Friday, September 06, 2024
From Ian:
Andrew Roberts: No, Churchill Was Not the Villain
Andrew Roberts: No, Churchill Was Not the Villain
Cooper then unleashed an attack on Churchill's Zionism, saying that he was "bankrupt and needed money and [was] getting bailed out by Zionists. … He didn't need to be bribed but he was put in place by financiers [and] the media complex that wanted to make sure he was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict." If any reader owns a dog, don't let it hear that particular whistle!Brendan O'Neill: The shameful Nazi apologism of the Very Online right
It is also untrue. Churchill was never bankrupt, although he always needed money as his spending was huge. Some of his stock market losses during the Wall Street Crash were borne by Bernard Baruch, but that was four years before Hitler came to power. Another Jewish friend, Sir Henry Strakosch, left him a large amount of money in his will, but that could hardly have been a bribe for obvious reasons. Churchill was not a Zionist or an anti-Nazi because he was bribed by Jewish financiers but because he believed in both stances with every fiber of his being.
Furthermore, at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise throughout the world, it was profoundly irresponsible of Cooper and Carlson to make the insinuations that they did in that part of the interview. This thesis—if such a spewing of old lies and David Irving-esque Hitler-apologism can be termed as such—will be welcomed in certain areas of "Palestine," in Thuringia and Saxony, and in the danker recesses of cyberspace, but not in places where historical truth is still respected.
Far from "the media complex" supporting Churchill, he was ridiculed and opposed by most newspapers for most of his career, and editors only came round to his joining the cabinet in July 1939, once it had been made clear that all his warnings about Hitler and the Nazis had been proved correct on every particular over his long years in the political wilderness.
When Carlson commended Cooper's "belief in accuracy and honesty," it provided the only comic moment in the whole interview, unless one also counts Carlson's estimation that Cooper—of whom I confess I had not hitherto heard—is "the most important historian in the United States."
It was remarkable that in the whole interview, Darryl Cooper was not able to land a single blow on the reputation of Winston Churchill that was backed up by any evidence whatever. For in fact, Churchill made several mistakes in his career, as every responsible biographer of his attests. "I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes," he told his wife Clementine in 1916.
Yet in the three greatest threats to democracy and Western civilization of the 20th century—from Wilhelmine Germany in World War I, from Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in World War II, and from Soviet Communism in the Cold War—Winston Churchill both foresaw all three and provided much of the resilience and wisdom necessary to defeat them. Freedom of speech was thus saved, a freedom that has been so squalidly abused by the intellectually vacant yet preening snideness of Messrs. Cooper and Carlson.
Cooper’s theory of the Second World War, a theory gleefully lapped up by the Hitler simps of the batshit right, is a gross lie. Churchill became British PM on 10 May 1940. The Nazis opened their first concentration camp – at Dachau – in 1933. They invaded Poland in 1939. They invaded Denmark and Norway before Churchill came to power. And they invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the month he came to power. I don’t know who needs to hear this – in fact I do: the barbarous online right – but Churchill is not the bad guy here.Jonathan Tobin: Tucker Carlson and the turning point for right-wing antisemitism
Those of us old enough to remember the great showdown between the heroic historian Deborah Lipstadt and the Holocaust denier David Irving should feel especially worried by what’s happening right now. We had good reason to believe that the fall of Irving, also a historian devoted to ‘revising’ our understanding of the Second World War, represented a fatal blow to Nazi apologetics. What Irving presents as his historical scepticism is in truth a ‘distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish’ belief system, said the judge in Irving’s libel suit against Lipstadt after she called out his Holocaust denial. Yet fast-forward 24 years and Irving-style revisionism is not only making a comeback but also going mainstream. Cooper is ‘the most important popular historian working in the United States today’, gushed Carlson. How long until he gets Irving on?
More and more members of the batshit right are tumbling down the toilet of historical revisionism. Foghorn hater of Israel, Candace Owens, recently described as ‘bizarre propaganda’ the idea that Josef Mengele conducted experiments on Jewish kids at Auschwitz. Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times calls these people ‘Hitler-curious’. Their swirling conspiratorial belief that we’re governed by a secretive ‘Matrix’ leads them to believe that ‘all [we’ve] been told about the nature of reality is a lie’, says Goldberg. And so they take aim at every truth of our society, mistaking such puerile disassembling of proven facts for ‘scepticism’. As Goldberg says, ‘once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense’.
A descent into barbarian thought really is what we are witnessing. And not just on the right. The crank right – with its war on the past, its philistine assault on truth, its vile obsession with race – is a mirror image of the woke left. Both rage with curious ferocity against Churchill: the woke leftists of the BLM era were vandalising Churchill statues years before Tucker had a Churchill hater on his show. Both relativise the Holocaust. The online right does it by suggesting the deaths of all those Jews was kind of unintentional; the crank left does it by calling everything it doesn’t like in the here and now, including Israel’s war on Hamas, ‘another Holocaust’. The former robs the Holocaust of its murderous intent, the latter robs it of its uniqueness: a right / left pincer movement of woke denialism that obscures the truth of what the Nazis did to the Jews.
