuracy, of a politically load-bearing set of historical narratives. It’s also premised on broadly the same set of insights about the relation between historical narratives, ideology, and power as Left-wing “woke” revisionism, and particularly the crucial “woke” insight concerning the operation of power through language, narrative, and ideology.
The Second World War is, Cooper argues in this week’s interview, “part of the founding mythology of the world we’re all living in”. There does indeed exist a simplified account of the war, circulated via (mostly American) movies and in the popular and political imagination, in which the war was fought for “freedom and democracy” and against European racial atavism, and all the atrocities were committed by Hitler’s side. And there are numerous extant historical accounts of WWII that at least complicate this Manichean one. The great 20th-century English historian A.J.P. Taylor, for instance, is not a figure generally associated with Nazi apologism. But he viewed the conflict less as a cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good and evil than as a continuation of the First World War: a tragic consequence of European geopolitics that might even have been avoided had different judgements been made on European alliances in the Twenties and Thirties.
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SubscribeI watched Carlson’s interview with this strange person because I think Tucker’s stuff is mainly pretty good, including the interview with Putin where we could see the historical influences on his imperialist views for restoring Russia’s glory. Darryl Cooper in the beginning was sound about Jim Jones, but when the conversation turned to WWII, about which I know a little bit, it was clear that this library rat — he had listened to 2000 hours of tape recordings of Jones and found his views not unsympathetic! — I quickly saw he didn’t know what he was talking about and I switched it off. Carlson’s reputation has taken a drubbing and Cooper, a “historian” — really? — will sink into nutterhood.
If anyone on the right thinks acting as a retrospective apologist for Nazi depravity is a path either to popularity, or to intellectual coherence, they need their heads examined.
It’s not called the boomer truth regime for nothing. These are truths that boomers simply cannot bear to see interrogated. In Haidt’s terms they are sacred values.
The generation who lived through the war, and the generation who came after them, have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to understand how Germany (and Spain and Italy) fell into a cesspit of state-orchestrated murder and war, creating death on an industrial scale, while bringing ordinary Germans along with them.
Cooper, in Carlson’s interview at least, misses out huge swathes of core historical background. Yes, Churchill was a flawed and complex character, despised in places, as is well-known to historians in the UK, but he was given the role of Prime Minister eight months into the war, when his sheer bloodymindedness was deemed essential in the stand against a Nazi Germany that was expansionist and genocidal, and treacherous in its international negotiations.
Spain was neutral. How does Italy fit this description?
There is no question that Spain was killing political prisoners well after the end of the Civil War up until the 1950s. It also of course treated the entire defeated Republican population a second class citizens. It embarked on the mass stealing of babies from their “red” mothers. Not in the League of the third eye but unusually brutally repressive in its own right. And of course Franco was on Hitler’s side until it became expedient not to be.
Italian fascism gained power largely because of their extreme use of political violence, and eventually the cowardice and even corporation of much of the conservative state and political forces. The March on Rome could easily easily have been stopped by the Italian army but it wasn’t with the King’s connivance.
The Italian fascist state in power was subject to all sorts of corruption and never lived up to its ideals except in its foreign politics that expansionism, with the brutal ‘revenge’ conquest of Abyssinia and the farcical attempt of the conquest of parts of the Balkans. Nevertheless ideals and stated purposes do matter and the fact that the brutality wasn’t much worse wasn’t much to do with the fascist leadership.
Franco detested Hitler. he treated him as his mental and social inferior. To him, adolf was a ‘effing corporal’. Hitler’s loathing of Franco because of the way he dealt with him and his refusal to do anything he was asked, is well documented. Franco’s fascism was less doctrinal and more a doctrine of “I’m Franco, doing what i say is the whole of the law’. the left in spain were equally murderous, especially to each other.
Hilarious – you and a bunch of very unrepresentative people decide to use a hitherto unknown term the boomer truth regime” and then go on to say” it’s not called that term for nothing!”
The meaning, purpose and indeed moral complexities of the World War 2 have been hugely covered by the literature with passionate disagreement. However blaming Churchill for World War 2 is simply grotesque. Perhaps though it isn’t grotesque if you think it was fair enough for the whole of Eastern Europe to become part of a Nazi slave Empire. Why don’t you ask some Poles for their views on that?
