Forget that toothless crackhead who says he had sex with Barack Obama. Never mind the lowlife pimp who cosplays as a lifestyle guru, Andrew Tate. This week Tucker Carlson scraped even lower in the barrel of cranks to find a guest for his chat show on X. He had on Darryl Cooper, a historian, podcaster and – wait for it – apologist for Adolf Hitler. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now reached the ‘Were the Nazis really the bad guys?’ stage of contrarian online blather.
Tucker’s chat with Cooper has caused a storm. As well it might. Also known as ‘Martyr Made’, Mr Cooper is a notorious historical revisionist. He has huge beef with Winston Churchill. Churchill, not Hitler, was the true villain of the Second World War, he says. He’s a giddy promoter of the myth that Hitler made a peace offer in 1940 but Churchill rejected it and insisted on plunging the world into war. Hitler the peacenik – who saw that coming down the pipeline of online bollocks?
What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.
For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.
Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault on Western civilisation in history.
Cooper’s theory of the Second World War, a theory gleefully lapped up by the Hitler simps of the batshit right, is a gross lie. Churchill became British PM on 10 May 1940. The Nazis opened their first concentration camp – at Dachau – in 1933. They invaded Poland in 1939. They invaded Denmark and Norway before Churchill came to power. And they invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the month he came to power. I don’t know who needs to hear this – in fact I do: the barbarous online right – but Churchill is not the bad guy here.
Those of us old enough to remember the great showdown between the heroic historian Deborah Lipstadt and the Holocaust denier David Irving should feel especially worried by what’s happening right now. We had good reason to believe that the fall of Irving, also a historian devoted to ‘revising’ our understanding of the Second World War, represented a fatal blow to Nazi apologetics. What Irving presents as his historical scepticism is in truth a ‘distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish’ belief system, said the judge in Irving’s libel suit against Lipstadt after she called out his Holocaust denial. Yet fast-forward 24 years and Irving-style revisionism is not only making a comeback but also going mainstream. Cooper is ‘the most important popular historian working in the United States today’, gushed Carlson. How long until he gets Irving on?
More and more members of the batsh*t right are tumbling down the toilet of historical revisionism. Foghorn hater of Israel, Candace Owens, recently described as ‘bizarre propaganda’ the idea that Josef Mengele conducted experiments on Jewish kids at Auschwitz. Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times calls these people ‘Hitler-curious’. Their swirling conspiratorial belief that we’re governed by a secretive ‘Matrix’ leads them to believe that ‘all [we’ve] been told about the nature of reality is a lie’, says Goldberg. And so they take aim at every truth of our society, mistaking such puerile disassembling of proven facts for ‘scepticism’. As Goldberg says, ‘once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense’.
A descent into barbarian thought really is what we are witnessing. And not just on the right. The crank right – with its war on the past, its philistine assault on truth, its vile obsession with race – is a mirror image of the woke left. Both rage with curious ferocity against Churchill: the woke leftists of the BLM era were vandalising Churchill statues years before Tucker had a Churchill hater on his show. Both relativise the Holocaust. The online right does it by suggesting the deaths of all those Jews was kind of unintentional; the crank left does it by calling everything it doesn’t like in the here and now, including Israel’s war on Hamas, ‘another Holocaust’. The former robs the Holocaust of its murderous intent, the latter robs it of its uniqueness: a right / left pincer movement of woke denialism that obscures the truth of what the Nazis did to the Jews.
And both seem hell-bent on upending our common history. On violating the truths and wonders of our past. On scrubbing away the wins of our civilisation that shape who we are. The online right’s intellectual lynching of Churchill is in many ways its 1619 moment. Woke leftists in the US have for years sought to unilaterally change the founding date of the United States from 1776, the year of the revolution, to 1619, the year slaves first arrived in America. The aim of this conceited, elitist project? To reimagine America as a nation born in sin, not revolution; hatched from crime, not democracy. Now, the crank right seeks to dismantle the foundational truth of modern Europe, a truth that rightly still moves us and informs our devotion to civilisational values: namely, that the Nazis represented an incalculable evil, and the Allies were right to wage a war to the last against them.
