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Niall Ferguson: History and Anti-History

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Thought Leader: Niall Ferguson
September 5, 2024
Source: The Free Press
Written by: Niall Ferguson

This piece is by WWSG exclusive thought leader, Niall Ferguson.

According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none.

According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.”

The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history.

True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism.

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.

I could see early on where this conversation was going. It’s the moment when Cooper offers his appraisal of the Jonestown mass suicide of 1978 as microcosm. A microcosm of what? Of the civil rights movement, of course.

Here’s Cooper:

It follows the trajectory of the civil rights and protest movement in America through its rise, its peak, its radicalization, and then its decline in the late ’60s and then into the ’70s, into insanity and death. . . . You can tell the story of Jonestown and give a month-by-month account of that process of those protest movements being radicalized and turning to violence and insanity in the ’60s and ’70s. And so it became a vehicle for that. And that’s what. . . the story is about. It’s about that period of American history from the mid-’50s up until about 1980.

The problem is that framing Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple as a microcosm of the civil rights movement is like saying John of Leiden’s Anabaptist theocracy in Münster was a microcosm of the Reformation.

“What you’re not doing,” Carlson says at one point, “is using history as a weapon, a cudgel, or as a kind of propaganda tool.” But that is precisely what Darryl Cooper is doing. His whole shtick is that the Western world’s escape from the racial hierarchies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been a kind of massive historical scam. The only reason we have a positive view of the direction history has taken since 1945 is that we have been brainwashed into believing in “the founding mythology of the. . . current global order.”

That founding mythology—so sacrosanct that in Europe you can “literally” get thrown in jail for challenging it—is that the good guys won World War II.

Having written a book on this very subject with a chapter titled “Tainted Victory,” I have managed to point out the morally compromised nature of the Allied victory in 1945 without suffering incarceration. But that’s not what Cooper has in mind. His problem is not that Stalin was among the victors. His problem is that Hitler lost.

According to Cooper, the “official story” about the rise of Hitler is as follows. Once upon a time, Germany was a “sophisticated, cultural superpower.” But then, after the First World War and the Weimar Republic “they all turned into demons for a few years, and now they’re fine again.” (At no point does Cooper vouchsafe who wrote this strawman “official” history.)

But that’s not what really happened. Oh, no. Because “everything has a cause,” and Adolf Hitler, just like Jim Jones, was not born a psychotic murderer. The circumstances were responsible. And so we need—though it’s of course forbidden—to “try to understand how the Germans saw the world” and to see how they “genuinely felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors.”

This will hardly come as news to the many scholars who have devoted years of their lives to studying the attitudes of ordinary Germans in the 1920s and 1930s, showing how many people simply refused to accept the reality of their country’s defeat in the war and the legitimacy of the democratic republic ushered in by the November 1918 revolution. The difference is that Cooper not only understands that many Germans felt this way. He appears to think they were right.

Now comes what Cooper wishes us to see as his most iconoclastic revelation: that “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War,” in the sense that “he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.” Hitler, for his part, had no desire to go to war with France or Britain after partitioning Poland with Stalin:

He doesn’t want to fight France. He doesn’t want to fight Britain. He feels that’s going to weaken Europe. When we’ve got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there. And he starts firing off peace proposals, says, let’s not do this, like we can’t do this.

But no one listens to peace-loving Hitler. So:

. . . 1940 comes around and they’re still at war. And so he launches his invasion to the West, takes over France, takes over Western and northern Europe. Once that’s done, the British have, you know, escaped at Dunkirk. There’s no British force left on the continent. There’s no opposing force left on the continent. In other words, the war is over and the Germans won.

Once again, Hitler bombards Britain with peace offers, in Cooper’s words, “trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you, like we don’t want to fight you offering peace proposals that, you know, said, you keep all your overseas colonies. We don’t want any of that. We want Britain to be strong. The world needs Britain to be strong, you know, especially as we face this communist threat.”

