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After a controversial interview between Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper, in which Cooper claimed Churchill was, in fact, the villain of WWII, Tom talked to Churchill expert Andrew Roberts about the true political and personal history of Sir Winston Churchill, from the British Empire to the beaches of Normandy.
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SubscribeGreat interview.
Just once I wish one side or the other on some hot-button issue would fairly represent the other’s views when attacking them. What Daryl Cooper said can fairly be criticized, but it wasn’t fairly criticized here. Words were put in his mouth that he didn’t say. He and Tucker Carlson were presented as fools, which neither of them are.
Indeed, by these two ridiculing Daryl Cooper in this interview they prove his point: you can’t resist the accepted historical narrative without being ridiculed instead of being responded to.
The problem with that argument is that you need to be on stable and solid ground in this debate which Daryl Cooper almost certainly wasn’t then you are fair game. If you want respect and to be treated as an equal then you need to work hard to earn that.
If Cooper can’t even get when Churchill was even in power or even acknowledge Churchill’s friendship with Chamberlain or get when Bomber Command actually started its unrestricted bombing campaign correct (or acknowledge that the Nazis had already indiscriminately bombed the cities of Britain in 1940 and 1941) then he can’t expect to have a fair hearing with the preeminent historians of the UK let alone the world.
If only history had an end. What a relief that would be.
Churchill walked out of the Tehran conference at a grim moment. Yet Churchill put more than his name to the forced expulsion of German-speaking populations from eastern Europe as the foundation of a post-war peace settlement. And in a private meeting with Stalin agreed a concession to give Polish territory to the USSR, thus abandoning the very reason Britain had gone to war with Germany. Diplomacy or appeasement?
Which British politician today, and especially any wanting to emulate Churchill, would agree to both such things to bring peace to Europe in the Russo-Ukraine war? Why not if Churchill is our lodestone?
Though Churchill alternated on the one hand between arguing that this vast population transfer was logistically possible (observing ghoulishly that space in Germany had been provided by the deaths of 8 million Germans, and perhaps forgetting Air Marshall Harris’s efficient destruction of housing stock) and on the other what R M Douglas called Churchill’s ‘display of crocodile tears’ in his August 1945 speech in the Commons on this matter, he wasn’t single-handedly responsible for the bad Winter weather, the poor organisation, the food shortage, and the murderous actions of individuals in foreign countries.
The destitute and homeless women, children and the elderly were met with self-exculpation on both sides of the Atlantic. Gaza on a larger scale.
History is like the Titanic. Decayed wreckage scattered in the perma-dark. Fragments are dredged up from the abyssal depths either to be pawed over by obsessive experts whose books few people read or to be carelessly handled by partisan dilettantes.
Using these fragments as a guide to solve present-day problems is like consulting the Witch of Endor. Looked at from Moscow and overlain with the pattern of the Second World War, what does NATO’s expansion look like? Looked at from Western Europe and overlain with the pattern of the Second World War, what does the Russian invasion of Ukraine look like? History becomes a straitjacket. In the way that the biblical description has the spirit of God ‘clothing itself with Gideon’, the Israelite hero, so the spirit of history can clothe us – if we choose to wear it.
C S Lewis once wrote an essay called, What if this were the world’s last night?