Tucker Carlson interviews & ideologies

[thorbiorn]

Tucker Carlson did an interview with Darryl Cooper posted on X.com 7:00 PM · Sep 2, 2024
Here is a screenshot at the time of posting, showing 33 million views:

Copying the content and links gives:

Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two. (1:20) History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (12:39) The Jonestown Cult (32:10) World War Two (45:04) How Would You Assess Winston Churchill? (1:17:17) How History Is Rewritten and Propagandized (1:24:39) Mass Immigration in Europe (1:42:25) The Civil Rights Movement and BLM (1:48:17) Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump (1:58:30) Christianity (2:10:58) Hate Blinds You

In my opinion, the timing is not that accurate, but you have an idea.

The reactions when searching for Darryl Cooper on YouTube indicate that the topic is difficult, and that it got both Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper into stormy weather. Here are some responses on YouTube:





Darryl Cooper uploaded a comment to the interview with Tucker Carlson: on The Martyr Made Substack | Darryl Cooper | Substack
To the Perplexed (w/audio) My final word on Churchill & Hitler
He begins:

Well, that was interesting. I say “was,” even though it’s still ongoing, because I figure that being officially denounced by the White House must be the peak of an experience like this, but who knows… I’ve been surprised more than once this week. I have been very gratified that all of you have chosen to stick with me through this time, and that many of you have joined us since it happened. Martyr Made has been the #1 ranked podcast in all categories for several days now. We live in a new world. No official White House denunciation, or hit piece in a national newspapers, or rabid Twitter mob, can change the fact that I work for you guys, and only you guys. Today, more than most days, I am very grateful for that. Most of the invective lobbed my way this week has been either uninformed or simply in bad faith, but there are good faith people I respect, including some of you, who have questions, and this message is to you.

This will be my final word on the matter until the first episode of my upcoming series, Enemy: The Germans’ War.

Being denounced by the White House these days, is that a shame or a badge of honor? (Did you see this clip from
the latest NewsReal with Joe & Niall:

That is how the WH representative goes about campaigning to make it modern and contemporary!

Cooper writes later:

My statement - which I said at the time was hyperbolic and intentionally provocative - that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War 2 was made in the same spirit. World War 2 was perhaps the greatest catastrophe in human history, and the starting point of any discussion about it must be that, of all the possible outcomes that could have resulted from events leading up to the conflict, the one that ended up happening was the worst of all. Given that the choices made in the 1920s and ‘30s led to the worst possible outcome, it is worthwhile to ask whether different choices might have led to a better one. In recent decades, only one such counter-factual has been permitted in polite discourse, namely, that of the cop who insists that the murder-suicide could have been averted if only the SWAT team had been sent in right away. And he might be right. Once the man inside kills his family, anyone arguing that the police should have been more conciliatory will find few sympathetic ears. But the lessons we take from the last crisis inform our response to the next one, and too often the lessons we take are wrong. The lesson taken from Jonestown, for example, was that the tragedy might have been averted if US authorities had taken harsher and more decisive action, and this lesson shaped the official response to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas fifteen years later.

World War 2 has cast this spell on us for for eighty years. Virtually every war on which the US has embarked in the years since has been justified by claims that the enemy leader is “the next Hitler,” and that our only two choices are to fight him now, or to fight him later when he’s stronger and more dangerous. It’s clever rhetorical jiu jitsu that frames those advocating for peace as the ones actually advocating for a bigger and more violent war. Bari Weiss called Tulsi Gabbard an “Assad toady” on the Joe Rogan Experience, attacking her moral character and effectively accusing her of treason, simply because Tulsi advocated for a de-escalation of the Syrian civil war. When Dr. Ron Paul pointed out that Osama bin Ladin’s own words confirmed that US military intervention in the Middle East fueled Al Qaeda’s hostility toward us, Rudy Giuliani called Dr. Paul “dangerous,” and accused him of blaming America, rather than the terrorists, for 9/11. These tactics work less and less often, and most of you will have seen through the cynical abuse of language by Weiss and Giuliani in these examples, but, as we’ve seen this week, they remain powerful when it comes to World War 2, the Ur-myth of the American-led global order.

My friend Gray Connolly, a well-read Australian lawyer, and staunch champion of both Churchill and the British Empire, wrote a thread on X to counter my claims about Winston Churchill’s culpability. Elon Musk, who recently recommended my interview with Tucker before deleting it once it became controversial, commented that Gray’s thread was excellent, and I agree. I like and respect Gray very much, so I re-posted and recommended his thread before even reading it, because I knew he would approach the controversy with good will. But what struck me is that Gray’s defense of Churchill did not really dispute my central claims. He pointed out that what I had said in the interview, and in my X thread fleshing it out, is nothing that hadn’t already been said decades ago by British historians like Alan Clark, AJP Taylor, and others who were trying to understand the events that led to the loss of their empire. After listing attempts to avoid a wider war in 1939 and 1940, Gray writes, “Churchill and his government - and the Empire, however - were never going to make peace. There would be no surrender. The formerly allied French fleet was sunk by the Royal Navy at Oran in July 1940 as a sign of British ruthlessness.” The crux of Gray’s argument is what follows:

This was not just Churchill, though - the British Empire was not in as weak a position as made out & regardless, there were no good terms to be obtained in 1940 that made fighting on a worse alternative. Also a united Europe (esp under Nazis) is unacceptable for British security… Winston Churchill was not any villain but simply was Prime Minister, he was the head of a wartime coalition government that was - come what may - committed, as all in the Parliament were, to the see the war through, even at the destruction of our Empire… It is inconceivable in mid 1940 that any British Government could responsibly seek a peace or even armistice with the Germans. Quite apart from the Nazis themselves, British policy aimed at a divided Europe via war & economic subsidy.​

Well, unless I’m missing something, this is not far off from the claim I was making, except that it shifts the blame I attached to Churchill onto British Imperial Policy in general. I admit that making it about Churchill himself engages in the same unfair demonization as pinning total blame for the Iraq War on George W. Bush, rather than on the US security establishment, and I’m happy to concede Gray’s point. However, I’d note that distributing responsibility to larger groups or forces is often a tactic used to absolve the people most responsible of any accountability for their own role. In other contexts, “I was just following orders” is not considered a valid defense. Nevertheless, I am happy to concede the point that it is a mistake to focus too much on one man, and Gray’s thread will be in my mind as I work on the upcoming World War 2 series.

But it leaves open the central question of whether there were off-ramps available that might have resolved the crisis by means other than the most deadly and destructive war in human history. The fact that the man inside might have murdered his family in any case is not an excuse for the police to avoid a conversation about what they might have done differently. No historian disputes the fact that Hitler and his generals genuinely wanted to avoid war with Britain and France. None dispute the fact that Germany made several peace overtures once Hitler’s bluff was called in Poland. Everyone, of course, disputes that these overtures were sincere and the idea that the British government was under any obligation to take them seriously. But that was not universally true at the time.

If WWII was a trial run, then revisiting it for lessons is appropriate.
Beside his own podcast, or site, Darryl Cooper also participates in shows here.

 

[Alejo]

Whenever you touch that one subject, the world goes nuts. How long before they call him an antisemite again?