Having a crowd lambaste you is no proof at all that you are a courageous truth-teller.
Having a crowd lambaste you is no proof at all that you are a courageous truth-teller.
S top me if you’ve heard this one before. A figure on the internet says something ridiculous, or grotesque, or both, and, when it is widely explained to him that he has said something ridiculous, or grotesque, or both, he points to the furor that he has engendered as evidence that he must be on to something important enough for his critics to wish to conceal.
This week, Tucker Carlson had as a guest on his show a revisionist “historian” named Darryl Cooper who, under the guise of challenging what he described as the West’s “state religion,” promulgated a narrative version of World War II that reserved all of its opprobrium for the Allies. Out was the “emotional” “mythology” of Hitler as an evil, genocidal threat; in was the story of a frustrated and misunderstood leader who, in the key period of 1939–40, was most famous around the world for “firing off peace proposals” and hoping that Britain would remain “strong.”
Hitler’s primary problem, Cooper explained, was the perfidy of Winston Churchill, “the chief villain of the Second World War,” who not only “wanted a war,” but a world war, and who was willing to stop at nothing to get one. Partly, Cooper submitted, this was because Churchill was a “psychopath.” Mostly, though, it was because Churchill had been “bailed out by people who shared his interests, you know, in terms of Zionism.” Unfortunately for Hitler, Cooper concluded, this left Germany with no choice but to go it alone in finding an “acceptable solution to the Jewish problem” that, for reasons that have apparently been lost to history, had suddenly become most acute in the hitherto sovereign nation of Poland.
As one might expect, the reaction to this commentary was pretty unfavorable — not least because, as many observers instantly recognized, it represented nothing more salubrious than a resuscitation of the type of dead-end, pro-Nazi propaganda that had sprung up from the bombed-out German sewers as early as 1946. Writing at the Free Press, Niall Ferguson noted acidly that “the last time I heard this kind of thing was when the full extent of the Wehrmacht’s complicity in mass murder was being exposed in the 1980s and 1990s,” before recording that “the people who made these arguments” last time around “were old Nazis, making excuses.” “And that,” Ferguson resolved, “is what we have here, reheated and served up to an American audience: Nazi excuses.”
To which Darryl Cooper rather predictably responded: “The emotional incontinence of people upset about my Tucker interview is proof of my point about the sacred nature of the World War 2 mythos.”
I will not attempt to improve upon the work done by Niall Ferguson or Victor Davis Hanson in explaining why Cooper is substantively wrong. Instead, I want to fire a broadside at the sheer, unalloyed, Kafkaesque ridiculousness of responding to the charge that your worldview is abhorrent and wrong by proposing that, because you have been informed that you are abhorrent and wrong, you must, in fact, be virtuous and correct. Despite the endorphin rush that fights on the internet can bring, it remains the case that there is nothing intrinsically brave about being contrarian, revisionist, or antagonistic in public. Indeed, as approaches, all three are value-neutral. Revisionism that corrects a mistake or presents a coherent counterpoint is useful; revisionism that adds errors to the canon or launders malevolent propaganda is pernicious. Like Forrest Gump’s “stupid,” contrarianism, revisionism, and antagonism are as they do. It is true that a crowd will shout loudly at a person if he attempts to convey a truth it would prefer to suppress. But this reaction can also be achieved by stripping naked and soiling oneself in front of a bunch of children.
What matters, ultimately, is the value of one’s provocation. Sometimes, one does indeed “hit a nerve,” “bust a myth,” or “take flak” because one “is over the target.” Sometimes, one is just a total bloody buffoon. Insisting that, “actually, Hitler wasn’t the real villain” is likely to fall in the second camp, and if the people who lambast those who proffer such analysis sound a little “emotional” while doing so, the fault lies not with them, but with whatever moron thought it might be a nice idea to spend an afternoon making tendentious excuses for the Third Reich.