The Far-Right Algorithm: Anti-Churchill, Anti-West

Hello and welcome back to the David Fromm Show. I'm David Fromm, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be Lord Andrew Roberts. the great British historian and man of letters, and we'll be talking about many subjects, but above all about the great duel between Churchill and Hitler, and why In our day, so many people in positions of public prominence seem to have difficulty figuring out who is on the right side of the Hitler Churchill duel and of the Second World War.

My book this week will be a novel, Burr by Gore Vidal, which raises some questions about the relationship between art and morality. But before my discussion of the novel, Burr, and before my dialogue with Lord Andrew Roberts, some thoughts on recent dramatic developments.

On the morning of Monday, march twenty third, the world woke up to this startling announcement by President Trump on his social media platform, True Social. I am pleased to report that the United States of America and the country of Iran have had over the last two days very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East. Based on the tenor and tone of these indepts.

detailed and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.

This statement at seven twenty-three AM was promptly contradicted by the Iranians at a half an hour later, who said there were no negotiations and no dialogue. Now, neither the Iranians nor President Trump are reliable narrators, so who knows what is true. But it does seem to be genuinely true that President Trump wants to back away from his confrontation with Iran.

interviewed uh on live television a few minutes after this true social post, um he said he was on his way to some kind of he was thinking about some kind of joint owned management of the Strait of Hormuz between the United States and the Ayatollah of Iran. So we've gone from calling for regime change, for calling from unconditional surrender, to a kind of shared management of this w of the waterway between the United States and Iran.

Trump obviously wants out, and he wants out in a way that is going to leave almost all the important questions of the war he initiated unresolved. The Iranian nuclear program, the Iranian uranium stockpiles, uh Iran's n missile program, uh Iran's threat to world oil supplies by its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. All of these seem to be unresolved as Trump seems to be heading out.

This story will have many twists and turns, and Trump, of course, is not, despite his pretenses otherwise, the sole decider here. The Iranians get a vote. As Tom Nichols uh said in one of our discussions of a couple of weeks ago, wars end when the loser decides they're over. In tactical military terms, the Iranians are the loser of this conflict. They've taken much more damage, but there isn't peace until the Iranians say, We've we're ready to stop fighting.

And they seem to have concluded whoever they is, because the leadership keeps being changed by Israeli airstrikes against against the leadership, but whoever the leadership is, they seem to have decided they've taken the measure of Donald Trump and they can outlast him.

And if they remain standing and continue to to be firing missiles at the Gulf states, at Israel and at shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, they sort of determine the shape of the outcome much more than the United States, the tactical winner.

Why is Trump backing away in this way? I think there's a clue in something he said the day before on March twenty. Now, everyone who's traveled this weekend or read about travel knows what chaos the airports are in. The airports are in chaos because of the cutoff of funding to the Department of Homeland Security, which is the envelope in which uh TSA and other airport security agencies are located. There have been negotiations between Republicans and Democrats in Congress over the DHS funding.

some kind of deal seemed to have been within reach that would have severed ICE, the immigration agency, and said, okay, we'll keep we'll keep talking about ICE and the restrictions on ICE, but the rest of DHS can be funded so the airports get open. And President Trump vetoed that. and said, No, I like this issue. I want to keep fighting over the whole of DHS. I want to keep the airport snarrow.

Because I don't want to negotiate about just immigration alone because the Democrats will ask me things like the end of face masking, cameras on Ice ICE agents that I I Trump find unacceptable. I don't want to fight that fight alone because I'll probably lose. I want to fight it in conjunction with a bigger fight over airport funding. And here's what he wrote on march twenty second at eight thirty one PM to explain his research.

I don't think we should make any deal with the crazy, country-destroying radical left Democrats unless and until they vote with Republicans to pass the Save American Act. It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate. And that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems, who are to blame for this mess. And so it goes. Notice the contrast in tone between the country of Iran and the crazy country-destroying radical left Democrat.

Trump is most comfortable as a war president. in a war against half of the United States or m somewhat more than half the United States. Ron Brownstein, a colleague from mine at the Atlantic, has observed very well that Donald Trump is a wartime president, yes, but his war is a war of occupation by Red America against blue America.

Having to be a leader of the whole country in a war against Iran, that's just not in his nature. And when his poles begin to sag and the price of gasoline goes up, He fears not that something is happening to the American national interest that may or may not be outweighed by the strategic goal of ending the Iranian nuclear program, changing the Iranian regime, whatever his whatever his his goals are in that context. His most important war is the war at home. And if the war abroad

asks of him too much, asks him to act like president of all of America. He just doesn't want to do that. Where he is at home and where he is comfortable is as a w war leader of part of America against the majority. He can't be a national leader. He doesn't want to be a national leader. He doesn't know what it looks like, and he's only comfortable when he's the leader of a faction of the country against the rest of the country.

