Bi-Weekly Discussion - WWII Revisionism & The Right

Details

This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry — it's easy to use and free to join.

Click on the link below at the scheduled date/time to log in...

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WWII REVISIONISM & THE RIGHT:
WHY ARE NEOCONS & THE POPULIST RIGHT DEBATING CHURCHILL & THE HOLOCAUST?

INTRODUCTION:

Some of our members may remember a discussion we had back in January entitled "From 'Peak Woke' to 'Post-Woke': What Was the 'Great Awakening & Is It Over?" In the 3rd section, we discussed how James Lindsay & Konstantin Kisin have identified the rise of a faction on the political right they called the "woke right". They use this moniker to signal its similarity to the "woke left" in terms of its racial/ethnic identitarianism, focus on oppressor vs oppressed dynamics (albeit with conservative white Christians as the oppressed class) and the alleged inevitability of conflict, deconstruction of what they view as a hegemonic ideology (with concepts like Curtis Yarvin's "Cathedral" or Jonathan Keeperman's "Longhouse" replacing the left's focus on white supremacy & the hetero-patriarchy), and a pessimistic & revisionist view of American history. Lindsay & Kisin view the rise of the "woke right" as an overreaction to the excesses of left-wing social justice activism in the 2010s & early 2020s, but note that the radical right has increasingly adopted & repurposed many aspects of the radical left's concepts & methods over the past decade.

This meetup will focus on this new brand of right-wing historical revisionism, which often includes a rejection of the Founding Fathers & formerly admired Republican presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower & Ronald Reagan; a sympathetic view of far-right governments of the past like the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain & Pinochet's Chile; and admiration for a variety of reactionary intellectuals of the past (e.g. Joseph de Maitre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt). This would be a too much ground to cover in one meetup, so we'll focus specifically on some recent debates about World War 2, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

The proximate cause of this current debate over WW2 revisionism was Tucker Carlson hosting the amateur historian & "Martyr Made" podcaster Darryl Cooper on his show back in September 2024. Cooper sparked controversy by calling Winston Churchill the "chief villain of World War Two" for not accepting Hitler's peace overtures in the spring of 1940 which (he argues) would've drastically limited the war's scope & loss of life. Cooper also suggested Churchill's motives may have been corrupted by the backing he received from Jewish financiers. He also appeared to minimize the Holocaust as an accidental result of the Nazis not being prepared to take care of so many POWs during the early days of Operation Barbarossa.

Over the next couple weeks, critics dug up Cooper's first podcast, "Decline of the West", which included a friendly interview with the white nationalist Greg Johnson and found some of Cooper's deleted 'MartyrMade' tweets that included ones like "Democracy is a disease. Tyranny is the cure" and "Fascism is merely what happens when normal people realize that the left will never stop until they're forced to." There was also a Cooper tweet saying that a June 1940 picture of Hitler marching into Paris was "infinitely preferable in virtually every way" to a recent picture of the drag show at the Paris 2024 Olympics. For people who think maybe the screenshots of these tweets were fabricated, here's an episode of the Comedy Cellar podcast where the host Noam Dworman confronted Cooper with these tweets and he admitted he made them (listen from 26:00 to 38:00).

As journalistic responses to Carlson's interview with Cooper were published in the following weeks, it quickly became apparent that this had highlighted a growing fault line on the political right, with most neocons & traditionalist conservatives in the anti-Cooper camp and many paleocon & populists (and some anti-war libertarians) in the pro-Cooper camp. Elon Musk briefly promoted the Cooper interview in a tweet before deleting it amid criticism, but the libertarian pundits Tom Woods, Scott Horton, and Dave Smith all hosted friendly follow-up interviews with Cooper, seeing him as a natural ally in their criticisms of American militarism. Conversely, National Review, once the flagship of American conservatism, published several journalists who harshly critiqued Cooper's arguments, and the Piers Morgan show hosted Churchill historian Andrew Roberts for the same purpose. Bari Weiss's Free Press - one of the major new media sites known for criticizing the "woke left" - hosted critiques of Cooper by the conservative historians Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson, as well as Sohrab Ahmari. Ahmari saw Darryl Cooper & Tucker Carlson as emblematic of a new & dangerous faction he called the "Barbarian Right".

