What’s Really at Stake With the WWII Debate
Last week, Tucker Carlson broke the internet—again. This time, he did so by interviewing the popular historian podcaster Darryl Cooper (aka Martyr Made) who made some controversial assertions about World War II—namely, that Winston Churchill was a warmonger who instigated the war, authorized inhumane attacks on civilians, and ignored Hitler’s many peace proposals. This set off a firestorm in the media, with a number of critics and even a White House spokesman calling Cooper and Carlson Nazi sympathizers deserving cancellation for daring to challenge the official narrative of WWII.
And while an instance of history nerds arguing with one another might seem “too online” for most normal people to care about, it actually reveals a great deal about today’s political culture. As Cooper himself noted in the interview, the popular beliefs about Churchill and the Allied Powers in WWII are critical to the Western identity today. As the story goes, the Americans and British were liberators who championed freedom and justice while the Germans and Japanese were genocidal monsters that would enslave humanity. As for the Russians, who were also genocidal monsters enslaving humanity, they’re generally not part of the conversation.
On the one hand, this narrative has benefitted Americans, who can take pride in being part of a nation that exterminated fascism from the world. Considering that leftist historical revisionists continually cast
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