Historical illiteracy: it’s not just for the Left anymore
Man alive, obsessive JOOJOOJOOOOOphobia sure does lead some of us who really ought to know better into some pretty odd places, intellectually speaking.
No, Churchill Was Not the Villain
The historian Darryl Cooper has argued in an interview on Tucker Carlson’s show that Winston Churchill “was the chief villain of World War II,” which would be both interesting and indeed shocking were his thesis not based on such staggering ignorance and disregard for historical fact that it is safe to disregard completely.Cooper’s first argument was that Churchill “was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, something other than an invasion of Poland.” Yet in the moment that Adolf Hitler invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg at dawn on May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was not even prime minister. Unless Mr. Cooper is arguing that from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty—the head of Britain’s navy—Churchill was somehow able to force Hitler to unleash Blitzkrieg in the West, his first argument falls to the ground.
Hitler had planned his surprise attack through the Ardennes—the “Sickle-cut” maneuver—with senior generals such as Erich von Manstein, Erwin Rommel, and Gerd von Rundstedt several months before the attack took place. They bear responsibility “for that war becoming what it did,” not Churchill. Furthermore, they also bear full responsibility for the unprovoked invasion of neighboring Poland itself, about which Cooper and Carlson were silent.
In April 1939, when Churchill was not even in the cabinet, the British government guaranteed Poland’s security, so Hitler had no right to be surprised when Britain went to war with Germany when he flagrantly disregarded that guarantee.
Cooper’s next egregious error was to blame Operation Barbarossa on Hitler’s perception of a threat from Stalin, or a Soviet plan to capture Romanian oilfields, completely ignoring the genuine reason, which was the Nazi demand for Lebensraum—”living space” in Eastern Europe, especially in Belarus and Ukraine. One wonders whether Cooper has ever read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler’s ultimate intentions were made plain. Elsewhere in the interview he makes the outlandish claim that Hitler “no longer thought of Russia as an international Communist movement,” which contradicts all the evidence of Hitler’s public and private statements prior to unleashing Barbarossa.
Cooper next claimed that the millions of Soviet prisoners of war who died in German captivity did so because the Nazi leadership “had no plans for POWs,” ignoring the obvious fact, well supported by the sources, that in fact the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs were the deliberate Nazi plan for what to do with them.
Cooper goes on to castigate Churchill for not accepting Hitler’s peace proposals during the Phoney War from October 1939 to May 1940, stating that Hitler “didn’t want to fight France or Britain.” Yet by then he had invaded Poland, and had no intention of disgorging it, so the original casus bellum remained.
“The war was over and the Germans won by the fall of 1940,” Cooper states. Not so. The Germans had indeed forced the British from the Continent at Dunkirk by June 1940, but it is to Churchill’s everlasting and untarnishable glory that he kept Britain in the war until Nazi evil was extirpated. The war at sea was continuing, as was the war on the North African littoral. Greece came into the conflict in April 1941, drawing German forces south two months before Barbarossa. The battle was lost by Britain, true, but the war was far from won by Hitler.
Cooper’s wailing that Churchill rejected Hitler’s peace offers also fails to take into account the fact that had Britain made an ignoble peace in 1940, Hitler would have been able to concentrate all his forces on the East in his invasion of Russia in June 1941. Instead, he was forced to keep 30 percent of the Luftwaffe and considerable land forces in the western part of Europe. It was perhaps Churchill’s greatest act of statesmanship, that of a hero rather than “the chief villain of World War II.”
When Cooper blames Churchill for “demonizing [Neville] Chamberlain” in 1940, he is presumably ignorant of the fact that Churchill in fact asked Chamberlain to join his War Cabinet, where he worked closely and cordially with him, and then gave one of his greatest speeches as his eulogy to Chamberlain in November 1940.
“Churchill wanted a war,” claimed Cooper. “He wanted to fight Germany.” Not so. From the moment Hitler came to power in Germany, Churchill warned of the threat the Nazis posed to world peace, and how weak the West was militarily, but his solution was to rearm, not to monger war. He had fought in the trenches in the Great War and had lost too many friends in it to want another war, but he was willing to undergo it if the only alternatives were disgrace and dishonor.
Cooper then alleged, again without any evidence, that Churchill wanted war because “the long-term interests of the British Empire were threatened by the rise of a power like Germany.” Again, not so. All senior British policymakers recognized that the threats to the Empire came from Japan in the Far East, Fascist Italy in northeast Africa, and Russia in the Near East. Germany had no contiguous borders with the British Empire anywhere. A glance at a map would have shown Cooper that.
Cooper gave what Carlson called “the wryest smile I’ve ever seen” when he answered Carlson’s naïve question as to “What was [Churchill]’s motive?” in wanting to fight World War II. The true reason was that Churchill knew he needed to extirpate Nazism, but according to Cooper it was because “Churchill’s got a long and complicated history” that needed “redemption” because “Churchill was humiliated by his performance in the First World War.”
This ludicrous piece of cod psychology simply does not stand up. Churchill’s performance in World War I included being the man who got the Royal Navy ready for the war, who transported the entire British Expeditionary Force to France without the loss of a man in August 1914, who defended Antwerp during a crucial period that October, who undertook 30 trench raids in no man’s land as a lieutenant colonel, and who was the minister of munitions who provided the British Army with much of the weaponry necessary to win in 1918. The idea that the Gallipoli disaster, for which Churchill was ultimately though not solely responsible, made him feel a need for “redemption” a quarter of a century later is hogwash.
Cooper then describes Churchill as “a psychopath,” which surely says more about his own state of mind than Churchill’s. He goes on to make the accusation that Churchill “was a drunk,” which he was not, although he certainly drank a lot. Churchill could hold his liquor, and there was only one occasion during World War II when he was drunk, an astonishing achievement considering the pressure he was under.
I’ve not the vaguest clue what could have possessed Tucker the C to have this assclown on for an interview and treat with him as if he were actually a sane, sensible sort whose ahistorical revisionism was worth taking at all seriously, but I very much hope he gets over whatever it is and starts to feel better real soon.
Perhaps the single most crotch-chafing aspect of this spectacular, wide-spectrum self-beclownment—the Platonic ideal of what political pundits are talking about when they call some foolishness or other an “unforced error”—is the smear-fodder it hands, gratis, to salivating shitlibs, who will assuredly not let any moss grow on them before jumping in with both feet to take fullest advantage of the golden opportunity gratuitously provided them by Tucker, his out-there interviewee, and likeminded Jewphobic nitwits.
Not that I, you, or anybody else gives a fat rat’s patoot about what those “people” think, about anything. But still. To wit:
The shameful Nazi apologism of the Very Online right
Tucker Carlson’s chat with Darryl Cooper was a new low for the crank right.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.
And this, mind, not from a wild-eyed Leftard, but the more-or-less moderate Brandon O’Neill.
Be that as it may, the inexplicable Carlson/Cooper lovefest suggests a question or three. Namely: Have the asswipes both Left and Right really dragged Western Civ to the point where it must only be one or the other? That—Roosevelt, Churchill, and presumably De Gaulle having been stricken from eligibility in the “heroes” category because the (Not) Smart Set has re-evaluated them as WW2’s Worst Monsters—we’re reduced to a binary choice between either Hitler or *gulp* Stalin? Either it’s Nazi thugs marching or Manwoman degenerates prancing down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, no in-between option to be found anywhere along that wide, history-steeped thoroughfare? SRSLY, people?!?
Thanks a pantload for this stellar contribution to the public discourse, Tucker. New category for annoying twaddle such as this: Dem pesky ((((JOOOOOOOZ!!!))))














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