Since Tucker Carlson’s interview with friend of the Libertarian Institute Darryl Cooper, the War Party apparatchiks have been losing their minds. The spectacle of War Party consolers lashing out at Cooper highlights the intellectual depravity of regime-sanctioned essential thinkers and the diabolical core commitments of the state.
The consolers will say and do anything to convince you of the legitimacy, the urgency, and the righteousness of sending your children to war. And the mythologies that Cooper dares interrogate are foundational to the structures of the existing world order that is voracious for the sacrificial blood of America’s youth.
Cooper hosts The Martyr Made podcast and co-hosts The Unraveling podcast with Jocko Willink. Tucker introduced him as “the most important historian in the United States” and voiced his hope that more Americans would experience and embrace his work.
The interview touched on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Jonestown religious sect, the Great Migration, the U.S. labor movement, mass immigration, DIY ethnic cleansing in Los Angeles, political elite identity construction via class warfare, World War II, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Right Honorable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill KG OM CH TD DL FRS RA.
During the interview, Cooper said a lot that could (and no doubt did) trigger the War Party. But it was his comments on Churchill and Nazi Germany that the insidious yet insipid backlash has focused on.
The White House condemned him and said his appearance on Carlson’s show was a “disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans.”
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives called him a “Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier.”
The Wall Street Journal demanded that Donald Trump “disavow” Carlson for platforming Cooper’s crimethink.
The New York Times called Cooper a “Holocaust revisionist” who “claimed the Holocaust was not premeditated genocide.”
The Washington Post called him a “crackpot” and “an obscure right-wing ‘historian.’”
The Hoover Institution tasked Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, and Andrew Roberts with penning consoling rebuttals.
Hanson spoke of “the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods.” Ferguson accused Cooper of “anti-history” and “neo-Nazism.” Roberts claimed Cooper was guilty of “staggering ignorance and disregard for historical fact.”
If one watches Carlson’s interview, it becomes evident that all these consolers are engaged in a fiendish misrepresentation of Cooper’s comments. He is not engaged in Nazi apologetics. He is merely illuminating “uncomfortable” and “problematic” and “narrative debasing” facts about British policy (and Prime Minister Winston Churchill) during World War II.
Cooper’s real crime was to recognize the fundamental narratives underpinning the U.S.-dominated world order as mythologies that occlude documented facts and the force of history. World War II is a sacred story for the United States Imperial Government (USIG) and its consoling intellectual bodyguards will do anything to defend it.
For example, the mythology would have you believe that Germany unleashed a bombing campaign on Britain before Britain began bombing Germany. Not true. Britain bombed Germany first.
It is true that Britain had given Poland a war guarantee. And it is also true that Germany went ahead with its invasion of Poland and bombed the Polish cities of Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Gdansk, and Wroclaw. And it was not until Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940 that Britain unleased a bombing run on Germany the following day, May 11, 1940. But Germany had not attacked Britain.
To be charitable, Hanson and Roberts directly acknowledge this fact, and Ferguson joins them in focusing on the devastation Germany wrought on Polish cities months before Britain attacked.
But in his anti-Cooper article, Roberts claims Britain’s bombing campaign was “only undertaken once Hitler and Göring had already bombed Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London.” Why pretend Britain’s bombing of Germany on May 11, 1940 didn’t happen?
Hanson has a more sophisticated move. He admits that Britain bombed Germany first, but justifies it on the grounds that Britain had to do something in reaction to German aggression on the continent and it used the only tools it had. But here is Cooper’s point: no, Britain did not have to “do something” and certainly not bomb Germany. Why pretend there was no choice?
A really clever rhetorical move is to point out that Germany actually bombed Britain first…on January 19, 1915, during World War I. So even though it was a few regimes later, they had it coming. Erik Larson deployed a subtle version of this in The Splendid and the Vile.
The book opens with Churchill taking the office of prime minister on May 10, 1940 as Germany has begun conquering France. It discusses the fear in Britain that Germany will begin bombing her cities and maybe even invade. It mentions the German bombing of Britain in 1915. And it never mentions the May 11, 1940 British bombing of Germany. There is even a chapter entitled “First Bombs,” that talks about Germany bombing the English mainland in June 1940. Why obfuscate like this?
Once again, to be charitable to the Hoover Institution’s historians and Larson, they buy into the greatness of Britain’s “liberal” empire. They view it as the defender of the West. Therefore, an attack on the West (albeit carried out by the West) was by definition an attack on Britain. But, do you want to send your children to war on that kind of thinking?
The reason the War Party resorts to lies, clever interpretations, and subtle trickery is that their project of endless violence and chaos does not serve the interests of the American people and they need to keep at least some of us hooked on the mythology. At least enough to fill the ranks of the military and intelligence agencies. They need to make us believe we have no choice.
If such duplicity is what history is, then yes, Darryl Cooper is a welcome provider of “anti-history” and his upcoming World War II podcast is sure to be epic.
