It is nearly impossible to find anyone who will paint Winston Churchill as the real bad guy responsible for World War II and yet Tucker Carlson found one in historian Darryl Cooper. Giving Cooper a platform is so unforgivable that Carlson has been rightly condemned on “X” and in articles such as that found in the Jerusalem Post among many others.
Though the interview occurred just days ago, Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance had more than enough time to call Tucker out for the interview and refuse an invitation to appear Tucker’s program.
Except Vance didn’t. He ignored the burgeoning scandal.
Vance’s failure to even address Cooper’s holocaust-sympathizing views is nearly as bad as Tucker allowing Cooper to spit his wicked and false views to a massive audience. The Jerusalem Post compiled some of Cooper’s grotesque assertions from the interview:
“In 1941, [the Nazis] launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners,” …Cooper then suggested that the murder of millions in the camps was an unintended consequence of Hitler’s unpreparedness for war.
An unintended consequence? Prisoners of war? He makes it sound like an accident! Many Jewish people were taken right out of their homes. Cooper also ignores the fact that “the final solution” was an official policy, a horrific one that killed six million innocent Jews.
It gets worse:
“They went in with no plan for that and just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there,” …Cooper [asserted] that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, rather than Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II because “he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”
No, the concentration camps were a direct consequence of Nazi policy, and the war became what it did because the invasion of Poland was just the next step in a larger plan to overrun Eastern Europe. It took Churchill and FDR to stop the butcher who single-handily set Europe on fire.
The shocking interview was so vicious that it was Vance’s duty to raise and reject Cooper’s views prior to being interviewed, or – more obviously, simply refuse the invitation. Alex Floyd of the DNC put out a statement:
“Just days after ultra-MAGA extremist Tucker Carlson lavished praise on a Holocaust denier in a friendly interview, JD Vance rushed to be one of Carlson’s next guests.
“Instead of calling out Carlson for his shameful actions, Vance is cozying up to him – and it’s no surprise considering far-right extremist Carlson was a staunch advocate for Donald Trump picking Vance as his running mate in the first place…”
As correct as it is concise. This is not difficult. Any responsible person would surely address the problem, never mind a vice-presidential candidate.
Lingering anti-Semitism continues to be a problem for Trump and Trump supporters, including Elon Musk. Inexplicably, Musk found Cooper’s shameful rendition of Nazism “interesting” but then deleted his tweet.
Futurist: #Musk Deletes Nazi Apologist Tweet. He quote-tweeted Carlson podcast calling a Nazi apologist "very interesting" & "worth watching" The Holocaust denier says then-UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the "chief villain" of World War II.
https://t.co/esVhU7zx7K— James Fawcette (@TheFawcette) September 6, 2024
Deletion or not, what could possibly have made the Cooper interview “worth watching”? It is spiteful, dangerous, and just plain factually wrong.
But Musk and some on the Right have been here before. Donald Trump has been appropriately called out for dining with an infamous and well-know anti-Semite, and Eric Trump has featured anti-Semitic guests as speakers at some of his promotional events.
Vance missed a golden opportunity to put some distance between a MAGA movement encompassing some associated with anti-Semitism. And yet Vance did not.
Perhaps one could chalk his failure up to simply being unaware of the issue in a brutally hectic campaign. Doing the interview would be just as wrong. But some of the blame might be laid on campaign staff not prioritizing the matter. Even so, it remains Vance’s responsibility.
Anti-Semitism remains one of the most dangerous concerns that seem to inevitably, perhaps inherently, arise out of populist movements.
Extremism is always extreme and extremely dangerous. As history shows, the real villain of World War II was a proud populist, and anti-Semite.
Never forget. It can happen here unless it is promptly stamped out. Vance failed. It’s too late to address it anyway.
He should.
Isn’t it odd that the party that follows/allows views on Hitler like this is Netanyahu’s friend and accuses the Democratic Party of being anti-semetic when they criticize Israel?
Maybe I’m mistaken, but I don’t equate opposing Netanyahu with being anti-semitic…..
