The sacrificial Nazi
7 September 2024
So do you think that we are far enough away, eighty years from that war, where you can try to take as an objective a look as you can, and that will be allowed? (Tucker Carlson)
As always happens when anybody dares to question the Nuremberg consensus, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper earlier this week set off a tiresome round of self-righteous condemnations by the usual crowd of self appointed moral entrepreneurs. Some more sober critics, such as Mark Wright, the executive editor of National Review, patiently explained why they disagreed with Cooper’s claims about Hitler and Churchill and attempted to rebut them point by point. Most were not so abstemious, however, and preferred to fling insults and invective, accusing Cooper of purveying “Nazi apologetics” and “pure evil” or calling him a “moron” and “a psychopath”. Even the Biden administration joined in the moral panic, calling the interview “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans” and calling Cooper “a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda.”
The prize for the most hysterical outburst must surely go to that foul-mouthed Zionist blowhard, Amy Alkon, who, in another one of her unhinged rants on Twitter/X, called Cooper a “sicko,” “moral sewage,” and (predictably) an “antisemite” — which is a bit rich coming from a person who has described Islam as a “pernicious ideology.” Alkon also grossly misrepresented Cooper’s arguments; he certainly did not say that “mass-murdering the Jews was a humanitarian gesture.” In her rush to see antisemitism in everyone she disagrees with, Alkon clearly mistook Cooper’s reference to the millions of Russians who surrendered to the advancing German army in July and August, 1941, “a month or two after Barbarossa was launched,” for a reference to the Jews who died in the concentration camps. But it’s clearly too much to ask this feverish Witchfinder General to pay any attention to what Cooper actually said.
The first taboo: re-evaluating Hitler
So what did Cooper say to trigger such an avalanche of invective? Actually, he said a lot of things in the course of the two-hour twenty-minute interview, most of which the baying mob ignored. A transcript of the interview is available online for those who can’t bring themselves to watch or listen to it. Whenever I quote from the interview, I have relied on this transcript.
Before addressing the main bone of contention, it’s important to note what Cooper did not say. Contrary to the statement issued by White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, Cooper did not deny that the Holocaust happened. Nor did he praise Hitler or present him as one of the “good guys” — in fact he attempted to preempt such misunderstandings by explicitly stating: “that’s not what I’m saying.” Cooper knew that his attempts to forestall the usual knee-jerk reactions would prove futile, however, since he was calling into question, not historical facts per se, but the foundational myth of postwar America, “a core part of the state religion,” and “there are just certain things you’re not allowed to question.”
When you try to add any type of balance to that account, when you try to tell the story in a way that brings other approaches and other perspectives into it, it’s going to look like you’re trying to justify those other things.
The thing that really got everyone’s goat was Cooper’s claim that it was Churchill, and not Hitler, who was the “chief villain” of World War II. Note that this does not imply that Hitler was not a villain — simply that Churchill was even worse. This is clearly not an empirical claim, but an ethical one. And one might think that one is entitled to make one’s own moral judgments. However, this would be to forget the Nazi exception; you are free to make your own moral judgments about anything except the Nazis. Why? Because, as I wrote in another article, we are supposed to believe that:
the Nazis constituted, not just the enemy of civilisation, but an Absolute Evil, far worse than any group before or since — an almost supernatural, demonic force, not to be reckoned according to any normal, secular moral calculus.
The statement from the White House makes this clear:
Hitler was one of the most evil figures in human history and the ‘chief villain’ of World War II, full stop.
Interestingly, none of the critics mentioned Cooper’s discussion of the French historian and philosopher René Girard and his theory of scapegoating. In Violence and the Sacred (1972) Girard argues that when communities are threatened by social tension and conflict, they often resolve the crisis by identifying a scapegoat — an individual or group that is blamed for the problems–which is then expelled or killed. This act of collective violence temporarily restores peace by uniting the community against a common enemy. Girard believes that ancient myths and religious practices often mask the scapegoating process by presenting the scapegoat as obviously guilty and deserving of punishment, thereby obscuring the somewhat arbitrary nature of the decision to hold them, and only them, responsible for the crimes they are accused of. After telling Carlson that he is “a big fan of the writer Rene Girard,” Cooper went on to draw an explicit connection between Gerard’s theory of the scapegoat and national myth:
If you look through the myths of every society you can pretty much think of throughout history; if you look at the national origin stories of any nation or people that you can think of; it is almost without exception — and it may be without exception — that there’s blood at the beginning of that story. There’s blood in its frame, because it’s a sacred story.
And the most important national myth of postwar America is that, in defeating the Nazis, America saved the world from the most evil people in history. This, said Cooper, is “the founding mythology of the order that we’re all living in at this time,” and “when I say that, I don’t mean myth like that’s a myth [in the sense of] that’s a lie”:
That’s not what I mean. I mean that it’s a formative part of how we all understand the world we’re in, or at least officially like the official world, like that the structures we live in, structures we live in, it’s the justification for a lot of those structures, right?
