Revisionism and Misplaced Empathy: The Darryl Cooper - Tucker Carlson Situation

That is kind of broken out in the history content creation community of sorts that I find myself in, I figured it would be time for me to say something about it. And because it directly impacts me to a much less degree than other people I know, thankfully, but it does impact me, and it has impacted a number of people that I know. So without further ado, let's

get into it. I have for many years recommended Daryl Cooper's hit podcast Martyrmaid to the relative handful of people kind enough to listen to my own show and read my thoughts on various publications, including my own substack and not to fully bury the lead. I still do recommend Martyrmaid, though admittedly with a little more reservation than I might

otherwise have only a month earlier. The reason why there is any reservation on my part can actually be summed up in the following email I received just a few days before writing this essay. You've previously recommended The Fear and Loathing, a new Jerusalem series by the Martyr Maaide podcast is a good resource for learning about the Israel Palestine conflict. In light of Daryl Cooper's recent Holocaust denial,

would you still recommend that podcast? This is one among several messages that I have been receiving in the past week or two. I was not surprised when they started coming in. I've been producing a historical podcast since twenty nineteen and occupied a similar space at least until twenty twenty one as Daryl Cooper for just as long, a space that we might presumptuously call the Dan Carlin school of podcasting. You know, the long form episodes lasting from

anywhere from two to six hours. In case people forgot, I even have collaborated with Darryl once in twenty twenty, and he and I had developed something of a friendly relationship and occasionally but playfully antagonistic banter online. This friendly relationship was actually solidified when he offered to fly me back across the country to my hometown of Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd's death to be with my mother while what they were calling neighborhood incursions were taking

place in my childhood homes immediate vicinity. For context, in case some of you haven't heard me talk about this elsewhere, I actually grew up five blocks from where George Floyd was killed. I know exactly where it is.

no obligation to offer. Now, thanks to this experience, I find myself as a historical podcaster with at least some audience crossover with Cooper's in a bit of a strange space, namely after Tucker Carlson's now infamous interview with Cooper has

been given time to gestate and be reacted again. I had known that Daryl was going to discuss World War Two from the German perspective for some time at that point when that interview went up, and while I thought it was a potentially interesting and illuminating angle on which to tackle our world's most infamous conflict, one that I'm covering myself at least the corners of it, I immediately knew this would not go over smoothly whenever it happened. Fast

forward to September two, twenty twenty four. It did, indeed happen, and not in a way that I believe Daryl necessarily wanted or was fully prepared for, at least in the Free Press on September fifth, only three days later, Barry Weiss referred to Cooper as a quote unquote pseudohistorian with quote a disgust toward Judaism that has inspired him to

turn Hitler into a misunderstood figure unquote. On the same day and in the same publication, so Rabbamari wrote that Cooper was someone who had long since quote made known his nutty views about the Jews, as well as his sympathy for the Third Reich unquote, and linked him to what he called the barbarian rite catch you name, regardless of what you think, which enjoys membership of figures and groups as diverse and unlikable as Nick fuentes Is, Grouper's

movement and Ray science peddlers like Steve Sailor. Similarly, and perhaps most harshly, historian Neil Ferguson called Cooper quote a nasty little Nazi apologist unquote that engages in quote unquote

anti history. Joshua Trevigno, writing in Armas, didn't even directly reference Cooper or Carlson, but said very plainly that he believed we were living through end quote abrupt resurgence of anti Semitism unquote, relating to quote the generation that experienced anti Semitism's most horrific episode in the Holocaust being mostly gone.

Constantine Kissin wrote on his substack that this whole affair confirmed his thesis on a new quote unquote woke right, while referring to Cooper's interview as quote so historically illiterate that every major claim he made was debunked on ex itself within hours, with community notes and in articles published

by prominent historians. Some criticisms were less sweeping, but no less seemingly damning, including Winston Churchill scholar Andreas Correas tweeting that quote Cooper knows nothing about Winston Churchill unquote, followed by several points of refutation against some of Cooper's subsequent claims. Even the White House chimed in, calling the interview quote unquote Nazi propaganda that was quote disgusting and a sadistic insult.

his detractors have claimed. And I do not even believe that we are living through some era of Hitler reappraisal just because Darryl is being lumped in with the insanity, the objective insanity that is Candice Owens's recent obsession with the Francis.

his immediate response following. He has since added more clarity to his approach on the Martyr Made substack, which is worth reading for a fuller picture. However, his initial claims are always going to be his first impression on this particular topic, and thus they require challenging, especially on their

merits and more importantly, on their sourcing. This will help provide the necessary context or grain of salt, however you want to look at it for when he actually finishes and releases the work that he has now officially announced.

twenty the British Empire was at work pacifying. The problem is that this quote is inaccurate. Now, Churchill did indeed refer to Iraqi tribes as uncivilized and in need of gasing, but in the departmental minutes presented by the International Churchill Society revealed that Churchill advocated for the use of lacrymatory.

are there not better examples? Well, Cooper seems to believe so, and yet those examples have their own issues in explaining how wretched conditions became in Germany during and especially after the First World War, which did indeed contribute to the conditions that would allow for such a reactionary populist movement as national socialism to gain ground. Cooper also claimed that this was due to a long, unprecedented tactic of starving

out Germany's civilians with naval blockades. Now, he is right to point out that quote unquote, up to seven hundred and fifty thousand Germans would starve to death, and scholars agree typically that the number is likely lower, but Daryl's phrasing is appropriately careful here. But it's basically reasonable to say that hundreds of thousands of Germans starved to death

thanks to blockade. However, Cooper's framing is wrong with his use of Churchill's explanation that quote the blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress and avowedly sought to starve the whole population unquote, serving as evidence for the then First Lord of the Admiralty's

unique cruelty. Cooper was not necessarily incorrect in pointing out that this tactic was problematic at best, But the problem is that this tactic was not unique Germany's own infamous U boat campaign, which frequently sank unaligned and civilian ships, was in response to the blockade, but its goal was also to starve out the British before the blockade devastated

Germany the way it ultimately did. Therefore, the only thing that makes Britain appear more like a villain in this case is the fact that they won World War One and Germany lost. In other words, had Germany won, there would be people doing revisionism, likely making the opposite claim, which ultimately reveals equally little about moral complicity, except that

everyone involved in warfare is complicit in their intentions. Now likely anticipating this, Cooper dismissed the argument that quote unquote wars he had in order to make his broader point that Churchill and the British were uniquely nefarious in this regard, by claiming that quote for two and a half centuries, Europeans had refrained from tactics like mass starvation and other means of targeting civilian populations when they fought each other.

