Carlson, Cooper, and a New American Mythos

Why can’t you even moderately challenge the WWII narrative?

By guest contributor Ignatius of Florida.

A friend recently remarked to me: “Isn’t it convenient that the good guys have won every time we have fought a war?”

It has become more and more evident that the adage “History is written by the winners” is true to a certain extent — not in the sense of the progressives’ use of this phrase as a bludgeon to make Americans feel blood guilt, but in the sense that the cultural and political victors of conflicts define the terms of the subsequent discourse. For no conflict is this truer than for World War II itself.

Twitter has been blowing up since Tucker Carlson unveiled his latest interview, with Darryl Cooper of the Martyr Made podcast. Darryl is a masterful historian, a man who turned a hobby for killing time after work into likely a hundred hours’ (minimum) worth of historical content to listen to. His most recent project, as announced by Tucker himself, is a series on World War II.

Darryl appears to have stoked the fires with his comments, drawing the ire of everyone from the Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon to Josh Hammer of Newsweek. Smears of “antisemitism” and of besmirching the name of beloved Winston Churchill fly left and right. The claims of his antisemitism are even unfounded, as the “logistical nightmare” that Darryl describes was over the housing of Soviet POWs — he was not even speaking of the Holocaust. In fact, Darryl has made clear in his Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the decision to enact the extermination of the Jewish population was made long before war with Poland and Britain kicked off.

But it shows the mythological status that World War II and the conventional narrative have in the mind of every American, especially the regime class. Darryl and Tucker posit that the events of World War II are a “founding myth” of the post-war world. The post-war consensus has been one of U.S. imperial authority, one of so-called “social progress” away from the “regression of Fascism and the past.” To the average American learning only the most surface-level of World War II history, Nazism and Fascism were mere blips of right-wing regression backwards into bigotry. Cooper points out in Fear and Loathing, as does Ludwig von Mises in his work Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, that these ideologies were considered the peak of enlightened scientific thought in their times.

Communism and Fascism were progressive ideologies, both socialist in nature, and were the trajectory that so-called “progressive” thought was already on. Even this realization should cause one to question the notion of so-called liberal “progress,” and the role that World War II is supposed to play in this narrative.

Darryl and Tucker identify World War II as the age-old justification for every intervention. Every authoritarian is Hitler now. Anyone shying away from sending our boys off to war is Neville Chamberlain. A sure sign of a midwit or propagandist is whether he is able to make any comparison to history beyond the War of Northern Aggression or the Second World War: every conflict that we engage in has become Hitler taking Czechoslovakia, and you must demand that we intervene to stop this despot from taking over the world. Never mind Churchill’s role in expanding the conflict further than it needed to have gone. Never mind our Lend-Lease program that erected the Iron Curtain over Eastern Europe. You, dear citizen, should never question our war narratives, our war motivations, our assessment of the practicality of this new war. If you do, you are a xenophobic fascist isolationist — or so the conventional narrative would have you believe. The liberal world order is here to save you!

But World War II saw the death of the Old Right, the opponents of the New Deal order. The New Deal destroyed free enterprise. The New Deal destroyed mutual aid. And World War II destroyed any discussion of repealing this mistake. As Murray Rothbard identified, World War II and the crackdown that followed shut down any hopes of repealing the New Deal before it could sink its roots into the ground.

The World War II mythos is needed to maintain the regime of today. Every progressive social crusade bludgeons any resistance by calling them “Nazis.” Every intervention abroad demands that we treat it as though it were the specter of Fascism over Europe. Every attempt to repeal mistakes of the past is clouded in the mythos of World War II. This is why it is so vigorously defended as orthodoxy.

The impotent Right — defined by Buckley as “standing athwart history and yelling, ‘Stop!’” — has built itself on feigned opposition to the Leftist crusade. Rather than get results, they would rather make money by acting outraged. So, it is no wonder that they denounce anyone willing to question the cornerstone of the Leftist crusade: their bottom line depends on it. Those of us interested in restoring America to what it was should be more than willing to tear down the conventional lens of history. Revisionism is needed to restore America.