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When, if ever, is it appropriate to provide an apologetic defense of Nazi Germany?
Darryl Cooper, host of the widely acclaimed Martyr Made podcast, recently did a 2+ hour interview with Tucker Carlson. Darryl Cooper is known for two things. One: being meticulously empathetic with regards to the plight of the disaffected groups that are the subject of his 30-hour long history podcasts, bringing out the vivid details that form the background milieu for poorly-understood events like Jonestown. And two: his unhinged Twitter takes.
As one can imagine, jimmies were rustled. The most common line of attack was “Tucker Carlson platforms Nazi apologetics.” In a literal sense this is true. Cooper gives the German perspective on Winston Churchill. One might make the obvious point that Germany started the war by invading Poland, but the Soviet Union also invaded Poland. Yet the Western allies did not declare war on Stalin. This AskHistorians thread (no haven for Nazi apologetics!) is enlightening. What masqueraded as a mutual defense treaty was actually an anti-German treaty. Britain really was out to get them.
Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe, the exact same reason that Britain joined World War I. Post-hoc rationalizations are just that, post-hoc. It certainly isn’t irrelevant when studying World War II that the holocaust happened, but that isn’t part of the causal chain of events the way many seem to believe.
I want to emphasize that I personally like Anglo-American hegemony. Churchill’s aggressive stance towards Germany is good for me and for the vast majority of the people reading this, but in order to understand history (or current events for that matter) one has to understand the people who do not like Anglo-American hegemony. I do not know where on the doll Anglo imperialism touched him, but I do not believe that Darryl Cooper says the things that he does out of hate for his fellow man.
It probably won’t come as any surprise to those of you that know me, but this is where my sympathies for the new American right evaporate. I disagree with the object-level historical take, not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2, and Hitler’s cavalier takeover of numerous small neutral countries (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands) massively violated that important international norm.
More acutely, though, this seems like disastrous political strategy from reactionary elements on the American Right. There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID. Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
The diplomatic history doesn't really bear this out, at least for WWII, given how many small nations were thrown into Stalin's lap before he even had to ask. A more accurate take, I think, would be that moral feelings, such as the "rights of small nations", end up being outraged when and only when a violation of such moral feelings is also a violation of the prevailing international order. Moral feelings towards small nations act as a defense of geopolitical order, and are stirred up more by threat than by empathy. Hitler was violating the international order more gravely than Stalin in the run-up to war, by taking more critical states in a more flagrant manner, and by 1945 there was no international order at all save for what the Allies were constructing. This theory also has the benefit of continuity to the present day.
The revisionist take errs in a more simple way, by ascribing to malice what was actually incompetence.
"Rights of small nations" overlaps strongly with "Don't bitchslap the British Empire and expect no response" in practice.
British grand strategy between the end of the Anglo-Dutch wars in 1668 and the Brexit referendum in 2016* was built around preventing the emergence of a hegemonic power in Continental Europe. Putting a neutral Belgium slap bang in the middle of the most convenient invasion route between France and Germany was part of that - it prevents either side converting a temporary force advantage into a Sedan-tier victory by successful maneuver warfare. So from a British perspective the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgian neutrality wasn't just a "scrap of paper" - it was core to British policy in the same way that the current "rules-based" international order is to US policy. Accordingly, violating Belgian neutrality without asking the British nicely suggests that the Germans don't take Britain seriously as a Great Power able and willing to defend its interests, and was therefore perceived by the part of the British establishment that didn't already favour a full defensive alliance with France as a bitchslap, and produced (largely without thought on the British side) an appropriately robust response.
The bitchslap in WW2 is even more blatant. At Munich, Hitler tells Chamberlain that Nazi grand strategy is about reversing Versailles, and that the Sudetenland is the last major territorial adjustment needed to complete this project**. Germany signs a treaty explicitly guaranteeing the borders of rump Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain sells Munich to the British people on the basis that it is "Peace in Our Time". When Hitler invades the rest of Czechoslovakia six months later, he is basically saying to Chamberlain and the British voter "I have altered our agreement. Pray that I do not alter it further." This goes down differently when it is said by the Empire vs when it is said to the Empire by a short Austrian corporal with one ball. Both AJP Taylor and Orwell (in The Lion and the Unicorn) agree that the resulting British policy was a largely unthinking response to being bitchslapped.
* This is one of the reasons why I agree with this blog post suggesting that the core supporters of Brexit were assuming the EU would collapse following the withdrawal of the British net budgetary contribution - I'm pretty certain that not even the Brexiteers saw the UK facing a united, hostile Europe as a good outcome.
** This is more plausible than the modern schoolboy version of history says it is - AJP Taylor in the serious-but-moderately-heterodox Origins of the Second World War points out that Hitler had plans for a second Munich-style deal to avoid an attack on Poland, and had it worked he was not expecting to grab any Polish territory - just to annex Danzig (which was a majority-German city under League of Nations administration, where the local Nazis dominated local elections) and get better transit terms for German rail freight crossing Polish territory between contiguous Germany and East Prussia.
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