Here is what I wrote on another thread about both the historian being interviewed, and the conclusions he reached through his studies of the matter. These are my opinions. They absolutely will not align with everyone elses, but these are mine. As people often say here, “Your mileage may vary.”
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Okay, I listened to that interview. This hysteria is all BS.
Period.
Tucker apparently characterized the guy as the most honest historian, and I cannot disagree much with that. The guy is honest and says what he thinks. And I think some of conclusions he reaches as a historian are not just wrong in my opinion, but some of them border on the crackpot. That is my opinion.
Personally, I didn’t like the guy at all. But what I saw and what this hysteria shows is dishonesty or ignorance on the part of those piling on Tucker Carlson.
BEING HONEST AND BEING RIGHT ARE NOT THE SAME THING.
This historian may be quite honest. That is a different thing than being right, so I have no issue with Carlson calling him “honest”.
Watching the WWII section of the video, it is clear that the historian Cooper wasn’t talking about the Jewish Holocaust in the WWII segment. Never in the interview that I listened to did he say the Nazi’s didn’t mean for the Holocaust to happen.
Unless I missed it.
Did I miss it? Did anyone else hear him say that? If so, can you mark the time for me so I can go back? (I mean that...if I missed it, I want to know)
Cooper was clearly talking about Barbarossa and the lack of planning on the part of Nazi Germany in many ways, and one of them was the lack of understanding that there were going to be huge masses of people they were going to have to take responsibility for, and that they didn’t think that through or anticipate it. That is a fair assessment.
To go further, anyone who knows history understands that Barbarossa wasn’t fully baked in many respects, due to the fact that Hitler was pushing it, and the Generals were compelled to go along with it (and did to along with it because they did not grasp the enormity of that endeavor, underestimated the unknowns in the Russian military and variables in that campaign and were flush with victory in Europe, which didn’t help them object in the manner they should have.) and that is one of them. But that is as far as it goes with that.
I have never heard of this guy, and frankly, while I didn’t care for him in his presentation and many of the “conclusions” he reaches, he isn’t wrong on everything. I didn’t mind his way of thinking outside the traditional box, I have known lots of people who do that. Some of the things he said were the equivalent of putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and trying to imagine their thought processes. That is often both interesting and illuminative. I think some of the things he said were put forth in that mindset of looking at it from the “other side”, and I think people who might not be following the whole conversation but only getting a piece of it out of context and it would, of course, sound completely outrageous.
For example, it has been clear to me in many histories I have read that Hitler did not want to go to war with England, he thought that the British and the Germans were natural allies against the Russians, and he didn’t think the British would declare war on him if he invaded Poland. He thought they would be all bluster.
And his assessment of Churchill was loaded with a degree of personal animus that I believe clouded and invalidates his judgement in my mind. That is my opinion. Anyone who has read much of anything about Churchill, either written by him or by others knows that the guy was an extremely eccentric guy, even for a Englishman. He was also an extraordinarily heavy drinker who was able to consume huge amounts of alcohol each day that would put others under the table, but according to most people who knew him, he remained functional. I would characterize Churchill in retrospect as a high functioning alcoholic, something I know about since I viewed my father as one.
I objected to his characterization of Churchill as a “psychopath”. I thought it was childish and demeaning, and watching his demeanor as he made those statements reduced his credibility in my eyes. That I think very highly of Churchill must be factored into my response to it, that is plain, but something smacks of his treatment of Churchill that falls outside (in my eyes) the purview of an honest historian.
And I also take issue with his assessment of the firebombing of Germany. The world entered into unrestricted warfare in WWII. It is war. And when you see what the Nazis did to those people they subjugated, there is no doubt that factored in the Allies decision to engage in unrestricted warfare.
When one engages in unrestricted warfare (as some of the people on this forum wish to see happen in Ukraine) it is an absolute certainty that things will get out of hand. What the Nazis did to both Guernica and Rotterdam even BEFORE the Blitz showed that was the course things would take. It ended up with the round the clock bombing by the Allies. Germany would have done the same if they could have, but they couldn’t. That they resorted to the use of V1 and V2 weapons was only due to the fact that they couldn’t do it with conventional weapons. If they had nuclear weapons, they would have used them.
War is war, and once you go on the path of unrestricted war, you better win.
What the Nazis did to the Jews is proof that there wasn’t going to be mercy for any victim of the Nazis. The Holocaust wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t unintentional. It was planned. And that fact that Communists (the heroes of today’s Leftists, including the two people at the top of the Democrat Presidential ticket) have murdered far, FAR more many people than the Nazis ever did does not excuse what the Nazis did, and for THAT the Nazis deserved total defeat.
People I know disagree with me on this. It is my opinion. Others may feel differently.
Anybody see any similar paths he’s taken? Think Ann Coulter, O’rielly, Savage. The need to stay relevant. You don’t see them too much anymore on the tube.
Nothing new under the sun.
Cooper was clearly talking about Barbarossa and the lack of planning on the part of Nazi Germany in many ways, and one of them was the lack of understanding that there were going to be huge masses of people they were going to have to take responsibility for, and that they didn’t think that through or anticipate it. That is a fair assessment.
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It is not a fair assessment, it’s complete nonsense. The Nazi’s were planning on deliberately starving 10’s of millions of Russians when they launched Barbarossa. There was no lack of understanding. They knew full well what they wanted from the USSR, Lebensraum. To get it, Slavs had to go.
appreciate the write-up