Trump's election & inauguration overshadowed the Cooper debate for several months, but it was rekindled when Darryl Cooper appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast back on March 13th and expanded on his revisionist take on WW2 and made more controversial comments; for example, that Soviet Bolshevism was a predominately Jewish movement and that Hitler's anti-Semitism is understandable after witnessing Jewish dominance in Vienna and the wretched state of the ethnic German underclass. Then Joe Rogan hosted the conservative British journalist Douglas Murray & the American comedian & libertarian activist Dave Smith to debate foreign policy on April 10th, and the initial part of their debate focused on some of Cooper's controversial comments, and whether Rogan is unwisely platforming non-experts who mislead the general public.

In the 1st section, we'll look at how the debate over Cooper's WW2 revisionism has been part of a broader debate over the decline of the public's trust in experts and the concurrent decline of the legacy media's ability to engage in "gatekeeping" public debates amid the rise of online media outlets on Twitter/X, YouTube, Substack, and Spotify. While the many media scholars have become increasingly concerned about the online spread of misinformation, some of our member may recall that this debate over the role of experts in settling debates over contentious political issues elides the "fact-value distinction" and ties into the "information deficit model" of science communication which has been called into question. However, the repudiation of expertise ties into another social phenomenon we've discussed in past meetups - "reflexive contrarianism", i.e. the assumption that since many experts have been wrong about some major issues (e.g. Saddam's WMDs, 2008 financial crisis, Russiagate, COVID lab leak theory), then they must be wrong about literally everything and any amateur with a contrarian position must be right.

In the 2nd section, we'll look at how the debate over Cooper's condemnation of Winston Churchill ties into a broader debate on the political right about whether World War 2 saved or destroyed Western civilization. As we'll see, Cooper's central argument about Churchill being the "main villain of World War 2" who needlessly broadened the scope of the war and thereby aided Stalin & destroyed the British Empire appears to be lifted from the paleoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan's 2008 book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Although it was mostly forgotten until recently, this book's thesis was the subject of intense debate when it was first published - for example, Intelligence Squared hosted a debate in 2009 between Pat Buchanan and one of the leading Churchill historian Andrew Roberts, with each side being supported by 2 other partners.

In the 3rd section, we'll look at how Cooper's comments attempt to explain the anti-Semitism of Hitler, relativize the brutality of Nazi Germany in WW2, and downplay the level of intentionality behind the Holocaust. We'll compare this to similar comments by Candace Owens about Hitler & the Holocaust - some of which date back to 2019, but she's become more prolific after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7th, 2023 and her split from Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire in Mar. 2024. Their intention appears to be to destigmatize the commonly held association between nationalism & genocidal fascism and reveal the way Nazis serve as "folk devils" who prop up the hegemony of "globalist" liberalism. As we'll see, this all ties into a broader debate about whether populism & nationalism are beneficial counterweights to elitism & globalism or inevitably lead to racial discrimination, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and violent inter-ethnic conflicts. It's worth noting that while much of the media coverage of Cooper & Owens's provocative statements have equated them to "Holocaust denial", it seems that they don't deny the Holocaust occurred so much as argue that it wasn't much worse than war crimes committed by the Allies or by Israel today.

In the 4th section, we'll look at how debates over World War 2 often serve as a proxy for a broader debate over the relative merits of American military interventions to "police the world" and "promote democracy" versus an "America First" form of non-interventionism that is often equated with "isolationism" and "appeasement". This last issue ties back into the 1st section, in so far as it hinges on the question of whether empirical data from history can provide geopolitical experts with enough information to settle the debate over if/when a military intervention is justified. And while this debate is nominally about WW2, it usually functions as a proxy for current debates over whatever wars the U.S. and its allies are currently engaged in. Back when Pat Buchanan raised the issue in 2008, it was a proxy for the debates over the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, and now it's a proxy for the debates over the wars in Ukraine & Gaza.

