The continuing controversy over Tucker Carlson’s promotion and apparent approval of the heterodox revisionist views of Darryl Cooper raise two discrete questions.
Ah, the utopians, who believe that war can be abolished by hoping real hard. Lots of those hopers attended a dance festival for peace in Israel on October 7th, 2023. There is no peace in this world unless there are rough men ready to defend it from evil.
Around 1-2 minutes watching Darryl Cooper's interview, a thought occurred to me (This Thinking Always Dangerous) This guy is Not A Very Good Historian.
Tucker also called him (if memory serves) The Most Popular Historian Alive Today. I've Never Heard Of The Guy.
Tucker is very oddly insulated from the world. He's somewhat gullible, ignorant, and naïve. He has an open mind, which can be valuable, but can also mean he can be talked into a lot of nonsense.
"My slight adaption of this point is that when serious things are motion, no one has time for nonsense about what correct pronouns to use. . ."
I have long thought that should a really serious war (or depression) break out, the idiotic follies of the Left that bedevil our society today would be relegated once again to obscure cellars in Greenwich Village, and the real men would take over.
I used to think that when the Baby Boomers died off the world would be a better place. I didn't count on their infesting academia and infecting subsequent generations with the nonsensical Marxism of the Berkeley "Free Speech Movement".
It's pretty interesting how much heat merely questioning Churchill's choices have generated. We've invested so much energy into the idea that the Nazis were the penultimate evil that asking if there was another way to address them is not allowed. But Churchill DID make choices, and what followed as at least in part, a result of his choices. In 1940, Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination, and the Holocaust was not yet a fact. If you believe, as I do, that the British Empire had some good features, and the world would be better off had it lasted past 1948, the Churchill's choices might be worth considering. Tucker, Joe Rogan, and many others are interesting because they being people foreword who ask new questions and offer different perspectives. I'm not interested in hearing the same orthodox interpretations of events from the registered experts in any field, including WW2 history, and will judge for myself if a new interpretation is worth considering. To me, the best line in the entire Tucker/Cooper exchange was from Tucker, who said "The UK doesn't look like a country that won the war." And they don't, and neither does the rest of Europe. Churchill made choices, early, long before the real killing began, and now, the results are perfectly well known.
What they say in 2074 about 2024 depends on what happens around, say, 2030. Are we headed for catastrophe? In 1940, 50,000,000 people were alive that would be dead by 1945. It was a worst case, and that was not the only way. Appeasement or Total War weren't the only choices then, and aren't now.
I would encourage you not to rip Cooper to shreds about as yet unpublished exploration of the pre-WWII period and the decisions all of the principles made in the 1939/1940/1941 period. Cooper is an amateur historian with a decidedly populist world view. ( He is as much a cheerleader for Hungary and the Orban administration as you.)
His formative years are similar to JD Vance - chaotic childhood, followed by a long stint in the military and gaining direct front-line experience in Iraq. Darryl is the opposite of the pretentious, irrelevant academic historians you love to demolish on the 3WHH. From what I can tell he relies primarily on secondary published sources, however he did listen to more than a 1,000 hours of Jim Jones recordings to prepare his Jones Town Massacre series.
And he was intelligent enough to respond to Tucker in advance of touching the Churchillian "third-rail of history":
Tucker: "Do you think that we are far enough away, 80 years, from that war where you can try to take as objective look of the event as you can and that will be allowed?"
Cooper: "Ah, no I don't. I think we have a little ways to go on that. Umm, but I hope I can start to break the ice a little bit... when you have a mythologized historical event... whenever you try to add any type of balance of that account... it's going to look like you are trying to justify those other things... that's just how it's going to seem to people who are locked into that side."
As Wilde said: "The only thing worse than being talked about is being talked about." So the kerfuffle that has played out, as Cooper expected, appears to have raised his visibility even more than an hour+ with Tucker's 3 to 5 million audience.
