The Ben Shapiro Show - Who Was The Bad Guy In WWII? | Niall Ferguson

00:00:00.000 But it's a fact that Britain has become a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society, as the United States is today, and London is a cosmopolitan city the way New York is.

00:00:12.000 These are realities.

00:00:13.000 If your response to these cities is, I wish Hitler had won World War II, then it seems to me you really don't have a place in a serious discourse about these issues.

00:00:24.000 You've exposed yourself as somebody who would like to be aligned with the genocidal killers of the 1930s and 1940s.

00:00:33.000 When we talk about World War II, there's no getting around Adolf Hitler and his vile evil plan for the planet. 0.94

00:00:39.000 This is why World War II wasn't just a battle of armies, it was a battle for humanity itself.

00:00:43.000 There's a narrative, introduced recently, that Adolf Hitler wasn't really interested in continuing World War II, that he offered peace to Britain and France, but that Winston Churchill, driven by some mysterious personal vendetta, refused and kept the war going for his own perverse purposes.

00:00:57.000 This is, of course, a gross misreading of history.

00:01:00.000 It conveniently omits key facts about Hitler's true intentions, like all of the facts.

00:01:04.000 The truth is, Adolf Hitler, of course, did not want peace.

00:01:07.000 He wanted control.

00:01:08.000 Anyone suggesting otherwise is engaging in dangerous revisionism that undermines the reality of the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler during the war.

00:01:15.000 To assist us in weeding through these untruths is the one and only Neil Ferguson.

00:01:19.000 Ferguson is a Scottish historian who's made waves in both academic and popular circles.

00:01:24.000 He's known for his in-depth analysis of economic history, empire, and of course, the big picture stuff, global conflicts like World War I and World War II.

00:01:31.000 He doesn't just tell you what happened, he tells you why it happened.

00:01:34.000 What could have been different and how the war reshaped the entire global order?

00:01:38.000 His analysis goes beyond the battlefield, digging into the economic and geopolitical forces that fuel the conflict.

00:01:43.000 Neil doesn't just recite history, he makes you think about it in new and challenging ways.

00:01:47.000 Welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special.

00:01:51.000 So obviously the bizarre podcast that set the historical world aflame was a podcast

00:02:04.000 between Tucker Carlson and a person that he actually suggested was the best and most important

00:02:11.000 historian working in the United States, most honest.

00:02:15.000 It was a bizarre suggestion because the person he was speaking about was not in fact a historian.

00:02:18.000 It was a person named Daryl Cooper who does a variety of long-form podcasts, who then proceeded to make

00:02:24.000 a series of pretty wild allegations about World War II.

00:02:28.000 He suggested that Winston Churchill was the great villain of World War II.

00:02:31.000 He made some suggestions that Hitler seemed to be rather misunderstood, which was a unique 1.00

00:02:36.000 suggestion.

00:02:37.000 So why don't we begin sort of from the beginning.

00:02:40.000 The contention was made that the West was effectively wrong in World War II, that the

00:02:45.000 better thing for Great Britain to have done would have been to sit aside, allow Nazi Germany 0.98

00:02:50.000 to take over the entire European continent and then turn its eyes toward the Soviet Union. 0.74

00:02:55.000 How did World War II start?

00:02:56.000 Was Churchill the bad guy?

00:02:59.000 Was Hitler actually just a misunderstood person who just wanted a little bit more living room?

00:03:03.000 What was the actual story here?

00:03:04.000 Well, if Hitler was a misunderstood person who just wanted a little more living room, then obviously I've wasted my entire life since I spent most of my adult years writing books and articles about 20th century history and specifically about Germany where my career began many years ago now. 0.63

00:03:27.000 I was puzzled by this podcast because I couldn't quite understand why Tucker Carlson had decided to promote someone I'd never heard of before.

00:03:38.000 Daryl Cooper's not a historian, at least not in any sense that I understand the term.

00:03:43.000 He's never published any history books.

00:03:46.000 And his thoughts, if they really deserve the name thoughts, are essentially a rehash of what the Nazis said about themselves.

00:03:57.000 Let's just be clear, this isn't some incredibly challenging revisionism overthrowing the established ideas of a previous generation.

00:04:07.000 What Cooper does is to resuscitate what the Nazis said, that Churchill was the warmonger, that in fact he had strange and suspect relationships to Jews who were his backers, that Hitler really was a man of peace who was trying to protect Europe from Bolshevism, that the Russian prisoners of war on the Eastern Front just died because of bad luck and lack of

00:04:37.000 Adequate humanitarian aid.

00:04:39.000 All of these things Cooper trots out in his conversation with Carlson.