RELEVANT MATERIALS FROM PAST MEETUPS:

Back in March 2024, we had a meetup entitled "How Much Should We Trust the Experts?" that is relevant to the 1st section of today's meetup. In the Introduction section we covered 2 points that are especially pertinent: (1) everyone - including self-styled free thinkers & contrarians - defers to some experts some of the time since it would be too time-consuming to "do our own research" on every issue, (2) there's legitimate concerns about deference to experts when it comes to the more complex & value-laden issues that occupy history & the social sciences, as well as public policymaking - especially the foreign policies we'll discuss here.

Back in Aug. 2022 we had a meetup on the breakup of the "Intellectual Dark Web" (IDW) entitled "What Is Responsible Heterodoxy?" We considered the development of "heterodox" intellectual spaces in recent years and the debates around why some members of the IDW have arguably become grifters after falling prey to "reflexive contrarianism" and "audience capture" - this is also relevant to the 1st section of today's meetup.

Back in Jan. 2021, just after the storming of the Capitol on 1/6, the Skeptics had a meetup entitled "Bad History & Our Political Crisis". The Introduction section that discussed the concepts of "bad history" and "misuse of history" (as distinct from "pseudo-history") and the 2nd section that looks at comparisons between Weimar Germany and modern-day America are somewhat relevant to the 2nd & 3rd section's of today's meetup.

The Skeptics also had a meetup way back in Nov. 2018 entitled "False Pretexts & Acts of War" that addressed some conspiracy theories about the sinking of the Lusitania that led to the US entering WW1 & the Pearl Harbor attack that led to the US entering WW2. Note that Darryl Cooper appears to be drawing on Pat Buchanan's 2008 book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War that argues WW1 & WW2 were avoidable and that we've been misled to think they were entirely Germany's fault, but neither Cooper or Buchanan allege that there was a conspiracy to use false flag attacks to draw us into these wars.

In the 3rd section of today's meetup, we'll discuss how current debates over immigration & ethno-nationalism are linked to the Holocaust, and it may be helpful to refer to a meetup we had back in Oct. 2023 entitled "Understanding the Immigration Debate" and a related Skeptic meetup entitled "Is Mass Migration a Crisis or a Moral Panic?"

Back in March, we had a meetup entitled "What Is/Was The 'Liberal International Order'?" and in the 3rd section we discussed the value of "Pax Americana" and military interventionism which is relevant to the 4th section of today's meetup. In the past, I've often paired our discussion with a Skeptics meetup on the "New World Order" conspiracy theories, since those are essentially a paranoid take on the think tanks & multinational organizations involved in promoting what mainstream scholars call the "liberal international order".

DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of the recent debates over WW2 revisionism and its relevance to other modern day political debates. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 51 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I've listed some questions under each section to stimulate discussion. We'll do our best to address most of them, as well as whatever other questions our members raise. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN LEGACY INSTITUTIONS & NEW MEDIA ENTREPRENEURS OVER WHO GETS TO INTERPRET HISTORY:

1.) Konstantin Kisin, "Murray vs Smith: Dispatches from Podcastistan" (video - 17:21 min, listen to 15:35)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tk3ETnFjfo

Niall Ferguson, "History and Anti-History: Podcasts are not reviving history, as is often claimed these days. They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious." (Free Press)
https://archive.ph/yDj1d
Arash Azizi, "The Dangerous Rise of the Podcast Historians: If professional scholars don’t engage the public, charlatans and Holocaust deniers certainly will." (Atlantic)
https://archive.ph/ruKN2
Konstantin Kisin, "Murray vs. Smith: Dispatches from Podcastistan"
https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/murray-vs-smith-dispatches-from-podcastistan
Emily Jashinsky, "The new media is still a good thing" (reply to Kisin)
https://archive.ph/rZIEs

