cover of episode World War II and the Rise of Anti-History

World War II and the Rise of Anti-History

2024/9/10
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Honestly with Bari Weiss

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Darryl Cooper
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Michael Mina
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Victor Davis Hanson
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Darryl Cooper: 我认为丘吉尔是二战的主要罪魁祸首,而不是希特勒。丘吉尔是一个精神病患者,迫使纳粹德国参与了一场它并不想要的战争。纳粹只是把战俘、当地政治犯等等关进集中营,导致数百万人死亡。希特勒确实渴望和平,并愿意与其他强国合作,以找到“犹太问题”的可接受解决方案。 Tucker Carlson: (未在访谈中直接表达观点,但对Cooper的观点表示赞同) Victor Davis Hanson: 二战后,人们对战争的反思和质疑一直存在,认为战争并非完全正义,而是更加复杂。与一战不同,二战实现了其目标,尽管代价巨大,但它确实改变了世界格局。希特勒和戈林率先对平民目标进行轰炸。早在1941年,希特勒就下令对苏联进行种族灭绝战争。对德累斯顿的轰炸可能违反了日内瓦公约,但它并非仅仅针对平民目标。德国和日本在战争后期每天都在杀害成千上万的人,盟军必须采取地面行动才能结束战争。右翼对二战的重新解读,部分源于对当前政治和社会文化变化的失望和不满。右翼人士认为,美国长期以来一直由一个“团结一致”的政党统治,该政党容忍或无力阻止激进的社会和文化变革。一些右翼人士对历史的故意曲解,反映了他们对成功、知识和智慧的蔑视。我对卡尔森最近的政治举动感到失望,因为他为那些散布虚假信息的人提供了平台。卡尔森创建了一个平台,允许表达各种观点,但他没有过滤那些故意歪曲事实并可能造成损害的观点。如何应对在最受欢迎的播客中宣传的虚假历史?对抗虚假历史需要在思想战中取得胜利,这需要利用同样的传播工具,并迅速驳斥虚假信息。我对当前局势感到失望,但更重要的是要支持以色列,因为以色列正面临着严重的威胁。 Michael Mina: 一些右翼人士对二战历史的歪曲解读中存在反犹太主义因素。过去,人们批评犹太人,往往是因为他们认为犹太人是自由主义者的代名词,但现在这种说法已经发生了变化。一些右翼人士对大屠杀的否认或淡化,以及对犹太人对以色列的权利的质疑,是反犹太主义的表现。左翼和右翼的反犹太主义表现形式有所不同,但其核心都是对犹太人成功和受害者地位的矛盾心理。

Deep Dive

Chapters
The episode begins by introducing Tucker Carlson and his influential conservative podcast. It then delves into his recent interview with Darryl Cooper, an amateur historian with controversial views, marking a shift in Carlson's career trajectory after leaving Fox News.
  • Tucker Carlson's podcast is highly popular.
  • Darryl Cooper is an amateur historian with no formal credentials.
  • Cooper's podcast, Martyr Made, covers controversial topics.
  • Cooper has described himself as a "non-racist fascist".

Shownotes Transcript

Tucker Carlson is perhaps the country’s most influential conservative commentator; his eponymous podcast is routinely among the most downloaded shows on the internet. Despite his endless fulminations against the mainstream media, Carlson has an impeccable mainstream media pedigree. He’s hit for the cycle on cable news, having hosted shows on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. After he was fired from Fox News in 2023, under circumstances that are still hotly disputed, Carlson quickly reconstituted his career on his own—free of corporate shackles, with no institutional guardrails, and with a professed willingness to explore topics that his former mainstream media colleagues wouldn’t touch.

Last week on his show, he did just that, airing an interview with a man most people in the mainstream won’t touch: a podcaster named Darryl Cooper, who Carlson called “the most important historian in the United States.”

In reality, Cooper is an amateur historian with no publishing record—no books, no academic articles. He produces a popular history podcast called Martyr Made, in which he does deep dives into subjects like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the cult of Reverend Jim Jones, and the trials of Jeffrey Epstein. He has previously described his personal politics as those of a “non-racist fascist.”

On Carlson’s show, Cooper demonstrated some of those fascist tendencies when he identified Winston Churchill—not Adolf Hitler—as the “chief villain” of World War II. He wasn’t a hero at all, Cooper argued, but a “psychopath” who forced Nazi Germany into a war that it didn’t want. And what of the Holocaust? Cooper doesn’t speak of Jewish victims, but vaguely and airily of “prisoners of war. . . local political prisoners and so forth” who the Nazis “just threw. . . into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.” 

In September 1941, a mere week after Nazi troops occupied the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, that city’s Jews were ordered to congregate for “resettlement.” Under threat of severe punishment, they obliged. . . and were loaded into trucks to be transported a short distance to Babi Yar, a ravine just north of the city. In a two-day orgy of violence, 33,000 Jews ended up dead. Innocents, not prisoners of war; children forced to lie on top of those pushed into the pit before them, then executed with a bullet in the back of the head. This is how they ended up dead.

Tucker Carlson, who has the ear of millions of conservatives, including Donald Trump, and who secured a prime time speaking spot at the Republican National Convention, said nothing in response to Cooper’s revisionism. No pushback. Not an arched eyebrow. Just unalloyed praise for an extremist autodidact, America’s “best” historian.

Cooper defended himself on Twitter by assuring his critics that Hitler was indeed desperate to make peace and was also willing to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” Jewish problem was not in quotes. When another user pointed this out, Cooper responded: “Was there not a problem involving the Jews in Europe at the time?”

Hitler apologia and antisemitism packaged as brave historical inquiry is not new. We’ve heard versions of these arguments from cranks, extremists, and anti-Americans on the left and right, for decades. But why is there a sudden resurgence of these odious ideas on the American right? 

Today, we talk to Victor Davis Hanson to help us answer this question. Hanson is a classicist and historian, the author of two dozen books, including the critically acclaimed The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won). And for years, Hanson was a weekly guest on Tucker Carlson’s television show. We discuss his relationship with Carlson, the accuracy and derivation of Darryl Cooper’s claims about the Second World War, and why so-called “anti-elitism” often drifts into antisemitism.

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