00:04:45.000 And apparently Carlson doesn't realize that this is the Nazi line that he's hearing.

00:04:51.000 This is what the Germans said during World War II.

00:04:54.000 And it's quite extraordinary to me that anybody should want to broadcast such a tissue of lies in 2024.

00:05:02.000 I can't imagine why somebody would want to do that.

00:05:06.000 It's kind of amazing. So one of the things that the Tucker suggested is that he was distressed

00:05:10.000 by the uses to which the myths about World War II have been put in the context of modern

00:05:13.000 foreign policy. So if the objection is presumably to everybody comparing everybody to Hitler

00:05:19.000 or that the World War II is used as sort of the great example for everybody who wants

00:05:24.000 It seems to me that the best way to rebut that would be to say, well that's because these two things are dissimilar.

00:05:29.000 So if you are, as Tucker is, not a fan of American intervention in Ukraine or even financial

00:05:34.000 support for Ukraine, then try to distinguish it from World War II in a variety of ways.

00:05:39.000 We have these conversations all the time.

00:05:41.000 But instead, he and Cooper decided to do something different, which was to basically say not

00:05:45.000 only are the lessons of World War II being misapplied, World War II itself is misunderstood

00:05:51.000 in a dramatic way.

00:05:53.000 And again, I hesitate to sort of attribute intentions, although I think Cooper's intentions are relatively clear, I think Tucker's are rather opaque.

00:06:00.000 When it comes to the actual history, which obviously you've spent your life studying, one of the things that Tucker says is, well, now we're finally allowed to talk about this stuff.

00:06:09.000 As a historian, you're the historian, I'm not, I'm just a person who reads these books, it seems to me that people have been talking about this stuff rather a long time, and in fact, there are some pretty solid sources Yes, it's hard to think of a topic that has been more heavily researched than the origins of World War II, or for that matter, the rise of Hitler.

00:06:32.000 And so to claim that you can literally be thrown in jail for challenging some received mythology is bizarre.

00:06:43.000 I wrote a chapter of my book, The War of the World, with the title Tainted Victory.

00:06:49.000 Making the point that there were all kinds of moral compromises involved in the victory that Allies won, not the least of which was that they were in alliance with Joseph Stalin and the totalitarian Soviet Union.

00:07:02.000 And I don't remember facing criminal prosecution for challenging the mythology of World War II.

00:07:10.000 So this is a straw man.

00:07:13.000 If ever there was one.

00:07:14.000 I think the argument that Churchill's the villain is only one of the kind of crazy things that is proposed here.

00:07:28.000 Of course, there's a large revisionist literature on Churchill.

00:07:31.000 There are lots of people who've made a career out of criticizing Churchill.

00:07:35.000 On the right, there was John Chalmney, to name just one conservative historian who said, well, Churchill actually threw away the British Empire and handed world power to the United States.

00:07:45.000 And then on the left, there's any number of Post-colonial scholars who want to say that Churchill was a terrible racist.

00:07:53.000 But that's not what Cooper's telling us.

00:07:56.000 Cooper is telling us that Churchill wanted World War II, that he turned down peace offers from Hitler on multiple occasions.

00:08:06.000 That he actually enjoyed the war, that he was, quote, the chief villain of the Second World War, who was, I'll quote again, primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.

00:08:21.000 And if one delves into Cooper's argument, it gradually becomes clear what he's doing.

00:08:28.000 One is to believe that Hitler's offers of peace in 1939 and 1940 were sincere. 0.97

00:08:35.000 He made those offers, but it was clear to Churchill and to others in the British government what peace with Hitler implied was subjugation, was essentially accepting the outcome of the initial German campaigns, putting Germany in charge not only of Europe, but ultimately in charge of the world by subordinating the British Empire to German power.

00:08:58.000 So these were not sincere peace offers, but But we are being told by Cooper and implicitly by Carlson that they were. 0.85

00:09:07.000 I think the other really interesting thing that comes out of this strange dialogue is that Churchill thirsted to bomb and kill German civilians.

00:09:21.000 He brings forward the idea of firebombing, which was actually a part of the later strategic bombing campaign to 1940.

00:09:30.000 1940 was the Battle of Britain when the Germans were launching air attacks on Britain.

00:09:38.000 And Britain's counter raids were really relatively small at this point and were clearly directed at industrial or economic targets.

00:09:48.000 Not very well directed because of course there was no precision bombing then.

00:09:52.000 But the idea that it was really the British who were doing the terror bombing, and he calls it terrorism, is straight out of Goebbels' propaganda.

00:10:00.000 That's exactly what was told to the German population.