That may be the fundamental reason, even more than the lack of strategy, the lack of stated goals, uh the lack of explanation, the lack of con congressional authorization. Why this war in the Middle East has gone so weirdly and strangely and inconclusively despite all the tactical successes of the American and Israeli bombing of Iranian war making capacity. Because he can't lead the nation and doesn't want to and doesn't know how and doesn't like it.

He can't speak to the nation about anything to do with a national interest. The only interest he knows is his own personal interest and that of similarly aggrieved people in a struggle against the majority of the country that just wants to get through the airline in an expeditious and efficient way.

And so, given the choice between winning the war against Iran and waging the war against the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats, It's that second war, the war against the country crazy the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats that Trump gives priority to. Now, those are the Democrats, those are the people who's gonna need whose votes he needs in order to fund the war he wants less to find.

And so it looks like he's going to give up the war in Iran to save the war against the crazy country destroying radical left Democrats and and all the Americans who oppose him, the great major the majority of Americans who oppose him and want A president who can speak for an America in the way that this president never has, never will, never could, doesn't want to. And now my dialogue with

Drömmer du om en nymålad fasad eller kanske bara en nyåljad terras. Sluta drömma! Med butiker i hela Sverige hjälper vi dig med allt från val av färg och kulör till terrassåja för altan omöbler. Välkommen in till Alkros Studio.

Lord Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, is one of Britain's foremost historians and men of letters. He is known internationally for his 2009 book, The Storm of War, which received the British Army Military Book of the Year Award for 2010. Also among his roughly two dozen books are Conflict, The Evolution of Warfare, co authored with General David Petraeus, and The Aiken Memorandum, a political thriller.

Roberts chaired the seventh October Parliamentary Commission, whose report draws on forensic evidence, survivor testimonies, and open source footage to document the crimes committed by Hamas and its allies during the sneak attack on Israel of october seventh, twenty twenty three. In twenty november twenty two, Roberts was elevated to the House of Lords. My own personal favorite among his many books is his biography of the great high Victorian statesman Lord Salisbury.

underrated among Britain's wittiest prime ministers. I attributed him as a remark when a supporter suggested that maybe he considered changing a few things in Britain. Salisbury is supposed to have replied, change, change. Aren't things bad enough already? But we are here today because of Andrew's work on Churchill, of whom he wrote an outstanding one volume life in twenty eighteen.

At a time of online attempted rehabilitation of the Third Reich, Nazism, and Adolf Hitler, Lord Roberts is the man we need most urgently to hear from. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much indeed for having me on, David, and thanks very much also for those very kind words.

Um let's start with something you have both observed and participated in, which is this crazy online rehabilitation in the American and English social media world of the or the attempt to do an online rehabilitation of the legacy of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. What is going on with these crazy talkers and bloc and podcasters?

Well, they're attempting to attack Winston Churchill because he was epicentral in defeating Adolf Hitler, of course. Anti-Semitism plays an absolutely central role to this as well. And they essentially argue and it's no it's not a new thing, this is something that goes back Second World War revisionism goes back to the nineteen sixties earlier. yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r

uh after the Operation Barbarossa in June nineteen forty one. And Churchill made a strategic error in uh in not supporting Hitler and opposing Stalin. That's, I think, where it stems from. But of course, it's got massive modern connotations with regard to the United States and where the United States How how is it that somebody decides, you know what, I'm trying to differentiate myself from a sea of online voices

I could talk about a lot of things. I could have a lot of opinions. I could go into sports podcasting for goodness sakes sakes. But no, my distinctive value-added proposition. is going to be the defense of Hitler, anti Semitism and the Third Reich. And by the way, it seems to work when you look at uh America's top podcasters, in the political sphere at least.

It is amazing how many of them find the rehabilitation of Nazi ideology their ticket to success. I think it's the very shock value, isn't it? We always used to call radio shock jock. um, because they try to say the most outrageous thing possible, therefore drawing attention to oneself. And that is the nature of the internet is that the more shocking you are, the more likely you are to appeal to the lowest form of human nature, I suppose.

So it's built into the algorithm of the internet in a sense. I also think that as well as wanting to shock and be perverse and so on, there's also a very even darker side to all of this, which as I say is anti-Semitism. And I think it has contributed enormously to the present rise of anti Semitism in the world. Wh which do you think is cause and which is effect? You s you start as an anti Semite and then want to rehabilitate the Third Reich?

Or do you start by wanting to rehabilitate the Third Reich because you look at a lot of old picture postcards? and imaginary scenes for an old and leaning Riefenstahl movies and think, well, that's an accurate depiction of reality. They they must have had a point about the Jews. Which which goes first, this cultish uh attraction to the Third Reich or the anti-Semitism driving the cultish attraction? I I I I think they go absolutely hand in hand. I think they're in lockstep both of them.

