Who Was The Bad Guy In WWII? | Niall Ferguson
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But it's a fact that Britain has become a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society as the United States is today. And London is a cosmopolitan city the way New York is. These are realities.

If your response to these cities is, I wish Hitler had won World War II, then it seems to me you really don't have a place in a serious discourse about these issues. You've exposed yourself as somebody who would like to be aligned with the genocidal killers of the 1930s and 1940s. When we talk about World War II, there's no getting around Adolf Hitler and

and his vile evil plan for the planet. This is why World War II wasn't just a battle of armies. It was a battle for humanity itself. There's a narrative introduced recently that Adolf Hitler wasn't really interested in continuing World War II, that he offered peace to Britain and France, but that Winston Churchill, driven by some mysterious personal vendetta,

refused and kept the war going for his own perverse purposes. This is, of course, a gross misreading of history. It conveniently omits key facts about Hitler's true intentions. Like all of the facts, the truth is Adolf Hitler, of course, did not want peace. He wanted control. Anyone suggesting otherwise is engaging in dangerous revisionism that undermines the reality of the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler during the war. To assist us in weeding through these untruths is the one and only Neil Ferguson.

Ferguson is a Scottish historian who's made waves in both academic and popular circles. He's known for his in-depth analysis of economic history, empire, and of course, the big picture stuff, global conflicts like World War I and World War II. He doesn't just tell you what happened, he tells you why it happened, what could have been different, and how the war reshaped the entire global order. His analysis goes beyond the battlefield, digging into the economic and geopolitical forces that fueled the conflict. Neil doesn't just recite history, he makes you think about it in new and challenging ways.

Welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special. So, obviously, the bizarre podcast that set the historical world aflame was a podcast between Tucker Carlson and a person that he actually suggested was the best and most important historian working in the United States, most honest. It was a bizarre suggestion because the person he was speaking about was not, in fact, a historian. It was a person named Daryl Cooper who does...

a variety of long-form podcasts who then proceeded to make a series of pretty wild allegations about World War II. He suggested that Winston Churchill was the great villain of World War II. He made some suggestions that Hitler seemed to be rather misunderstood, which was a unique suggestion. So why don't we begin sort of from the beginning. The

contention was made that the West was effectively wrong in World War II, that the better thing for Great Britain to have done would have been to sit aside, allow Nazi Germany to take over the entire European continent, and then turn its eyes toward the Soviet Union.

How did World War II start? Was Churchill the bad guy? Was Hitler actually just a misunderstood person who just wanted a little bit more living room? What was the actual story here? Well, if Hitler was a misunderstood person who just wanted a little more living room, then obviously I've wasted my entire life since I spent most of my adult years writing books

books and articles about 20th century history and specifically about Germany where my career began many years ago now. I was puzzled by this podcast because

I couldn't quite understand why Tucker Carlson had decided to promote someone I'd never heard of before. Darrell Cooper's not a historian, at least not in any sense that I understand the term. He's never published any history books. And his thoughts, if they really deserve the name thoughts, are essentially a rehash of what the Nazis said about themselves

Let's just be clear, this isn't some incredibly challenging revisionism overthrowing the established ideas of a previous generation. What Cooper does is to resuscitate what the Nazis said, that Churchill was the warmonger, that in fact he had strange and suspect relationships

to Jews who were his backers, that Hitler really was a man of peace who was trying to protect Europe from Bolshevism, that the Russian prisoners of war on the Eastern Front just died because of bad luck and lack of admiration

adequate humanitarian aid. All of these things Cooper trots out in his conversation with Carlson. And apparently Carlson doesn't realize that this is the Nazi line that he's hearing. This is what the Germans said during World War II. And it's quite extraordinary to me that anybody should want to broadcast such a tissue of lies in 2024. I can't imagine why somebody would want to do that. Yeah.

It's kind of amazing. So one of the things that Tucker suggested is that he was distressed by the uses to which the myths about World War II have been put in the context of modern foreign policy. So if the objection is presumably to everybody comparing everybody to Hitler or that the World War II is used as sort of the great example for everybody who wants to get involved in a conflict, it seems to me that the best way to rebut that would be to say, well, that's because these two things are dissimilar.

