THE WAR ON WORLD WAR II: Why False Revisionism Must Be Defeated.
Nearly a year apart from each other, Tucker Carlson interviewed guests Darryl Cooper and David Collum — “amateur” historians — who have erroneously circulated false narratives about the war, contradicting the story that the Allied Powers were entirely morally ‘good.’
Last summer, Cooper ignited a bevy of notoriety and backlash by claiming Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II for declaring war on Germany after the invasion of Poland. He even provided cover for Adolf Hitler. This August, Collum posited, “The story we got about World War II is all wrong” to which Carlson agreed, and even suggested the Allies should have aligned with the Nazis and fought the Soviet Union.
The interviews were certainly “incendiary” as World War II historian Victor Davis Hanson stated before refuting Collum’s mischaracterizations of the war point-by-point. The year prior, British historian Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, pummeled Cooper’s “staggering ignorance and disregard for historical fact” against the man who, arguably, saved Western Civilization.
Still, millions of people consumed Carlson’s videos; and there is a susceptible audience prone to accept the historical inaccuracies as gospel on a first glance rather than critically reading to discern fact from fiction. In fact, Americans are reading less, so YouTube videos, social media, and podcasts hold more weight as sources of information. But the correction is never as large or widely promoted as the initial report; so there is a danger in the amplification of these egregious narratives.
Andrew Fowler of RealClearHistory asks, “This ignorance makes revisionism more dangerous, as audiences are less equipped to separate fact from fiction. The question becomes: what is the revisionists’ end game? Certainly not to perpetuate freedom or to properly educate the public. Regardless, it is sowing distrust in the very foundations of democracy.”
“End game” implies a single, unified goal; Gnosticism for its own sake is also a possibility. Back in 2012, the European Union went on a full Oceania meets Whig History bender and declared that WWII was actually “The European Civil War” that foretold the coming of the EU. In 2022, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times similarly fired up the memory hole when he declared, “Ukraine Is the First Real World War.”
Regarding Tucker’s interview with Daryl Cooper, Lee Smith of Tablet wrote last week, “What did it matter to Carlson that his stunt could’ve cost Trump the election? His brand is despair and demoralization, and the model works best when Americans have lost faith in their country. Like Obama, he was hacking away at the United States’ historic roots and dismantling its heroic narrative of itself: Churchill was the bad guy, and everything your grandfathers believed and fought for was a lie. The Greatest Generation was a hoax.”