And uh of course they then do lead you on to a whole load of other views about the world that are essentially and anti democratic, anti Western. uh anti civilization, anti Christianity, anti culture, as well as the uh this uh primary motivating force of of anti Semitism and the desire to shock So you're led from Third Reichism to pro Assadism to uh apologies for Hezbollah and Hamas to defense of Iran.

to I mean one crazy thing after another. All of it and Putin, of course, as well. Because you admire Putin enormously because he invades countries and is a strong man and I'm afraid there could be overlaps. We've seen that there are overlaps in all this manosphere incel thing as well, that you think it's macho to invade countries and black buildings and send tanks overboard.

And so on. So that also something that uh Hitler did and Putin is doing, and you want to try and make an apology for that too. All right. So let me draw on your historian's hat, or your historian's expertise for a moment.

Because there are maybe some basic facts about this that people don't know. So let's start with this. Who won and who lost the Second World War? The um Germans, Italians and Japanese most definitely lost. uh the Russians, Americans, British and uh British Commonwealth uh So if you have an if you have an impression that the Nazis had the most formidable war machine in the history of the world and the most effective society organized for war, you do bump into this problem. They did lose.

ac yn ymwneud â'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl yw'r bobl. and uh so on. So it it bumps into your racial theories uh it's in i at every stage. I mean not least of course because ultimately the Japanese are not Aryan peoples, but they're your allies against

various countries like I don't know, Denmark, who are Aryan people. So it just doesn't make any kind of sense on on its o even according to its own really weird and screwed up um ideology. The toll that Hitler's regime took on the Germans, one of the reasons that Hitler and Nazism are so discredited is because the Germans have led the way in saying, you know what, this was not good for us either. If we had stayed on the path of democracy and peace.

All the prosperity we had in the nineteen fifties we could have had in the nineteen forties. Well that's right. And also of course the Fuhrer did declare war on Germany at the end, in the very last uh days of nineteen forty five. Uh he wanted to destroy the reservoirs and the railways and uh yn gwneud unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unru.

And Britain, as you say, as a result of Britain having uh continued to fight. He also finally declared war on his own country. Right. Just as he left orders to blow up Paris and destroy that, orders that were mercifully ignored by the German commander in chief in the Paris vicinity.

You left blow up every waterworks, blow up every power plant, make sure that if Germany does lose the war, the German people then die of starvation. And that was Hitler's idea, not something that the United States and Britain did to them. The Americans and British fed the Germans after the war. Rydw i'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw.

And of course it was also the um junior commanders that refused to carry out the Fuhrer's uh final wishes with regard to basically turning Germany back into an agrarian uh staff.

Um let's talk a little bit about the attempt to overturn the reputation of of Winston Churchill. As you and I speak, Winston Churchill is still on the British five pound note. Uh but there's a project of the British government to take him off. I don't I forget what they some kind of um bird. Yeah, it's not just Churchill. It they're taking off all of the famous people, you know, all of the uh the writers and the people we're we're proud of, and they're going to be

they can be swapped for various fauna. Um it say um uh c birds and dogs and and things like that. There I think there's gonna be a public consultation. And it's uh already the British people. typically are taking it as a huge joke and uh and they're putting forward completely absurd um animals that are going to uh do if it's done on a vote.

then all hell's gonna break loose, frankly. Uh so but it's this is symbolic of a larger trend, which is even within Britain and certainly outside Britain, an attempt to make Churchill a villain of world history rather than uh the great hero of the twentieth century. That's right. And we saw this of course um most it has been going on as as I like to Always point out this has been going along

on a long time. David Irving tried it back in the uh seventies and eighties. Uh in a sense, obviously Goebbels himself demonized um Churchill. There have been lots of books attacking Churchill of the

quite recently we've had three or four in a row. So let me let me put a paw pause there because not everyone will know recognize the name David Irving, who's a huge hero to many other people on the Internet far right. So tell us about the career of of David Irving and why He's so central in fabricating these myths of re Third Reich rehabilitation and Winston Churchill defamation.

David Irving is a neo-Nazi historian. He, because of his extreme right-wing views, was able to contact a lot of the widows of leading Nazis back in the 70s and 80s. and therefore was able to get quite a lot of uh information, including new information. So he posed as an historian, uh, but unfortunately He was somebody who didn't believe in the Holocaust, for example. And uh there was a huge libel action against him that was taken out by a very brave um writer called Deborah Lippstadt.

and who won against it. But it was because neo Nazis will often say he was sued for his views, it was David Irving who initiated the libel action against Deborah Lipstad, not the other way around. Sorry, you're quite right for calling him a uh for calling him a Holocaust denier.

She he sued her. It was he who tried to suppress her speech, not she who tried to suppress his speech. That's a I think that's a very important thing to ram home. And in Britain where it is so easy to win a libel action, he lost.