Again, no response. And why not? Not because Hitler’s peace offers were patently insincere and would have consigned Britain to the status of a vassal. Because of wicked Winston Churchill, who just “wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany.”

And not only the German army. According to Cooper, Churchill thirsted to kill German civilians, too. Because “all he had were bombers,” in 1940 Churchill “literally” sent “firebomb fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest.” This was “rank terrorism,” intended to kill “as many civilians as possible.” As all the men were “out in the field,” British bombing raids killed exclusively women, children, and the elderly. They were “gigantic scale terrorist attacks, the greatest. . . scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history.”

This is certainly a revelatory recasting of the Battle of Britain, which boring old conventional wisdom depicts as a German bombing campaign against British targets.

And evil Churchill was not content with firebombing German babies. He also had a dastardly plan to “drag us [the United States] into that war,” using covert “media and propaganda operations.” Why? Partly, Cooper argues, to redeem his reputation after the military disaster of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I. But also because he was “a psychopath” and “a drunk”—not forgetting a “dedicated booster of Zionism.”

Ah. By now, any real historian has understood the kind of books that Cooper boasts of reading. There are of course many anti-Churchill books to choose from, some of them more or less respectable critiques from the right, such as John Charmley’s, others more fashionable critiques from the anti-colonial left.

But the ones Cooper clearly has on his nightstand are by the likes of David Irving, whose remaining reputation as an historian was destroyed in 2000 when he was exposed as Holocaust denier in a libel case that he himself brought against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. But at least Irving knew the dates of the firebombing raids. In 1940 the Royal Air Force aimed only to hit industrial targets, though with very low accuracy.

Cooper’s reason for bringing up Churchill’s lifelong philo-Semitism is obvious:

You know, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests, you know, in terms of Zionism, but also, his hostility. . . . You know, I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don’t think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But, you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex.

Ah yes, of course. Churchill, the puppet of the financiers. Now why does that seem familiar? Well, because it was one of the leitmotifs of Joseph Goebbels’s wartime propaganda.

In a revealing digression to Carlson, Cooper offers a justification for the brutal mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war in the wake of Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941). The transcript is worth reading carefully:

They launched a war where they were completely unprepared. Millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth, that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that. And they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like, letters, as early as July, August 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people that are rounding up and. . . they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin, saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says, “Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”

. . . But, man, like maybe you as the, you know, the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east. Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you’d be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat, and whatever it was, whatever it was like, maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control. And millions of people died because of that, right?

Note that at no point in their conversation do Carlson and Cooper mention the Holocaust. The word genocide is never uttered. They talk about Jews a good deal, but not as the principal victims of Hitler’s lethal racial policies.

The last time I heard this kind of thing was when the full extent of the Wehrmacht’s complicity in mass murder was being exposed in the 1980s and 1990s. The people who made these arguments were old Nazis, making excuses. And that is what we have here, reheated and served up to an American audience: Nazi excuses. The well-documented reality is that the mass murder, including systematic starvation, of soldiers and civilians in the German-occupied Soviet territory was ideologically motivated and deliberately planned.

Here, by way of comparison, is what I wrote about the same events in The War of the World:

From the outset Hitler had determined that his campaign against the Soviet Union would be fought according to new rules—or rather, without rules at all. It was to be, as he had told his generals on March 30, “a war of extermination” in which the idea of “soldierly comradeship” would have no place.

This meant the “destruction of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia.” The decision systematically to shoot certain Red Army prisoners, foreshadowed by the brutal way the war in Poland had been fought, was taken on the eve of Operation Barbarossa and subsequently elaborated on during the campaign. The “Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia” issued on May 19, 1941, called for “ruthless and vigorous measures against the Bolshevik inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs [and] Jews.”

. . . The Wehrmacht High Command reiterated this by decreeing that the army was to “get rid of all those elements among the prisoners of war considered Bolshevik driving forces”; this meant handing them over to the SS Einsatzgruppen for execution. . . . In September 1941 the High Command issued a further order that any Soviet troops who had been overrun but then reorganized themselves should be regarded as partisans and shot on the spot. Such orders were passed on by front-line commanders in less euphemistic terms. Troops were “totally to eliminate any active or passive resistance” among prisoners by making “immediate use of weapons.”