00:10:04.000 At the time.

00:10:04.000 So if you're completely ignorant of history, you might possibly fall for this.

00:10:10.000 If you know history, you recognize that what Cooper's doing is in fact rehashing the German propaganda of the 1940s to smear Churchill.

00:10:22.000 And then the real giveaway is when we get to Churchill's relationship with the Jews. 0.71

00:10:29.000 Not only we're told was he a psychopath and a drunk, but he was also a dedicated booster of Zionism, quote unquote. 0.92

00:10:37.000 And this is when, if you hadn't already spotted that there was something fishy going on, it's absolutely unmistakable. 0.51

00:10:44.000 I'm just going to give you a little passage from the interview that stood out for me.

00:10:50.000 You know, he says to Carlson, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests.

00:10:59.000 You know, in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility.

00:11:03.000 You know, I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. 0.94

00:11:08.000 I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling.

00:11:12.000 But, you know, I think he was to an extent put in place by by people, the financiers, by a media complex.

00:11:19.000 So Hitler, the good guy, Churchill, pawn of the Jews. 0.96

00:11:24.000 somebody who to some extent had been bribed to pursue his war against Germany.

00:11:30.000 This is Nazi propaganda, Ben.

00:11:33.000 How could anybody possibly want this to be broadcast to become one of the most popular

00:11:39.000 podcasts in the country?

00:11:41.000 It's actually sick.

00:11:43.000 And here is where I think that, you know, it is quite dishonest that the sort of backfilling tactic that Tucker has used in the aftermath of this where he has suggested, for example, you just want to shut down open and honest debate.

00:11:53.000 I mean, first of all, he wasn't openly and honestly debating Daryl Cooper.

00:11:55.000 he had him on, proceeded to praise him fulsomely, essentially back all of his points.

00:12:00.000 And also nobody is calling for the deplatforming of Tucker Carlson.

00:12:03.000 They're pointing out that backing this sort of nonsense is actually a wrong thing to do.

00:12:09.000 And Daryl Cooper would go on in that same interview to make excuses for the Nazi atrocities

00:12:14.000 on the Eastern Front.

00:12:15.000 I mean, he openly says that effectively the reason why so many people died in Ukraine

00:12:20.000 and Poland and in the East was because Hitler just had made no provision for all of the

00:12:25.000 various prisoners of war and civilians who were going to get in the way.

00:12:30.000 You know, that happens to me all the time.

00:12:31.000 I'm just, you know, living my daily life and suddenly there's a trench in my backyard filled with human bodies. 0.98

00:12:35.000 I don't know about you.

00:12:36.000 It happens, you know, it happens to the best of us, but what's the actual story with what Hitler, it was an actual plan to starve people in these areas, aside from the plans for the concentration camps and death camps. 0.63

00:12:48.000 Right, so this is what's, again, deeply insidious.

00:12:53.000 What Cooper does is to rehash the excuses that were subsequently made for the German army's involvement in mass murder.

00:13:05.000 Prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Convention.

00:13:08.000 But Red Army prisoners died in their millions in German captivity.

00:13:14.000 We think perhaps as many as 3 million Soviet soldiers died as captives.

00:13:19.000 And this was not an accident because they miscalculated the provisions that were needed.

00:13:24.000 It was deliberate policy.

00:13:26.000 And we know it was deliberate policy because documents like Rosenberg's Generalplan Ost, the Generalplan East, specifically envision large-scale executions.

00:13:35.000 Indeed, there were orders given after the launch of the Soviet invasion to German commanders to engage in, quote, a war of extermination.

00:13:45.000 This was a phrase that Hitler was fond of, to weed out Bolshevik commissars and communist intelligentsia for execution. 0.85

00:13:55.000 And what happened was that these categories were really quite elastic. 0.72

00:14:01.000 There was also a fairly clear indication that Jews who fell into German hands should be executed.

00:14:08.000 So the idea that there was something accidental about the mass death in the German-occupied parts of Eastern Europe is completely false.

00:14:18.000 There is absolutely abundant documentation showing that there was a plan, not just for genocide directed against Jews, but for the wholesale ethnic cleansing of the area under German control, that implied not only the genocide of the Jews, but also mass murder of non-Jewish populations, to be followed by the resettlement of these areas by ethnic Germans.

00:14:47.000 So to claim that this wasn't the case is just to ignore decades of meticulous historical research by serious scholars.

00:14:57.000 Neil, one of the things I think that was posited during that interview, and you hear this posited all the time, is this idea, again, that we just can't talk about this stuff.

