The Internet continues to buzz with speculation about why Tucker Carlson opened up his vast platform to Darryl Cooper, a Hitler apologist and Holocaust denier. Cooper, as Stephen Green ably explained, “is either a loon or a fraud.” There’s no doubt about that, and it also must be borne in mind that he wasn’t there to have a conversation with Tucker about intriguing aspects of twentieth-century history. Darryl Cooper was making not-so-subtle points about today’s political scene, and how certain controversial issues should be approached.
One of the most controversial aspects of the interview was that Cooper called Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II, which led many viewers to think, quite reasonably, that Cooper regarded Adolf Hitler as one of the “good guys." Cooper, however, denied this in the interview himself: “That's not what I’m saying. Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this.” Yet what Cooper really is saying is even worse.
Cooper went on to say that Hitler’s National Socialist regime, “when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and 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.” As a result, he said, German commanders began suggesting that the humane thing to do would be to kill these people and thereby end their suffering: “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?”
Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) September 2, 2024
(1:20) History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
(12:39) The Jonestown Cult
(32:10) World War Two
(45:04) How… pic.twitter.com/HJ2B8RjcCY
This is a wildly inaccurate scenario of how the Holocaust began. The genocide of the Jews didn’t happen by accident, or because the Germans were unprepared for the number of prisoners of war they would have on their hands. On January 30, 1939, two and a half years before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler said in a speech to the Reichstag that “if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” This was no idle remark. In September 1941, three months after the invasion of Russia had begun, the National Socialists even distributed this quote as a wall poster to be displayed in homes, schools, and offices.
The National Socialists were preparing the German people to accept the mass murder of the Jews. Cooper is likewise misleading (at best) when he suggests that all those who were killed were Jews in Eastern Europe. He ignores the millions of Jews who were sent from Western Europe to the East precisely in order to be killed. On March 23, 1943, National Socialist official Adolf Eichmann’s chief statistician, Richard Korherr, provided SS chief Heinrich Himmler with a document entitled “The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question,” giving details of what had been done to the Jews up to December 31, 1942. Korherr reported that “since the seizure of power, the number of Jews in Europe, which was over ten million in 1933, has been halved; the decline of over four million is due to German influence.” These people weren’t just relocated; they were murdered.
Cooper, however, isn’t really making a point about Hitler at all. He is really talking about Israel and Gaza today. He continued:
I argue with my Zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as 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, that, 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. You can look at it and say, well, yeah.
Well, no. Cooper’s point is that the Israelis are like the Germans, launching a war without a plan and ending up committing genocide. This analogy outrageously ignores the fact that Hamas started the war with Israel by invading the country and murdering 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. Did the Soviet Union invade Germany before the German tanks rolled into Russia on June 22, 1941? No. In fact, Stalin was scrupulously keeping to the terms of his pact with Hitler, and studiously ignoring the many signs that the Germans were about to break that agreement.
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Also, the Israelis are not committing genocide, either by accident or design. It is false that they had “no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war.” West Point Professor John Spencer says that Israel has, in fact, “created a new standard for urban warfare” In a March 25 article in Newsweek, Spencer stated that as of that date, “some 18,000 civilians have died in Gaza, a ratio of roughly 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. Given Hamas’ likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1. Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”
Cooper ignores all that, as demonizing Israel is the entire point of his discussion with Tucker Carlson. Cooper wants us to think that Hitler was pushed reluctantly into war and ended up killing Jews out of grim necessity and even worse, a desire to be humane. Then he wants us to see Israel as the new Hitler, committing genocide not out of malice but out of an abject failure of planning, but either way, the point is clear: the U.S. should abandon Israel and stop aiding its allegedly imperialist and genocidal enterprise. By making Hitler seem more reasonable, Cooper attempts to make betraying an ally seem more reasonable as well. And Tucker Carlson, to his everlasting discredit, earnestly played along.
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