This is likely in reference to the modernizing efforts taken up by the Prussian military in the mid seventeenth century, in which Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg deemphasized the use

of mercenary soldiers and tried to professionalize the military. According to historian HW Coch, quote one innovation finding general approval was the introduction of severe discipline in the army, in which quote any act of plundering would be punished by hanging, and quote any officer who physically attacked a civilian will be stripped of his rank for a year and have

to carry the musket as a common soldier. This frames the Prussian military and thus early modern European military standards as being both noble and disciplined, too morally upstanding to engage in anything resembling a war crime, or, more to the point, a hunger blockade. Now noble as this was. Naval blockades occurred in Europe well after this time, the one I just spoke of, and well before the British blockade of Germany during World War One, to say nothing

of Germany's aforementioned unrestricted U boat warfare. Napoleon engaged in wartime blockades of Britain known as the Continental System, in which English industries were harmed in the process. While one can quibble with the intent behind such blockades, being different, It's simply not accurate to claim that these blockades were not designed to put pressure on warring nations civilian populations,

whether through starvation or unemployment. In addition, during the Franco Prussian War of eighteen seventy, the siege of Paris by Prussian forces was in essence a blockade against the city,

resulting in a massive death to ward of civilians. According to historian Jeffrey warrou quote, in three weeks of firing, the German gunners that hit hospitals, schools, churches, prisons and apartment houses, but were still far behind the death toll wrought by cold and hunger, which were killing three thousand to four thousand Parisians every week in January. The blockade against Germany by Great Britain in the First World War was no doubt significant in its effects and arguably cruelty.

I don't think that that can necessarily be disputed, at least not that much. But it was by no means unprecedented in European history. In fact, to my eyes, it kind of seems like the norm the framing cooper engaged in also neglected to reckon with the German airship bombing campaigns of the First World War against England, specifically, which began before the British blockade of Germany and Austria Hungary

started this framing involving Germany's late war misery. We also neglected one of the largest blind spots in the history of the First World War and its effects. And I don't necessarily blame Darryl for missing this because a lot of people have missed it, and it gives me a chance to sort of gloat a little about my own work that I've done on this very subject, which was ultimately the devastation wrought by the so called Spanish Flu. If a recall, the Spanish Flu ultimately killed German soldiers

at far higher rates than British or French troops. It arguably cost them the war and its effects in Germany at home even correlated with later support for the National Socialists, as shown by the scholar Andrew Price Smith in his

excellent book Contation and Chaos. These areas of neglect and others just sort of demonstrate a deeper issue with Cooper's initial framing, a skewed perception of historical agency in favor of motivated reasoning, in which Churchill the chief villain of his framing was given full agency, and later on Adolf Hitler,

his nemesis, was given none. We can see this with how Cooper explained the relationship between Churchill and Hitler as late as nineteen thirty seven, which he characterized as quote unquote not hostile because Churchill said, of the dictator quote those who have met Hitler face to face have found a highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a

subtle personal magnetism. Now this is actually a selective quotation, and one likely derived from the paleoconservative writer Pat Buchanan in his own two thousand and eight revisionist book Churchill, Hitler and the quote unquote Unnecessary War, How Britain lost its empire in the West lost the World, which Cooper

has since happily admitted is one of his sources. It's also worth pointing out that Darryl has since done some deeper digging into his sources and has admitted that this quote was not put in the proper context when he found it and used it, so credit where credits due, of course, but the full context of this quote in Buchanan's book was missing from his account, in which Churchill was expressing, as Scott Manning puts it, quote awe and

caution unquote, not reverence or respect. Bu canon claim that Churchill ended his analysis of the Fure on a quote unquote hopeful note when nothing could be further from the truth. Churchill ended his essay with a note of caution, if not outright fear, for what Hitler's Germany was coming to

mean for Europe. As Churchill wrote, quote, the great wheels revolve the rifles, the canon, the tanks, the shot and shells, the air bombs, the poison gas cylinders, the aeroplanes, the submarines, and now the beginnings of a fleet flow in ever broadening streams from the already largely war mobilized arsenals and factories of Germany. Quote now, was this not hostile? Well, perhaps not, but it was certainly not friendly. And letting not hostile do the heavy lifting certainly implies such now.

This led to Cooper's implication that Churchill's anti Semitism was little different than Hitler's, which he accomplishes by claiming that, quote, like Hitler, Churchill blamed Jews for communism. While it certainly is true that Churchill trafficked in what we would today consider anti semitism once writing that quote, they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer unquote, this made him a little different than many world leaders

at the time, especially in the West. As you guys might remember, I've made the case that Franklin Roosevelt was a little different. However, as Churchill scholar Andreas Careis explains, Churchill's contention quote was that though many many Bolsheviks were Jews,

few Jews were Bolsheviks unquote. Though certainly politically incorrect to such sweeping statements today, Churchill also stated that quote, some people like Jews and some do not, but a not thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are, beyond all question, the most formidable and most remarkable race that has ever appeared in the world. Frankly, this sounds remarkably unlike Hitler's quote from around that same time, where he called Jews a quote race tuberculosis of the people's quote.

Churchill's feelings on the Jews visa VI. Hitler's treatment of them also contradicts any idea or even implication that Hitler did not have any problems with him or England with how he reacted to what ultimately was a snub from Churchill over the so called Jewish question. In August of nineteen thirty two, he ran into Hitler's press secretary Ernst Putzi Hunpstengel, who asked if Churchill would meet with Hitler. In response, Churchill stated, quote, why is her chief so

violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with Jews who have done wrong or who are against the country, and I understand resisting them if they try to monopolize power in any walk of life. But what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth quote? In response to Churchill's challenge, Hitler refused to meet with him that day, and Churchill later stated that quote Hitler then lost his only chance of meeting with me later on, when he was all powerful.