We joke about wokeness. We laugh at kids with blue hair who think you can change sex. We make fun of people who take refuge from words in ‘safe spaces’. But wokeness, in its truest form, is far from funny. It is a barbarous surge, coursing through the fibres of the internet and the thinking of our institutions, laying waste to every victory and insight of Western civilisation. And now we have a nexus of a morally exhausted right and a de-enlightened left, both awash with cynicism and contempt for the modernity we are privileged to inhabit. That we are witnessing an attempt to rehabilitate the actual Nazis is a testament to the threat all this poses to everything that is good and right. Reason has slept for long enough – it’s time to wake it up.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.
For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.
Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault on Western civilisation in history.
Cooper’s theory of the Second World War, a theory gleefully lapped up by the Hitler simps of the batshit right, is a gross lie. Churchill became British PM on 10 May 1940. The Nazis opened their first concentration camp – at Dachau – in 1933. They invaded Poland in 1939. They invaded Denmark and Norway before Churchill came to power. And they invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the month he came to power. I don’t know who needs to hear this – in fact I do: the barbarous online right – but Churchill is not the bad guy here.
Those of us old enough to remember the great showdown between the heroic historian Deborah Lipstadt and the Holocaust denier David Irving should feel especially worried by what’s happening right now. We had good reason to believe that the fall of Irving, also a historian devoted to ‘revising’ our understanding of the Second World War, represented a fatal blow to Nazi apologetics. What Irving presents as his historical scepticism is in truth a ‘distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish’ belief system, said the judge in Irving’s libel suit against Lipstadt after she called out his Holocaust denial. Yet fast-forward 24 years and Irving-style revisionism is not only making a comeback but also going mainstream. Cooper is ‘the most important popular historian working in the United States today’, gushed Carlson. How long until he gets Irving on?
More and more members of the batsh*t right are tumbling down the toilet of historical revisionism. Foghorn hater of Israel, Candace Owens, recently described as ‘bizarre propaganda’ the idea that Josef Mengele conducted experiments on Jewish kids at Auschwitz. Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times calls these people ‘Hitler-curious’. Their swirling conspiratorial belief that we’re governed by a secretive ‘Matrix’ leads them to believe that ‘all [we’ve] been told about the nature of reality is a lie’, says Goldberg. And so they take aim at every truth of our society, mistaking such puerile disassembling of proven facts for ‘scepticism’. As Goldberg says, ‘once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense’.
A descent into barbarian thought really is what we are witnessing. And not just on the right. The crank right – with its war on the past, its philistine assault on truth, its vile obsession with race – is a mirror image of the woke left. Both rage with curious ferocity against Churchill: the woke leftists of the BLM era were vandalising Churchill statues years before Tucker had a Churchill hater on his show. Both relativise the Holocaust. The online right does it by suggesting the deaths of all those Jews was kind of unintentional; the crank left does it by calling everything it doesn’t like in the here and now, including Israel’s war on Hamas, ‘another Holocaust’. The former robs the Holocaust of its murderous intent, the latter robs it of its uniqueness: a right / left pincer movement of woke denialism that obscures the truth of what the Nazis did to the Jews.
And both seem hell-bent on upending our common history. On violating the truths and wonders of our past. On scrubbing away the wins of our civilisation that shape who we are. The online right’s intellectual lynching of Churchill is in many ways its 1619 moment. Woke leftists in the US have for years sought to unilaterally change the founding date of the United States from 1776, the year of the revolution, to 1619, the year slaves first arrived in America. The aim of this conceited, elitist project? To reimagine America as a nation born in sin, not revolution; hatched from crime, not democracy. Now, the crank right seeks to dismantle the foundational truth of modern Europe, a truth that rightly still moves us and informs our devotion to civilisational values: namely, that the Nazis represented an incalculable evil, and the Allies were right to wage a war to the last against them.