So if you are, as Tucker is, not a fan of American intervention in Ukraine or even financial support for Ukraine, then try to distinguish it from World War II in a variety of ways. And we have these conversations all the time. But instead, he and Cooper decided to do something different, which was to basically say not only are the lessons of World War II being misapplied, World War II itself is

is misunderstood in a dramatic way. And again, I hesitate to sort of attribute intentions, although I think Cooper's intentions are relatively clear. I think Tucker's are rather opaque. When it comes to the actual history, which obviously you've spent your life studying, one of the things that Tucker says is, well, now we're finally allowed to talk about this stuff. As a historian, you're the historian, I'm not. I'm just a person who reads these books. It seems to me that people have been talking about this stuff rather a long time. And in fact, there are some pretty solid sources of

in the millions of pages about pretty much all of these topics. Yes, it's hard to think of a topic that has been more heavily researched than the origins of World War II or, for that matter, the rise of Hitler.

And so to claim that you can literally be thrown in jail for challenging some received mythology is bizarre. I wrote a chapter of my book, The War of the World, with the title Tainted Victory, making the point that there were all kinds of moral compromises involved in the victory that allies won, not the least of which was that they were in alliance with Joseph Stalin and

and the totalitarian Soviet Union. And I don't remember facing criminal prosecution for challenging the mythology of World War II. So this is a straw man, if ever there was one. I think the argument that Churchill's the villain is only one of the kind of crazy things that is proposed here.

Of course, there's a large revisionist literature on Churchill. There are lots of people who've made a career out of criticizing Churchill. On the right, there was John Charmney, to name just one conservative historian, who said, well, Churchill actually threw away the British Empire and handed world power to the United States. And then on the left, there's any number of post-colonial scholars who want to say that Churchill was a terrible racist.

But that's not what Cooper's telling us. Cooper is telling us that Churchill wanted World War II, that he turned down peace offers from Hitler on multiple occasions, that he actually enjoyed the war, that he was, quote, the chief villain of the Second World War, who was, I'll quote again, primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.

And if one delves into Cooper's argument, it gradually becomes clear what he's doing. One is to believe that Hitler's offers of peace in 1939 and 1940 was sincere.

he made those offers. But it was clear to Churchill and to others in the British government that what peace with Hitler implied was subjugation, was essentially accepting the outcome of the initial German campaigns, putting Germany in charge not only of Europe, but ultimately in charge of the world by subordinating the British Empire to German power. So these were not sincere peace offers, but

we are being told by Cooper and implicitly by Carlson that they were. I think the other really interesting thing that comes out of this strange dialogue is that Churchill thirsted to borrow

and kill German civilians, he brings forward the idea of firebombing, which was actually a part of the later strategic bombing campaign to 1940. 1940 was the Battle of Britain when the Germans were launching air attacks

attacks on Britain. And Britain's counter raids were really relatively small at this point and were clearly directed at industrial or economic targets. Not very well directed because, of course, there was no precision bombing then.

The idea that it was really the British who were doing the terror bombing, and he calls it terrorism, is straight out of Goebbels' propaganda. That's exactly what was told to the German population at the time. So if you're completely ignorant of history, you might possibly fall for this. If you know history, you recognize that what Cooper's doing is in fact rehashing the

the German propaganda of the 1940s to smear Churchill. And then the real giveaway is when we get to Churchill's relationship with the Jews. Not only we're told, was he a psychopath?

and a drunk, but he was also a dedicated booster of Zionism, quote unquote. And this is when, if you hadn't already spotted that there was something fishy going on, it's absolutely unmistakable. I'm just going to give you a little passage from the interview that stood out for me.

You know, he says to Carlson, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests, you know, in terms of Zionism. But also his hostility, you know, I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But, you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by

a media complex. So Hitler, the good guy, Churchill, pawn of the Jews, somebody who to some extent had been bribed to pursue his war against Germany. This is Nazi propaganda, Ben. How could anybody possibly want this to be broadcast to become one of the most popular podcasts

in the country. It's actually sick. And here is where I think that, you know, it is quite dishonest that the sort of backfilling tactic that Tucker has used in the aftermath of this, where he has suggested, for example, you just want to shut down open and honest debate. I mean, first of all, he wasn't openly and honestly debating Daryl Cooper. He had him on, proceeded to praise him fulsomely, essentially back all of his