How many of these “anyones” do you know?
By the way, I read an article by Bari Weiss in “Free Press” today, in which she threw a tantrum about the impending fascism in the person of this idiot. The subtext of the article was the slogan “Vote for Kamala”. The comments were appropriate, like “I thought for a long time about who to vote for, but between this guy and Hamas, I choose Hamas”.
.
I’m not exaggerating. The idiocy of American Jews is phenomenal
It may not say much for the American Old Right that its mouthpiece was now Tucker Carlson, but that tradition never has had much, if any, time for Winston Churchill, and nor did the British New Right when it was still New. Andrew Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955, holding it up as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. One may or may not agree with that view. But that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.
In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Will it still be there when Great Contemporaries was div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>reissued on 14 November? If not, why not?
In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, div > p:nth-of-type(5) > a”>over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. Yes, a book that says something genuinely new about the War. Those are not published every week. But one has been published this week.
All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, still less to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.
But the electorate was under no illusions while he was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two of them, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. It was Churchill who coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.
Churchill wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, he redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause. He presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. The famous dipping of the cranes for his coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. The London dockers, who had been as heavily Blitzed as anyone, anywhere. As for Churchill’s having “saved Britain”, it will be interesting to see whether anyone could continue to hold a serious academic or journalistic position in 10 years’ time and come out with that one. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes.
You clearly feel very passionate about Churchill and while I am not knowledgeable enough about him to know how fair or accurate your views are I would like to thank you for your detailed views. Something to think about.
Thank you.
Churchill’s Conservatives won 48% of the vote on a 83% turnout in the 1951 election against a very formidable Labour government, and the Liberal votes and MPs generally lined up behind the Conservatives also. Churchill was very widely personally popular, as evidenced by the outpouring of sadness at his death in 1965. The public were proud of the way he led and spoke for the Nation, particularly in 1940, and they were right to be proud. And Stalin’s USSR was not broken by war after 1945; it was emboldened by war.
The USSR suffered the greatest losses of both blood and treasure of any of the participants in that total catastrophe.
It had huge losses, yet on seeing the terms of “Western help” ie from the USA capitalists (absolute penetration of the Soviet market and therefore dominance by the USA…), Stalin refused, no doubt mindful that the “West” had tried to destroy the Soviets during the Civil War.
Far from being emboldened, the USSR simply “circled the wagons” to protect itself. No more would a threat from the West be tolerated.
Compare and contrast the attitude and approach of Britain, which became a US vassal…as it remains.
Then it would have carried on marching, all the way to the Atlantic. We have known for more than 30 years that it never have could have done, and never wanted to.
Tripe, from start to finish.
Feel free to reference contrary evidence…
And no, that isn’t just a disobliging comment, I would be interested to see…
Why would Churchill have praised Hitler in 1935 when Hitler was building up his military and arms? The Versailles treaty, which Hitler hated, stipulated that Germany could not build up an army or manufacture any arms.
For precisely that reason, one assumes.
The Versailles Treaty was considered by many sensible statesmen to be “problematic”, to say the least. However France would not consent to any major changes, hence its occupation of the Rhineland, and the “economic consequences of the peace”…
The Great War, both Parts One and Two, was disastrous for Britain, which should have stayed well clear.
Pretty much spot on, particularly about the “old mining areas” having a particular dislike for him, as I found out when I was very young in one of those.
As Churchill said ” history will treat me kindly, for I shall write it…” and he did. But we all grow up eventually and question fairy tales…
I haven’t read Andrew Roberts’s book (he seems to me rather “gung ho Tory”) but I will now…) as well as the other you reference.
There are a number of “revisionary” analyses of Churchill eg Churchill…essays edited by Blake and Louis, and Churchill’s Shadow by Wheatcroft…all worth reading.
Although I would point out that A J P Taylor did consider Churchill a great War Leader.
And he was certainly right that WW2 was a tragic consequence of the Great War…which most certainly does not make him a N**i apologist, despite the implication in the article.