00:15:05.000 So there's this straw man history set up, and Cooper literally says this in the interview, that basically everything was hunky-dory under the Weimar Republic and then all the Germans went simultaneously mad and elected Nazis.

00:15:17.000 But again, one of the most hashed over One of the big questions in all of human history is what happened to Germany?

00:15:23.000 Why exactly did Germany turn to Hitler?

00:15:26.000 Why did reasonable people decide that they were going to vote for Hitler in, say, the 1933 elections?

00:15:31.000 Why was it that social conservatives, people like Franz von Papen, decided that they would rather ally themselves with Hitler and elevate him to a position in the government? 0.58

00:15:40.000 And obviously this is a subject that you've studied, you've written about.

00:15:43.000 The Wars of the World, folks, if you haven't read the book, it's a tremendous piece of from Neil, specifically about a lot of these sorts of

00:15:48.000 questions. So let's go through that.

00:15:50.000 Why did the German people decide to elevate Hitler to a position of power?

00:15:54.000 Well, this is particularly strange to represent as forbidden fruit, since the debate has been

00:16:03.000 going on uninterruptedly since the 1930s, when plenty of people from Bertolt Brecht to Thomas

00:16:11.000 man asked the question, why are the Germans voting for this man?

00:16:16.000 I think that literature offers all kinds of interesting explanations.

00:16:21.000 What Cooper says is that he understands the German people, and not only does he understand them, he sympathizes with them, because, and here I'll quote again, they felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors.

00:16:46.000 Now, it's true that after the German defeat of 1918, the revolution of 1918-19, and the Versailles Treaty of 1919, many Germans were in denial about the fact that their country had lost World War I, and they were in revolt against both the republic that had emerged from the revolution and the peace treaty.

00:17:06.000 But none of that, it seems to me, is news.

00:17:10.000 What's news is that somebody living in the United States today thinks that those grievances were a legitimate basis for the rise of Adolf Hitler and Hitler's pursuit of a policy that led to the It's the fact that Cooper is telling us not only what the Germans felt, which I don't think is controversial, but that they were right to feel it, and they were right therefore to back Hitler, that's so outrageous.

00:17:43.000 So I think the literature, if I can cite one scholar, is in fact really nuanced on this.

00:17:51.000 Michael Burley, a brilliant historian whose work on these questions I deeply respect, wrote a fantastic new history of the Third Reich more than 10 years ago, in which he made the point that Hitler's rise to power is partly a result of these grievances, but it's also partly because Hitler had a very unique charisma and a vision of national regeneration that tapped into all kinds of popular impulses.

00:18:22.000 Hitler presented himself as a messiah, often used religious language of redemption, and especially appealed to German Protestants.

00:18:31.000 In fact, practically the only thing that gave you any resistance to Hitler's appeal in Germany in the 1930s was being a Catholic.

00:18:40.000 It's a very interesting finding.

00:18:42.000 So I think we can argue not only that the Germans had grievances but that Hitler plausibly presented himself as a national redeemer kind of fake messiah. 0.70

00:18:54.000 The Germans themselves were not thirsting for war and when war broke out there was a great deal of anxiety in Germany because of course the Germans had suffered heavy losses in World War I.

00:19:06.000 So, the desire for national resurrection didn't necessarily imply war, but Hitler pursued war, and ultimately, you could argue, pursued the destruction of Germany.

00:19:18.000 And this is something Cooper doesn't talk about, the death wish element that Hitler always had. 0.82

00:19:24.000 Because although Hitler achieved initially great victories, most spectacularly in 1940, he then embarked on a series of strategic decisions that were highly likely to be disastrous. 0.82

00:19:36.000 Not only the invasion of the Soviet Union, but the declaration of war on the United States.

00:19:41.000 In short, there's a very large literature on what it was that led to Hitler to come to power and led Germans to follow him. But

00:19:49.000 this literature appears unknown to Daryl Cooper. Indeed, it's not clear to me what Daryl

00:19:54.000 Cooper has actually read because he never cites any historian when he's explaining his

00:20:00.000 strange worldview to Tucker Carlson.

00:20:04.000 There seems in a lot of the arguments that are made about this, you know, from, let's

00:20:07.000 say not Daryl Cooper, but people who could be deemed sort of softer versions of Daryl

00:20:11.000 Cooper.

00:20:12.000 Pat Buchanan wrote a book on this in the 2000s, a sort of revisionist history of World War II.

00:20:17.000 There's an implied counterfactual, which was that if Britain had cut a separate piece with the Germans in 1940, then that would have allowed the Germans to turn eastward, to have taken on the Soviet Union, to have rid the world of Bolshevik communism.