Note that everyone is quoting the show notes, not Carlson's actual statement on the podcast: "I think you are the most important popular historian working in the United States today... I am a fan of yours because of the way you treat history, which is: with relentless curiosity and honesty... you get to what you think is true based on really intense research."
Important doesn't mean he is always right or the best. To me it implies he brings a viewpoint that is worth listening to, even if you completely disagree with the conclusions he makes.
What people often forget about WW II and its discontents: the entire imbroglio was based on eugenics.
Darwin invented eugenics. The University of London had an endowed chair of eugenics, endowed by Huxley, Darwin's cousin, by the 1920s. America was implementing eugenics - it was the first nation in the world to eugenically sterilize its own citizens against their will. The infamous Buck v. Bell decision affirmed that government had the right to sterilize its own citizens. In "Mein Kampf", Hitler pointed to America as his muse, and insisted Germany had to CATCH UP with America.
Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organization. Every American president since (and including) Teddy Roosevelt has been a eugenicist, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps GW Bush.
WW II was western eugenicists (Britain and America) fighting Central European eugenicists.
The eugenicists won. Cooper's statement about the Holocaust being almost an accident is not a minority view among historians of the period. Look at the location of the death camps - they are all in conquered territory. Prior to WW II, Hitler was hoping to export all of Germany's Jews to Madagascar. Hitler had a concordat with the Zionists to ship German Jews to British Palestine (the British famously machine-gunned the approaching boats filled with Jewish refugees).
Sure, the Wannsee Conference happened, but only AFTER WW II closed off all other ways to ship Germany's Jews out of Germany. Oddly enough, there is zero hard evidence Hitler signed off on the Final Solution. It's one of the odd quirks of history, but it's also a fact. Cooper's position is on the outer marks, but he bases his unusual interpretation on a set of undisputed facts. That doesn't mean he is right. It DOES mean there is a lot more to this discussion than will fit in a blog or a combox.
Don’t murder, bear false witness, commit adultery, or covet what your neighbor has. These ideas may not have been etched by lightning but they were written down a long time ago because some humans were doing those things back then, with bad results, and they’re doing them now. It’s human nature, not nurture. Give one 2 year old a candy bar then a second kid a bigger one and see what happens.
I am beginning to sense that things in academia have changed sufficiently that I can finally submit for publication my finished draft of The Warm & Witty Side of Heinrich Himmler. I anticipate criticism from the usual suspects that I am not really a "historian." I am in fact, a "history stylist" a professional mode, that, like it or not, will become the norm.
Philip Larkin, the great and beloved English poet, was also the jazz for The Telegraph for eleven years. He said that modern jazz was "ugly on purpose." The great jazz musicians who created it -- Parker, Davis, maybe he included Coltrane -- knew better; they had produced great jazz that was beautiful, that ordinary listeners could enjoy. But then they, Larkin writes, like the Cubists before them in the visual arts, went off the rails. It sounds as if James Q. Wilson reached the same conclusion as Larkin.
A lot of anti-Churchill revisionist "historians" conveniently forget that, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt chose to ask Congress to declare war only on Japan. It was Hitler's Germany which thereafter declared war on the U.S. and thereby brought the U.S. into the European War on Great Britain's side.
The natural state of human affairs is conflict... peace is merely the interregnum between conflicts. It is temporary and of undependable duration, a brittle hiatus. The only purpose for war is to dictate the terms of the next interlude of peace. Late strategist Colin S. Gray should be required reading. Let me recommend two of his works:
"Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy" and "Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare" - or why the next hundred years is not going to be any different than the last, or the centuries before that.
That said, Carlson beclowns himself... and that coming from one who never did watch or listen to him. Ignorant revisionist history is not the sole purview of the right -- see the 1619 Project, for example. I don't know if it is intentional in its distortions (as under Communism for sure), or aspirational in support of a world view? Wishful thinking or mindful malice? Some combination of the two? Regardless, it is recurrent regardless of political suasion. So thank you for this...