After all, the Israeli protesters who demonstrated after he ignored calls to negotiate a cease-fire and free the remaining hostages are anything but anti-semitic.
During the war, the nazis marched through France. In a village suspected of supporting the resistance, the nazis herded hundreds of villagers, all the residents, i.e., old young everyone, into a building. They locked them in and burned THEM ALIVE. The French decided to let the abandoned village stand as a monument to nazi cruelty. I’ve been accused of being a lot of negative things due to my ‘tone’, language, profanity, being mean, etc. I admit I am a zealot because this nazi has risen to the top of our government; he has murdered tens of thousands of Americans, he has already killed and destroyed children, and many other fascist things. We are in serious danger, something many of you have never been in before. I have many times in my life. This is not a time to whisper the house is on fire. Unfortunately, too many believe if you play nice with nazis, you will avoid their horror. You should study what the leaders tried when Hitler took over the German government. It didn’t work then and it won’t withTrump. I don’t believe any one of my five uncles, who were in that war, who shot nazis as they crawled across France, or survived the pacific theater, ever regretted it. Time to understand if he wins there will be murder, mass incarceration, who knows. What I do know that enabled me to survive all the violence I faced is that fighting fear is number one. The second is be prepared to fight. Unfortunately too many are fine being victims. The nazis welcome that. VOTE! If we succeed then we can all hold hands and sing kumbaya.
…”too many believe if you play nice with nazis, you will avoid their horror. You should study what the leaders tried when Hitler took over the German government. It didn’t work”. And history will remember the name Neville Chamberlain forever.
As a friend told me, “I’m Jewish, NOT a Zionist.”
Sure, all Zionists are Jews like all MAGA’s are Americans, but not all Americans are MAGA (TFG).
In the diary of Victor Klemperer “I Shall Bear Witness” (the top reference for Jewish life in Germany during the Hitler Years) He considered the Zionists just a shade below the Nazi’s, if that’s any endorsement of Zionism.
Um, I’d like to know where this Cooper person got his credentials to be called a “historian.”
““In 1941, [the Nazis] launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners,” …Cooper then suggested that the murder of millions in the camps was an unintended consequence of Hitler’s unpreparedness for war.”
For starters, the war began in 1939–September 1, to be exact–when NAZI GERMANY invaded Poland. Two days later, the UK and France declared war on Germany, upholding their agreements with Poland. For what it’s worth, Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister of the UK at this time. Chamberlain–like Churchill–was a Conservative PM. Churchill would take over as PM the very day (in 1940) that the NAZIS INVADED the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg on their way to invade France and, within a month of Churchill’s assumption of the Prime Minister’s role, British troops were besieged at a little French town called Dunkirk (maybe this Cooper guy missed it but there was a movie of that name just 7 years ago that dealt with the evacuation of the hundreds of thousands of British and allied French troops, mostly by hundreds of PRIVATE BRITISH ships, including fishing boats and small personal craft). This “Cooper” guy might want to read up on what else the NAZIS were doing to Britain before 1941. There’s fascinating historical documentation about the “London Blitz” in which German aircraft flow raids over Britain, especially London, dropping bombs and devastating large parts of the city (decades later, they were still finding *unexploded* German bombs various parts of the city while digging new lines for London’s subway system and while constructing new buildings and doing renovations to existing structures) and well into the 1980s, there were still hundreds of thousands of British citizens who harbored resentment towards Germans in general over the war (this resentment even made it into some well-loved British *comedy* programs, like “Are You Being Served,” “Fawlty Towers,” “The Benny Hill Show” and even “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”).