I made a very similar point in a previous article on Medium:
This cornerstone of post WW2 “orthodox” Western history is crucial for portraying the superior moral virtue of the Allies and for obscuring the many equally heinous crimes that Britain, France, and the United States have committed themselves, including many genocides that rival or even surpass in both numbers and cruelty that committed by Nazi Germany. By presenting the genocide of European Jews in WW2 as a crime sui generis — not just another in a long series of holocausts, but as The Holocaust, as if it was the only one — the Allies were able to whitewash their own past and offload all their own sins onto the Nazis, thereby converting Germany into the most overburdened scapegoat the world has ever seen. The degree of sheer moral hypocrisy here is stupefying.
A crucial part of the scapegoating mechanism is that anyone who dares to question the simplistic dichotomy between good and evil that it implies has to be scapegoated too — has to be accused of partaking in the very same evil which the scapegoat is accused of. So anyone who dares to add any nuance to the story, or tries, for example, to understand the history of WW2 from the German perspective, is automatically denounced as a Nazi themselves, as Cooper pointed out:
And so when you do something like that with, I mean, again, like a historical event, like World War Two, where, I mean, the one rule is that you shall not do that. You shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world. Like how the whole thing from the First World war on up to the very end of the war, how these people might have genuinely felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimised by their neighbours and by the allied powers. And you can, and you can handle that with a sentence. You can wave it off and say, well, they’re justifying themselves or they’re rationalising their evil or whatever you want to say. But again, I think we’re getting to the point where that’s very unsatisfying for people.
And, of course, this is exactly what all Cooper’s critics did when they accused him of purveying “Nazi apologetics” and “Nazi propaganda” in the aftermath of his interview with Carlson. The irony was, of course, completely lost on them.
The second taboo: criticising Churchill
In the eyes of his critics, Cooper committed a double crime; not only did he fail to condemn Hitler as the most evil man in history, but he also failed to uphold Churchill as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. Churchill’s purported hero status is derived, of course, from his role in the mythical version of WW2 as the giant-slayer, the leader of a band of Hobbits who defeated the evil Sauron. Criticism of Churchill therefore undermines the myth almost as much as portraying Hitler as a human being instead of a demon with flashing red eyes and gnashing teeth.
Cooper’s main beef with Churchill is that “he was primarily responsible for that war [WW2] becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.” According to Cooper, Churchill should have accepted Hitler’s peace proposals in 1940:
Fall of 1940. There’s literally no opposing force on the continent. And throughout that summer, Adolf Hitler is firing off radio broadcasts, giving speeches, literally sending planes over to drop leaflets over London and other British cities, trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you. We don’t want to fight you, offering peace proposals that said: you keep all your overseas colonies. We don’t want any of that. We want Britain to be strong. The world needs Britain to be strong, especially as we face this communist threat and so forth like this. What’s going on? And I think that if there were people in Britain who, well, if they hadn’t — put it this way, if they hadn’t been so successful at delegitimising the peace approach by demonising Neville Chamberlain and so forth and holding him responsible for the invasion of Poland, that people would have been, they would have understood, like, we don’t need another repeat of the First World War, which is not what ended up happening, but that’s what everybody thought was going to happen. And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy, Churchill wanted a war. He wanted to fight Germany.
Some critics responded by arguing that Churchill was perfectly rational in refusing Hitler’s overtures:
Churchill rightly understood that the war was being fought for national survival … It’s too often forgotten — perhaps especially on this side of the Atlantic, by the likes of Darryl Cooper — that it was Winston Churchill and not the Appeasers in the British establishment, including the high-ranking members of Churchill’s own Conservative Party, who was standing in the great continuity of British geopolitical strategy that had guided the island nation successfully for centuries.
This too, of course, is a moral claim and not an empirical one. And anyone who thinks that “standing in the great continuity of British geopolitical strategy” suffices to prove someone’s moral virtue clearly has a rather old-fashioned view of the history of the British Empire, not to say a decidedly racist one.
None of the critics, however, addressed Cooper’s discussion of Churchill’s unusual fondness for Zionism, in the course of which he refers to an article by Churchill that was published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, a London newspaper, on February 8, 1920. Entitled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,” the article explored two contrasting political movements within the Jewish community: Zionism and Bolshevism.