It would certainly be interesting to know whether Lord Roberts, as he now is, stood by quite a few things in that book, such as his pronounced criticism of George VI and of the then Queen Mother. And what would the present King make of Roberts’s evisceration of Lord Mountbatten? But his searing critique of Churchill’s only peacetime Premiership has to be shared by anyone who stood in the tradition that began as Thatcherism.
“All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored.”
Are they? Churchill has always been a somewhat divisive figure, it’s not news and it’s not ignored. Even my dad born in 39, generally on the right politically and, like many of his generation, very interested in military hardware, told me as a child that Churchill was ‘the right man in the right place at the right time, but was bloody useless the rest of the time’.
Yes, sometimes you need war donkeys.
This is a bit too easy. You skip any achievements, and then blame the man for anything he has done, anything he has not done, anything he could not do anything about, and any idea he may briefly have toyed with.
If you are actually interested in facts, you might also consider his preparing the Navy for WWI, his insisting on convoying merchant ships (in the teeth of opposition from his admirals), and his contribution to the invention and production of the tank. Not to mention not surrendering to Hitler and pulling the country together for WWII.
As George Orwell (an extreme left-winger) said – published in the second half of WWII, in a polemic with a pacifist poet:
[…]
I’d gladly shoot his nibs tomorrow
Or now, if there was someone to replace him.
But, unlike some, I’ll pay him what I owe him
There was a time when empires fell like houses
And many a young pink who now is moaning
was glad enough to cling to Churchills trousers.
Contrary to the “movie” version of history, there never was any proposal to surrender, nor could Britain ever have been invaded.
Further, Chamberlain was an excellent Prime Minister who tried to maintain peace, to Britain’s advantage.
…expand your WW2 reading list Michael. Mr Cooper clearly hasn’t got to grips with the historical evidence advanced by the post-Churchill historians. It’s fine for Carlson to have a conversation with the likes of Cooper, but Cooper’s interpretations and extrapolations can’t withstand even cursory examination.
Which books do you suggest? Do they claim that there was a proposal to “surrender”, or that there was a realistic possibility that Britain could be invaded (despite having the world’s largest navy and Germany only Rhine barges to try to cross the Channel…)…
Okay, well, start with the two articles in this week’s The Free Press, by actual historians, Niall Fergusson and Victor Davis Hanson. Follow on from that and read their books on that War, as well as older works by the likes of AJP Taylor. You should also probably also take in the work of Davis Irving, who I suspect is the source of Cooper’s grossly uninformed opinions.
And Gallipoli.
Garbage from start to finish. Just one example, the supposed refusal to bomb the railway line to Auschwitz. The flight path to Auschwitz from UK bases was at the extreme of a bomber’s range, crossed almost the whole of occupied Europe and its air defences, the target was in remote, featureless, and poorly mapped areas, presented a target less than 10 metres wide when the miss distance of bombing at night from altitude was about 5 miles, and even if it resulted in damage to the railway line would have achieved absolutely nothing; the break was easily bypassed on foot, or the captives simply being left to freeze or starve where they were, if not shot. And Auschwitz was just one of many camps.
There’s a fundamental difference between a “critical re-reading” of history and just making stuff up.
It sounds as though you are alleging that Cooper has made something up? Other people speak of his punctiliousness in researching evidence. What do you think he has made up?
Offering contrasting interpretation is exactly what he is doing: to suggest that he is making things up will require you to back it up with some evidence. Have you got any?
‘Boomer vision’ is a terrible thing. They think they are virtuous but their delusions and obsessions are used against them by the far-left.
…go read at least two of the articles on The Free Press today, the one by Niall Ferguson, and the other by Victor Davis Hanson. Evidence based history.
Plenty of evidence. For instance see this piece by Dr. Niall Ferguson in which he refutes various claims by Cooper.
Niall Ferguson: The Return of Anti-History | The Free Press (thefp.com)
Suggesting that abundant and exultant Nazi atrocities were somehow forced upon the German leadership, for example through food shortages etc, rather than their obvious racial and expansion list ideology as clearly outlined in Mein Kampf, is indeed “making things up”.
