Why do all these neo-Nazis keep showing up in prominent conservative circles?
By See if you can guess where this is going:
Spoiler alert!
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson fawned over Darryl Cooper, whom he described as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” during a recent interview in which Cooper identified Winston Churchill as the “chief villain” of World War Two and appeared to argue that the Holocaust was an accident.
Cooper’s claims followed Carlson’s profession to be “highly distressed by the uses to which the myths about World War Two have been put in the context of modern foreign policy — particularly the war in Ukraine.”
“You know, Churchill’s the good guy, Neville Chamberlain’s the bad guy. You know it’s just, it’s too pat, it’s too, obviously, quite banal. But it also has justified, like, the killing of millions of people since the end of the Second World War. And so I do think it’s fair to ask like ‘What really was going on?’ So for example, I’m American, I’m not English so I don’t have any weird motive in asking this but how would you assess Winston Churchill?” Carlson asked Cooper.
Cooper replied by saying he’s “gotten in trouble” with his podcast partner, whose family admires Churchill, over this very question.
“I told him that I think — and maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, maybe — but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War,” said Cooper. “Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe and I don’t really — I really think that when you get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”
Edgy!
How about some lite Holocaust denial?
You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re- so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”
Is there a tweet? You know there is:
A certain Germanophile, whose name I do not wish to remember, came to my house that day. Standing in the doorway, he announced the dreadful news: the Nazi armies had occupied Paris. I felt a confusion of sadness, disgust, malaise. Then it occurred to me that his insolent joy did not explain the stentorian voice or the abrupt proclamation. He added that the German troops would soon be in London. Any opposition was useless, nothing could prevent their victory. That was when I knew that he, too, was terrified. . . .
Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.
Jorge Luis Borges on the liberation of Paris, August 23, 1944.