Distractions, Distractions, Distractions

There's a time and a place for everything

Last week, Tucker Carlson posted an interview with popular historian and podcast host Darryl Cooper, a.k.a MartyrMade. They spoke about a variety of subjects, but a large part of the focus was on World War II, Winston Churchill as a leader and how history, including the history of World War II, is shaped and even manipulated to serve present-day goals.

The interview hit a nerve.

That’s an understatement.

Cooper made a very simple point. The foundations of the post-World War II liberal order are built on a particular vision of World War II itself as a moral crusade, with clear good guys and bad guys. That vision is, in large part, a myth.

The response, from left, right and center, was furious.

Here’s Bari Weiss, who sits somewhere left of the middle, I suppose.

“The illiberal ideology that has become increasingly mainstream on the political left—one that makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project—is inspiring a mirror ideology on the right,” Weiss Tweeted.

“That is exactly where we find ourselves, with an illiberal left that defaces Churchill statues—and an illiberal right that defaces Churchill’s legacy. With a left that insists 1619 was the year of the true founding of America—and a right that suggests the Greatest Generation was something closer to genociders. With a left that sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—and a right that sympathizes with the original ones.”

On “the right,” oily snake-in-the-grass Sohrab Ahmari made a typical legless denunciation, accusing Cooper of “relativizing Nazi evil” and even coining a new term—“the barbarian right”—to describe those who “[loathe] the mildly egalitarian conservatism that took hold postwar and made peace with civil right.”

You’ll have to forgive me, but “barbarian right” actually sounds pretty cool. I’ll be using that one in future.

According to Ahmari, the “barbarian right” is a motley crew of “writers, pseudo-scholars, and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought, including the idolatry of strength (as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate); the notion of supposedly “natural” hierarchies; IQ-based eugenics; overt racism and antisemitism.”

Various old Tweets were dug up—Sohrab likes burrowing for Tweets—as further evidence that Darryl Cooper is a Bad Man. A Very Bad Man.

Of course, the fact that Cooper was, for example, demonstrably pro-BLM in 2020 and has expressed support for mass immigration was ignored or simply forgotten. It’s hard to picture a latter-day Reinhard Heydrich taking the knee for George Floyd.

World War II revisionism, as it’s often known, is interesting. It’s also provocative, which I think we’ve established. And once you get past a certain surface-level reading of the conflict—the sort of dreck you’re likely to find in a Tarantino movie, complete with flamethrowers and baseball bats—it’s also unavoidable. The official narrative simply doesn’t hold up, whether we’re talking about the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or innumerable other facts and events, right back to the causes of the war or the actual aims of the parties involved.

You don’t have to denigrate the extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians who took part, whether they died or lived (two members of my family were killed on HMS Achilles when it was bombed in Portsmouth harbour by the Luftwaffe), or even condone the monstruous evils that took place, to ask a question like—Was Europe surrendered to an evil worse than Nazism?

Or: Who actually won the war? It certainly wasn’t Britain, in any obvious sense. Britain didn’t achieve any of its stated aims. It didn’t preserve the Empire and it certainly didn’t preserve the sovereignty of Poland. Churchill failed, on his own terms.

And Cooper is obviously right that World War II, and the World War II myth, has made it pretty much impossible to be properly right wing ever since. Above all, the foundational right-wing concern with demographics and the ethnic basis of nationhood is simply unacceptable in a world built on a condemnation and conflation of all forms of nationalist in-group preference with Nazi atrocity and industrialised mass murder.

But this is a distraction from what I really want to talk about, which is that this whole episode itself is a distraction—and a potentially harmful one, at that.

I don’t know why the interview was released this close to the election. Personally, I just think it was a mistake of timing. But it’s had the practical effect of tying Tucker, via Darryl Cooper, to Holocaust denial and Hitlerism, which means, by extension, it’s tied JD Vance to those things—Vance is taking Tucker on tour with him soon—and, by further extension, it’s tied Trump to those things as well.

Oh yes: it’s also tied Elon Musk—now a powerful Trump ally—to those things, since he made the mistake of retweeting the interview and commenting “interesting.” The Tweet was swiftly deleted. But it was seen, and that’s enough.

As if Trump’s critics needed further ammunition for their charge that he is, in fact, the second, more orange, coming of the failed painter from Branau-am-Inn. Trump is an enemy of everything America stands for and stood for by defeating Nazism in Europe. It’s perfect.