And also, nobody is calling for the deplatforming of Tucker Carlson. They're pointing out that backing this sort of nonsense is actually a wrong thing to do. And Daryl Cooper would go on in that same interview to make excuses for the Nazi atrocities in

on the Eastern Front. I mean, he openly says that effectively the reason why so many people died in Ukraine and Poland and in the East was because Hitler just had made no provision for all of the various prisoners of war and civilians who were going to get in the way. And they just sort of died. You know, that happens to me all the time. I'm just, you know, living my daily life and suddenly there's a trench in my backyard filled with human bodies. I don't know about you. It happens, you know, and

It happens to the best of us, but what's the actual story with what Hitler was? It was an actual plan to starve people in these areas aside from the plans for the concentration camps and death camps. Right. So this is what's, again, deeply insidious.

What Cooper does is to rehash the excuses that were subsequently made for the German army's involvement in mass murder. Prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Convention, but Red Army prisoners died in their millions in German captivity. We think perhaps as many as three million Soviet soldiers died

as captives. And this was not an accident because they miscalculated the provisions that were needed. It was deliberate policy. And we know it's deliberate policy because documents like Rosenberg's Generalplan Ost, the Generalplan East,

specifically envision large-scale executions. And indeed, there were orders given after the launch of the Soviet invasion to German commanders to engage in, quote, a war of extermination. This was a phrase that Hitler was fond of, to weed out Bolshevik commissars and communist intelligentsia for execution. And what happened was that these categories were really quite elastic.

There was also a fairly clear indication that Jews who fell into German hands should be executed. So the idea that there was something accidental about the mass death in the German-occupied parts of Eastern Europe is completely false. There is absolutely abundant documentation showing that there was a plan, not just for genocide directed against Jews, but for the wholesale murder

ethnic cleansing, to use another euphemism, of the area under German control that implied not only the genocide of the Jews, but also mass murder of non-Jewish populations, to be followed by the resettlement of these areas by ethnic Germans. So to claim that this is not

that this wasn't the case. It's just to ignore decades of meticulous historical research by serious scholars. Neil, one of the things I think that, you know, is posited during that interview, and you hear this posited all the time, is the idea, again, that we just can't talk about this stuff. So there's this straw man history set up, and Cooper literally says this in the interview, that basically everything was hunky-dory under the Weimar Republic, and then all the Germans went simultaneously mad and elected Nazis. But

But again, one of the most hashed over questions in all of human history is what happened to Germany? Why exactly did Germany turn to Hitler? Why did reasonable people decide that they were going to vote for Hitler in, say, the 1933 elections? Why was it that social conservatives, people like Franz von Papen, decided that they would rather ally themselves

with Hitler and elevate him to a position in the government. And obviously, this is a subject that you've studied, you've written about, the wars of the world, folks, if you haven't read the book, it's a tremendous piece of work from Neil, specifically about a lot of these sorts of questions. So let's go through that. Why did the German people decide to elevate Hitler to a position of power?

Well, this is particularly strange to represent as forbidden fruit since the debate has been going on uninterruptedly since the 1930s when

Plenty of people from Bertolt Brecht to Thomas Mann asked the question, why are the Germans voting for this man? I think the literature offers all kinds of interesting explanations. What Cooper says is that he understands that.

the German people. And not only does he understand them, he sympathizes with them. Because, and here I'll quote again, they felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors.

Now, it's true that after the German defeat of 1918, the revolution of 1918-19 and the Versailles Treaty of 1919, many Germans were in denial about the fact that their country had lost World War I. And they were in revolt against both the republic that had emerged from the revolution and the peace treaty. But none of that, it seems to me, is news.

What's news is that somebody living in the United States today thinks that those grievances were a legitimate basis for the rise of Adolf Hitler and Hitler's pursuit of a policy that led to the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. It's the fact that Cooper is telling us not only what the Germans felt, which I don't think is controversial, but that

they were right to feel it, and they were right, therefore, to back Hitler that's so outrageous. So I think the literature, if I can cite one scholar, is in fact really nuanced on this. Michael Burley, a brilliant historian whose work on these questions I deeply respect,

wrote a fantastic new history of the Third Reich more than 10 years ago, in which he made the point that Hitler's rise to power is partly a result of these grievances, but it's also partly because Hitler had a very unique charisma and a vision of national regeneration that tapped into all kinds of popular impulses.