And both seem hell-bent on upending our common history. On violating the truths and wonders of our past. On scrubbing away the wins of our civilisation that shape who we are. The online right’s intellectual lynching of Churchill is in many ways its 1619 moment. Woke leftists in the US have for years sought to unilaterally change the founding date of the United States from 1776, the year of the revolution, to 1619, the year slaves first arrived in America. The aim of this conceited, elitist project? To reimagine America as a nation born in sin, not revolution; hatched from crime, not democracy. Now, the crank right seeks to dismantle the foundational truth of modern Europe, a truth that rightly still moves us and informs our devotion to civilisational values: namely, that the Nazis represented an incalculable evil, and the Allies were right to wage a war to the last against them.
We joke about wokeness. We laugh at kids with blue hair who think you can change sex. We make fun of people who take refuge from words in ‘safe spaces’. But wokeness, in its truest form, is far from funny. It is a barbarous surge, coursing through the fibres of the internet and the thinking of our institutions, laying waste to every victory and insight of Western civilisation. And now we have a nexus of a morally exhausted right and a de-enlightened left, both awash with cynicism and contempt for the modernity we are privileged to inhabit. That we are witnessing an attempt to rehabilitate the actual Nazis is a testament to the threat all this poses to everything that is good and right. Reason has slept for long enough – it’s time to wake it up.
Why did Carlson choose this crucial moment only two months before the election to air such a show? One theory comes from my JNS colleague Caroline Glick. She wrote on X that Carlson is deliberately trying to sabotage Trump because a Kamala Harris presidency would enhance his standing as an opposition voice; therefore, inciting a Republican civil war right now is in his interest and gives a boost to antisemites on the right. I don’t know for sure that this is his intention, but the practical effect of what he’s done could be exactly what she describes.
One other aspect of this disturbing story is that Musk actually endorsed Carlson’s show with Cooper, writing that it was “Very interesting. Worth watching.” That foolish post reflects the mercurial nature of the billionaire as well as his bad judgment. Still, whatever we think of him, the idea that this should be another reason to shut down or hinder X is as dangerous as Holocaust denial. As we saw with the tech giants’ cooperation with the Biden administration’s efforts to shut down dissent against COVID-19 policies and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 election, the trend towards authoritarianism among liberals (despite their claim to be defending democracy) is a clear and present danger to the right to free speech.
That’s a battle for a different day. For now, the relevant question is what Republicans, and more pointedly Trump, are going to do about Carlson. Moreover, he can count on being asked about this in next week’s debate even though Harris will probably not be queried in the same fashion about embarrassing elements of her record. That notwithstanding, perhaps Musk’s deletion of that post was the first indication that Carlson’s antisemitic journey has reached a turning point.
The Buckley precedent
The precedent here is the effort made by the late William F. Buckley to rid the modern conservative movement that he helped found in the 1950s of right-wing nuts and antisemites. In the 1960s, he effectively canceled members of the John Birch Society, a lunatic fringe group with a large following. He did the same 30 years later by making it clear that conservatives who dabble in antisemitism like Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan must be refuted and marginalized.
It is hard to think of anyone less like Buckley, an urbane, patrician intellectual, than Trump. But the former president is presented now with the same opportunity to make clear in no uncertain terms that he will have nothing to do with Holocaust denial and antisemitism. Failing to do so would be similar to the way President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have refused to unreservedly condemn the pro-Hamas and antisemitic mobs demonstrating against Israel since Oct. 7. But, like it or not, there is a double standard in the media that forces conservatives to adhere to a higher standard.
Everything we know about Trump tells us that he will always refuse to do what conventional wisdom tells him he must because he will be falsely condemned as an extremist and antisemite, no matter what he says or does. Nevertheless, he needs to make an exception in this case.
Rebuking Carlson and making it clear that he is no longer welcome to tag along at his events is something that will be difficult for him and might upset some of his voters. But this is not some made-up controversy contrived by the left to trip Trump up. Carlson’s actions and statements are a direct threat to his campaign and a frightening effort to mainstream the hatred of Jews. He must be put in his place, and condemned by Trump and Vance, if the Republicans are to defeat Harris and have a chance to make good on their promise to rid the government of the toxic disease of woke ideology that is empowering antisemitism on the left.
If they don’t, the consequences for the Republicans and the hopes to roll back the tide of antisemitism that has been surging on the left and now apparently on the far right, are, too, frightening to contemplate.
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