II. CHURCHILL & THE DEBATE OVER WHETHER WORLD WAR 2 SAVED OR DESTROYED WESTERN CIVILIZATION:

2a) Pete Peterson w/ Victor Davis Hanson, "Tucker Carlson's Interview with Darryl Cooper" (video - 6:02 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbhUOLh8xDw

2b) Piers Morgan, "Tucker Carlson Confronted Piers Morgan on Western Civilization" (video - 12:33 min, listen to 9:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHe7frXp528

Jeet Heer, "Challenging the cult of Churchill: The view that Winston Churchill was a disaster for western civilisation is gaining traction among conservatives" (review of Pat Buchanan's book)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jul/01/usforeignpolicy.usa
David Freeman, "A Polemic Not A History" (review of Pat Buchanan's book)
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/reference/a-polemic-not-a-history/
Nathan Pinkoski, "The End of the Churchill Myth"
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-end-of-the-churchill-myth/
Josh Abbotoy, "Are We the Bad Guys? Reflections on Churchill"
https://americanreformer.org/2024/09/are-we-the-bad-guys/
Andrew Roberts, "No, Churchill Was Not the Villain"
https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/no-churchill-was-not-the-villain/

III. NAZI GERMANY & ITS RELEVANCE FOR CURRENT DEBATES OVER WHETHER POPULISM & NATIONALISM CAN BE GOOD OR ALWAYS LEAD TO DISCRIMINATION & ETHNIC CONFLICT:

3a) Tucker Carlson w/ Darryl Cooper, "How History is Rewritten and Propagandized" (video - 7:26 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvuAJZ3PpRU

3b) C-SPAN, "Rep. Ted Lieu plays recording of Candace Owens statement on Adolf Hitler" (video - 3:39 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-poqjet5mY

Morgan Jones, "The Free Press Versus Darryl Cooper for Deviating from the WWII Narrative"
https://www.unz.com/article/the-free-press-versus-darryl-cooper-for-deviating-from-the-wwii-narrative/
Sohrab Ahmari, "Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right: Odious views like the Nazi apologia aired by a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast this week threaten to make their way from the fringe to the mainstream" (Free Press)
https://archive.ph/mGifk
Noah Smith, "This thing will fail: Trump [and WW2 revisionism] will not restore the 'strong gods' of community, family, and faith." (reply to N.S. Lyons "American Strong Gods")
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/this-thing-will-fail
Cathy Young, "Candace Owens Plays the Victim Card: She’s not a Hitler fan, but she’s a terrible messenger for black conservatism" (Arc Digital)
https://archive.ph/DiIy3

IV. WORLD WAR 2 & WHAT IT TEACHES US ABOUT THE MERITS OF "POLICING THE WORLD" VS "AMERICA FIRST" ISOLATIONISM:

4a) Sean Hannity & Pat Buchanan, "Hannity and Buchanan argue about WW2 again" (video - 2:10 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QRfnl02KXk

4b) Lex Fridman w/ Dave Smith, "Darryl Cooper controversy [and the abuse of WW2 history]" (video - 9:34 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49P2F7kEzrY

Scott McConnell, Tom Woods, Andrew Bacevich, et al., "How Good Was the Good War? TAC contributors debate the lessons of World War II and their relevance to American foreign policy today."
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-good-was-the-good-war/
Michael Moynihan, "Pat Buchanan Prevents the Holocaust" (review of Pat Buchanan's book)
https://reason.com/2008/06/23/pat-buchanan-prevents-the-holo/
Victor Davis Hanson, "The Truth About World War II: Germany and its fascist allies started the war. They felt empowered to do so not because of supposed Allied aggression, but because of Western appeasement and isolationism." (Free Press)
https://archive.ph/lo9V0
Mike Brock, "The Theater of Neutrality: The Moral Failure Behind 'Just Asking Questions'"
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-theater-of-neutrality

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Bi-Weekly Discussion - WWII Revisionism & The Right