Victor Davis Hanson
When we read the latest and now widely read denunciations of Churchill as a terrorist, drunk, psychopath, or warmonger, or accusations that the Allies fought a war of terror against their Axis enemies, we naturally expect those indictments more often emanate from the Left.
So, what then drives this new rightist revisionism of World War II of Darryl Cooper and others? And how is it relevant in the 21st century?
I will speculate in more detail at the end of this series that an isolationist anger arising from contemporary interventions such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, or the supplying of critical weapons to Ukraine, or support for Israel, prompts some conservatives and libertarians to see a long, misguided pattern of American intervention that is not in our interests—one that apparently, in their view, dates all the way back to World Wars I and II.
In other words, they claim that the lessons of World War II—the charges of appeasement, the often-invoked disaster of Munich, the need for deterrence against dictators, all juxtaposed with the Allied victory—are used to justify subsequent unwise conflicts and indirectly account for the perceived pathologies of American society. Cooper and others therefore go back to 1939–45 and hope to undermine that “lesson” by suggesting that there is no lesson at all—given that it was the Allies, not Hitler, who were responsible for the war!
Of course, the problem with such non-interventionist revisionism is threefold. First, British and French appeasement, along with American isolationism and Russian collaboration, really did empower Hitler as he himself admitted after Munich (“Our enemies … are little worms. I saw them at Munich.”).
Second, given unchanging human nature, there are invaluable lessons about the causes of war from World War II to remember, as there are from every conflict—and World War II was the deadliest war in history.
And third, the problem is not the paradigm of Munich or the idea that deterrence would have prevented Hitler from starting a world war, but the difficulty of properly identifying the applicable appeasing parallel to Munich and discerning the true aggressive nature of any alleged Hitler wannabe. The lesson is correct—the challenge is to see it applied properly to the correct events and persons.
There may be other motives for the new revisionism, as I cite in the conclusion to follow. The end of World War II empowered the rise of the Soviet Union, and, more indirectly, of Communist China, which for some conservatives calls into question whether the entire catastrophe of 70 million deaths was worth the eventual result.
These are not my views, but they may also help explain Cooper’s vitriolic attack on the Anglo-American war effort—especially the alliance with the Soviets to defeat Hitler and the concomitant empowerment of their murderous creed to plague the postwar West for a half-century.
Throughout Cooper’s answers, Israel and the Jews also appear, in all sorts of strange anecdotes and contexts. And his downplaying of German culpability for the atrocities in the East has naturally prompted accusations of anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic views. And why not, when he contextualizes and excuses the atrocities committed against POWs, Jews, and Russian civilians by the very invading army that on September 29, 1941, at the ravine of Babi Yar, began slaughtering some 33,000 Jews?
Lastly, such revisionism is also in part a phenomenon of the Internet age, in the sense that off-the-wall, improvised personal podcasts and blogs can now reach larger audiences than university presses or academic books.
Therefore, far more easily than in the past, historical theories can be proposed to large audiences without the filters of fact-checking or academic peer review, regardless of whether authors are formally trained in the study of history.
In any case, given our new technologies, Cooper can find an audience that is orders of magnitude larger on a Tucker Carlson podcast than historians can hope to find through traditional and even online publications. Hence this extended reply to the interview that follows.
Cooper’s more controversial remarks that follow are excerpted and printed in italics, followed by my non-italicized analysis. In the conclusion, I also quote from the transcript of his interview, which did not appear earlier in the critique.
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