And um yes, I attended court actually. I I I watched it. It was better than any West End show. It was absolutely fascinating. Historian after historian getting up and and talking about the um evidence that proved that there was a Holocaust and also of course that um David Iring had denied But therefore this does make him into a hero of the extreme right. He's also crucial in elaborating the myth of the Dresden bombing.

Um Dresden is a very beautiful city in eastern Germany, uh now thankfully substantially rebuilt. It was also an important railway node. It was the last unbombed city in the Reich. and it was it was hit by the Western Allies in the last days of World War Two and twenty thousand people were were killed. And this is a obviously a a major disaster, but not as big as the Hamburg bombing or the terrible bombings of of Tokyo.

for reasons that are kind of obscure to me, the Nazis in their last days decided to make an propaganda issue of this, and Irving became the person who took the twenty thousand to thirty thousand authentic casualties and created a much bigger magnification of the number through falsification of archives and other things. But so I you want to be a little bit more than a little bit of a few.

sy'n ymwneud â phobl, sy'n ymwneud â phobl, sy'n ymwneud â phobl, sy'n ymwneud â phobl, sy'n ymwneud â phobl, sy'n ymwneud â phobl. But it was the fact that the Gowleiter there had basically pocketed the money he was given to uh build massive um air raid shelters that led to larger than expected deaths. Yrving yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r.

It's therefore the sort of understandable why he should become the godfather of the of the modern revisionists, you know, he's their hero. The modern revisionists, on the other hand, have far, far. I mean, they they've gone far further than even David Irving. Um, primarily of course because of the internet.

um that Irving was working before the internet. But whereas when uh Tucker Carlson interviewed Daryl Cooper, for example, who said that Winston Churchill was the greatest villain of the Second World War, 33 million people downloaded that. show. So he was able th there at the modern revisionists are able to reach a far wider audience than ever um David Irving was. Tell us who Darrell Cooper is.

Well, I tr I I tried to find out when I heard about these moronic remarks of his and uh the answer is that he's somebody who who Tucker Carlson calls the most uh consequential American uh historian writing today, but he's never written a history book. this fellow. He has a uh um he goes on podcasts a a lot and makes sort of long form podcasts. sydd wedi cael eu cymdeithasol sydd wedi cael eu cymdeithasol sydd wedi cael eu cymdeithasol sydd wedi cael eu cymdeithasol.

Uh I mean I can offhand, you know, tell you a few dozen historians who've got uh uh American historians who've got uh genuine um right to be considered more seriously than Mr. Cooper. One of the things that makes you a historian rather than a just a journalist like me is the historian gets the quotes from the place they came from.

Um so if the quote comes from a state paper, they consult the state paper. If it comes from a memoir, they consult the memoir. They go to the original thing. The journalist says, Well, I trust if this fit thing from the state paper is reproduced in the work of An Andrew Roberts. I trust Andrew Roberts, and so I get my quote from the Andrew Roberts book. But there's always the possibility, even with an Andrew Roberts book, of a mistake.

Oh yes. And so the diff the difference between an historian is the historian goes to the source, the journalist goes to the secondary source. And my impression from listening to Cooper is he partly because he doesn't have the language. Uh, which historians are supposed to do, he goes with a secondary source, and it's often a neo-Nazi secondary source, and and there are various kinds of verbal clues that this.

Churchill quote, he discovered not from reading the Churchill speech, not from reading Hansard, but via some more much more sinister secondary details. And actually the laziness of it is also pretty reprehensible because nowadays if you go on to the International Churchill Society website or if you consult the Churchill documents at Churchill... archive centre, a lot of which are online. It doesn't actually take that much. It's not that difficult to get the the correct quote.

I've uh got upstairs the twenty volumes of Churchill's documents. Now not everybody's gonna have those, but they are available online. So it's not that hard to do. But but you're right, he doesn't uh he doesn't bother to do that. But there's also something about internet culture that makes us vulnerable to this. So when David Irving his primary means of comment communicating with the world was was through books.

And because he wanted to be taken seriously as an historian, he complied with the formal architecture of an historical work, which is footnotes and links, footnotes and quotes. So you would say he you make your argument that Hitler was completely innocent of the Holocaust, that he didn't know about it. You you cite a bunch of sources, and people can then read the your the people who are encountering your work, they read it.

They have the book open. They see the footnote and they can then wander down the hall if they're in a library to the shelf. And pull the thing you cite off the shelf and see, did you quote it correctly? And as John Lukac did in Hitler of History, point out, oh, you introduced a series of very malicious mistakes into your reading. But the preferred form of modern neonazism is verbal or verbal and visual. That is, there's no text.

And the and their favorite form is not to say, let's not have a a historical controversy in writing, but let's debate in form. So if I tell a lie and my the person I'm talking to is not as nimble or not as well informed, the lie sails pass. In a way that it can't do in true historical debate, which is done in writing with football.