I was to receive several invitations from him, but by that time a lot had happened, and I excused myself. Now, Cooper's implication of Winston Churchill as an anti Semite of similar caliber as Hitler was self evidently problematic. Thanks to hindsight, but it is also demonstrable of selective application of historical agency. To bring that up again, the problem is that this appeared to be applying agency based on, like I was saying, motivated reasoning, rather than a more coherent view of human

motivation and interaction. Churchill and Hitler made their own choices, both in response to one another and independent of one another. It is a deterministic fallacy to believe, as Cooper seemed to be doing in his assessment, that Hitler was pushed into the choices that he made by the choices that Churchill made. That is, that Churchill possessed all the agency in the world and that Hitler possessed none, or at

least significantly less. This framing can be seen from Cooper's original claim in the Carlson interview that quote Churchill wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany unquote, while claiming in his follow up thread that quote Hitler said.

motives and openly admitted desire for more Laban's realm. What Churchill understood then, just as many of us more clearly understand now, is that a push for territorial acquisition is never going to be peaceful, not really, especially when it involves people that you frequently and loudly designated as undesirable at best and subhuman at worst.

such a regime's actions. However, according to Cooper, the British essentially involving themselves in the affairs of Poland after it was invaded and ripped apart by Europe's reigning totalitarian forces that is Nazism and Stalinism. That was their biggest crime. This is because by the British guaranteeing war that is World War this was really what placed the crosshairs on the backs of Jews and millions of other civilians in

the Eastern territories. It does not take the responsibility off of Hitler for doing so, and Cooper does not make that argument. He actually makes it very clear was Hitler's responsibility, But he still makes a causal claim, a deterministic claim that had it not been for the behavior of Winston Churchill,

none of that would have happened. By linking Britain's involvement in churchills supposed bloodthirstiness to how the Second World War and thus the Holocaust turned out in the East, Cooper revealed not just another in my opinion, major blind spot in the history of the conflict, but also let himself get sucked into the most controversial part of his analysis. In the interview with Carlson, Cooper claimed the following, you.

They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.

to feed these people. 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? And so this is like two months into the invasion, right, and like my view, on this. You know, I argue with my Zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Book man, like, maybe you, as the you know, 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 wants a surprise attack and sees 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 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.

The open ended phrasing also allowed people to easily use their imaginations on what was being implied, since it sounded very similar to things that had been stated by people like David Irving, the famous British historian of World War Two who was eventually outed as an outright Holocaust denier. However, what Cooper was saying was spoken off the cuff, and he elaborated a little further in its response over on X,

writing that quote. Would Germany have eventually attacked the Soviet Union, perhaps, but they would not have done so in June of nineteen forty one if England had agreed to end a war which had no hope of victory, short of expanding it into a much larger conflict by bringing in the USA, USSR or both. That's a little better in terms of clarification, but the claim is still very broad, as it remains in Cooper's much more fleshed out explanation on his sub stack.

He concludes his explanation there in a similar way, arguing that quote. The second objection is that Hitler had always had his eyes set on the East and would have eventually invaded regardless of what the allies did, and that may be true. Jim Jones and the hostage taking father may have killed their families no matter how much they were appeased, but maybe not, and agree or disagree that

maybe is worthy of discussion. While Cooper is certainly entitled to his own open mindedness on this question, specifically related to Hitler's intentions, and I do respect him for that, unless he's actively avoiding the vast majority of available evidence that exists on this subject while doing the main research for this series he's working on, he's not likely going to come away with a much different conclusion than that of the mainstream once he stacks up all of that

available evidence. This is because there is less evidence suggesting maybe or maybe not about what Hitler planned for the East than there is the amount of evidence suggesting that Hitler absolutely knew what.

because of Britain's in transigence is simply untrue. Obviously, that is an oversimplified presentation of what Daryl was saying, but that is the essence of how most people interpreted it because of how it was phrased. The thing that needs to be understood and was not clearly understood based on how Daryl phrased everything when he was talking about this stuff, is that the Nazis from Hitler on down always had a plan, and one that was largely independent of anything

Great Britain set or did. That doesn't mean they weren't impacted by what Great Britain set or did, but their plan was independent of that, and the problem for them was not that there was no plan, it was that their plan kept changing, thanks largely to circumstances created by

the choices made by the Nazi leadership. It is important to reiterate here that These choices made by the Nazi leadership were not merely made as reactions to other leaders choices, as Cooper suggests with his claims about Winston Churchill like

I was saying, they made their own choices. The best example of this was something we talked about on History Impossible in one of the episodes of the Balkan Inferno trilogy, specifically about the decision by Hitler to send thousands of troops and aircraft into Yugoslavia on April sixth, nineteen forty one, and subsequently partitioning the kingdom and divving it up among

the Axis powers. Hitler was not compelled to issue Feodor Directive number twenty five on March twenty seventh, nineteen forty one by Winston Churchill's belligerence or desire to spill German blood. In fact, it was because he was so enraged by a poorly executed and badly planned coup de ta that had been launched by Yugoslav military leaders opposed to the absolutist Serb monarchy that had been making promises to the Germans.

You might remember this quote from that episode where we talked about that from William Shire's The Rise involved the Third Reich, where he wrote of the Furi's reaction as follows quote. The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront, and in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the

fortunes of the Third Reich. He hurriedly summoned his military chieftains to the Chancellery in Berlin on March twenty seventh, and raged about the revenge he would take on the Yugoslavs. The Belgrade coup, he said, had endangered both the planned invasion of Greece and even more the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. He was therefore determined, without waiting for possible declarations of loyalty of the new government, to destroy

Yugoslavia militarily as a nation. No diplomatic inquiries will be made, he ordered, and no ultimatums presented. Yugoslavia, he added, would be crushed with unmerciful harshness unquote. It is important to note that Hitler did accuse Britain of quote unquote pulling the strings with this coup and it would actually turn out that they did play a role in setting the tone for the coup to happen. As you might recall, we covered a bit in the first episode of the

Bulkan Inferno trilogy. But here's the thing. In nineteen forty one, Hitler had already been at war with Britain for nearly two years, and ultimately he took his rage out on the Yugoslavs, whose coup plotters were already planning on making a deal with the Axis, which they had made pretty clear. And ultimately it was Yugoslav citizens who would suffer tens of thousands of casualties in Germany's initial invasion, never mind the chaos that was unleashed by the subsequent partition of

the Old Kingdom. The point remains that Hitler made his own choice and was based on rage and wounded pride, and it was not one that he had to make to begin with, and he could have simply continued his plan to unleash Operation Barbarossa in May of nineteen forty one, not altering the timetable as his Yugoslav adventures ultimately did.