Hitler presented himself as a messiah, often used religious language of redemption, and especially appealed to German Protestants. In fact, practically the only thing that gave you any resistance to Hitler's appeal in Germany in the 1930s was being a Catholic. It's a very interesting finding.

So I think we can argue not only that the Germans had grievances, but that Hitler plausibly presented himself as a national redeemer kind of fake messiah. The Germans themselves were not thirsting for war. And when war broke out, there was a great deal of anxiety in Germany because, of course, the Germans had suffered heavy losses in World War I.

So the desire for national resurrection didn't necessarily imply war, but Hitler pursued war. And ultimately, you could argue, pursued the destruction of Germany. And this is something Cooper doesn't talk about, the death wish element that Hitler always had.

Because although Hitler achieved initially great victories, most spectacularly in 1940, he then embarked on a series of strategic decisions that were highly likely to be disastrous. Not only the invasion of the Soviet Union, but the declaration of war on the United States. In short, there's a very large literature on what it was that led Hitler to come to power and led Germans to follow him.

But this literature appears unknown to Daryl Cooper. Indeed, it's not clear to me what Daryl Cooper has actually read because he never cites any historian when he's explaining his strange worldview to Tucker Carlson. There seems in a lot of the arguments that are made about this from, let's say, not Daryl Cooper, but people who could be deemed sort of softer versions of Daryl Cooper, it's a

Pat Buchanan wrote a book on this in the 2000s, a sort of revisionist history of World War II. There was an implied counterfactual, which was that if Britain had cut a separate peace with the Germans in 1940, then that would have allowed the Germans to turn eastward, to have taken on the Soviet Union, to have rid the world of Bolshevik communism. And somehow this would have been better for the world in some way, which both

tends to downplay the mass atrocities that were committed by the Germans and also tends to, I think, ignore the fact that that would have had some knock-on effects, that if Germany had actually been able to conquer vast swaths of Eurasia and hold those vast swaths of Eurasia, that no peace deal with Britain would have then prevented some sort of consolidation of power between the Japanese and German spheres of influence to isolate the United States. That's right. This kind of argument has...

has a kind of history that goes back even further to the isolationists of the 1930s, Charles Lindbergh and others, who felt that the United States should stay out and who felt some sympathy with Hitler's goals, including his racial policy.

In a book called Virtual History that is quite old, it goes back to the 1990s, I and Andrew Roberts and a group of other historians tried to think through the implications of what we call counterfactuals, the what-ifs. And we tried to do it in, I guess, a more rigorous way than the novelists who've addressed this question, Robert Harris and Len Dayton. There are plenty of books that imagine Hitler...

But if you actually look closely at what Hitler's intentions were, what he would have done, if, say, he'd been able to launch a successful invasion of England in 1940, or if he'd been able to defeat the Soviet Union, if Stalin had never recovered from Barbarossa, we know that

But Hitler's plans were not peaceful coexistence with the English-speaking peoples. There was a megalomania to Hitler, an intention always to go further. The goal of war with the United States was a part of Hitler's worldview,

Brendan Sims has written recently on this, showing that anti-Americanism was a really important part of Hitler's ideology. Hitler had some somewhat confused ideas about the United States, but he certainly never intended, if he were victorious on the Eurasian landmass,

to leave the United States alone. The Germans had a plan to build a large Atlantic fleet, the Z-Plan or Z-Plan, which would not have been directed at anybody other than the United States had it ever been built. So I think there's plenty of documentary evidence that Hitler would not have stopped

at the control of Europe. He wouldn't have stopped at the control of the United Kingdom if he'd successfully invaded it. There was a goal that was world dominance in partnership, remember, with the Axis powers and initially with the Soviet Union. Because

people sometimes forget that the Soviet Union and Hitler were allies at the beginning of World War II. This is a problem for the people who would like to imagine Hitler as a purely anti-Bolshevik or anti-communist figure. Opportunistically, at the beginning of World War II, he was in alliance with Stalin and in a way

They were natural allies since they both represented extreme versions of totalitarianism. We'll get to more of Neil in just one second. First, are you still struggling with back taxes or unfiled returns? Handling this alone can be a huge mistake and cost you thousands of dollars. In these challenging times, your best offense is with Tax Network USA. With over 14 years of experience, the experts at Tax Network USA have saved clients millions in back taxes.