00:20:30.000 And somehow this would have been better for the world in some way, which both tends to downplay the mass atrocities that were committed by the Germans, and also tends to, I think, ignore the fact that that would have had some knock-on effects.

00:20:43.000 That if Germany had actually been able to conquer vast swaths of Eurasia and hold those vast swaths of Eurasia, that no peace deal with Britain would have then prevented some sort of consolidation of power between the Japanese and German spheres of influence to isolate the United States.

00:20:58.000 That's right.

00:20:58.000 This kind of argument has a kind of history that goes back even further to the isolationists of the 1930s, Charles Lindbergh and others, who felt that the United States should stay out and who felt some sympathy with Hitler's goals, including his racial policy.

00:21:20.000 In a book called Virtual History that now is quite old, it goes back to the 1990s, I and Andrew Roberts and a group of other historians tried to think through the implications of what we call counterfactuals, the what-ifs.

00:21:34.000 And we tried to do it in, I guess, a more rigorous way than the novelists There are plenty of books that imagine Hitler winning, but if you actually look closely at what Hitler's intentions were, what he would have done if, say, he'd been able to launch a successful invasion of England in 1940, or if he'd been able to defeat the Soviet Union if Stalin had never recovered from Barbarossa, we know that Hitler's plans were not peaceful co-existence.

00:22:07.000 existence with the English-speaking peoples.

00:22:11.000 There was a megalomania to Hitler, an intention always to go further. 0.90

00:22:17.000 The goal of war with the United States was a part of Hitler's worldview. 0.65

00:22:22.000 Brendan Sims has written recently on this, showing that anti-Americanism was a really important part of Hitler's ideology.

00:22:30.000 Hitler had some somewhat confused ideas about the United States.

00:22:33.000 But he certainly never intended, if he were victorious on the Eurasian landmass, to leave the United States alone.

00:22:40.000 The Germans had a plan to build a large Atlantic fleet, the Z-Plan, which would not have been directed at anybody other than the United States had it ever been built.

00:22:51.000 So I think there's plenty of documentary evidence that Hitler would not have stopped At the control of Europe. 0.89

00:22:58.000 He wouldn't have stopped at the control of the United Kingdom if he'd successfully invaded it.

00:23:03.000 There was a goal that was world dominance in partnership, remember, with the Axis powers and initially with the Soviet Union, because people sometimes forget that the Soviet Union and Hitler were allies at the beginning of World War Two.

00:23:17.000 This is a problem for The people who would like to imagine Hitler as a purely anti-Bolshevik or anti-communist figure.

00:23:26.000 Opportunistically, at the beginning of World War II, he was in alliance with Stalin and in a way they were natural allies since they both represented extreme versions of totalitarianism. 0.79

00:23:37.000 We'll get to more with Neil in just one second.

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00:24:44.000 So when we look at Winston Churchill, who as you have mentioned was completely demonized in this interview, seen as the chief villain of World War II, What is Winston Churchill's actual role in World War II?

00:24:54.000 Was he truly, as people think he was, and I believe he was, the indispensable man of World War II?

00:25:00.000 If Winston Churchill had never existed, how does the war go differently?

00:25:03.000 Well, I think A.J.P.

00:25:04.000 Taylor, who was no conservative, was right when he described Churchill.

00:25:10.000 In a footnote in his English history as the savior of his nation. But I actually

00:25:16.000 went further in a book called Empire, written more than 20 years ago, arguing that Churchill was

00:25:22.000 really the savior of the West, maybe even the savior of the world. Because at the darkest

00:25:28.000 moments of British history, which was in 1940 when the British expeditionary force had

00:25:34.000 been evacuated from Dunkirk, entirely losing its equipment and also losing many men, it

00:25:40.000 returned demoralized to Britain.

00:25:42.000 And Britain faced the prospects of invasion and certainly the prospects of air attacks from Germany.

00:25:50.000 There were many conservatives who were ready to consider some kind of settlement with Hitler.

00:25:56.000 It wasn't as if there was unanimity that Britain should fight on, but Churchill having consistently argued in the 1930s that Hitler posed a mortal threat, that Britain must rearm, arguments for which he was reviled at the time, had by 1940 One, the legitimacy that led him to be Prime Minister and Churchill inspired British people to fight on even when the odds seemed daunting.

00:26:26.000 And remember, this was at a time when Britain was alone.

00:26:30.000 France had collapsed, Hitler controlled all of Western Europe, the United States was not in the war, and Britain also had to reckon with attacks by Italy and Japan, the other members of the Axis.