Churchill begins the article by praising the Jewish people as remarkable and influential throughout history, attributing to them both great contributions to civilisation (such as Christianity) and a potential for subversive ideologies (like communism). He then categorises Jews into three groups: national Jews, who are loyal to their countries of residence and contribute positively to society; international Jews, whom he associates with Bolshevism, radicalism, and revolutionary activities; and Zionists, who advocate for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Churchill paints Bolshevism as a destructive, almost demonic force led by Jewish revolutionaries like Trotsky, and argues that Bolshevism is a threat not just to Europe but to Jewish communities themselves. Churchill sees Zionism as a useful counterweight to Bolshevism — a positive and constructive movement that offers a national solution for Jews, unlike Bolshevism’s international and communist agenda. As a way of supporting Zionism and thereby weakening Bolshevism, Churchill advocates for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine under British protection that would present a hopeful alternative to the spread of revolutionary ideologies. He also urges loyal Jews to actively oppose Bolshevism and support Zionism, arguing that this internal struggle within the Jewish community has global implications.
This is another reason why we’re not allowed to criticise Churchill — because criticism of Churchill might undermine support for Israel. And support for Israel is, of course, another key element in the national myth of postwar America that Cooper critiques, alongside the demonisation of Hitler and the Nazis and the corresponding deification of Churchill and the Allies.
And here we get, perhaps, to the nub of the matter — the real reason why Carlson’s interview with Cooper evoked such hysterical reactions from the Zionist thought police and the mob of fanatical antisemite-hunters like Amy “Asshole” Arkon. Support for the Zionist regime, and the corresponding demonisation of Palestinians, is such a core part of the postwar American world order that anyone who dares to challenge it is automatically cast into the same fiery pit to which this sanctimonious myth casts Hitler and the Nazis. Arkon’s demented rant on Twitter/X, for example, makes the connection with Israel explicit, while the grammatical errors suggest that she was not writing in a state of calm reflection:
Anybody who’s read any actual history knows Cooper is utterly full of it and using his fictionalized pretense of what the history is to push his hate to of Jews and Israel.
This sort of crazed hyperbole is reminiscent of Majorie Taylor Greene’s remark that “anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas” and the IDF line that “you either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.” The same simplistic dichotomy that is embodied by the mythologised version of WW2 — the same stark division of the world into good and evil — is used to equate the saintly Allies and demonic Nazis with the equally virtuous Israelis/Jews and diabolical Palestinians/Muslims.
The perils of counterfactual history
In the course of criticising Churchill, Cooper inevitably engaged in some historical revisionism. He is far from alone in doing so; WW2 is one of the most common topics in speculative fiction, and works of counterfactual history often explore what might have happened had Britain not gone to war with Hitler in 1939, or Germany not been defeated in 1945. Nor is it controversial to claim that the world might have been better off in this scenario. Counterfactual history is, however, fraught with potential risks, as one commentator pointed out:
I’m not going to denigrate revisionist history in its entirety or as a discipline. But Cooper is doing revisionist history in the most juvenile way possible: by assuming that his preferred counterfactual would have worked out better than what happened in reality, or that the various actors (including some very bad men such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, who are well documented to have sometimes made very poor decisions) would always act entirely rationally and in their best interests.
I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of this argument here, as it opens up so many rabbit holes that it would require a much longer article than I have time to write or you have time to read. Suffice it to say here that Cooper is at his weakest when he suggests that Churchill could or should have accepted Hitler’s peace proposals in 1940. The critics are right to point out that there was nothing in Churchill’s character or in the geostrategic logic of British foreign policy at the time to suggest that such a thing was even remotely likely, as Mark Wright pointed out:
Cooper asserts that Hitler sent out multiple peace feelers after his victory in Poland and after the defeat of France. But he would, wouldn’t he? Of course it would have been in Germany’s interest for Britain to get out of the war. But would it have been in Britain’s? The answer is undoubtedly no if it meant that a militaristic and hostile nation as powerful as Germany would be secure in its redoubt, established in its newfound possessions, and able to build up its strength across the Channel.
But while a peace treaty between Britain and Germany might be a highly implausible counterfactual, this does not prevent us from considering what the outcomes of such a scenario might have been, or evaluating these outcomes from the point of view of other peoples’ interests, such as the Palestinians. I briefly hinted at these counterfactual outcomes in a previous article when I suggested that, if Britain had not gone to war with Hitler, and the Nazis continued with their Holocaust unopposed by the Allies, all the Jews in Poland and Russia might have perished, and none would therefore have emigrated to Palestine after 1945. There would then have been no Nakba and no genocide in Gaza (nor, it should be said, any Hamas).
I was, predictably, accused of “hate speech” for daring to even imagine such a scenario, let alone thinking through the consequences. I had anticipated this sort of knee-jerk reaction and tried to forestall it by writing that:
It might seem obscene, if not downright impossible, to weigh up the pros and cons of one genocide against another, but this sort of thing is standard fare for population ethics, and there is no especial need for any extra squeamishness here.
But of course such caveats fell on deaf ears, as they always do when taboo topics are discussed or sacred values challenged. And this, of course, is the real moral of the Cooper interview and the mobbing that ensued.