Almost the entire purpose of the Third Reich was to implement these extreme ideologies all the other aspects such as full employment and even the preservation of the German people as we saw at the end of the war were tactical and secondary to.
Just an anecdote. A US prisoner in a Luftwaffe POW camp wrote that conditions weren’t horrible, but that the adjacent camp for Soviet POWs featured starvation. It’s difficult to attribute the difference to logistics, unless you start with a conclusion seeking support, punctiliously.
This is a really wise piece with considerable truth but “Woke” is not the correct term. Woke is a state of “enlightened consciousness” that allows one the “expert knowledge” to understand the truth and then change conditions.
This is more like an attempt to understand the past through positing questionable hypotheses about unchallenged narratives. Its not trying to impose a worldview but provoke a response that will create a more accurate summation of events.
Its a Dialectical or Socratic method of working through fact patterns. I think the “Hegelian Right” is a better term.
It’s a joke, you’re meant to smile.
No, she means it and I get why she’s saying it. They’re playing with historical metanarratives just like the Postmodern Left.
I agree with everything you’ve said, except that at this stage to call this element of the right woke is only done to provoke a response, and not to impose a worldview. It is within the dialectic and not trying to end or suppress a dialectic.
Most people on the right don’t intentionally think dialectically. They might do it or mimic the Left but it’s not “conscious.” The Left consciously tries to create changes through the dialectic. At least Tucker doesn’t. The only provocation he’s doing is talking to unapproved guests.
In whatever way the events of the 1930s and the Second World War are re-narrativised, it demonstrates a thinking and a politics that is stuck in that time.
In Germany the electoral success of new parties is met with a reaction from 1949. Using the Second World War to prevent political change today by dealing with the challenges of a lifetime ago, ones that were resolved then. Does interpreting such challenges as the Ukraine war in terms of the 1930s really offer any solution other than repeating the past by importing it into the present?
There are only about 160,000 people alive today in Britain who were alive during the Second World War, mostly as children. The effect on younger generations of having had no experience of the War or who have never known anyone who fought in it has been pointed out recently.
Anyone who has known such people will know that they broadly fall into two categories. There are those who detest war, even to the point of not being able to watch war films. Then there are those who chose to be defined by it, as if nothing in their lives happened before or since.
Additionally, meeting those who were children in the War but who are now elderly reveals people who, though having a child’s romantic memory of the Lancaster bomber (in reality an instrument of death operated by trained killers) for example, are realistic about the effects that a war today would have.
War can morally damage even those who were not alive at the time. Reconsidering it in the way he does, Cooper is in danger of this. The same can be seen in the way some become intemperate when Air Marshall Harris’s area bombing strategy is criticised. People, though not alive at the time, who are nevertheless rather like those in the 1930s who would not have thought bombing cities was a good idea but who by 1945 had at least come to accept it.
It really is a mercy that the younger generations no longer feel constrained by the straitjacket of the War, however interpreted, or feel it’s anchor dragging on them.
The big difference, of course, is that the 1619 project, and the ideology that underpins it, has been mainstreamed by academic, political and cultural institutions. Jones I believe actually won a Pulitzer for her dubious beliefs. This WWII revisionism is being promoted by some loon no one has heard of – at least for me – literally until today. This new narrative is going nowhere beyond the fringe.
It’s more interesting to try to follow the argument rather than trying to assess the speaker’s credentials. Do you want to be right, or do you just want to be in the right tribe?
Explain how Churchill was a villain?
Idk. I tried listening to it now that it’s a controversy and I couldn’t. It was nonsense.
I haven’t watched the video, but an endorsement by Tucker Carlson would be a fairly big deal. TC is the new truth teller for the Right, and in my view begins to sound quite unhinged if you listen to him long enough.
Isn’t the Internet great? The 1619 Project was carefully curated by the Regime NYT and publicized by Regime Narrative curators. Cooper is just some nobody with a podcast on the Internet that was picked up by Carlson, fired from FoxNews.