00:26:46.000 So it's clear that Churchill was the vital factor, the indispensable man who rallied British morale and persuaded the British that they could fight on if necessarily alone.

00:27:01.000 Anybody who's not listened to Churchill's wartime speeches, which are some of the most brilliant speeches ever given, And also some of the most powerful prose ever written has missed out because I think they're an indispensable part of an education.

00:27:19.000 I used to play them to my children on an old audio cassette when I drove them to school.

00:27:26.000 You can't understand Churchill's importance until you realise the power of those words, and my grandparents often used to refer to the influence and inspiration that Churchill gave.

00:27:39.000 Even though my grandfather was no conservative, in fact he was hostile to Churchill's domestic politics, But I think that's the thing that people miss.

00:27:50.000 And they miss that if Churchill had not been there, and another leader, say Lord Halifax, had negotiated terms with Hitler, that would not have been the end of it.

00:27:59.000 That would just have given the Germans the opportunity to prepare for the next phase of Hitler's plan for world domination. 0.92

00:28:05.000 One of the claims that is constantly made about Churchill is the suggestion by revisionists that, for example, the reason that Churchill did not sign some sort of separate peace was a pathetic attempt to maintain the British Empire, which, of course, I think ignores the actual terms that Germany would have imposed on Britain.

00:28:22.000 If they were similar to what was imposed on France, then that would have meant, presumably, the dismantling or seizure of the British Navy, which would have meant a complete shift in world power.

00:28:31.000 At the very least, it would have meant that the British would have to go neutral in the war in the Atlantic.

00:28:35.000 It would have meant, presumably, access to oil resources in the Middle East that were controlled by the British, and that Rommel attempted to gain in the middle of the war.

00:28:43.000 The follow-up effect of a peace between Germany and England would have meant German world domination, essentially. 0.75

00:28:51.000 And you can see why, therefore, those terms were rejected if you read the relevant parts of War of the World, which was my attempt to address these issues.

00:29:01.000 War of the World shows why the policy of appeasement was adopted by Churchill's predecessors, Danny Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, and why it failed.

00:29:11.000 Not because of naivety, but because I think of a miscalculation about what would happen if you just played for time Appeasement was about playing for time to rearm.

00:29:22.000 The problem was that Hitler got the time too and he made better use of it. 0.88

00:29:27.000 When the moment of truth came and the idea of some kind of separate peace or some kind of compromise with Hitler was discussed, it wasn't too hard for Churchill to win the argument since it was so obvious to the other members of the cabinet that the peace was a phony peace that would have subjugated Britain and opened the door for German world domination. 0.69

00:29:49.000 So I don't think anybody should take those peace offers at face value, especially as we have documentary evidence of what Hitler really thought.

00:29:58.000 You see, the problem for Daryl Cooper, who's never done as far as I can see the necessary reading, is that he's unaware that even as Hitler was making peace offers, he was describing Britain as our hate-inspired antagonist, our eternal enemy, So Neil, one of the things that Tucker suggested about Daryl Cooper is he said that he was not using history as a weapon, a cudgel, or as a kind of propaganda tool.

00:30:30.000 It seems pretty clear that precisely the opposite is the truth, that this entire So revisionist history is designed to push for an isolationist West that is friendlier with revanchist powers.

00:30:44.000 That obviously has been Tucker's foreign policy as a general rule.

00:30:47.000 He's much more isolationist on foreign policy.

00:30:49.000 And again, I think there's a case to be made with regard to World War II that this example does not apply.

00:30:54.000 But the reality is that what World War II, the big lesson that everybody took away from the post-World War II era is that if you actually wish to avoid war, the thing you need to do is rearm in the 30s.

00:31:06.000 The real lesson of history is that Churchill was right in his analysis of the threat that Hitler posed, and right that rearmament should have begun much earlier. 0.95

00:31:17.000 It was left too late.

00:31:20.000 Too late to deter Hitler from taking the enormous risks that he took in 1938 and 1939 that ultimately led to the outbreak of war. 0.86

00:31:30.000 But Ben, I think we have to look at this as something other than a spurious historical debate.

00:31:37.000 There's something else going on here which I think is important and it's the contemporary resonance of these old Nazi arguments.

00:31:46.000 There's a moment in the dialogue when Carlson says to Cooper, I don't see you as hostile to the West.

00:31:54.000 I see you actually as a product of the West and as a defender of the West for its values.

00:32:00.000 And Cooper and he then start to riff on why Hungary is so much superior these days to England. 0.83

00:32:10.000 And it's the critique of England that's especially revealing.

00:32:15.000 But first, they say about Hungary, well, that Hungarians aren't afraid to say, this is Hungary, this is a country for Hungarians, this is a Christian country, this is our country.