Now it has been claimed by some historians, including by William Shire, that the Yugoslav partition operation is what caused Nazi Germany the ability to make the necessary headway for

Operation Barbarossa to be a success. That is certainly debatable, and I'm not here to weigh in one way or the other, but what this demonstrates is quite the opposite of what Cooper appeared to be claiming in the Tucker Carls interview that instead of there being no plan, there were actually many plans, and oftentimes they were changing at a rapid pace and at the whim of one out

of control man. The fact that there were plenty of plans in place when it came to the invasion of the Soviet Union is also very well known, refuting the implication that Nazi Germany simply threw together an invasion with no notion of what kind of actions would be quote unquote necessary when it came to their ultimate goal of territorial expansion, and as a consequence, what ultimately became millions of civilians and prisoners of war.

was saying. However, the emphasis on a lack of preparedness, as well as the idea of the Nazis believing that summary execution was a mercy given that lack of preparedness, just does not track with the multitudes of evidence that is available. The evidence that Cooper used does support this framing to be fair, namely the letter from SS administrator Rolf Heinz Hoopner to Adolf Eichmann that Cooper quoted both

in his response thread and his follow up post. In fact, the celebrated historian Christopher Browning wrote that he believed this memo from Hoopner was among the first pre vancie confirmations of what would ultimately be the fate of Europe's Jews.

And yeah, that is not completely at odds with Cooper's interpretation, since, as he wrote in his follow up post, quote lack of food was at the very least used as an excuse for murder, one which may have helped overcome the uncertainty of men like this Hoopner, who did not seem overjoyed at the prospect of mass killing.

that's the case, that simply does not hold water. As Christopher Browning also notes, quote, immediately after the invasion of the USSR, Himmler and Hedrick traveled together behind the advancing German lines, inciting and sanctioning the execution of Jews and recruiting killing units beyond the Einsatzgrup, And for this task after Midsummer, both Hadrick and Himmler gave instructions to different

units to now target Jewish women and children. Although the onset of the Final Solution in Soviet territory Midsummer nineteen forty one sealed the fate of Soviet Jews, the fate of the rest of European Jewry remained undecided. Hadrik did not need a new authorization to continue his previous planning. He procured one from Gourring on July thirty one to submit a plan for a final solution for the Jews

and the rest of the German sphere in Europe. Precisely because he faced a new task determining if and how the final Solution underway on Soviet territory could be extended to the rest of Europe. Cooper was right to point out that Hupner did not like what was being implied by the realities staring at him in the face. In the summer of nineteen forty one, however, as Browning points out, mass executions were already taking place, primarily from the infamous

ss Einstotskropen squads. These forces were indeed set in directly behind the Wehrmacht, specifically with the orders to massacre what ultimately became about a million and a half people, a third of which were killed within six months, and they were eventually done with the help of the reserve police battalions that Browning covered in his masterpiece Ordinary Men Reserve

Police Battalion one oh one. In The Final Solution in Poland, Browning explains that he believes consensus on the so called Jewish question was reached in October of nineteen forty one, but that is merely consensus. As we have seen, there was already plenty of clarity among Hitler's inner circle on what must be done with the broad category of quote unquote enemies of the Reich that the Nazi forces came across and their pushed.

by the insets good open squads. There is no doubt about the intentions of such orders, and as Neil Ferguson pointed out in his two thousand and six book War of the World, quote from the outset, Hitler had determined that his campaign against the Soviet Union would be fought according to new rules, or rather without rules at all. It was to be, as he told his generals on March thirtieth, a quote unquote war of extermination in which

the idea of soldierly comradeship would have no place. This meant the quote destruct of the Bolshevik kammissars and the Communist intelligentsiaquote. The decision systematically to shoot certain Red Army prisoners, foreshadowed by the brutal way the war in Poland had been fought, was taken on the eve of Operation Barbarosa

and subsequently elaborated on during the campaign. The Guidelines for the conduct of Troops in Russia issued on May nineteenth, nineteen forty one, called for quote ruthless and vigorous measures against the Bolshevik insiders, gorillas, saboteurs and Jews, as implied by what was being stated in that quote from Neil Ferguson.

But important to really dwell on for a moment. The atrocities against civilians were already occurring well before Operation Barbarosa, mere days into the invasion of Poland on September one, nineteen thirty nine. These atrocities had already been set into motion before the invasion thanks to the quote unquote famously thorough SS practices put in place by Heinrich Himmler and

Reinhardt Hadrich. To use the words of historian Richard Rhodes in his book Masters of Death, the s S Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, Rhoades quotes from an SS officer who explained their indexing system as quote a series of lists including the names of every active member of the Communist Party, as well as quote all of the non party intelligentsia and listings of scholars, teachers, writers and journalists, priests, public officials, upwardly mobile peasants, and the

most prominent industrialists in bankers. And it also listed quote relatives and friends in case any subversive scum tried to hide. Given the Nazi's propensity for collective punishment measures even in response to mere suspicion, one can see what the policy

would lead to if it was not yet clear enough. However, Quotes from an englishwoman eye witness to one of the seven hundred and fourteen mass executions that occurred after the German invasion of Poland, this one in the town of bid Gushed, which would come to be known as the Valley of Death.

up in the face of the historical record. For one of those specific reasons, the basis of Operation Barbarossa's territorial acquisitions, known as the AA line referring to Archangelskan the North an Ostra Khan in the South, was put forth by Hitler on December eighteenth, nineteen forty, under the name Feuire Directive twenty one, a full six months before the actual invasion was set to take place, and even longer after the delay that was caused by the invasion of Yugoslavia.

The AA line in that directive can be traced even further back to a military study drafted by General Eric Marx published in the summer of nineteen forty, a full year before Operation Barbarossa was supposed to take place. However, it is clear that there were already plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union in place, with it also being made clear, at the very least through strong implication

that it would be a war of extermination. In nineteen thirty nine, Hitler spoke to his generals of engaging in a racial war with the Soviets, as we've covered, while Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's propaganda machine was putting out NonStop content depicting the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a

land populated with racial undesirables. The propaganda film that Iviga Yuda the Eternal Jew was released on November twenty eighth, nineteen forty, and contained the now infamous visual comparisons of Jews and vermin. A Nazi reviewer of the film even wrote that the film made it clear that quote we are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal, greed, and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world.