Who are these people on “the right” that people like Mary keep coming up with? I know many, many people “on the right” and none of them believe anything remotely like this. From what I can see it’s an army of straw men. I don’t know this guy Daryl Cooper. Sounds like I’m going to keep it that way. Seems to me that they get more views and have more influence – to the extent that they have any at all – by being featured in interviews and articles like these. Oh, I know you can always come up with the radical few – but after all, there are nearly 8 billion people in the world. You can find almost anything if you look. But how many people actually know any of them?
It sounds like you are more concerned with finding authority for your beliefs than finding arguments for them.
No he’s trying to understand stand how this guy represents “the right”.
Let’s hear then about your beliefs, Christian. What, for instance, do you believe about Jews?
Being a person on the right ,I agree with with your comment…Having watched Tucker occasionally over the years, I personally think that he did this interview for the obvious predicted reaction, He knows that his voice is less relevant in the conservative world & the word “desperation” comes into play
I think he did it because he doesn’t like Jews. The boy can’t help it.
Its an interesting premise and always a good idea to be critical of the consistent narrative in order to learn more even if it sounds illogical. But really it just helps to remind us of a time that was about as engaging on a world level that has ever been.
“But he viewed the conflict less as a cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good and evil than as a continuation of the First World War: a tragic consequence of European geopolitics that might even have been avoided had different judgements been made on European alliances in the Twenties and Thirties.”
Is this ‘no longer mainstream’ or just not discussed anymore because it is well known? Or is that Hollywood films shouldn’t be taken as authoritative opinion?
I think he’s been watching Tarantino too much.
The fact that Allies included the Soviet Union invaders of nine countries before 1935 and five in 1939, after killing millions of its own people, surely argues against the cataclysmic confrontation etc idea.
Great to see Tucker Carlson doing so well!
Comparing this with the 1619 project is not a good analogy.
After decades of far-left ( mainstream) revisionism, the 1619 project was simply further escalation.
Cooper’s work is just opening the door to an unseen cavern of history the far-left would rather no one enter, because it implicates them massively.
The main thrust of the conversation was about the horrors of the far left, ie, Communism in the 20th century. On the back of this I listened to his podcast called ‘anti-humans’. I urge others to listen.
Dear UnHerd, why did you remove my comment?
My view is that WW1 was the most consequential event of the 20 th century, largely resulting in the geopolitical events that followed, including WW2. I also believe that the Nazis were evil and WW2 did have a moral equation of right and wrong.
What’s everyone so scared of?
Author at least recognises what has existed and been evident for some time – a Woke Right exists which spouts as much twaddle as it’s Woke Left bedfellow. They feed off each other.
On the specifics about Cooper’s revisionist view – it’s not that new and been a belief in Far Right for many years. I welcome it gets further illumination so we can see these folks for what they are.
There was a reason Winny was so great, despite his many faults, and it was because he knew this sort of sentiment existed in rather larger numbers than we like to admit. He was never taken in by it. The Left has historical amnesia too of course and forgets how great Atlee thought Churchill was when it really came to it. And we can forget too it was Labour that got him into power (There you go just to add to historical cocktail)
I don’t think it new news that the Germans offered a peace to Churchill and that he rejected it.
By that point the Government probably felt more confident that the island would not face imminent invasion and even if we did Churchill knew we would control the air and that the Germans would be beaten out.
He would also have known that by hunkering down and spending time building up our war capabilities, taking the fight to the Axis in Africa and waiting for the probable intervention of the USA that Britain could afford to take time and wait it out.
What we did not need to do was capitulate to Germany by agreeing to a ‘peace’ that would neuter Britain and require our neutrality ongoing.
What Churchill did was in effect to stick up 2 fingers to Hitler and tell him to ‘bring it on’. It wasn’t the last time he did that right?
Good piece. Today it is unfortunate how easily both the Right and the Left are willing to sacrifice truth on the altar of myopic transient political imperatives.
I read it v many years ago, but I think David Irving’s biography makes a number of points hostile to Churchill. I don’t remember however his arguing that Britain should have made peace with Germany, or at any rate not declared war on Germany. Can anyone remember who has read the book?
We have two wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, which are being justified partially by using contested history.
A J P Taylor was describing the events which led up to WW2. The worst crimes committed by Hitler and the Nazis (for which they are now held to be the epitome of evil) were made possible by the war.