00:32:25.000 They don't have a problem saying that, Cooper says.

00:32:28.000 And then they talk about modern London, and this is worth savouring because it's so revealing.

00:32:33.000 Carlson says, it's totally degraded.

00:32:35.000 I try not to go there because it's so depressing.

00:32:37.000 It's just so sad.

00:32:38.000 It's so broken.

00:32:39.000 It's not the country of victors.

00:32:41.000 It's a defeated, completely defeated country that's subsequently been invaded.

00:32:46.000 If Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the streets of London? 1.00

00:32:51.000 And London is not majority English now.

00:32:53.000 Like, what?

00:32:54.000 And Cooper says, well, the people who formulated the version of history that considers Churchill a hero, they like London the way it is now.

00:33:03.000 So one sees here what's really going on.

00:33:06.000 This is something like the conversation that Tucker Carlson had with Vladimir Putin, which It was equally bad from the point of view of its historiographical accuracy.

00:33:17.000 Carlson allowed Putin to tell a complete farada of lies about Russian and Ukrainian history in that interview.

00:33:24.000 But the real point is not the history.

00:33:26.000 The history is just a means to an end.

00:33:29.000 And the end is to promote the idea that some terrible degradation has happened to Britain because of immigration.

00:33:39.000 And really it would be much better if Britain were more like Hungary and perhaps also more like Russia, though they don't explicitly say that.

00:33:48.000 So I think it becomes clear by the end of the dialogue that this isn't really a serious discussion of history at all.

00:33:54.000 It's really about reviving arguments from the 1930s and 1940s in order to deploy them In this argument on the right about what do you do about mass migration and the emergence of a multi-ethnic Western Europe.

00:34:14.000 They don't quite go right into great replacement theory, but that's clearly where the conversation is heading.

00:34:19.000 By the end.

00:34:20.000 I think that's the point of this discussion.

00:34:22.000 Just in the same way that the conversation with Putin was not really about Russian history.

00:34:28.000 It was really about legitimizing Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

00:34:32.000 This is the great irony of these conversations we're living through right now.

00:34:38.000 A fascist regime attacking a democracy. 0.96

00:34:42.000 Russia is the fascist regime, Putin's the dictator.

00:34:45.000 They attacked Ukraine two and a half years ago and they've committed heinous war crimes, not on the scale of the Nazis, but certainly war crimes. 0.73

00:34:55.000 And for whatever reason, perhaps one day this will be explained to me, Tucker Carlson, who was once a really talented broadcaster, has decided to legitimize Putin's regime, to also stand up for the one European country that is sympathetic to Putin, which is Hungary and its leader Viktor Orban, and to give airtime to people who want to tell spurious historical stories.

00:35:21.000 to support the argument that that's the West.

00:35:24.000 Now, if Hungary, if Budapest and Russia and Moscow, if that's the West, then I'm geographically confused, Ben,

00:35:33.000 because that was never the West when I was in high school.

00:35:37.000 And what's kind of amazing is the attempt to inject that debate into the World War II debate,

00:35:43.000 because you can certainly make the argument that Britain has been too lax on immigration.

00:35:47.000 It's one of the things that drove Brexit, for example.

00:35:49.000 I mean, this is a very open argument that's being had right now all across Europe, everywhere from France to the Netherlands, everywhere from Britain to Hungary.

00:35:56.000 And you can make contemporaneous political arguments about whether or not Europe ought to be allowing less immigrants or fewer immigrants.

00:36:03.000 And I tend to agree with the immigration restrictionist side.

00:36:05.000 I tend to believe that it's been a mistake to allow mass migrations from countries that

00:36:10.000 don't have cultures that typically mesh particularly well with the West's culture.

00:36:14.000 Why that has to be connected with Britain winning World War II is something else.

00:36:20.000 And that sort of suggests, again, a motivation which is to revitalize many of the arguments

00:36:28.000 from the 30s and 40s, from the darkest parts of the human brain, that were used to justify

00:36:34.000 the immigration restriction.

00:36:36.000 Because I think, again, there are good arguments for immigration restriction, there are bad ones, and they are not equivalent.

00:36:39.000 But in a strange way, if your response to multi-ethnic London is to say, Hitler was right and Churchill was wrong, then it's possible that you're really part of the problem, isn't it? 0.72

00:36:54.000 I think there's something really insidious about trying to resuscitate Nazi arguments in the context of the debates that we have on immigration and multiculturalism.

00:37:08.000 We can't unmake the multicultural societies that have evolved since Churchill's death.