"This counterfactual is at least as plausible as the current speculations that if only Churchill had struck a deal with Hitler and preserved the British Empire, Western civilization would have fared much better since 1940."
The latter isn't plausible. Adam Tooze's exhaustive "The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916 -1931" chops that to ribbons. America is the main, though not only, reason. Even if we weren't there, we and what we might do was the ghost haunting every international confab. The British Empire was well on its way to dissolution. If not for WWII and the threat of Japan, India would have likely have been independent by 1940-ish. And it was Japan who sealed the deal that India would be independent sooner or later by showing that an Oriental power could, even if only for a time, defeat a Western power.
Darryl Cooper’s analysis is flawed by a “year zero” approach: nothing that came before the analyzed era affects the analyzed era. So the post WW2 Era existed on its own rather than-in the case of Churchill and his life—in the context of Edwardian-Victorian values.
But Cooper is correct in recognizing that Western Societies need to stop sending their middle class and poor off to war in foreign lands only to the benefit of the wealthy and governing classes. The conclusion is correct but his means of reaching that conclusion is erroneous
Ah, the utopians, who believe that war can be abolished by hoping real hard. Lots of those hopers attended a dance festival for peace in Israel on October 7th, 2023. There is no peace in this world unless there are rough men ready to defend it from evil.
Reclaim liberty and tyrants fall worldwide.
I am in awe at Steve's energy and persistence. If I start drinking whiskey, will I be able to write like Hayward...and Churchill?
It's worth a shot! What's the downside to trying?
Was that a pun? I prefer bourbon will that help my writing?
Alchoholism, which may not be a danger to you or to him but might be for me.😀
It might depend on how well you write before you start drinking whiskey.
Around 1-2 minutes watching Darryl Cooper's interview, a thought occurred to me (This Thinking Always Dangerous) This guy is Not A Very Good Historian.
Tucker also called him (if memory serves) The Most Popular Historian Alive Today. I've Never Heard Of The Guy.
Tucker is very oddly insulated from the world. He's somewhat gullible, ignorant, and naïve. He has an open mind, which can be valuable, but can also mean he can be talked into a lot of nonsense.
There's A Reason Why There Are Editors. Someone to say NO, Don't Do This. Tucker needs someone to say NO, Don't Do This.
I am reminded of The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour (film). No one was there to say NO, Don't Do This. They made something that was unwatchable.
No editor is preferable to the Federal government as editor.
Likewise, George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels.
"My slight adaption of this point is that when serious things are motion, no one has time for nonsense about what correct pronouns to use. . ."
I have long thought that should a really serious war (or depression) break out, the idiotic follies of the Left that bedevil our society today would be relegated once again to obscure cellars in Greenwich Village, and the real men would take over.
I used to think that when the Baby Boomers died off the world would be a better place. I didn't count on their infesting academia and infecting subsequent generations with the nonsensical Marxism of the Berkeley "Free Speech Movement".
It's pretty interesting how much heat merely questioning Churchill's choices have generated. We've invested so much energy into the idea that the Nazis were the penultimate evil that asking if there was another way to address them is not allowed. But Churchill DID make choices, and what followed as at least in part, a result of his choices. In 1940, Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination, and the Holocaust was not yet a fact. If you believe, as I do, that the British Empire had some good features, and the world would be better off had it lasted past 1948, the Churchill's choices might be worth considering. Tucker, Joe Rogan, and many others are interesting because they being people foreword who ask new questions and offer different perspectives. I'm not interested in hearing the same orthodox interpretations of events from the registered experts in any field, including WW2 history, and will judge for myself if a new interpretation is worth considering. To me, the best line in the entire Tucker/Cooper exchange was from Tucker, who said "The UK doesn't look like a country that won the war." And they don't, and neither does the rest of Europe. Churchill made choices, early, long before the real killing began, and now, the results are perfectly well known.
"In 1940, Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination, and the Holocaust was not yet a fact."