Precisely right. And it's and it's all part of their modus operandi. And they have to do it that way, because of course if they did it the other way, uh we'd be able to catch them out all the time. Uh so it's much, much easier to lie

verbally than um than on the page if you want that lie to survive longer than the amount of time it takes for somebody to check you. Can you take us through what you think are one or two of the most common lies about Churchill and Churchill in relationship to the Second World War?

Oh golly. Well there are there are dozens of them. Um I don't know. I wonder whether it's best to do it chronologically or just uh he's supposed to have been involved in secret Um there's uh um he is uh of course supposed to have deliberately made the Bengal famine worse than it actually was uh already.

for which there's no proof whatsoever, uh, he's supposed to have um let Coventry be destroyed, even though he knew that um Coventry was going to be attacked in order to preserve the secrecy of the ultra um decrypt

Oh gosh, there are there are there are so many. I mean, all the way through his life, by the way. Uh as well as a is another one. But he's also supposed isn't the central lie that he was supposed to be in the thrall of Jewish bankers. That's that's the big thing. The Jews invented Churchill. In order to make war on white Western civilization. Yeah. And Churchill, because he was, for a man in his time, strikingly not anti Semitic, although not.

purely so, but strikingly non anti-Semitic for a man of his time and and class, that therefore he he's some kind of tool of the Jews in their war on the West, on the White West.

Yes, I mean this this again has been uh around for a very long time. Oscar Wilde lover Bosey, uh, Lord Douglas Hamilton, was a believer in in this theory, and he and uh Churchill actually sued him where he said that Churchill had underplayed Yn ymwneud hynny'n ymwneud hynny'n ymwneud hynny'n ymwneud hynny'n ymwneud hynny'n ymwneud hynny'n ymwneud hynny'n ymwneud hynny. in the nineteen uh thirties. Now, he did have rich Jewish friends who occasionally did bail him out.

So that's the way that they tie in this sort of, you know, Protocols of the Elders of Zion kind of uh conspiracy theory. Um but there's no example. One of the requirements of being a Churchill friend. Yeah. Yeah. No Churchill Churchill was broke his entire life, basically. No, he didn't he didn't get into the black until he was In his seventeenth years

You introduced me to you introduced me to that a wonderful book about Churchill's finances. What was it called? No More Champagne? That's right. Yeah, David Lowe. Very good book. Yeah. He would periodically write l letters to his wife instructing her on domestic economy. And the first thing is we're going to eliminate champagne at lunch. That's that's how we're really going to That's right. And actually I asked Mary, his daughter, uh uh Winston and uh Clementine Churchill's daughter, Mary Same.

And she said that that lasted about three days. Right. His stance was cigars were only the expensive Cuban cigars were only to be served at the discretion of Churchill, the box wasn't to be opened for guests to help themselves. I don't suppose that lasted terribly long either.

But he the the thing was that he was always broke, but he also quite rightly I think his attitude was not really to to try and save spending money'cause that never worked, but to just work harder and to and that's the reason that we have eight hundred and he uh and he wrote more than than Shakespeare and Dickens um combined. You know, th it's because he had to, because he was uh he was broke.

And as you say, non Jewish friends um bailed him out as well. But there's no example of any Jew ever asking him for anything at all as a result of bailing him out. And some people, like Sarah Bailey, I think Sir Henry Strachov, Gave him money in their wills. So there's clearly nothing that they were after.

Um as a result'cause the money didn't actually get s given to Churchill until they died. Well, because the impression one has has of him is he was not just a deeply admirable man, but also a highly personally lovable man. And so people who were his friends who were good with money and knew that he was horrible at it. would say, this is something I can do in testimony to my not only my admiration for him, but my love for him.

That's right. And Bernie Baruch being the uh another great um example of that, the uh New York banker who um basically allowed if Churchill's stocks and shares went up then Churchill kept the money and if they went down then Bernie Baruch would cover the cover the difference. But again, there was no quid pro quo for this, apart from friendship, uh admiration, uh a love for them. So of course the anti Semite

immediately pounce on on this aspect of Churchill's character to try to insinuate that he was in the pocket of the Jews and so on. And therefore he took the British according to this theory, he took the uh British Empire into war in order to destroy the man who was attempting to destroy the Jews, i. e. Adolf Hitler.

This completely ignores the fact, of course, that he was out of office throughout the nineteen thirties. One of the things that Darrell Cooper accuses Churchill of having done was to have made the Second World War worse. after the after rem Hitler's in invasion of Poland. But he wasn't actually in the government until uh Hitler had uh invaded Poland. He didn't get into the government until after the invasion.

And then he doesn't become Prime Minister, of course, until the Nazis had already invaded Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg. So you know, just on chronological grounds, none of these accusations really add up, logically, just in terms s solely of rational arguments. One of the differences between real histori there are many differences between real history and and this kind of internet history, but real historians are always very attuned to which event happened first.