00:37:14.000 Bear in mind that The really big increase in immigration to the United Kingdom from outside Europe is a very recent origin.

00:37:22.000 It's certainly long after Churchill's time.

00:37:25.000 But it's a fact that Britain has become a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society as the United States is today.

00:37:34.000 And London is a cosmopolitan city the way New York is.

00:37:37.000 These are realities.

00:37:39.000 If your response to these cities is, I wish Hitler had won World War II, then it seems to me you really don't have a place in a serious discourse about these issues.

00:37:49.000 You've exposed yourself as somebody who would like to be aligned with the genocidal killers of the 1930s and 1940s, because this was the point of my book War of the World.

00:38:02.000 The Nazis, like all those racial movements that emerged out of the late 19th century, were reacting against the formation of multi-ethnic societies in the course of the 19th century.

00:38:18.000 Mass migration in the late 19th century produced an America not unlike the America we see today where, what, 14% of the population was foreign-born.

00:38:28.000 We kind of have relived this globalization in our lifetimes and it's produced similar levels of heterogeneity in our societies.

00:38:38.000 And what happened in the 1920s, 30s and 40s was a backlash.

00:38:42.000 against the formation of these multi-ethnic societies, and that backlash in its most toxic form was National Socialism, was Nazism, and its most toxic protagonist was Hitler. 0.63

00:38:54.000 Now, surely the lesson of the mid-20th century is that the worst possible way To react to the emergence of multiracial societies is racial policies that aspire not just to forced resettlement but to genocide. 0.82

00:39:08.000 That seems to me like the single most obvious lesson of the 20th century.

00:39:14.000 The fact that there are people who want to go on the air and take Hitler's It left me, honestly Ben, with a feeling of failure.

00:39:25.000 I spent a lot of my life making arguments about this, publishing books, and yet it's possible for somebody like Cooper to set himself up as a historian, having published nothing, having apparently spent no time in libraries or archives, and to pontificate in ways that are recognisably the arguments of the Nazis.

00:39:45.000 I must have failed for this to be possible.

00:39:48.000 At best, This should be some incredibly marginal contribution to public debate, which attracts only cranks, the kind of people who used to write letters in green ink.

00:39:59.000 The fact that in 2024 something like this becomes a huge hit online is a terrible indictment of American education and the state of our culture today.

00:40:09.000 Neil, I also think that it's a reflection of the fact that all the politics these days, and probably always, is just highly reactionary.

00:40:17.000 And that the response to the political left closing the Overton window so narrow that nobody could fit inside, unless you agree with their very specific positions on the issues, the response to that was not to broaden the Overton window so as to allow broader and more robust discourse, It was to completely explode the Overton window and then treat all arguments as equally credible and as equally meritorious.

00:40:38.000 Right.

00:40:39.000 In the end there are serious debates to be had about World War II and about the rise of Hitler.

00:40:46.000 I wish more of them were going on at Harvard and Yale and Columbia and for that matter Stanford.

00:40:52.000 In truth, Teaching of the Third Reich and the Holocaust and World War II does not go on on any very large scale in American higher education today, much less in American high schools.

00:41:07.000 And so part of what we see here is that there's an audience of people who really don't know terribly much about these issues, and they're very susceptible, therefore, to sensationalism, to claims that something terribly daring is being proposed.

00:41:22.000 Obviously, part of what's going on here is forbidden fruit.

00:41:25.000 The more censorious the left becomes, the more certain people are attracted to the transgressive ideas of the right.

00:41:33.000 But I don't think this game would really work if people were just a bit better educated about what happened in the 1930s and 1940s.

00:41:40.000 I think our knowledge of that history has decayed quite dramatically in the last 20 years.

00:41:47.000 And that's part of the reason not only that people are taken in by Darrell Cooper, it's also part of the reason why woke students on the left are taken in by Islamist propaganda, which completely misrepresents the history of Israel and essentially writes the Holocaust out of history.

00:42:03.000 Well, Neil Ferguson, I really appreciate the time, and I really appreciate the arguments that you're making, obviously.

00:42:09.000 I think it is fair to call you the best and most honest historian working today.

00:42:13.000 I really appreciate it.

00:42:15.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:42:15.000 Ben, that's very kind of you.

00:42:25.000 Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

00:42:28.000 Production intern is Sarah Steele.

00:42:30.000 Editing is by Josh Wingard.

00:42:32.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

00:42:34.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

00:42:36.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

00:42:39.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:42:41.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

00:42:43.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

00:42:46.000 Executive producer Justin Siegel.

00:42:48.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

00:42:50.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 15, 2024

Who Was The Bad Guy In WWII? | Niall Ferguson

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