early on. This is actually at root why I do not believe he is a Holocaust denier, as has been accused. He has not and still does not deny that the Nazis killed the Jews in the numbers that they did, and that they hated the Jews. He made that very clear, and not just his response to this, but in past

episodes he has talked about this. It is his connection between that hatred and that killing that comes across as weak to me, though, because, like I was saying, he has shown no indication that he believes the Nazis set out to eliminate the Jews from Europe by any means necessary from day one, or at least before the war even started. This is the old functionalist versus intentionalist argument, though I don't think there's really much debate left to

be had about that. Now, this could be construed as a type of revisionist prudence, but given the problems with his interpretations, combined with the evidence that is already available and well known by scholars, I believe that his skepticism or prudence, whatever you want to frame it as on

this point is unwarranted. It also requires some unpacking. A frequent argument brought into this conversation with anyone who wants to revise the history of the Second World War is the so called Madagascar Plan, in which the Nazis would ship Jews under their sphere of control to Madagascar in

order to be rid of them. While this is obviously a form of ethnic cleansing on paper, it also does not come across as monstrous as what eventually happened in places like Auschwitz, and of course that comes across as

significantly less terrible. Those who wish to blame Great Britain for the jews ultimate fate will also point to the fact that had Britain not gunn for war in nineteen thirty nine, their control of Mediterranean Sea lanes, which the Germans expected to have taken by nineteen forty would not have prevented the Madagascar Plan from being dead in its

crib and thus prevent the necessity of the gas chambers. However, this is a simplistic interpretation that, like a lot of things in this controversy, places far to which charity in the minds of the Nazi leadership. According to historian David Blackburn, the Madagascar Plan was welcomed across the board by just

about everybody, including Eichmann, Headrich Himmler and Hitler himself. However, as Blackburn writes, quote, it hardly needs to be said that implementation of the Madagascar Plan would have meant high death rates by attrition, and it was intended to. After the abortion of the Madagascar Plan, places like the Pripet Marshes and even the Arctic Circle were suggested. The former was considered quote arable land yet to be cultivated unquote.

According to a Reich Office of Regional Planning report discussing the use of forced labor, which had been implemented into law, it should be noted in nineteen thirty nine, and the latter, given the environs of the Arctic Circle was little different than the Turk sending the Armenians into the desert in nineteen fifteen, As Blackburn writes, quote, there is no doubt that, like the Madagascar Plan before it, the idea of forcing Jews to quote unquote settle and perform forced labor here

or in the Arctic Circle was an intentionally genocidal proposal unquote. Genocide by expulsion to inhospitable land, genocide through attrition, or genocide by gas chamber, all with the purpose of eliminating a so called racist people. Genocide is genocide, especially when the purpose of complete elimination is as clear as it was.

This attitude can be seen in a speech given at a Nazi Party reception given in Lublin in January of nineteen forty one, where to raucus laughter, the head of the German General Government and occupied Poland, Hans Frank said, quote, whether they go to Madagascar or somewhere else, none of that that interests us. We are clear that the best thing for this mismash of Asiatic progeny is that they

slouched back to Asia where they have come from. The plan to take the lands in the east and replace the people who existed in those lands came long before

war was even declared in nineteen thirty nine. Adolf Hitler himself had been speaking of invading and taking the lands to the east, namely Russia, for over a decade and a half by the time Operation Barbarossa began and analyzing mine Kampf Rodrik Stackelberg explained in his nineteen ninety nine book Hitler's Germany Origins Interpretations Legacies that Hitler's designs for Russia were quite clear by nineteen twenty five, especially when he spoke of the need for adrang nach Austen or

drive to the East, writing to mine Kampf that quote, it is eastwards only and always eastward, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which Nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples. It is therefore extremely doubtful that this meant simply stopping in Poland when General Plan ost placed the Ural Mountains as the natural border against which the new Third Reich

would abut. And this view that he was expressing as early as nineteen twenty five was not some fringe view. In isolation, the German geographer Martin Buergener was instrumental in providing quote unquote natural justifications to Germany taking these lands, particularly when describing them in his travels there in the mid nineteen thirties as a quote unquote gray dark wilderness where the masses that is, Slavs and Jews were quote

vegetating in hopeless apathy. According to Burgener, the main impediment to developing these lands were the Jews and Slavs living on them.

and above all race unquote. Given all this and much more that exists in the scholarship, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that something, and it's quite clear what if you ask me, was always in the works regarding the Eastern territories at some level within the Nazi leadership. It is also extremely doubtful that there was not an awareness of who was already living in these places, what was already thought about them as a people, and what would be necessary in order for the long held dream

of Dragnach Austin to be completed. There is simply no evidence for a lack of a plan, and there is a wealth of evidence for their being perhaps an overabundance of plans. There is also no evidence that avoiding war with Britain and France would have somehow quelled such savage violence to be unleashed on the men, women and children that the Wehrmacht, the SS and Reserve Police battalions came across when they pushed east, not when the evidence that

is available suggests the exact opposite. It is important to point out that there is an element of truth in discussing the lack of appropriate preparation the Nazis had when it came to their quote unquote Eastern operations, but it was not necessarily in the way that Cooper had described it. The problem that the Nazi leadership was not prepared for was a psychologue told that such mass murder was going

to take on soldiers, both volunteers and especially conscripts. Christopher Browning's famous work that I mentioned earlier, Ordinary Men, paint an incredible picture of this. Hence why I recommend it among many other books about this subject, because it illustrates both the horror that many of these men felt and more to the point, the eventual resignation that they experienced and taking part in such ghastly atrocities thanks to the

simple brutal realities of self imposed social pressure. In this narrow sense, the Nazis were not prepared for anything like that Battalion and obviously many others experienced as they butchered Jews, Polls and Russian POWs by the hundreds of thousands. This was, in large part, along with a push for efficiency and a desire for slave labor, what led to the construction of extermination factories like Auschwitz, Treblinka, helm No Sobibor Belzek.

the Nazis were not operating with literal genocidal intent. That has been proven in every way possible. However, imperfectly the

plans to accomplish this outcome are what changed. As Victor Davis Hansen has written that even though quote some of the invading Wehrmacht officers may have been disturbed, the sheer mass of captives and Germans inability to offer even the bare essentials of humane treatment their deaths were consistent with prior Feurier directives for the future resettling of Western Russia.

