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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.
I guess I'm finally no longer able to see both of the"two movies on one screen." That doesn't seem unhinged to me at all. Slighty provocative (only slightly because "nazi" has been abused so much that it stings about as much as "commie") but to me fairly obviously true. Jew-hunting was likely transitory and once the exigencies of war vanished would very likely have disappeared*, while the near complete destruction of the family and basic relations the sexes is something that it's not clear a society can ever come from. So Jesse's outraged pearl clutching to me reads as "it's okay for a a country's native culture to be completely corrupted as long as no Jews die." I'm no white nationalist or jew hater, but come on.
*I guess this can be argued, but I just can't see a sustained long term appetite for murder of Jews after the war. I'd guess they'd reach some sort of emancipation agreement with the governments of the German puppet states and probably would have been encouraged to move to Israel. Not very nice I guess, but that still seems less terrible than the complete degradation of a nation and its identity to me. I wonder if Jesse would have preferred Israel to adopt strong Laicité and import tons of Arabs rather than fight to keep its national character by hook or by crook
Compared to what? He was on the level of Stalin and at least in the same league as Franco or Mussolini who actually invented blackshirts as a precursor to Hitler's brownshirts, and we do not even go to atrocities committed by Italians in Ethiopia. Even "milder" leaders like Austrofascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss committed political violence in three figure range. We can go on, especially early post-WW1 period was full of atrocities such as during Polish-Soviet War or under Hungarian Soviet Republic and related red and white terror.
I think your sense of "normal" is highly curated by modern sensibilities and information available to you, which is vastly different to what people in Europe lived as "normal" for decade of their lives or more prior to WW2.
I guess my gripe is with the definition of "normal". Let's think of today - I think Putin is a "normal" leader. Not dissimilar to Xi Jinping or range of various leaders in Africa or Middle East etc. Hitler espoused especially virulent version of fascism, but then Germany was also facing unique challenges. If let's say Germany won WW1 and carved out Lotharingia/Burgundy out of France/Benelux as a new puppet state populated by Dutch and German and French and Flemish people, I would not expect rump France to have your cookie-cutter milquetoast leaders just accepting that.
I would not say that let's say kaiser Franz Joseph or tzar Nicholas II or kaiser Wilhelm II or president Raymond Poincaré or prime minister David Lloyd George were "abnormal" leaders for their times and yet they are all co-responsible for WW1, which should put them into 0.01% of abnormal leaders according to your criteria - right?
Also I was assessing Hitler pre-war, of course once you have total World War, then all comparisons are off. In fact related to the topic of Darryl Cooper vs Churchill - and we can throw Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman into the bunch - grounding to dust millions of houses full of civilians during air raids on cities in Germany and Japan, including dropping atomic bombs is up there on the scale of atrocities committed on civilian population by any leader in the history of the world. Vietnam war caused around 2 million civilian deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - which makes JFK and Johnson and Nixon also pretty high on the abnormal list. What percentile of abnormality are those figures in your eyes?
And I see why you do not want to discuss these things, because exactly as Cooper points out, the WW2 is prime example of hyperreality event, it has high place as a national myth in very many countries, which makes any assessment immediately mired in controversy. The thing is that as the time goes this pressure is lessened - not many people are riled up if one assesses pros and cons of Napolen or Emperor Ferdinand II or if they talk about how Gengis Khan can be praised for bringing hundred years long Pax Mongolica, which enabled Europe to reach to orient with explorers like Marco Polo and spurred them toward modernity in its own way. We already see WW1 in rearview mirror and you can finally have reasonable discussions about the events leading to the war as well as if the treaty o Versailles. It is inevitable that the same will happen with WW2 some time, Cooper is just one of the early birds in this sense.
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It doesn't affect the argument, but this is a common trope which gets my goat, so I am going to stick an oar in. The Holocaust was mostly not Hitler murdering his own people - most of the German and Austrian Jews escaped. The Holocaust was mostly a genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied territory - with the numbers being dominated by Polish and Ukrainian Jews because Poland and Ukraine had the largest Jewish populations. Hitler was in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of militarily unnecessary massacres of conquered populations but probably not the top 0.01%. (Genghis Khan says "Hi!") Whether you consider "his own people" to be Germans, Austrians, or both, he wasn't even in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of murdering them.
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