THE choice between spending a couple of hours with a real historian or with a pretend one should be a no-brainer.
One is called Darryl Cooper, an American podcaster infamous for making Nazi apologist claims. He has been platformed by Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan – great for building fake, obsessive history market share. Cooper’s project is to re-create World War Two and to re-imagine the Nazis as victims of a shonky, Western historiography. Here he is with Joe Rogan.
The other is the British historian Sir Richard John Evans, FRSL FRHistS FBA FLSW, scholar of 19th and 20th century Europe with a focus on Germany. He has just done an interview with Winston Marshall, host of the Winston Marshall Show, who may or may not have been named after the other Winston. Evans, author of 18 books including his Third Reich Trilogy, is Britain’s most prominent historian of the Third Reich. His ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ came when he was the principle expert witness in a defamation case brought by the doyen of Holocaust deniers, David Irving (still with us, aged 87). Evans is not a one-trick pony with his demolition of Irving in the trial. He knows his Hitler and his World War Two. He is not to be messed with. Here he is with Winston Marshall, discussing ‘Why are they rewriting World War Two?’
This serious interview shows that in the age of the podcaster-historian, extreme caution is demanded. Evans covers Hitler’s (disputed) full-throttle anti-Semitism and his war aims, the real story of the war, lies about the bombing of Dresden civilians, Churchill’s alleged war-gaming and much else. He nails canards. He also shows David Irving, and by implication his spiritual descendants, to be an enemy of free speech. Something that the modern alt-righter engaged in this fight might be surprised to learn.
The anti-Churchill podcasts are all occurring at a time of division among the American right. Over . . . you guessed it, Israel.
What is driving these revisionist, amateur historians, apart from the desire for clicks and income? And the belief that ‘official history’ is by definition rigged and false?
Here is one theory that has a lineage going back to the end of World War Two and the birth of the postwar anti-nationalism consensus, that well-meant effort to end awful and unnecessary wars. The first iteration of this created the United Nations and the Popperian belief in the open society. Ironically, this all descended into globalism and stakeholder capitalism, aka WEF-world and Davos man.
Liberalism became tyranny.
This is the modern left’s linking up with anti-warism. An international liberal order has morphed into international, globo-cap fascism, as C J Hopkins calls it.
There are several back stories to this. Then there is the right-wing anti-war party.
The modern version of the anti-war party talks much sense on the futility of forever wars. Much of it has been a reaction against the rabid neoconservatism of the George W Bush and Dick Cheney era. The desire to impose American liberal democracy upon Middle Eastern Muslim countries in order to ‘fight terrorists over there’, to embed ‘our ways’ and so to end the curse of Islamist terrorism. Noble but idiotic.
The reaction?
You can find it at The American Conservative and in the continuing influence of its spiritual leader Pat Buchanan, the special consultant to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, and the father of paleoconservativism. The experience of fighting ‘terror’ through foreign ground invasions is a cautionary tale, to put it mildly. Fast forward to today. The money laundering going on in Ukraine provides the exemplar for the outsize influence of the military industrial complex, which caused the war through its backing of Nato adventurism from the 1990s.
Throw in Israel, and people go all silly. Israel must be forced to fit the narrative. See my other work on the crazy things that ideology makes people believe and say. It tips sensible, dissident history into poorly researched conspiracy theory. It gives conspiracy theory a bad name.
The merger of anti-war thinking with Israel-obsession also has a back story. Much of the Evans interview with Winston Marshall dealt with the ongoing influence of David Irving. The modern versions of Irving – think Buchanan, Cooper, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and (comedian!) Dave Smith – are sympathetic to Hitler, keen to diminish his role in causing World War Two, critical of Churchill, smelling Jewish conspiracies behind old and more recent wars, and lamenting America’s support for Israel and its objections to the global intifada. (Strange how the last bit tends to be overlooked by the Israel-obsessed. None of the modern anti-Zionists seem even to notice the Islamist threat).
The weird, anti-Churchill project of which Daryl Cooper is part is a product of the need to show all Western wars to be the futile and fevered efforts of a global Jewish cabal. One theory has it that Churchill was saved from bankruptcy by Jewish bankers. He owed them! If all wars are rigged and unnecessary, then the project becomes proving that all wars have perpetrators. Apparent goodies who are baddies. It becomes its own narrative protection. Ironically.
Evans, a real historian with absolutely no desire to exempt Churchill from criticism, shows that the campaign against Churchill in relation to World War Two is a lot of tosh. Churchill did not start the war. He wasn’t even in government when Britain declared war on Germany. He didn’t extend the war for the sake of it. Hitler bombed London first. Bombing Dresden and other cities was proportional, strategic and purposeful. Demanding unconditional surrender was reasonable. Hitler wasn’t a victim here. And no amount of history-sleuthing will make it so.
Yet the amateur, anti-Churchill campaign persists, and is propagated by faux historians with anti-Israel axes to grind. It is all very undergraduate, to be frank.
There is a reason why historians are trained. Even in these awful times where universities are generally a joke.