And uh one of the basic rules of history is an event that happened after an earlier event cannot have caused the earlier event because it came second in time and time flows only one way. Yes, exactly. And so and so and you get this of course with everything to do with Russia, with uh Hitler's invasion of Russia in June nineteen forty one.

You know, it comes um a year and a and a bit after Hitler's invasion of of France, and one leads on to the other, and um to try to therefore accuse Churchill of trying to save communism. in nineteen forty one as a result of anything that happens. It c it's very, very clear that the reason that he made um peace w made made an alliance with Russia, Soviet Russia, even though he hated communism was um because the the Russians were fighting Hitler and he recognised that Hitler had to be

It's that's a very important point just to stress here. The most famous of Churchill's speeches, the we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall never surrender, at the time those were given, Britain's allies were Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Greece. That's about it. And the Soviet Union was Hitler's most important ally. And at at the time of the fall of France, Hitler drove into France with Soviet provided fuel.

That's the same thing. And the s and the the German tanks were made out of materials that many of which came from the Soviet Union. And so this is both a Soviet lie and now a Russian lie, and an and a not neo Nazi lie to say that to forget this key fact when When when Hitler w when Churchill came to power after Dur and fought the Battle of France and lost

Hitler and the Soviet Union were allies, not enemies. Yeah, and the Communist Party in Britain opposed the war until the twenty second of june nineteen forty one. So you have Communist trade unionists in British factories causing trouble. even during the Battle of Breckham.

communists in the United States too. Let me take you into the present day because you are a r a rare historian who is not only active in contemporary discussions, but was called upon by your own parliament to write the definitive report on the um Hamas atrocities About after October seventh.

I I won't take you into that field right now because uh of respect for time, but drawing on the expertise you acquired through there, I want you to help us understand a debate that is going on, which is many of the people who advocate this um these crackpot theories of history have be ha were until a minute ago big supporters of President Trump.

And not to accuse D Donald Trump, who seems pretty hazy on most of history. I don't know that he would have a side on any of these disputes, unlike maybe a New York nightclubs in the nineteen seventies. He's kind of an expert on that. But there is there seems to be this split in the MAGA world between the voting bloc and the members of Congress who are mostly aligned with President Trump and supporting his actions against Iran.

And then the MAGA influencers online who are increasingly radically opposed to it. Do you have can you explain to us how this how this conflict is working and what it means? I suppose in a sense, of course, um the the MAGA opponents of Iran do have the point that they were sold a uh a pup by uh by Trump, who did promise no forever wars, no interventions and so on, especially not in the Middle East.

But the isolationist wing, who are are the people who feel that, again have a very long history. The the phrase America First was first used by Charles Lindbergh and the anti interventionist. who wanted America not to go to war against uh Nazi Germany. So uh here again you have very strong uh historical echoes. And um and so people who consider themselves to be on the sort of ultra right of the MAGA movie. In a sense of the same thing.

do feel sort of betrayed and and and let down. Well I I don't know that we want to call them isolationists because th the ultra right wing of the MAGA movement was very keen for a war against Denmark to seize Greenland. They were interested in uh fighting Panama to take back the Panama Canal and they raised no objections to Donald Trump's repeated talk of annexing Canada, some kind of

n fifty first state, although he never intended to give Canada any senators, so it wouldn't be a state, it would be kind of an occupied territory. So the the MAG was very comfortable with violent action in the Western hemisphere of a highly imperialist kind. against people who are traditional American friends, like like Denmark. Um Americans have been present in you'll know better than me, but have been present there's been an American military presence in Greenland

with the consent of the Danish government, since before the United States entered the Second World War, all during the Second World War and all during the Cold War, and the Danes would have gladly welcomed a larger American presence today if the Americans would have been willing to send it. So there there was no objection, but there there was this imperial and MAGA had not a problem with that imperialist agenda. It is conflict with

anti Western forces, whether it's Putin or the Iranians, that's what makes them upset. Yes. That's right. I mean, in a sense also historically, of course, with regard to Southern America, to Venezuela and Panama, etcetera, that does tie in with the Munro doctrine that goes back to eighteen So that isn't a radical change from what, I don't know, Tony Roosevelt would have...

been comfortable with. However, as you say, the time that the um that the MAGA that the Ultra MAGA people get uh very upset is when the West goes to war against uh people who um scream uh death to America as uh and tries to get the nuclear bomb. That that i it is an interesting aspect. We have the same thing here in uh in England of course. Let let's let's wrap this up here with going back to the historical matter.

And would you give us a refresher of what the world would have looked like if in those crucial days when the British had to make the decision whether to follow Churchill's lead, whether to refuse the peace that um Hitler offered after the fall of France? What would that world, if we had taken the advice of the Pat Buchanans and the Tucker Carl Tucker Carlsons and Britain had surrendered in the summer of nineteen forty, what would the world look like today?