What never changed, unlike the plans that were put in place, was what came to be known colloquially as Hitler's prophecy that appeared in his speech before the Reichstag on January thirtieth, nineteen thirty nine. In his speech, he made it clear who he was blaming for the coming conflagration that he already knew was going to happen, and it was not

Winston Churchill or the British Empire quote. If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevisation of the Earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race

in Europe. Now one may ask, why do we take Hitler and by extension, the Third Reich itself at his and their word here and not when he was supposedly making his overtures toward peace, Because what he said here lines up with what led up to and happened in the Second World War in the Holocaust, and what he said in his peace overtures did not, both obviously after the fact as well as before, along with the multitudes of other evidence of what Hitler's long term intentions for

the Eastern territories clearly were, and along with the propaganda and rhetoric that he was engaging in. He was not simply saying the Jews would be to blame for another World war for the first time or the last time. He had reportedly said it in private meetings in the wake of Christallnacht in nineteen thirty eight, and he continued to say it in the years that followed. As Jeffrey Hurf noted in his own monograph on the subject, the

Jewish enemy Nazi propaganda during World War II. In the Holocaust, Hitler was very upfront about how he felt about what was happening to the Jews, stating in a speech on September thirtieth, nineteen forty two, quote, the Jews in Germany once laughed about my prophecies. I don't know if they are laughing today or if the laughter has already gone out of them. I can promise only one thing, they will stop laughing everywhere, and with this prophecy as well,

I will be proved right unquote. The fact that there are still people questioning whether or not the Holocaust would have happened as it did is not necessarily an indictment on them or their questions. I think that assumption is unfair, because the Holocaust, with its deliberate industrialized nature and sheer scale and cruelty, along with its fundamental tether to the ideology of national socialism itself, is truly unthinkable. It's unimagined.

It's not capitulation to a corrupt establishment or the marvel cinematic universification of history.

is not nuance, nor is it even forbidden. All it really does is it tends toward basic moral contrarianism that is already very familiar, and it continues to have fundamental problems with its sourcing. If the problems with Cooper's analysis of Churchill, the Second World Wars causes, and the intention behind the treatment of the Eastern peoples under the boot of the Third Reich were frustrating, than the sourcing he seemed to have used for such claims initially was even

more so. As already mentioned, he admitted that he found inspiration in Pat Buchanan's work on the subject. However, it's important to point out that most scholars and critics seemed to be attributing Cooper's claim in the Tucker Carlson interview,

which he has since somewhat walked back. I should note that is Cooper has that Churchill was in debt and had Zionist backers willing to bail him out as a potential quid pro quo on the Israel question, that claim these scholars and critics have been pointing out is most likely attributed to David Irving. Now, so I was complete

in my research on this. I did my own digging, even making use of pro level AI to see where Cooper's comment about some people having made this claim, which is I believe the phrasing he used in the interview where it actually came from, and the original source actually seems to be Joseph Goebbels himself and the propaganda he had produced during the war. Now, I don't have any of David Irving's books myself, so I couldn't confirm or

refute this. But considering he has a seven hundred plus page biography of Goebbels, it is not unreasonable to assume that's the main secondary source where this claim gets repeated. However, Daryl did not cite Irving directly he could well be planning to cover this controversy, this claim in this series

and in a critical way. We just don't know, so I don't think it's necessarily fair, at least for me at this stage to outright claim or agree that he is getting his information from Irving, which, by the way, it's worth noting, is not necessarily a bad thing. It just depends on how you approach it information that is,

with the appropriate amount of skepticism. The same goes for citing Goebbels or any historical figure directly, Regardless, until Darryl starts citing the notorious historian known more for his Holocaust denial than the admittedly good work he had done in the past, a lot of historians did use him because he provided value. But until Darrell starts citing him directly, I see no reason to make such bad faith implications

or claims. However, the citation of Buchanan does seem to be indicative of a trend seemingly present in this interpretation of the secondary sources from which Cooper was initially pulling. His other main secondary source, which he cited both in

his ex response thread and in his follow up post. Thus, reasonably suggesting its importance in coming to the conclusions that he has come to this far is the book Human Smoke, The Beginnings of World War II The End of Civilization, written by the erotic novelist and self described pacifist Nicholson Baker. Now this is not to say that Cooper has not used other secondary sources in his research or looked directly at many of the primary sources he's used that are

also found in Baker's book book. However, given the importance that Baker's work took in Cooper's later explanations of his comments, we are forced to assume that Baker's work is one of the main sources of information that he was using. Now, to be clear, even though I highlighted the fact that Nicholson Baker is an erotic novelist and pacifist rather than a historian, citing a non historian is not a crime,

nor is it even completely pointless. The celebrated British novelist Martin Amos wrote a book called Cooba The Dread Laughter in the twenty million, and, for all of its historical faults and the riff that it caused between Amos and Christopher Hitchins, for a little, while it's still a very good book, and as far as I'm concerned, Nicholson Baker's work is no different. As a piece of nonfiction literature, it often tugs at the heartstrings, even in its clinical

use of primary source documents. However, if one source has been criticized by multiple historians and journalists one month, at the very least acknowledge such controversy for the sake of transparency, especially if it's the only source one is actively citing. I mean, that's how I see it. At least, and at most, one should perhaps cite the criticisms and counter arguments themselves and let the reader or listener decide on

their own. Now, it is impossible to say whether or not Cooper plans to do this with his upcoming podcast series on the subjects, so we shouldn't assume too much. But working with what we do have, the use of Baker's Human Smoke as the source to support the claims being made suggests a fundamental weakness in the scholarship at work. When Human Smoke was released in two thousand and eight,

it faced an avalanche of criticism. Most pointed among them was the aforementioned Christopher Hitchins, who wrote The New Statesman that the title of the book alone was either quote

very courageous or very tasteless, or conceivably both unquote. And this was not a compliment, because, as he continues, quote, I myself grew increasingly impatient with Baker's assumption of his own transgressiveness quote because quote I still detect something smug and vacant in the superior attitude struck by the peace lover.

Hitchins's ultimate criticism, and one that I think resonates most relevantly to the current controversy, is this that those in the anti war faction quote underestimate and understate the radical evil of Nazism and fascism. They forget that many peace loving forces did the same at the time, and they are absolutist in their ahistoricism unquote. However, Hitchins, as a journalist,

was not alone in his criticisms. Historians like Noel Malcolm, who people might recall I use a fair bit in my Bosnia related episode, as well as Piers Brandon, Dominic Sandbrooke, one of the co hosts of the Rest Is History podcasts, I should add, and Lewis Minand all had very strong and in my opinion, fair criticisms of the book's selective use of primary sources in order to promote a self

described pacifist agenda. Noel Malcolm even went so far as to write for The Telegraph that Baker either engaged in quote unquote, incompetence or malice, but that quote so far as the reliability of this strangely childish book is concerned,

it hardly matters which unquote. And Similarly, Sambrook expressed frustration in the same publication because while he quote dearly wanted to like this book because quote it is right and healthy for historians to puncture the patriotic myths of the Second World War, quote, he found it to be a quote self righteous book that cheapens the serious moral arguments

Baker tries to make. Peers Brandon and Lewis Minand were both slightly less harsh, but no less pointed in their criticism that Baker had made some pretty serious errors in his sourcing, to the point that it had become fair to question his motives when writing the book in.

the word devastatingly, but it's pretty bad. In Baker's selective use of a quote that Cooper also used in his response threat on X about Winston Churchill or Churchill stated that Leon Trotsky, in the end quote was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that quote. This was almost certainly meant by Baker to suggest that Churchill was as virulent an anti Semite as Hitler, or at least untrustworthy as a figure to be venerated as a friend of the Jews.

