I remember Tucker Carlson as the ‘bow tie guy’ from CNN back in the ‘Crossfire’ days. Crossfire was a CNN show, innovative in its time, where two hosts, a liberal and a conservative, would talk back and forth, argue a bit, and then wrap it up. Carlson was the stand in house conservative who was there when Pat Buchanan could not be.
The day of dueling hosts is gone. Now, entire networks are dedicated to one point of view, and no one from the other side is invited. For Carlson, this meant he was a staple on Fox News for many more years after leaving CNN. In April of 2023, after decades on TV, Carlson was fired from Fox. As anyone could have predicted, he launched his own media empire online, and now, hosts a podcast of notable success. The ground broken by, of all people, Joe Rogan, is now a fertile space for long, often rambling conversations with figures that would have never, ever appeared on any network news channel and if they had, their contributions would have been compressed into a few meaningless chatter points and no longer than 10 minutes long. Rogan, and now Carlson, go on for as long as three hours.
I can credit Rogan and Carlson, as well as a few others, for bringing new people and ideas into my consciousness by allowing people who otherwise would remain obscure to reach a broader audience. Carlson recently elevated the profile of a guy that does long podcasts of his own on historical subjects, and this is where it gets interesting.
Darryl Cooper does not claim to be an eminently credentialed historian, but he does claim, rightfully, to do historical research on subjects before making his presentation about them. His model, as he has described it, is to pick a topic and then read extensively about it until he understands all sides. This is the standard he spoke about when he was on the Tucker Carlson podcast. In fact, he spoke about several topics on that podcast and then the conversation drifted towards World War 2 since Cooper is working on a podcast series about the war as seen from the German side.
Cooper then mentioned, in passing, that he thought Winston Churchill was the chef villain of the war because Churchill resisted all efforts made by the Germans to reach a peace in 1940, which was before the Germans invaded Russia, which is what in turn brought the Soviets into Eastern Europe. In 1940, millions of Jews were still alive, as well as millions of Russians and Germans who would be dead in 1945, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Americans that would perish. By not even considering what peace might be available and claiming that Nevil Chamberlin’s ‘peace in our time’ deal was appeasement, Churchill and the British government drove events towards a cataclysmic war.
It was a couple of days later that I saw the reaction across the internet to Cooper’s thesis about Churchill. It brought down angry denunciation, the claim that he was promoting ‘anti-history,’ and there were many instances of putting historian in quotes, like ‘historian’ to show that he wasn’t a REAL historian, just some internet crank. There was also a dose of disapprobation directed towards Carlson for giving such a crank a ‘platform’ to spread his ‘disinformation,’ and there were spirited leaps to sacred Churchill’s defense.
The reaction to Cooper was far more interesting than what Cooper said, but it was perfectly aligned with other assertions that Cooper made about World War 2. He said that wars which establish a new order will have a founded mythology, an orthodoxy, and if the founders and the warriors that established the new order are still around, heterodox opinions will not be allowed. With World War 2, now 80 years behind us, the time to reevaluate has come. The war can now be seen from different perspectives, and new views will be opposed by those that are deeply invested in the orthodoxy, and they will attack anyone who questions the accepted narrative. The acceptable narrative now is that Churchill was good and strong by discarding the appeasement offered by his predecessor, and ‘standing up’ to the universal evil of the Nazis and Hitler. In spite of the fact that in 1940, 50,000,000 people were alive that would be dead in 1945, we are not to ask about the culpability of the British high command, and certainly not Churchill. Cooper did so, and he must be declared a ‘historian’ and not a real historian who can be counted on to dictate to us the past.
Cooper is not the only podcaster who reads a lot and then weaves hours long narratives about a particular subject. Dan Carlin’s ‘Hardcore History’ is similar, and his multi-hour narratives about the rise of Japan and Julius Caesar’s war with the Gauls are particularly interesting. There is long podcast available by individuals who have a passion for some subject, and they narrate the story right out of the books they read. So, do these people constitute a historian? What is a historian?
The dictionary defines the term as ‘an expert in or student of history, especially that of a particular period, geographical region, or social phenomenon.’ But to the defenders of Churchill, being a real historian either requires a fully credentialing degree in history, which, as far as I know, Cooper does not have, or it requires doing original research, and not relying on the books that are the product of the research done by others, or worst of all, telling a historical story from the settled perspective.
I was quite surprised by the reaction to Cooper that the normal historical experts displayed. There was a condescension to it, made most evident by the ‘historian’ label, as well as a sort of defense of the traditional narrative. But I consider the sort of work Cooper does to be historical research as valid as searching through archives. Reading the autobiography of the original participants to an event and comparing how the stories conflict is research. There are many historical subjects I can know about without starting at the beginning. I don’t have to go to Monticello myself to know a great deal about Thomas Jefferson. He has been researched by other historians of the past, and I can just accept, up to a point, what his biographers write. Cooper read deeply into the literature about the founding of Israel, and his 25-hour long story about the Zionists of the late 19th century and the founding of Israel is compelling and very popular. He did a lot of research and compiled the facts into a story. That makes him a historian as far as I’m concerned, and I don’t believe him any more or less than any expert from Harvard or Stanford. In fact, I’ve heard quite enough from the Ivy League proponents of the various orthodoxies. Rogan, Carlson and others have freed us from the tyranny of the elite educational class, which is good, since they have proven to be disastrously wrong about so much.
What really convinced me to listen to Cooper’s podcasts was his conclusions which are beyond doubt. You don’t need to be an expert to confirm his assertion that the narrative about Churchill, Chamberlin, and Hitler has been built into the justification of every war the United States has fought since then. I’ve seen this myself. It is happening now with Ukraine. Putin is Hitler, he must be confronted militarily now so we don’t have to fight a bigger war later. Talk of peace is appeasement every time. War and confrontations are really peace, and peace is really weakness because it leads to a bigger war. That is a narrative spun from World War 2, and it may be true in some instances, but not in every instance. Everyone we hate is Hitler, everyone who talks peace is Chamberlin, everyone who advocates for war is a Churchillian hero.
But how did this all turn out? What has the foundational story of the world since World War 2 given us? What is Churchill’s legacy? Well, as noted, 50,000,000 dead in Europe, the Soviets in Eastern Europe for decades, the end of the British Empire, proxy wars around the world, chaos in the Middle East in the aftermath of the war, and as Carlson pointed out, a Britain that doesn’t look like it won World War 2 All of this mayhem grew from World War 1 and then World War 2, and yet, we can’t speak ill of Churchill? Was Churchill powerless to stop all this, or all powerful? Here we have Schrodinger’s Churchill. Was he there and exerted power, and we live with the outcome, or he was powerless to stop any of it, and things would be worse without Churchill? I’d suggest that historians like Cooper are doing us all a favor by looking comprehensively into the past and learning new lessons. The defenders of the status quo stories are a dying breed, and there may be just a tad of professional jealousy involved. It was Darryl Cooper on Tucker Carlson’s show, and not a PhD in history from some liberal arts college.
I don’t believe everything I read or hear, and I want to hear from a wider pool of historical researchers. I listen to Darryl Cooper but keep an open mind up to a point. To the sneering experts, I’d ask them to look at the world they live in. Most young people don’t know shit about any history, and it was the credentialled class that made history boring and tedious. Cooper is changing that.
He’s winning, you’re not, Niall Ferguson, and that’s a historical fact.
TomRoushOnline 