1. The Ideology behind it was A Fact.
2. Some of the camps were already in operation.
Also let me say Hindsight Is Always 20/20. It always drives me nuts when people long After the fact judge what some did or didn't do At That Time.
Makes me wonder that people will say in 2074 what people did or didn't do in 2024.
What they say in 2074 about 2024 depends on what happens around, say, 2030. Are we headed for catastrophe? In 1940, 50,000,000 people were alive that would be dead by 1945. It was a worst case, and that was not the only way. Appeasement or Total War weren't the only choices then, and aren't now.
Steve,
I would encourage you not to rip Cooper to shreds about as yet unpublished exploration of the pre-WWII period and the decisions all of the principles made in the 1939/1940/1941 period. Cooper is an amateur historian with a decidedly populist world view. ( He is as much a cheerleader for Hungary and the Orban administration as you.)
His formative years are similar to JD Vance - chaotic childhood, followed by a long stint in the military and gaining direct front-line experience in Iraq. Darryl is the opposite of the pretentious, irrelevant academic historians you love to demolish on the 3WHH. From what I can tell he relies primarily on secondary published sources, however he did listen to more than a 1,000 hours of Jim Jones recordings to prepare his Jones Town Massacre series.
And he was intelligent enough to respond to Tucker in advance of touching the Churchillian "third-rail of history":
Tucker: "Do you think that we are far enough away, 80 years, from that war where you can try to take as objective look of the event as you can and that will be allowed?"
Cooper: "Ah, no I don't. I think we have a little ways to go on that. Umm, but I hope I can start to break the ice a little bit... when you have a mythologized historical event... whenever you try to add any type of balance of that account... it's going to look like you are trying to justify those other things... that's just how it's going to seem to people who are locked into that side."
As Wilde said: "The only thing worse than being talked about is being talked about." So the kerfuffle that has played out, as Cooper expected, appears to have raised his visibility even more than an hour+ with Tucker's 3 to 5 million audience.
Note that everyone is quoting the show notes, not Carlson's actual statement on the podcast: "I think you are the most important popular historian working in the United States today... I am a fan of yours because of the way you treat history, which is: with relentless curiosity and honesty... you get to what you think is true based on really intense research."
Important doesn't mean he is always right or the best. To me it implies he brings a viewpoint that is worth listening to, even if you completely disagree with the conclusions he makes.
edit: "The only thing worse that being talked about is not being talked about."
What people often forget about WW II and its discontents: the entire imbroglio was based on eugenics.
Darwin invented eugenics. The University of London had an endowed chair of eugenics, endowed by Huxley, Darwin's cousin, by the 1920s. America was implementing eugenics - it was the first nation in the world to eugenically sterilize its own citizens against their will. The infamous Buck v. Bell decision affirmed that government had the right to sterilize its own citizens. In "Mein Kampf", Hitler pointed to America as his muse, and insisted Germany had to CATCH UP with America.
Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organization. Every American president since (and including) Teddy Roosevelt has been a eugenicist, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps GW Bush.
WW II was western eugenicists (Britain and America) fighting Central European eugenicists.
The eugenicists won. Cooper's statement about the Holocaust being almost an accident is not a minority view among historians of the period. Look at the location of the death camps - they are all in conquered territory. Prior to WW II, Hitler was hoping to export all of Germany's Jews to Madagascar. Hitler had a concordat with the Zionists to ship German Jews to British Palestine (the British famously machine-gunned the approaching boats filled with Jewish refugees).
Sure, the Wannsee Conference happened, but only AFTER WW II closed off all other ways to ship Germany's Jews out of Germany. Oddly enough, there is zero hard evidence Hitler signed off on the Final Solution. It's one of the odd quirks of history, but it's also a fact. Cooper's position is on the outer marks, but he bases his unusual interpretation on a set of undisputed facts. That doesn't mean he is right. It DOES mean there is a lot more to this discussion than will fit in a blog or a combox.
