RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-history-and-anti-history?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-the-truth-about

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.

In a recent and now widely seen Tucker Carlson interview, a guest historian named Darryl Cooper casually presented a surprising number of flawed theories about World War II. He focused his misstatements on the respective roles of Winston Churchill’s Britain and Adolf Hitler’s Germany—especially in matters of the treatment and fate of Russian prisoners, the Holocaust, the systematic slaughtering of Jews, strategic bombing, and the nature of Winston Churchill. 

Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response. 

On the Treatment of Russian Prisoners

It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941. 

The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East. 

The edicts variously targeted for elimination prominent Soviet officials, intellectuals, Jews, and commissars. Just as importantly, Hitler exempted German soldiers from any criminal liability in what was expected to be the mass killing of Russians and Jews in general. 

In Mein Kampf, during the lead-up to the war, and even through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact years, Hitler had planned eventually to invade Russia, destroy the Soviet Union, put an end to what he called Jewish Bolshevism, and annex and then eventually resettle almost all of European Russia. In part he was encouraged by the German success in briefly absorbing much of Western Russia in late 1917 and early 1918. 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

When Marcellus utters Shakespeare’s immortal line, he speaks of the corruption that led to Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, being murdered. When Mr. Gingrich wrote the words in the rubric, it reflected his opinion that corruption, incompetence and dishonesty have come to characterize American politics. One does not have to be in accord with all that Mr. Gingrich believes to agree that politics in the United States has become polarized and that people, in general, have become disenchanted with those who labor in the vineyards along the Potomac. 

Complaints about politics and political leaders are as old as civilization, but they have reached new heights in the U.S., and, in fact, in much of the West. A PEW Research study, conducted a year ago, concluded: “Just 4% of U.S. adults say the political system is working extremely or very well; another 23% say it is working somewhat well.” Things have worsened since. On August 21 of this year Statista Research put the approval rating for the U.S. Congress at 16 percent. Keep in mind, this is despite the 118th Congress “being the most diverse Congress in American history.” Their report concluded that “nearly 60% of Americans have no confidence the parties can govern in a bipartisan way.”

When asked how they feel when they think of politics in the PEW study, 65% said they were “always/often exhausted”. Asked as to what words best described the current state of American politics, “divisive” and “corrupt” were the top choices. Members of Congress, especially those on the left, are famous for extolling wealth and income disparities. Yet, the median net worth of an individual member of Congress is more than five times the median net worth of American households. Wikipedia, in a list of presidents ranked by net worth, adjusted for inflation to 2022 U.S. dollars, shows that three of the last five U.S. Presidents head the list: Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. (George W. Bush is twelfth and Joe Biden is tied with Eisenhower for twenty-second.) Last on the list is Harry Truman, who famously replied when offered a corporate board seat: “You don’t want me; you want the U.S. Presidency, and it’s not for sale.” Today, everything in politics is for sale, including access.