It’s not especially surprising that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who remains popular with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, would host a two-hour interview Monday with a crank “historian” who believes that Winston Churchill forced poor Nazi Germany into a war it didn’t want, and also that the Holocaust was basically a tragic accident that the Nazis didn’t mean to happen. If you’re noticing that that sounds a lot like the people sad that NATO forced Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine and also refusing to just give him what he wants for “peace,” then yes. That’s exactly what it is.
It’s probably not that much more surprising that Twitter owner Elon Musk promoted the interview to his millions of followers, or that Musk, as he often does, deleted the tweet after even quite a few Republicans expressed disbelief (real or pretended) that Musk would be pushing the views of a Holocaust denier. We can argue about whether “Oops, Hitler killed millions but he didn’t mean to!” is the same as denial. I’d say it is. Here’s Musk’s now memory-holed tweet, in which he says the interview is “Very interesting. Worth Watching”:
And to complete the Gathering of the Deplorables, it turns out that Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance also follows the “historian,” Darryl Cooper, on Twitter, as does Vance’s Senate press office account. Vance boosted a 2021 thread by Cooper that explained why it was perfectly normal to doubt the outcome of the 2020 election. Oh, hey, so did Tucker Carlson, very same thread! To be clear, Vance didn’t weigh in on this week’s Hitler stuff; like European gentiles who silently watched their Jewish neighbors being dragged off by the Gestapo, he was at most a bystander, or may even have missed the online dustup altogether.
Like cranks and hucksters always have, Tucker framed Cooper’s supposed history insights as the secret forbidden truths that THEY don’t want you to learn in the government schools, claiming that Cooper is a far better historian than mainstream writers like Jon Meacham and Anne Applebaum, who Carlson dismissed as “the dumbest people in the country” and “dishonest political actors.”
On the other hand, Cooper, who claimed that Winston Churchill and “Zionist” bankers pushed Hitler into WWII, offers nothing but uncomfortable “truths,” because he’s defending the West (?) and just being so gosh-darned honest. Cooper is a podcaster who bleats about hidden history on his “Martyr Made” podcast, whose title may be the most succinct version of white grievance: YOU PEOPLE made me an extremist, you see?
Incidentally, here is a not entirely unrelated tweet from Cooper during the Paris Olympics, saying that it would be far better to have Hitler in Paris again instead of those awful Christianity-destroying drag queens. For some reason, he deleted it later.
Oh lordy, we can’t even with this guy, who sounds like a slightly more sophisticated version of the Nazi Holocaust deniers I used to debunk on Usenet’s alt.revisionism channel 20+ years ago.
For a full rundown of Cooper’s highly selective history, which leaves out little details like Hitler’s raging antisemitism, the Nazis’ racial purity laws, and the fairly explicit records of planning for the extermination of Europe’s Jews, see this Media Matters discussion, which quotes Cooper’s interview at length and then debunks him.
The TL;DR version is simple enough, and ludicrously cherry-picked: Germany had legitimate grievances following WWI but England, especially Winston Churchill, wanted war, so he kept backing Germany into a corner and also into Czechoslovakia and the rest of Europe. Why, if Churchill had just left things alone after forcing Hitler to take over France, everything would have been fine, according to Cooper. But darn it, Churchill “wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany,” so he ignored the very reasonable peace offers from Hitler. Also, Churchill was a “drunk” and a “psychopath” and worst of all, an ally of Zionism, you see.
So it was really Churchill’s fault that Germany faced blockades and was unable to adequately care for the millions of political prisoners and Jews whom Hitler imprisoned, and so, sadly, “millions of people ended up dead.”
Isn’t the passive voice a wonderful thing? Mistakes were made. Cooper did say that Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions, but he frames even the Holocaust as a sort of accident resulting from poor planning, aw shucks:
Germany, look, they put themselves into a position — and Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it — that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth, that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.
Say, what about the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that followed the German army into towns in the east and systematically rounded up and shot Jews, to say nothing of the death camps? They’re strangely missing from Cooper’s explanation that millions died because of poor logistics and Churchill’s unreasonable restrictions on supplying Germany with food:
You know, you have, you have, like, letters, as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering, or people they’re rounding up, and they’re — so it’s two months after, a month or two after [Operation] Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people, and one of them actually says rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?
Again, the people murdered by the Einsatzgruppen were not in danger of starving. Nor were those who got off the trains at Auschwitz-Birkenau and were “selected” to go to the gas chambers, while those allowed to live were forced into labor and deliberately not given enough food. Darn that Winston Churchill for forcing Hitler to take such unpleasant measures to deal with all those prisoners.
Rightwing Trump supporters sure seem to like what Carlson and Cooper are selling; as the Daily Beast notes, Cooper’s most recent podcast shot to Number 2 (fittingly) on Apple Podcasts on Tuesday, ranked only behind Carlson’s pod interviewing Cooper. Expect to hear more from this fucker and his bold, “unconventional” take on history, although we’d argue that “The Jews Did It” isn’t especially original or new.
As for Carlson, he’s scheduled to host JD Vance at one of his Live Grifting Tour stops on September 27, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. We bet by then the two will have even more to talk about, since sane people will continue claiming that being associated with a vile Nazi apologist is somehow a bad thing, and Carlson will insist he’s being unfairly attacked by communists. Heck, maybe Cooper could join them and make the case for why he should oversee the dismantling of the Department of Education.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Mediaite / Media Matters / New Republic (republished at Yahoo News)]
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In case you were wondering, I did not "forget" to make an "annex the Sudetenland" joke, I simply chose not to do so. This time. That is all.
While the rich tapestry of history does require nuance and context, there are occasionally simple things that still hold true from childhood:
Captain America punched Nazis. So did Indiana Jones. They're the good guys, so punching Nazis is the correct response.