Although their are many differences it is perfectly possible to find elements in common between twentieth century fascism and populist ethno nationalist movements today. Including using “history” as a weapon.
Two quick points:
1) History isn’t the only subject that’s suffering from an excess of imagination. Climate, human sexuality, even ancient building techniques and others come to mind.
I’m beginning to suspect that this is mostly due to the very low quality of education these days. It’s plain as day, if you make a quick comparison of this year’s textbooks with those of 40 years ago. People like Daryll Cooper just don’t have the necessary skills to add much of anything worthwhile to the conversation. Discernment is an ability one must learn.
2) Having spent a life-time reading history it occurs to me that it’s a subject in which the truth is elusive, to say the least. Every event has too many perspectives to ever really know what the truth is.
Of course, that’s not a good excuse for manipulating the narrative at will. In that way I thoroughly agree with Mary.
I will stipulate that Cooper is another podcast nutcase and that what he represents may be fairly termed “Right Wokeism”. However, the phenomenon exists because for decades bona fide mainstream academic historians have dominantly instilled in their students the notion that “all history is revisionist history” ( see https://www.neh.gov/article/all-history-revisionist-history). The left resurrected revisionist methods of Fascists and Communists from a century ago quite effectively to promote its agenda and the modern right merely imitates their method. The 1619 Project is an example of the Left’s current leadership role in revisionism in the service of ideology. After all, when a generation of mainstream academic historians have sneered at the notion of transcendent historical truth, how can we be surprised that ignorant charlatans like Cooper and Carlson invent their own histories to suit their agendas? The Left demolished transcendent truth with historical relativism and now everyone is empowered to lie.
Cooper has a lot of information about WW2. Churchill was anything but a saint and future historians will be very critical of the blanket bombing of Germany. Likewise Hitler did have a global perspective. He saw the US as a threat to Germany, an argument that is not yet mainstream in Europe but will be after the Ukraine War ends. Cooper’s problem is that he doesn’t know how to process what he knows or how to present a new narrative about WW2 in a careful and sensitive way that does not negate the horrors that the Allies, imperfect though they were, took on and defeated. Tucker Carlson handled the interview very badly. I was frankly surprised by how inept he was.
This is an interview Tucker Carlson will regret doing. He let himself down. I had never heard of Cooper before I stumbled on TC’s tweet and am happy never to hear of him again.
What has happened to Mary Harrington, she’s finding bogey men “On the right” or “On the left”round every corner. Then she gives lunatic ideas oxygen through articles on Unherd. In fact I’d like to know what’s happening to Unherd, they’re feeding this weirdness. Can we keep some lids on some whacko ideas please, not spread them.
Tucker Carlson will implode soon if he keeps going, same with Candace Owens, does Unherd want to follow a similar path one wonders
“A.J.P. Taylor, for instance, is not a figure generally associated with Nazi apologism. But he div > p > a”>viewed the conflict less as a cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good and evil than as a continuation of the First World War: a tragic consequence of European geopolitics that might even have been avoided had different judgements been made on European alliances in the Twenties and Thirties.”
It was a continuation of the First World War, at least as far as the Germans were concerned. Both Hitler and the German generals saw it as such; unfinished business. As for ‘the right’, who exactly are they? you seem to mean fascists, as in proper fascists, not the ‘once voted for boris johnson’ ‘fascists’ currently defined by the left. I’m ‘rightwing’: God, Country, Family, small ‘c’ conservative, hate no-one that doesnt hate me, economically liberal by the original definition of liberal not the current ‘Liberofascist’ version. where do i fit into your article? i would see Tucker (now vanished so far up his a**s it seems he had a total mental breakdown) and cooper as fascists i.e. very firmly on the left; along with stalin, hitler, mao, pol pot, jeremy corbyn, mussolini etc
I found AJP Taylor’s expatiations highly edifying and entertaining. Those who were not alive and of age through the seventies and eighties have missed a class act. One question I had wanted to ask hi, if I ever got anywhere near him, is what would have happened had the US declared early on which side she would be on in the of a war breaking out. I think WW2 would not have happened.
They found one idiot on the Right and say “You all like him” because they all are angry aggressive idiots