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For a complimentary consultation, call today 1-800-958-1000 or visit their website at tnusa.com slash Shapiro. That's 1-800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com slash Shapiro today. So when we look at Winston Churchill, who, as you have mentioned, was completely demonized in this interview, seen as the chief villain of World War II, what is Winston Churchill's actual role in World War II? Was he truly, as people think he was, and I believe he was, the indispensable man of

of World War II? If Winston Churchill had never existed, how does the war go differently? Well, I think A.J.P. Taylor, who was no conservative, was right when he described Churchill in a footnote in his English history as the savior of his nation. But I actually went further in a book called Empire, written more than 20 years ago, arguing that Churchill was really the savior of the West, maybe even the savior of the world. Because

At the darkest moment of British history, which was in 1940 when the British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from Dunkirk in

entirely losing its equipment and also losing many men, a return demoralized to Britain. And Britain faced the prospect of invasion and certainly the prospect of air attacks from Germany. There were many conservatives who were ready to consider some kind of settlement with Hitler. It wasn't as if there was unanimity that Britain should fight on.

But Churchill, having consistently argued in the 1930s that Hitler posed a mortal threat, that Britain must rearm, arguments for which he was reviled at the time, had by 1940 won the legitimacy that led him to be prime minister. And Churchill inspired this.

British people to fight on even when the odds seemed daunting. And remember, this was at a time when Britain was alone. France had collapsed. Hitler controlled all of Western Europe. The United States was not in the war. And Britain also had to reckon with attacks by Italy and Japan, the other members of the Axis.

So it's clear that Churchill was the vital factor, the indispensable man who rallied British morale and persuaded the British that they could fight on if necessarily alone.

Anybody who's not listened to Churchill's wartime speeches, which are some of the most brilliant speeches ever given, and also some of the most powerful prose ever written, has missed out because I think they're an indispensable part of an education. I used to play them to my children on an old audio cassette when I drove them to school.

You can't understand Churchill's importance until you realize the power of those words. And my grandparents often used to refer to the influence and inspiration that Churchill gave, even though my grandfather was no conservative. In fact, he was hostile to Churchill's domestic politics. But I think that's the thing that people miss.

And they missed that if Churchill had not been there and another leader, say Lord Halifax, had negotiated terms with Hitler, that would not have been the end of it. That would just have given the Germans the opportunity to prepare for the next phase of Hitler's plan for world domination. One of the claims that is constantly made about

Churchill is the suggestion by revisionists that, for example, the reason that Churchill did not sign some sort of separate peace was a pathetic attempt to maintain the British Empire, which, of course, I think ignores the actual terms that Germany would have imposed on Britain if they were similar to what were imposed on France.

then that would have meant presumably the dismantling or seizure of the British Navy, which would have meant a complete shift in world power. At the very least, it would have meant that the British would have to go neutral in the war in the Atlantic. It would have meant presumably access to oil resources in the Middle East that were controlled by the British and that Rommel attempted to gain in the middle of the war. And the follow-up effect of a peace between Germany and England

would have meant German world domination, essentially. And you can see why, therefore, those terms were rejected if you read the relevant parts of War of the World, which was my attempt to address these issues specifically.

War of the Worlds shows why the policy of appeasement was adopted by Churchill's predecessors, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, and why it failed. Not because of naivety, but because I think of a miscalculation about what would happen if you just played for time

Appeasement was about playing for time to rearm. The problem was that Hitler got the time too, and he made better use of it. When the moment of truth came and the idea of some kind of separate peace or some kind of compromise with Hitler was discussed, it wasn't too hard for Churchill to win the argument since it was so obvious to the other members of the cabinet that the peace was

was a phony piece that would have subjugated Britain and opened the door for

for German world domination. So I don't think anybody should take those peace offers at face value, especially as we have documentary evidence of what Hitler really thought. You see, the problem for Daryl Cooper, who's never done as far as I can see the necessary reading, is that he's unaware that even as Hitler was making peace offers, he was describing Britain as our hate-inspired antagonist, our eternal enemy, to the

the fellow members of the Nazi government in Berlin. So Hitler's own on the record as not being sincere in these peace offers. So Neil, one of the things that Tucker suggested about Daryl Cooper is he said that he was not using history as a weapon, a cudgel, or as a kind of propaganda tool. It seems pretty clear that precisely the opposite is the truth, that this entire sort of revisionist history is designed to push for an isolationist West that is friendlier with...