Hitler wasn't asking for an all out surrender of Britain. He was asking for Britain to stay neutral in the future in the future of the war. So Uh we wouldn't have had the Blitz, of course, we'd have probably been able to have hung on to the bits of the Empire that uh he wasn't interested in, and he would have been able to have attacked gyda'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un So

there would have been a um uh a very different attitude I think in the United States. I can't see the United States getting involved and also terribly difficult for them to have worked out how they could have um engaged with the Germans anyway, in North Africa perhaps, but that's hardly any sort of quick route through to um to Berlin.

So you could have easily found I mean, it was touch and go in Russia, of course. In the October of nineteen forty one Stalin had his own personal train made ready to take him back beyond the Europe. The uh the Battle of Stalingrad could have got either way as well. And of course the Germans did subject Leningrad to a grueling thousand AC.

So had the Germans won in Russia and pushed the Soviets back beyond the Urals, he would have been Hitler would have been master of Europe from the Urals all the way through to to Brest.

and it would have been a uh catastrophe. Of course as it was, fifty percent of of Europe's Jews died in the Holocaust. One hundred percent undoubtedly would have sydd wedi bod yn bwysig iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn i ddewis iawn. uh to fight against uh against Germany, i especially if they've been attacked at Pearl Harbor and uh

i and and and Britain wasn't in the war. So there's a world in which uh Hitler could have could have uh s certainly survived the the mid nineteen forties.

um very isolated. Yeah. And and remember the the Germans were ahead in rocket technology. So the Americans would have got gotten the the nuclear weapon first, but the delivery system the Germans would probably have got first. Um certainly, yes. Absolutely. The um there was no um uh you didn't have an American ver version of Werner von Braun in the um in the uh first part of the nineteen. So, yeah, I mean, Churchill's decision to fight on in 1940 is absolutely...

To the survival of Western civilization, which is in a way, which is why he's so unpopular with the revisionists, because they would much prefer to see a world in which Hitler was dominated. The world did have the bomb, did wipe out the um Jews, and had his their own f his own form of sort of uh Weltmark.

which uh is very, very different from the kind of Western civilization that we see today. The person who saw this all most clearly at the time was President Roosevelt, who gave speeches about it. Which we we don't read anymore because they seem so irrelevant until recently or s seem so much a part of history.

But Roosevelt warned in the summer of forty, nineteen forty, after the fall of France, that if we go down this path, if the Tucker Carlsons of this world had got their retrospective wish and tr and the British government had made a kind of peace with Hitler and let him invade the Soviet Union and annihilate all the Jews of Europe, that the United States would never have been a free country again. It would have lived on half a planet, it would have sheltered in the smaller of the two hemispheres.

And it would have had to live forever on a war footing, a full not a Cold War footing, but on a full war footing against this technologically advanced nuclear power with rockets on the Eurasian continent. That's what this was all about in nineteen forty.

And the development and peace that the world enjoyed after nineteen forty five was a product of American power and British endurance. And had the British made the the choice that is being recommended to them all by all these fool loudmouth bloggers. their own childhood.

would have been overhung by terror and fascism and and tragedy, and they would not have enjoyed the life that We have so the security that we have so taken for granted that we can entertain all these foolish, nonsensical, childish, ignorant opinions on the internet that was created because of

the peace and security and wealth that the Western world enjoy because of Churchill's endurance and courage in that summer. I think you've put the the full uh level of irony uh right up there. Yes, that's exactly that's exactly right.

Andrew, I understand can I ask you one last personal question? You understand you've just finished working on something. Can you share a little bit about what it is? Yes, Napoleon and his marshals. It's a uh book about the relationship between the Emperor and twenty his twenty six uh Marshalls. It's going to be coming out in America. And you have written the great rehabilitation of Napoleon as as n um i i in in another biography as as someone who

Um the the Hitler Napoleon comparison breaks down because Napoleon was, although he was a warlord, he did do a lot of good things too. Yeah, uh there's no comparison. There there's no comparison. One of them is uh is the Enlightenment on horseback and the other is the absolute opposition to the Enlightenment. Um no, uh that's going well and then after that I'm going to write a biography of uh Benjamin Disraeli.

So I'm I've got until the year twenty thirty nicely um uh cut out for me. You are a marvel. Andrew, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Thanks so much to Andrew Roberts for joining me today on the David Fromm Show. My book this week is Burr, a novel by Gor Vidal, published in 1973. I first read this book as a teenager. I returned to it this past week because of some thoughts left behind by my discussion last week of the novel The Director by Daniel Kelman.

That novel ponders the problem of a great artist, or someone we're invited to believe is a great artist, tangled in the moral compromises of making art under the conditions of the Third Reich. And we're asked to consider whether there is anything that can justify that kind of moral compromise.