We joke about wokeness. We laugh at kids with blue hair who think you can change sex. We make fun of people who take refuge from words in ‘safe spaces’. But wokeness, in its truest form, is far from funny. It is a barbarous surge, coursing through the fibres of the internet and the thinking of our institutions, laying waste to every victory and insight of Western civilisation. And now we have a nexus of a morally exhausted right and a de-enlightened left, both awash with cynicism and contempt for the modernity we are privileged to inhabit. That we are witnessing an attempt to rehabilitate the actual Nazis is a testament to the threat all this poses to everything that is good and right. Reason has slept for long enough – it’s time to wake it up.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
5 comments:
Brendan can get as worked up as he likes (and he's really frothing at the mouth in this article), but it won't change the fact that "revisionism" about the WW2 era as he calls it (the presupposition being that what is being "revised" is set in stone and cannot be questioned - like the sub-part and centrepiece of the era, and the founding and sustaining event of the post WW2 era of Globalism, post-nationalism, the denigration of White people, and mass immigration -all deeply connected - the holocaust) is increasingly being seen as a better account of the facts of the time, and that it provides a better explanation for all that has followed.
That people with ingrained thinking, and/or interest in maintaining accepted narratives, become so hostile when “revisionist” historical accounts are posited (and isn’t that how historical argument and debate is supposed to work?) suggests how unsustainable and vulnerable to question the established narratives are.
After all, when the post-1945 world order rests entirely on a set of narrative claims, the post-1945 order must necessarily fall if those claims are refuted and replaced.
We all know from Brendan's recent output how much of a shill he is for Israel, so it's no surprise that now he's losing his mind over any suggestion that the Judeo-centric version of mid-20th century history could be questioned, given how questioning it would obviously diminish his benefactors place in the hierarchy.
We are told that Germany wanted to rule over the entire continent of Europe, hence the war was fought to preserve the borders of each individual nation of Europe. But if that was the case, why within a few years of 1945 did the nascent version of the EU come into being and thus put Germany’s alleged dream into being? Moreover, Britain entered the war (by declaring war on Germany) to allegedly to preserve Poland's borders but by the end war, Poland was, by agreement at Yalta, left in the grasp of the Soviet Union? Neither of these facts are consistent with the 80 year old narrative.
Not only did Churchill's (or his sponsor's) insistence on going to war with Germany end up losing the Empire and bankrupting Britain, as well as opening the door for what has befallen all of Europe, it is a well-documented fact that he refused several peace offers from Hitler post September 1939, and ordered the bombing if German civilians prior to mid-1940 in the hope that Hitler would order retaliatory raids against British cities, thereby giving a casus belli for escalating the conflict with Germany.
Were Hitler and the Nazis innocent and pure? Certainly not. But it always takes two to tango, and these silly black and white moral narratives about WW2 (and other events) that we are asked to swallow seem increasingly tenuous. The difference is that now more than ever, people can talk about these issues more freely now, and find that many others share their doubts, whereas before, we had to take Steven Spielberg's version of events as the truth as unassailable.
i doubt if Carlson or Cooper have ever read (or seen the film) Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Not recommended if you are a light sleeper. Churcjills's not totally rational responses was fortunate, although the way UK ,Europe and here is headed i somtimes wonder
It never eases to amaze me how apparently intelligent people fail to aquaint with recorded history. There are very few left who have lived through the events of WW2 who can testify to the events as recorded.
One might consider that to deny the existence of photographic and written evidence is abhorrent and would gain applause from the perpetrators of the events themselves.
Unfortunately we see denial of historical events more and more, particularly when the truth is distorted to suit the current narrative. As is happening here in NZ
History is written by the victors, as Churchill eruditely pointed out. Both sides start writing the history of a conflict as soon as it begins (if not earlier), but then one is eliminated when the shooting stops; it could be said, therefore, that historical revisionism kicks in before the first 'official' history of a conflict even hits the press.
Thanks you Mme Blavatsky for echoing the thoughts of so many of us. The European theatre of WW2 and what led up to it does remain a taboo topic in Western society, the most reasonable non-conformists being gagged by threats of being jumped on from a great height by watchdogs such as the ADL. Less emotive is the Pacific theatre and it is an interesting lesson to school oneself about the modern-day Japanese approach to that conflict in official texts such as school history textbooks.
Madame Blavatsky +1
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