power. That obviously has been Tucker's foreign policy as a general rule. He's much more isolationist on foreign policy. And again, I think there's a case to be made with regard to World War II that this example does not apply. But the reality is that what World War II, the big lesson that everybody took away from the post-World War II era is that if you actually wish to avoid war, the thing you need to do is rearm in the 30s, is

in so as to avoid fighting a war in the 40s. Correct. I mean, the real lesson of history is that Churchill was right in his analysis of the threat that Hitler posed and right that rearmament should have begun much earlier. It was left too late

Too late to deter Hitler from taking the enormous risks that he took in 1938 and 1939 that ultimately led to the outbreak of war. But Ben, I think we have to look at this as something other than a spurious historical debate.

There's something else going on here which I think is important, and it's the contemporary resonance of these old Nazi arguments. There's a moment in the dialogue when Carson says to Cooper, "I don't see you as hostile to the West. I see you actually as a product of the West and as a defender of the West for its values."

And Cooper and he then start to riff on why Hungary is so much superior these days to England. And it's the critique of England that's especially revealing. But first, they say about Hungary, well, the Hungarians aren't afraid to say, this is Hungary. This is a country for Hungarians. This is a Christian country. This is our country. They don't have a problem saying that, Cooper says.

And then they talk about modern London. And this is worth savoring because it's so revealing. Carlson says, it's totally degraded. I try not to go there because it's so depressing. It's just so sad. It's so broken. It's not the country of victors. It's a defeated, completely defeated country that's subsequently been invaded. If Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the streets of London?

And London is not majority English now. Like what? And Cooper says, well, the people who formulated the version of history that considers Churchill a hero, they like London the way it is now. So one sees here what's really going on. This is something like the conversation that Tucker Carlson had with Vladimir Putin, which

was equally bad from the point of view of its historiographical accuracy. Carlsen allowed Putin to tell a complete farrago of lies about Russian and Ukrainian history in that interview. But the real point is not the history. The history is just a means to an end. And the end is to promote the idea that some terrible degradation has happened to Britain because of immigration issues.

And really, it would be much better if Britain were more like Hungary and perhaps also more like Russia, though they don't explicitly say that. So I think it becomes clear by the end of the dialogue that this isn't really a serious discussion of history at all. It's really about reviving arguments from the 1930s and 1940s in order to deploy them

in this argument on the right about what do you do about mass migration and the emergence of a multi-ethnic Western Europe. They don't quite go right into great replacement theory, but that's clearly where the conversation is heading by the end. I think that's the point of this discussion, just in the same way that the

conversation with Putin was not really about Russian history. It was really about legitimizing Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This is the great irony of these conversations. We are living through right now a fascist regime attacking a democracy. Russia is the fascist regime, Putin's the dictator,

They attacked Ukraine two and a half years ago, and they've committed heinous war crimes, not on the scale of the Nazis, but certainly war crimes. And for whatever reason, perhaps one day this will be explained to me, Tucker Carlson, who was once a really talented broadcaster, has decided to legitimize Putin's regime to

also stand up for the one European country that is sympathetic to Putin, which is Hungary and its leader Viktor Orban, and to give airtime to people who want to tell spurious historical stories to support the argument that that's the West. Now, if Hungary, if Budapest and Russia and Moscow, if that's the West, then

then I'm geographically confused, Ben, because that was never the West when I was in high school. And what's kind of amazing is the attempt to inject that debate into the World War II debate, because you can certainly make the argument that Britain has been too lax on immigration. It's one of the things that drove Brexit, for example. I mean, this is a very open argument that's being had right now all across Europe, everywhere from France to the Netherlands,

everywhere from Britain to Hungary. And you can make contemporaneous political arguments about whether or not Europe ought to be allowing less immigrants or fewer immigrants. And I tend to agree with the immigration restrictionist side. I tend to believe that it's been a mistake to allow mass migrations from countries that don't have cultures that typically mesh particularly well with the West culture. Why that has to be connected with Britain winning World War II is

is something else. And that sort of suggests, again, a motivation, which is to revitalize many of the arguments from the 30s and 40s, from the darkest parts of the human brain that were used to justify the immigration restriction. Because I think, again, there are good arguments for immigration restriction, there are bad ones, and they're not equivalent.

