Clearing the tabs -- of 1945 ...

Tucker is just this close to going full Candace Owens. Never go full Candace Owens.

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) September 3, 2024

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If you want to argue the alternate history of the Civil War, you don’t just start by understanding John C. Calhoun, you start by understanding Abraham Lincoln. The version of history Carlson chose to host and promote about World War Two is as deep as a 4chan thread and just as insightful. It is based on the aim of deceit, but with the arrogance of someone who absorbs history by osmosis. Why read a book? A podcast summary works just fine.

The American right has had a very rough go of it when it comes to promoting media careers. The combined forces of tens of millions of dollars spent on scholarships, fellowships, book projects, media training and public relations invested in a host of writers, commentators and publications has mostly turned up naught. Carlson is now just another example of a wasted talent who betrayed everyone who built him up along the way. 

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I have never heard of Darrell Cooper. But his claim that Churchill was “the chief villain of World War II” is ridiculous. To blame the widening of the war on Churchill when he was not even Prime Minister when Poland was invaded is absurd.

— Richard R Balsamo, MD, JD (@balsamo_r) September 3, 2024

Ed: This is true. Neville Chamberlain was still PM when the UK declared war in 1939, and didn't resign until after Hitler invaded France in May 1940 and unilaterally ended the "Phoney War" phase of WWII. Chamberlain, one will recall, was the PM that actually DID take Hitler at his word in 1938 and called the Munich agreement to dismember Czechoslovakia "peace in our time." You could look it up. And probably should.

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All this deserves a serious response, but before we begin, I will go ahead and concede at the outset Carlson and Cooper’s complaint that the “Munich 1938: Churchill vs. Chamberlain and the Appeasers” dynamic has been used and abused in the post-war period, often to our detriment. Not every foreign adversary is Adolf Hitler, and not every international negotiation is Munich 1938. But do you know who was Hitler? Hitler. What was a travesty as bad as Munich 1938? Munich 1938.

Cooper’s revisionist history is simply folly.

Ed: You know who was sympathetic to Chamberlain's decision at Munich? Winston Churchill. Although he strenuously disagreed -- calling it "an unmitigated defeat," to a chorus of derision in Parliament -- Churchill later wrote that Chamberlain had understandably desired peace and equitable settlement in Europe, and had been abused by an evil man in Hitler. 

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After watching a part of the Tucker Carlson interview of the “historian” I probably need to start with taking asprin for the headache of banging my head on the desk, and I want to make a point I’ve made here and elsewhere more than once over the years.

I believe in free speech. Period. That includes speech I don’t like. Tucker’s guest has every right to show his ignorance and worse to the world. Heck, done well, having on guests with contrary opinions (to you or to the accepted take) is a great thing. Done wrong, it leaves you looking like an idiot or worse[.]

Ed: Read Churchill's "The Second World War," an extraordinary history written afterward by Churchill himself. William Shirer also mentions it in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." I've read both several times, and both have the virtue of being written with plenty of supporting evidence; Shirer in particular had extraordinary access to Nazi records after the defeat of Germany.

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Here's one of Darryl Cooper's gems via @TuckerCarlson: "They [Nazi Germany] launched a war where they were completely unprepared for millions and millions of prisoners of war... and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead."

"ended up dead"!!! https://t.co/ZkqGLiSKdk pic.twitter.com/Vz4evqMEfW

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) September 3, 2024

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There’s an odd phenomenon on the left. They have decided to rewrite the history of JRR Tolkien’s orc creation from being a creature past the point of redemption and a manifestation of walking evil into a part of queer culture — a misanthropic anti-hero misunderstood by people. It is all part of redefining the deviant as normal and the normal as deviant.

Nazis are real live orcs and the progressive right is trying to redefine them as the misunderstood good guys of World War II. 

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Americans, even history nerds, don’t understand history, because they are too young. History is the unfolding, over centuries and millennia, of the inner logic of nations and geography. History was in Churchill’s blood, quite literally. In his bones. He understood perfectly well what every British statesman understood in June 1940, which was that the Fall of France had turned Germany into an existential enemy of the British Empire.

For a small island nation that imports most of its food, division on the European continent is a matter of survival, in the way that anti-nomad walls are a matter of survival for any Chinese empire.

Churchill would never have done it. Chamberlain would never have done it. No plausible occupant of Churchill’s seat would have done it, and if he had, he would have immediately been overthrown by Parliament and replaced by, well, Churchill.

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This school of thought believes Churchill should have made a deal with Hitler in June 1940, with many perverse arguments to follow.

Incidentally, a very distinguished historian of World War II and Churchill once told me privately that he checked the actual archived documents in many of Irving’s footnotes and could not verify Irving’s quotations or cites, concluding that Irving likely fabricated evidence. The historian, whom I won’t identify here, passed away before having the chance to dig further or issue his suspicions publicly, fearing a libel suit from Irving. But his examples shared with me were pretty convincing, and some of Irving’s fabrications came out in subsequent legal proccedings. Buchanan’s argument in his very bad Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War was simply derivative of Irving.

Ed: Google David Irving to find out more about his Holocaust denial and general historical unreliability. This stuff has literally been floating around for decades, and roundly debunked by historians and records captured by the Allies after the war. 

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Musk called the interview “very interesting” and “worth watching.”

Sometime after posting that tweet, however, Musk backtracked on that praise and deleted it. It is no longer on his timeline.

It’s unknown why exactly Musk chose to delete the tweet but it may have had something to do with the discovery that Cooper has a habit of siding with Adolf Hitler on a number of issues.

Ed: If Elon learned something today, all the better. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for many people. 

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We don’t need to go into all the ways in which this reductivism renders its adherents embarrassing curiosities (like I said, this is a well-trodden road). What’s more interesting is the psychological tendency that leads the intellectually curious to couple a reflexive hostility toward consensus with erudition. They seem to think that they sound smart when they insist that one of the foremost saviors of enlightened, liberal democratic civilization was, in fact, the author of our modern discontents. It’s a twist, a form of sprung logic — a clever reboot of a tired old property. But what do they get out of it?

The objective seems not to be to convince others of their outlook. The arguments they offer are unconvincing, and those arguments tend to be accompanied by veiled threats of coercion, which explains the limited effort applied to compelling argumentation. The goal seems to be to make a spectacle of themselves in the hope that you will regard their heterodoxy not as mulish contrarianism but clever iconoclasm.