And yet when looking at the full quote Baker used, it was clearly Churchill suggesting something different. Quote in nineteen twenty two, so great was the appreciation among the military for Trotsky's personal attitude and system that he might well have been made dictator of Russia by the armed forces, but for one fatal obstacle. He was a Jew. He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that hard fortune.

When you have deserted your family repudiated your race, spat upon the religion of your father's, and lapped Jew and gentile in a common malignity. To be bulked of so great a prize for so narrow minded a reason, such intolerance, such pettiness, such bigotry, were indeed hard to bear unquote. This suggests not a malice towards Trotsky for being a Jew, but rather a broader appreciation of the circumstances in which Trotsky found himself. That is a notoriously anti Semitic Russian empire.

The robbery of context in the original quote from Baker is, to put it bluntly galling. This is all to say

that sourcing does matter. As Compact writer Jeff Schullenberger wrote in his own reaction to this affair, quote, this is a good illustration of why certain scholarly standards exist, even if they're often not well respected in current academia unquote, and that there is a broader pattern of quote the person who repudiates institutions only to reproduce the same errors he finds there mythmaking on a grand scale, and without

any of their self correction mechanisms. As of right now, it is not clear how much of Cooper's sourcing is up to snuff, at least when it comes to making the claims that he has made publicly, and thus is running the risk of becoming what he is repudiating. Until he makes it perfectly clear what all of his sources are on this subject, what he ultimately claims will need to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Taking the word of a noted paleoconservative politician like Buchanan, or again an erotic novelist at Nicholson Baker simply is just not going to cut it, no matter how compellingly the points are made or the stories are being told, especially when it's clear both have engaged in selective quotation for their motivated reasoning. This is also because there are many other, far more reputable books that have been written

about the Second World War from the German perspective. These include several memoirs that have been translated into English, some being controversial but definitely worth looking at, including the famous The Forgotten Soldier by Gie Mumino, Blood and Soil, the Memoir of a Third reich Brandenberger by Sep the Gianpietro, or Blood, Red Snow, The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front by Gunter Korscherrek and sol Dot Reflections of a German Soldier in nineteen thirty six to

nineteen forty nine by Zigfried Nappa. There's also no shortage of second andary sources, including Jonathan Triggs through the GERMANI series of books, An Aftermath Life in the Fallout of the Third righte nineteen forty five to nineteen fifty five

by Harold Yanner. They're even broader cultural and social histories like Conrad yarro Ush's Broken Lives How Ordinary Germans Experienced the twentieth Century, which pulls together dozens of memoirs by Germans born in the nineteen twenties, and then, for an added twist of complexity, the memoirs that I used for one of my own episodes of Afro German Hans Massaqua

destined to witness growing up black and Nazi Germany. If one wants to understand why Germans did what they did and why so many Germans believed in the nobility of the national socialists, all without the baggage of hindsight, modern contrarianism and motivated reasoning. This is where you start. You gather the leads found within all of these pages, and then connect them to further evidence that might have otherwise

been missed as part of a larger picture. I find it very hard to believe that Daryl doesn't understand this process, or even that he has not already accumulated these sources as part of his research. He's obviously very smart and a well storced storyteller, but he has not yet demonstrated this with this particular story, and has instead taken a more zoomed out generalist view of the conflict that has already been discussed and described by previous authors who have

a questionable at best credibility. It is therefore not completely fair to judge what has yet to come out, namely his planned podcast series, but it is fair to wonder where he will be getting his information and its overall quality,

given what he has shown so far. It's worth mentioning that he has since said that he's using Nicholas Stargart's twenty fifteen work The German War, A Nation under Arms nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty five, John Tolin's nineteen seventy six home Adolf Hitler and Thomas Fleming's two thousand and one book The New Dealer's War Franklin D. Roosevelt in the War within World War Two, and the use of these sources suggests that despite Buchanan and Baker still

topping his list of must reads, which they are in the list that included these three books that I just mentioned, and despite the fact that Buchanan and Baker are the only ones who he has cited directly for the things that he has said, he is pulling from some higher

quality secondary sources than it initially seemed. However, if he was to follow my advice, which he has no obligation to do, he would be even better suited if he hired a research assistant, perhaps a graduate student of history over in Germany, who has direct access to the archival

material and most importantly, a fluency in German. If you ask me, this is not a tall ask, especially considering the financial enrichment that he has achieved from all of his work that he's done, especially from this incident alone, And perhaps he is already planning to do something like that.

I don't know, none of us have any way of knowing, but one like me can still hope When I reached out to Daryl for comment, he explained that, given all the noise that this is created, he would prefer to let his work speak for itself when it is finally finished, so that a proper debate on the subject can be had. Now, it is reasonable to be frustrated at this, since that was arguably a more advisable course of action to begin with,

especially given the topic we're talking about here. However, the past, as they say, is the past, and his overall point in saying letting his work speak for itself is sound. We can only wait for his final word on this, while treating his now immortalized comments as the proper grain

of salt that they are. When it comes to Daryl's comments, I believe it is vitally important and fair to someone who I consider to be a good person, and who I am glad to know at least somewhat to be as charitable as possible with the way he initially expressed himself as critical as I have been. Thankfully, he has a deed elaborated on his thinking and has stated the

following in his aforementioned substack post quote. Even if the deaths were largely the result of resource deficiencies in poor planning. It does not change the fact that the Jews were targeted for death under circumstances that forced a choice between those who would eat and those who would starve. The built in anti semitism of the Third Reich guaranteed that Jews would be among the last in line. That is not to say that Jews were not massacred. Of course,