But in a strange way, if your response to multi-ethnic London is to say Hitler was right and Churchill was wrong, then it's possible that you're really part of the problem, isn't it? I think there's something really insidious about trying to resuscitate Nazi arguments in the context of the debates that we have on immigration and multiculturalism.

We can't unmake the multicultural societies that have evolved since Churchill's death. Bear in mind that the really big increase in immigration to the United Kingdom from outside Europe is a very recent origin. It's certainly long after Churchill's time. But it's a fact that Britain has become a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society today.

as the United States is today. And London is a cosmopolitan city the way New York is. These are realities.

If your response to these cities is, I wish Hitler had won World War II, then it seems to me you really don't have a place in a serious discourse about these issues. You've exposed yourself as somebody who would like to be aligned with the genocidal killers of the 1930s and 1940s, because this was the point of my book, War of the World.

The Nazis, like all those racial movements that emerged out of the late 19th century, were reacting against the formation of multi-ethnic societies in the course of the 19th century.

Mass migration in the late 19th century produced an America not unlike the America we see today, where, what, 14% of the population was foreign-born. We kind of have relived this globalization in our lifetimes, and it's produced similar levels of heterogeneity in our societies. And what happened in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s was a backlash.

against the formation of these multi-ethnic societies. And that backlash in its most toxic form was National Socialism, was Nazism, and its most toxic protagonist was Hitler. Now, surely the lesson of the mid-20th century is that the worst possible way to react to the emergence of multiracial societies is racial policies that aspire not just to forced resettlement, but to genocide.

That seems to me like the single most obvious lesson of the 20th century. The fact that there are people who want to go on the air and take Hitler's side in these debates, I find staggering. And it left me, honestly, Ben, with a feeling of failure. I spent a lot of my life making arguments about this, publishing books.

And yet, it's possible for somebody like Cooper to set himself up as a historian, having published nothing, having apparently spent no time in libraries or archives, and to pontificate in ways that are recognizably the arguments of the Nazis. I must have failed for this to be possible. At best, this should be some incredibly marginal contribution to public debate, which attracts only cranks, the kind of people who used to write letters in green ink.

The fact that in 2024, something like this becomes a huge hit online is a terrible indictment of American education and the state of our culture today. And Neil, I also think that it's a reflection of the fact that

all of politics these days and probably always is just highly reactionary. And that the response to the political left closing the Overton window so narrow that nobody could fit inside unless you agree with their very specific positions on the issues, the response to that was not to broaden the Overton window so as to allow broader and more robust discourse. It was to completely explode the Overton window and then treat all arguments

as equally credible and as equally meritorious. - Right, in the end, there are serious debates to be had about World War II and about the rise of Hitler. I wish more of them were going on at Harvard and Yale and Columbia, and for that matter, Stanford. In truth,

teaching of the Third Reich and the Holocaust and World War II does not go on on any very large scale in American higher education today, much less in American high schools. And so part of what we see here is that there's an audience of people who really don't know terribly much about these issues, and they're very susceptible, therefore, to sensationalism, to claims that something terribly daring is being proposed.

Obviously, part of what's going on here is forbidden fruit. The more censorious the left becomes, the more certain people are attracted to the transgressive ideas of the right. But I don't think this game would really work if people were just a bit better educated about what happened in the 1930s and 1940s. I think our nation,

knowledge of that history has decayed quite dramatically in the last 20 years. And that's part of the reason not only that people are taken in by Daryl Cooper, it's also part of the reason why woke students on the left are taken in by Islamist propaganda, which completely misrepresents the history of Israel and essentially writes the Holocaust out of history. Well, Neil Ferguson, I really appreciate the time and I really appreciate the arguments that you're making. Obviously, uh,

I think it is fair to call you the best and most honest historian working today. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Ben. That's very kind of you.

Executive Producer, Justin Siegel. Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.

The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2024.

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