Don’t murder, bear false witness, commit adultery, or covet what your neighbor has. These ideas may not have been etched by lightning but they were written down a long time ago because some humans were doing those things back then, with bad results, and they’re doing them now. It’s human nature, not nurture. Give one 2 year old a candy bar then a second kid a bigger one and see what happens.
I am beginning to sense that things in academia have changed sufficiently that I can finally submit for publication my finished draft of The Warm & Witty Side of Heinrich Himmler. I anticipate criticism from the usual suspects that I am not really a "historian." I am in fact, a "history stylist" a professional mode, that, like it or not, will become the norm.
Philip Larkin, the great and beloved English poet, was also the jazz for The Telegraph for eleven years. He said that modern jazz was "ugly on purpose." The great jazz musicians who created it -- Parker, Davis, maybe he included Coltrane -- knew better; they had produced great jazz that was beautiful, that ordinary listeners could enjoy. But then they, Larkin writes, like the Cubists before them in the visual arts, went off the rails. It sounds as if James Q. Wilson reached the same conclusion as Larkin.
A lot of anti-Churchill revisionist "historians" conveniently forget that, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt chose to ask Congress to declare war only on Japan. It was Hitler's Germany which thereafter declared war on the U.S. and thereby brought the U.S. into the European War on Great Britain's side.
A quick look up tells me that Kipling wrote The Gods of the Copybook Headings in 1919. His Recessional was written in 1897.
Europe went mad in between, and that madness led to WWI. The Gods of the Copybook Headings encapsulates Kipling's view of it.
TR might have moderated the damage if he had been President rather than Wilson. But madness was in the times.
WWI had already bled out Western Civilization long before WWII. The wound was arguably mortal and was certainly self inflicted.
Or if Theodore Roosevelt had Not run and let Taft win?
The natural state of human affairs is conflict... peace is merely the interregnum between conflicts. It is temporary and of undependable duration, a brittle hiatus. The only purpose for war is to dictate the terms of the next interlude of peace. Late strategist Colin S. Gray should be required reading. Let me recommend two of his works:
"Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy" and "Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare" - or why the next hundred years is not going to be any different than the last, or the centuries before that.
That said, Carlson beclowns himself... and that coming from one who never did watch or listen to him. Ignorant revisionist history is not the sole purview of the right -- see the 1619 Project, for example. I don't know if it is intentional in its distortions (as under Communism for sure), or aspirational in support of a world view? Wishful thinking or mindful malice? Some combination of the two? Regardless, it is recurrent regardless of political suasion. So thank you for this...
"That said, Carlson beclowns himself... and that coming from one who never did watch or listen to him."
You should. When He is good, he's very good, But of late he's headed down the Isolationist road.
the 1619 Project, Bad History!
"This counterfactual is at least as plausible as the current speculations that if only Churchill had struck a deal with Hitler and preserved the British Empire, Western civilization would have fared much better since 1940."
The latter isn't plausible. Adam Tooze's exhaustive "The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916 -1931" chops that to ribbons. America is the main, though not only, reason. Even if we weren't there, we and what we might do was the ghost haunting every international confab. The British Empire was well on its way to dissolution. If not for WWII and the threat of Japan, India would have likely have been independent by 1940-ish. And it was Japan who sealed the deal that India would be independent sooner or later by showing that an Oriental power could, even if only for a time, defeat a Western power.
Very intelligent. On a truly high level. I am sure that all the future essays will be on this level
Darryl Cooper’s analysis is flawed by a “year zero” approach: nothing that came before the analyzed era affects the analyzed era. So the post WW2 Era existed on its own rather than-in the case of Churchill and his life—in the context of Edwardian-Victorian values.
But Cooper is correct in recognizing that Western Societies need to stop sending their middle class and poor off to war in foreign lands only to the benefit of the wealthy and governing classes. The conclusion is correct but his means of reaching that conclusion is erroneous