Jews were massacred. People of all ethnicities were massacred, and it would have been quite a mystery if the Jews were an exception, doubly so given the Third reces unique antipathy toward them. This is a far cry from the implications many people saw in the Tucker Carlson interview because, frankly, the way Darryl communicated his ideas there were deeply disturbing

to many people. While the attempts to make this interview a facet of a growing trend of Holocaust visionism and anti semitism are crude and unfair, the topic does remain hot button, and people's propensity to misread things poorly expressed

is understandable. It's frustrating, but it's understandable to wit using phrasing like no plan or people ended up dead while never once saying the word holocaust or genocide or even murder unless you're claiming that Vladimir Selinsky has had his political opponents murdered, is inevitably going to create tension, to put it mildly, And never mind the fact that the person interviewing Daryl, that is Tucker Carlson himself, and really the main reason this whole story became such a firestorm

in the first place, kept saying and implying that you're not allowed to talk about this because apparently you can get arrested even in the United States for such talk. But such talk about what exactly what is it that gets you arrested in other countries? Which does happen and I don't believe should happen, But that's another country that's not the United States. But what is it that gets

you arrested in those other countries for discussing? Frankly and in the open, that unanswered question, paired with the lack of ever saying the word holocaust or genocide, is just going to stick out, and it would be naive to pretend it would not. While it has always been Carlson's style, the fact that He never once pushed back or even asked more difficult follow up questions than why would they do that, and just merely nodded along. Was just going

to make the backlash all the more inevitable. That doesn't make it deserved, but it does make it inevitable. Now, perhaps it is because of my own bias toward Cooper as somebody I think is a good dude, But the responsibility for such imprecise talk is something I placed on

Tucker Carlson, not on his interview subject. Anyone who knows Daryl Cooper will tell you that he is unfailingly polite and, as I suggested from the outset, someone who does sincerely care about the people in his life, even people he does not know very well, and he shows it through action, not words. Tucker Carlson is the reason Darryl's as famous

as he is. While I believe Daryl deserves his success for his storytelling abilities on extremely complicated and controversial subjects, the fact remains that had Carlson not read Daryl's viral Twitter thread from twenty twenty one about why so many Americans believe to stop the steel narratives, which, by the way, in case anyone missed. It led to former President Donald

Trump actually name checking Daryl of his speeches. Daryl just would not have the scale of reach that he does, and he knows that and likely considers Tucker Carlson a friend and someone to whom he owes everything he currently has and enjoys. So why jeopardize that or make it awkward by pushing back against Carlson's lack of pushing back. There is certainly something honorable in that, but it is also frustrating, especially when discussing controversial interpretations of history in

such a public way. Darryl's strength is not in off the cuff interviews, as he himself has admitted more than once. His strength is in well written, well considered long form storytelling. Putting aside the quality of some of his conclusions, but we're not obligated to agree with everyone all the time.

I think he is a brilliant and unique storyteller, and his podcasts, when they are at their best, offer us one of the best entry points to some of the most difficult historical topics of our time, from the Israeli Palestinian conflict to the Jonestown massacre to Dostoyevsky his episode The Underground Spirit is really my favorite episode he's ever done, and probably one of my favorite podcasts I've ever heard.

I would even wager that had he not been speaking off the cuff in this interview with Tucker Carlson and simply letting this upcoming project speak for itself, it might have served that purpose admirably. However, until he demonstrates a better and more transparentability at sourcing and drawing reasonable, non motivated, non overtly provocative conclusions, it is unlikely that as many people will take this project as seriously as they perhaps

should have, and that's too bad. There's also a greater scrutiny, which is not necessarily a bad thing facing historical podcasters right now, but given how it has been framed, especially in places like The Atlantic, where they had the patently ridiculous headline the Dangerous Rise of the podcast Historians, this kind of scrutiny could just as easily become a type of delegitimization of the entire medium. That's something that hasn't

really been talked about since all this happened. One might call this growing scrutiny and criticism elitist, but frankly that is small comfort to the creators who do not make millions of dollars a year, and it's not much comfort to those who do probably either. I have it on good authority that Dan Carlin isn't too happy about this headline either. Nevertheless, calling Daryl Cooper an unabashed Holocaust denier, as the Wall Street Journal did, is just not true.

It helps nobody, and frankly, it's really insulting and it just makes things worse for everyone in historical podcasting. A final note, Darryl Cooper is known for encouraging empathy with his listeners and has spoken many times about how that is his goal. At his best, he demonstrates that we can have some measure of empathy for monsters, like someone like Jim Jones, for example. He reminds us that we can even try and live in the heads of monsters

in order to better understand them. Now, this can be a noble goal, but I've always had problems with this way of doing things, and that's just me. I'm not saying he should be doing things differently. I'm just explaining my perspective. I do believe this can be a noble goal, but that does not mean that we have to try and prove or even imply, that these people were not actually monsters, which is a risk that comes with empathy, that in and of itself proves the limitations of what

we call empathy. In my opinion, if the empathy we feel is merely to serve the contrarian impulses so many of us possess, and I'm speaking from experience here, then what kind of empathy is that it certainly does not appear to foster a greater, more complex understanding of the human condition. In fact, to me, it really just sounds like a typical way to shift loyalties from one narrative

over to another. We have seen this happen many times before, especially with the likes of the Gnome Chomsky's and the Howard Zins of the world, just reflexively believing that the supposedly oppressed can do no wrong because oppressors were the ones who wrote the history. This is not just a

wrongheaded way to approach history and simply not true. There's plenty of quote unquote losers of history who have written their views of things, But I also believe it's a wrongheaded way to perceive the world in general, and simply breeds distrust and paranoia. While an honest examination of power imbalances in both the past and present can be illuminating, especially if they're counterintuitive, it is a far too reductive way to look at the world as far as I'm concerned,

to say nothing of complex historical processes. That is what creates a selective application of agency that I was bemoaning earlier on. In all this, ultimately, that is not history,

that is politics. This is not to say history cannot be political in nature or should not inform political positions today, not at all, but pushing politics, especially without the utmost transparency while discussing history, is skipping a step politics blinds human beings to the truth of the present, even more so when it comes to our interpretations of the past. We would and have said the same thing about the

motivated reasoning that fuels the decolonialist crowd. We have yet to see what Daryl Cooper will produce with his finished product, so we must withhold full judgment, and I would hope stop impugny motives on him that no one can possibly know. Despite my significant reservations with the early interpretations that he has shared, I look forward to seeing what he creates, I sincerely hope that my concerns are proven wrong.