And the director comes to its own very ironic and understated conclusion about whether or not compromise and mora moral compromise justifies great art in the end, whether great art can be produced under quite conditions of moral compromise. I turned to uh Burr and Gor Vidal because the it was a book I enjoyed very much as a teenager, and I enjoyed it because it was a pretty nasty piece of work, actually, written by a pretty nasty man, Gor Vidal.

Burr tells the story of the American Revolution's founding generation, uh, through the eyes of Aaron Burr, um, who even today remains kind of a villain of American history. And in nineteen seventy three, building up to the bicentennial, at a time when Americans America's heroes were taken much more at face value than they are today, Burr was the great outsider, a man

hated both by a uh Thomas Jefferson and by Alexander Hamilton, so he had to be bad. Gorvidal took on Burr and used him to write a debunking novel about all the founding generation. The novel is set at the end of Burr's life in the eighteen thirties, and he but we we are constantly called back to the period of the revolution and the constitution. were shown through Burr's eyes, a George Washington who is stupid, vain, militarily incompetent, sexually dysfunctional, and mercenary in his marriage.

A man who walk who, by the way, because Vidal can spare no form of mockery, we are introduced to George Washington as a man who walks with an ungainly water. Thomas Jefferson, the great hero of the Declaration of Independence, is shown as hypocritical, cowardly, manipulative, a schemer of every kind.

And Alexander Hamilton gets slightly better pet pressed than the other two, but he is shown as someone who is brilliant, but self seeking, arrogant, snobbish, contemptuous of others, and profoundly two faced. Uh Burr himself is a man with certainly with faults. We see that he in late life marries for money and then steals from his wife.

Uh but we're invited to see him as despite these foibles, amusing, entertaining and um hit and his cynicism about everything and his lack of moral scruple is actually in we're invited to see this as a kind of higher wisdom.

There's no irony about this. Gor Vidal does not uh does not introduce us to Burr as an unreliable narrator. In fact, there's another narrator of the book, uh a younger man, who sees Burr With some distance, but we're invite we're in uh invited to take Burr's view as the novelist view and therefore as our view.

Now, Gorvidal, I I think his reputation is fading somewhat these days, but he was I knew him a little bit in his lifetime. He was a thoroughly unpleasant person. You can see it in his interviews. Uh he was vi uh spiteful and envious in his own right. I think he's best remembered now for a saying of his he later tried to explain this away as a joke, but it reflected the authentic man. He is said to have said every or he takes credit for the line every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

That's the man. And it is his own nastiness. that fills the novel with its amusingness. That the novel is amusing because Burr is nasty, his story is told by a nasty person, and we're given a point of view that very much appealed to the a adolescent smart alec who wants to see history as it really was and not through some gauze of legend.

So you have what we have here is a, I think, not a great work of art, but a successful work of art that owes its success entirely to the unpleasantness and spitefulness of the novelist's character. Bad character produced pretty good art. So is our problem solved? I'm not so sure. Because as I reread this book now as a much older man, I thought, what would a truly great artist have done with this pro with this material?

He would have allowed us to see through and past Burr in a way that, say, Shakespeare allows us to see through and past Burr. Richard III, or the way that John Milton allows us to see through and past his Lucifer, who gets all the best lines in Paradise Law.

And to understand that while we can enjoy the spiteful cynicism of an Aaron Burr as a narrator, The great work of art would have allowed us to see that Burr was fundamentally wrong, and that the people whom he's traducing, mocking, maligning, they are in fact, despite of their undoubted human foibles, which Burr can see and which history has kind of elided, that they were great people.

in their own way, because great people are not perfect people. And the presence of imperfection, an ungainly waddle in the walk of the founder of the country, does not make him any less the founder of the country and does not make his heroic and self self-abnegating acts any less heroic and self-abnegating, that the m spiteful man sees only as far as the spiteful man can, and that can produce a work of art that is successful, but maybe not ultimately great.

I don't know that that is a final answer to the question of the relationship between art and morality. I wanna go back to da I think we can think more hardly, more or accurately and more powerfully about this through the prism of a novel. like the director, which I think is a more successful novel than Burr, uh um a more powerful and maybe more enduring novel than Burr.

But Burr as entertaining. If you haven't read it, it's is it's worth a read. If you want to have a kind of mean view of the founding generation, it's a lot of fun. Um just understand always. that this is a limited work by a limited narrator in the hands of a limited artist. And so maybe the um the answer is actually the two art and morality may have more to do with one another than Gor Vidal ever imagined, as he wrestled with his own limits, both as a man and as an artist.

That's it for the uh David Fromm show this week. Um thank you so much for listening and for watching. As ever, if you're minded to support the work of this podcast, the best way to do it is by subscribing to the Atlantic and supporting the work of all of my colleagues at the Atlantic. Uh thanks for watching. Bye-bye. This episode of the David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards.

Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.