As for the camps, well, this “Cooper” fellow might want to go back and actually read up on what Hitler and his fellow Nazis were doing after they took power. For some background, in 1933, there was a national boycott called against Jewish businesses (with a bizarre twist, the date set was April 1) and within a week, a law was passed excluding “non-Aryans” (read, “Jews”) from virtually all civil service positions. A nationwide book-burning event took place in May of 1933, in which books deemed “un-German” (with a lot of Jewish authors’ works) were torched. Within months of this, Jews were stripped of their German citizenship (even for those whose families had been “Germans” since the unification of German states in 1871–longer than Hitler had been alive, much less an actual German citizen; as an Austrian, Hitler considered himself a “German” by nationality–specifically, an Austrian German–and in the days of the Dual Monarchy, the parts of Austria inhabited by Germans was commonly known as “German Austria” as opposed to “Czech Austria” or “Slovene Austria”). After the burning of the Reichstag (blamed on Jews, but most likely done by the Nazis for their own aims), the Nazis established prison camps, which would eventually become the concentration camps. (For historical accuracy, the British established “concentration camps” during the Boer War in South Africa, but the Germans set up similar camps in German Southwest Africa–now Namibia–during the first decade of the 20th century in which nearly 45% of all prisoners died; by comparison, the British camp death rate has been estimated at about 20 to 25%. And many prisoner-of-war camps set up during WW1 saw prisoners treated harshly with most of the worst treatment towards prisoners being the result of general economic crises; when the general public was starving, they weren’t going to accept a bunch of prisoners of war getting more food than they were–they could be convinced to accept their own army and navy getting more food but not a bunch of war prisoners who may have been responsible for killing their loved ones. But I digress . . . .) The camps the Nazis set up started off to “rid” society of those the Nazis would consider “deplorables” but, by 1938, they’d become the horrors we know them to be. Prisoners who’d previously just worn regular civilian clothing were now issued special prison garb, complete with the infamous badges and, even before the *official* start of the war (Germany’s invasion of Poland), people being sent to the camps were mostly there for POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS reasons (being a Communist or Socialist or other “anti-Nazi”; being a Romany or a Slav or a homosexual or what’s called work-shy; and, of course, being a Jew or a Jehovah’s Witness) rather than any “real” criminal activity (such as rape, murder, theft).
Whatever institution gave this Cooper guy his degree in history (assuming it’s a legitimate institution and not some shady institution like Trump University or Liberty University) needs to rescind the degree. Usually a “historian” gets a BA in history at the very minimum, while a master’s degree and a doctorate in history is where the real prestige lies (I think it’s possible to get a BS in history, depending on the specifics of where your work is going). If you don’t want to go through all that time and hassle, then you cannot legitimately be called a historian; your status is nothing more than an AMATEUR historian and you have NO business going on any kind of program or podcast suggesting you have any real authoritative background in the subject.
Nice summary that clearly shows it was incremental. In a complete book of the history of Germany, there’s a large section covering what you laid out. In a photocopy of an official edict naming who should be arrested…there’s the usual suspects, Jews, homosexuals, mentally ill, etc. I fit into several,(some here may think mentally ill), but there was one to cover everyone who writes here…’grumblers’, that is anyone who didn’t like what the nazis were doing. There’s a frightening picture of their version of the Supreme Court with all the judges dressed in robes giving the nazi salute. Of course it was either that or a bullet. History, if truly researched, tells us everything and every reason why we are in serious trouble. Of course, most don’t know it, some don’t care, and others twist it to suit their purpose. The Maga crowd falling into those subsets. Nazis. Maybe not by name but by their politics. Facts matter.
The slimebag’s reference to the Nazis “launching a war” in 1941 is to Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. The infamous and dreaded second front that all sane military minds want to avoid. And yes, the Nazis gathered up millions of “prisoners,” mainly the civilian populations they rolled over on their way to Stalingrad. They were already well prepared to deal with them according to Hilter’s instructions: special death squads followed the fighting troops, murdering as they saw fit. Whoever they couldn’t slaughter went to the Eastern concentration camps, by then already dedicated extermination centres. It was all planned, right down to minute details, by the efficient, black-hearted German bureaucracy.
Almost 60, and at one time read as much as I could about ww2. I can honestly say that I have forgotten more about ww2 than this pos ever tried to learn. Willful arrogant ignorance to state his views. In the easiest terms: one dumb sob. And yeah, these folks tend to use history… sometimes 90-95% accurate… but that 1% is pure hogwash. It takes effort and giving a damn to spot .