Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Tucker Carlson did a podcast with Darryl Copper. Since he is the most important historian (really??) of our times, I need not explain who he is. You already know. People such as other historians, journalists, and twitter emotes rushed to express their resentment, approval, and bemusement. The general sentiment from the mainstream right was: off with their heads.

I viewed this simply as Tucker’s first real attempt at retail punditry. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it simply means a sort of cheap, persuasive packaging of ideas and thought, generally for the purpose of a mass audience which is fact-impoverished and poor in its ability to interrogate information. And no, I’m not an elitist. I’m an enthusiastic Walmart shopper.

Niall Ferguson wrote a fine article in response; Victor Davis Hanson wrote an even better one. But the best article of all on the topic was written by Mary Harrington, which she titled, “Darryl Cooper: Word War II Historian for the Woke Right.” The title gives you the idea of the thing; rather than shaming the historical sluttiness of Cooper’s assertions, she writes about the philosophy behind Cooper’s right-wing historical revisionism. I quote her at length:

“And where contemporary Right-wing WWII revisionists set out to challenge the more modern Manichean account, it’s because they see how powerfully it contributes to shaping the contemporary political landscape. No Right-wing victory today is complete without an op-ed lamenting how the moment resembles “1930s Germany”; no debate over the wisdom of international conflict can pass without someone alluding to “appeasement”.  And, more importantly for such revisionists, WWII discourse functions overall as a powerful containment mechanism for the Right.”

There is powerful truth to this: the international Left has turned Nazism into a euphemism for “The Right”; one need only count the grains of sand in the world to know how many times Trump has been compared to Hitler, or MAGA voters to those dirty, racist, nazi, red-hat-wearing (probably) bastards who made up the Repub….., I mean, the Third Reich.

Darryl Cooper in fact admits as much; according to him, real right-wing values became impossible to support after the Nuremberg trials. That is to say, right-wingism itself, implies Cooper, was on trial in Nuremberg, and the International Left condemned it as guilty on all charges. The “manichean” version of WWII is the Left’s story of how the Right became fascist, genocidal, and altogether intolerable.

Needless to say, I do not view Nazism as the authentic right-wing. However, I am trying to point out that Cooper, as a right-winger, has judged the Left as using WWII for its great story, or “myth”, in which the Right is the great force for evil and Globalism is the great force for Good. In Cooper’s mind, this story has been used to assassinate the characters of populist leaders, nationalist movements, and “right wing” values for 80 years. Thus he is trying to rewrite WWII. In his story, “the Right” is not as bad as everybody says it is. That great figurehead of Globalism, Winston Churchill, patron saint of Neo-cons, (yes, isn’t it ridiculous?), was the real villain of the Second World War.

Harrington has the insight to see Cooper’s project as very much in line with left-wing
revisionism, insofar as it is philosophical. Take, for example, the 1619 project. After all, the great conservative myth is the American Founding. Conservative values are those values predicated, in large part, on the founding. If one successfully destroys a myth, one successfully destroys a religion.

Conservatism is culturally weak because its stories, in the popular imagination, are lies. The American Founding was not a great accomplishment for the rights tradition, nor popular government. It was a compromise which allowed the moral atrocity of slavery, says the Left- wing yarnist with a sly, Darryl Cooper-esque smile.

And there’s the rub: (Harrington took all my points before I could make them!). Cooper’s project is as postmodern as the revisionists of the left. “It’s also premised on broadly the same set of insights about the relation between historical narratives, ideology, and power as Left-wing “woke” revisionism, and particularly the crucial “woke” insight concerning the operation of power through language, narrative, and ideology.”

To reduce it to Nietzschean terminology, history is a function of power. That’s Cooper in a cracked nutshell. Of course, this says nothing explicit about the responsibility of Cooper’s project. I myself believe it a load of rubbish from the point of view of history, but found it to be primarily interesting as a piece of rhetoric.

I mean, consider this: Carlson and Cooper talked for two hours about terrorism in WWII without once mentioning the Holocaust. This is a strategy so bold, I cannot help but admire from a distance. It is indeed an advanced strategy, one exposited forthrightly in the Associated Press’ handbook for journalists: Elephant? What Elephant?

Consider the absurdity of this revisionist point: Tragic logistical circumstances forced the Nazis to kill 2 million soviet soldiers and tens of thousands of Jews and civilians. Cooper blames the Nazis for not having a plan “to take care” of, at the “end of the day”, these unfortunate millions, even if the Nazis had to invade and violate their non-aggression pact with Russia because of Romanian oil fields and Ukrainian neo-nazis and, like, really bad, bolshevik, crazy, zionist, sneaky, underhanded, jew-type stuff.

How to respond?

Together, let’s try an exercise from Elephant? What Elephant?. I’m going to quote from “Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia” issued by the German High Command, and you have to forget these words were ever written as quickly as you find possible:

“Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. Germany’s struggle is directed against this subversive ideology and its functionaries. . . .This struggle requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance. . . .The members of the Red Army — including prisoners—must be treated with the most extreme reserve and the greatest caution since one must reckon with devious methods of combat. The Asiatic soldiers of the Red Army in particular are inscrutable, unpredictable, devious, and brutish.”

Or perhaps let’s try brief excerpts from “The Decree on Exercising Military Jurisdiction in the Area of Barbarossa and Special Measures by Troops”; you’re job is the same: wipe you’re mind without delay:

“Guerrillas are to be eliminated ruthlessly by the troops in combat or while escaping. . . . All other attacks by enemy civilians against the Armed Forces, its personnel and its retinue also will be suppressed on the spot by the troops with the most rigorous methods until the assailants are annihilated. . . .Where such measures were not taken or were not possible at first, suspect elements will be brought before an officer immediately. This officer is to decide whether they are to be shot. . .. Regarding actions committed by personnel of the Wehrmacht or its retinue against enemy civilians, there is no obligation to prosecute, even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or misdemeanor.”

Notice Cooper’s use of the phrase “take care of” the Soviet prisoners. Even if we grant fiction supremacy over fact and acknowledge Cooper’s version of events — that the Nazis were merely underprepared for the number of prisoners and even if we imagine a scenario in which millions of Soviets are not starved or shot, how would the Nazis have taken care of anybody? They Nazis were invading the Russians’ homeland, killing their relatives in uniform, raping them of their land, destroying crops, pillaging the wealth of the land. . . . and we’re supposed to believe that if the Soviets had only been well fed in the prison camps, the Nazis would have been justified for what they did in the East? This is not straight-faced, masculine lying. This is feminine insinuation of untruth. It makes Cooper worse than he would otherwise be in my own view. . . .

Oh well. Enough is enough. Falsehood is like a forest fire. It would be folly to try stamping it out; my one article cannot combat all the lies and half-truths. I can, however, observe elephants when I see them. Especially when they are on such a small table between two people doing a podcast.