. . . In the first weeks of Barbarossa, the Germans may have summarily executed as many as 600,000 prisoners; by the end of the first winter of the campaign some two million were dead. Some were killed on the spot because German troops refused to accept their surrender. . . . Elsewhere Soviet prisoners were taken but then lined up and shot. Those who were spared found themselves herded into improvised camps where they were given neither shelter nor sustenance.

Many starved or died of disease; others were taken out and shot in batches. Some were transported to concentration camps like Buchenwald, where they were shot in the course of fake medical examinations, or to the death camp at Auschwitz. Altogether in the course of the war over three million Soviet soldiers died in captivity—substantially more than half and perhaps close to two-thirds of the total number taken prisoner.

In other words, Cooper’s claim that the Germans’ mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war, as well as the Jewish civilians he omits to mention, was some kind of unplanned response to the unintended consequences of a defensive war is not revisionist history. It is a pack of lies.

At one point, Carlson says to Cooper: “As a follower of your work, I don’t see you as hostile to the West. I see you actually as a product of the West and as a defender, really of the West for its values.” This is a new and unusual use of the term West as a synonym for the Third Reich, which is the only thing Cooper has thus far seemed serious about defending.

But as the conversation moves on, we see that this is “the West” as it is understood in Moscow and Budapest these days. For the Hungarians today, according to Cooper, “have no problem saying. . . This is Hungary. This is a country for Hungarians. This is a Christian country. This is our country. They don’t have a problem saying that.” Compare and contrast with modern London:

Carlson: It’s totally degraded. I try not to go there because it’s so depressing. It’s just so sad. It’s so broken. It’s not the country of victors. It’s. . . a defeated, completely defeated country that’s subsequently been invaded. . . . If Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the street of London? And. . . London is not majority-English now. Like what?

Cooper: Well, the people who formulated the version of history that considers Churchill a hero, they like London the way it is now.

I don’t need to browse his X posts to know what Darryl Cooper is. He tells us himself. “The post–World War II order,” he tells Carlson, “is really defined by the fact that, you know, after Nuremberg, it really became effectively illegal in the West to be, like, genuinely right wing, like the things we call right wing.” The only right-wing parties that are illegal in Europe today are Nazi parties. And the only people who regard the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a “sacrificial ritual”—Cooper again—are Nazis.

I have spent most of my adult life writing history books, most of them addressing in one way or another what still seem to me among the central questions of modern history: Why did the Germans, who in the 1920s appeared to be the most scientifically and culturally advanced people in the world, fall under the spell of Adolf Hitler and perpetrate the most odious crime of all: industrialized genocide?

Why did the economic and intellectual success of the Jews after their nineteenth-century emancipation arouse such hatred? And why did the British Empire, for all its flaws, not succumb to the seemingly irresistible force of Nazism in 1940?

I have never argued that Churchill was a saint, any more than have his greatest biographers, Martin Gilbert and Andrew Roberts. But I have consistently echoed A.J.P. Taylor’s verdict that he was “the savior of his country.” More, Churchill was the savior of Western civilization. Had he not stiffened British resolve—in the time before Hitler in his hubris declared war on the Soviet Union and the United States—the repulsive, blood-drenched empire that was the Third Reich might conceivably have won the war.

True, Churchill had to make common cause with Stalin to beat Hitler; but he knew Stalin for the brutal dictator that he was, and he was among the very first to see that World War II would soon be followed by Cold War I.

It is surely the epitome of professional failure to have spent more than three decades writing, teaching, and speaking about these matters, and to have achieved so little that a nasty little Nazi apologist like Darryl Cooper can win an audience of millions. But that is apparently what happens when podcasts drive out books and anti-history drives out history.

I shudder to think where this leads.

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