Posted on 09/03/2024 11:35:58 AM PDT by Miami Rebel
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.”
“Why don’t you just make the case, make the case for that,” interjected Carlson. “You’ve made your statement, a lot of people are thinking ‘Well, wait a second. You said Churchill, my childhood hero, the guy with the cigar-”
“Yeah, well and the next thought that comes into their head is ‘Oh, you’re saying Churchill was the chief villain therefore his enemies — you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth — were the protagonists, right? They’re the good guys if you think he’s a villain.’ That’s not the case,” said Cooper.
He continued:
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?”
After taking that detour to whitewash the Holocaust, Cooper returned to his indictment of Churchill:
So get back to your like your main question about Churchill. You know, if you go to 1939, when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland, as soon as that war’s wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain. France, because they had already declared war. He was, he didn’t expect them to declare war, actually. There’s a, you know, a famous scene where he kind of throws a fit when he finds out that they actually did, that did they did do that. And so he doesn’t want to fight France, he doesn’t want to fight Britain. He feels that’s going to weaken Europe when we’ve got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there.
And he starts firing off peace proposals, says, “Let’s not do this, like, we can’t do this.” And of course, you know, year goes by, 1940 comes around and they’re still at war. And so he launches his invasion to the west, takes over France, takes over western and northern Europe. Once that’s done, the British have, you know, escaped at Dunkirk. There’s no British force left on the continent, there’s no opposing force left on the continent. In other words, the war is over and the Germans won, okay?
After arguing that Hitler again sought peace and a “strong” Britain to take on the communist threat, Cooper refocused on the British prime minister:
And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy who once he- Churchill wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany. And the reason that I don’t begrudge him that, you know, people can, national leaders, you can fight whoever you want. If, you know, if you feel like your long-term, the long-term interests of the British Empire threatened by the rise of a powerful continental power like Germany, and you need to check that, those are great power games, and you play them the way you feel like you need to play them — that’s fine. The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way, he had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers. He was literally, by 1940, sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest just to burn down sections of the Black Forest.
“Just rank terrorism, you know, going through and, starting to, you know, what eventually became just the carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods, you know, to kill- the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible,” he concluded. “And all the men were out in the field, all the fighting age men were out in the field. And so this is old people, it’s women and children. And they knew that, and they were wiping these places out, as gigantic-scale terrorist attacks, the greatest, you know, scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history.”
“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?’
Talk about word salad.
He was referring to Soviet POWs. Ofc many who survived the war were sent to gulags when they returned home.
“ One thing he stated was that Hitler never wanted to go to war with Great Britain or France. He really did not think that Britain and France would go to war with Germany over Poland.”
Hitler thought the US would join him, too.
He was a crazy psychopathic murderer.
“I was born and raised in TN, but I also lived in Australia for 25 years, and let me tell you, Churchill is reviled there.”
Not to mention Gallipoli in WW1.
I will read just about anything to determine if the author has a leg to stand on.
All wars lead to atrocities.
Hitler and Germany bear the lion’s share of the condemnation for starting the war and intentionally exterminating millions in the holocaust.
Britain and America did intentionally target civilians in their bombing campaign.
Russia signed the pact with Hitler that allowed Germany to start the war, used its troops as cannon fodder during the fighting, and allowed their soldiers to rape German women.
The biggest strategic blunder was allowing Hitler to violate the weaponry limits Germany agreed to in the treaty ending WWI when Germany was weak. As each year of Hitler’s rule progressed Germany built more tanks, bombers, submarines, and battleships, and trained more troops, aviators, and sailors.
In 1936 German troops retook the Rhineland on a bluff.
In early 1938 Germany annexed Austria.
In the Fall of 1938 Germany threatened war if the Sudetenland wasn’t ceded to Germany by Czechoslovakia. Britain & France coerced Czechoslovakia into yielding.
In the spring of 1939 Germany took the rest of Czechoslovakia.
In August of 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide Poland between themselves.
In September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war. France had a large army. Britain did not. Neither of them could offer any aid to Poland.
Five and a half years of brutality and destruction took place until Germany could be defeated and its war criminals could be punished. The lesser war crimes of the leaders of the victors went unpunished.
Innocent people who had no significant role in the decisions and mistakes that caused the atrocities of WWII bore the brunt of the harm.
Have world leaders learned anything from the worst calamity suffered by the human race? Probably not. The escalation of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is inching toward a wider war and possible nuclear weapon strikes. The mainstream trope that Russia is the bad guy and Ukraine a poor victim is fueling the escalation. What is needed is someone not hypnotized by this trope. So far, Trump seems the only leader of consequence that is willing to seek a less bellicose option. Yet, he is the one being vilified by the mainstream and targeted for assassination.
God help us all.
“So get back to your like your main question about Churchill. You know, if you go to 1939, when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland, as soon as that war’s wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain. France, because they had already declared war. He was, he didn’t expect them to declare war, actually. There’s a, you know, a famous scene where he kind of throws a fit when he finds out that they actually did, that did they did do that. And so he doesn’t want to fight France, he doesn’t want to fight Britain. He feels that’s going to weaken Europe when we’ve got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there.”
Interesting claims. My understanding is that Britain, France and Poland were allies. How could Hitler have not taken that into account? Also, if Hitler’s main concern is communism, why did he invade Poland, making an alliance with Stalin? Perhaps Hitler should have joined a French, British, Polish alliance to face communism.
I would not be surprised to learn that we have been misled on history. However, these claims don’t seem to present a coherent alternative.
Perhaps a “coherent alternative” is too high a standard in history, which often seems driven by internal dynamics. Biden-Harris seem to be sleepwalking us into WWIII. Few notice. Why should I expect logic, when good sense seems to be in short supply?
“Trump seems the only leader of consequence that is willing to seek a less bellicose option.”
So are Xi and Modi, but of course the former is in the tank for Putin.
As to the rest of your post, you make many valid points, but you don’t speak to the views of Carlson’s guest, Cooper, which point to Churchill being culpable in part for Hitler’s war.
Says Cooper: “The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way, he had no way to go back and fight this war.” So to Cooper suing for peace would have been the only acceptable course, and Carlson raises no objection.
Further, the glib dismissal of the murder of Jews and Poles as an unavoidable happenstance of an invasion that was too successful and rapid is downright sickening.
Hitler thought he could take us on, and we smashed him. We would have taken Berlin first also, if Ike had let Patton
No, Churchill was a simp for Stalin. No one rescued communism in the 20th century than Churchill.
By the time Churchill became Prime Minister in the late spring of 1940 the war was already in full swing. With Hitler & Stalin on the same side he had two bad options: surrender or fight on. He probably chose the lesser evil.
We would have taken Berlin first also, if Ike had let Patton
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Stalin could have easily defeated the Germans in 1944 if he wanted to. The Red Army was just outside of Warsaw in the summer of 44. Stalin wanted the Polish home army destroyed and he happily let Hitler do it while the Red Army watched.
This is just a hit piece on Tucker. It’s too bad that people here are falling for this BS.
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