The Free Press versus Darryl Cooper

The war on their history

When Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper discussed the Second World War in September, Cooper named Winston Churchill as the “chief villain”, condemned the legacy of the war and attributed the present state of Britain to it. Pro-Churchill historians reacted: Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson (and the author and columnist Sohrab Amari) at Bari Weiss’ Free Press; Ferguson in conversation with Ben Shapiro; Andrew Roberts in a series of interviews; Ferguson, Hanson and Roberts together at the Hoover Institution.

The historians, though they regarded Cooper as unscholarly, stooped to respond due to the enormity of Carlson’s audience. The conversation’s view count on X is nearly 35 million. The wide interest and the reaction should both have been expected. The war, nearly eight decades past, continues to be the main justification for a political consensus of which most faux conservatives, including Roberts, Ferguson and Hanson, are adherents, and in which it is mandatory for Britons and other people of European descent to submit to being reduced to despised minorities in their ancestral lands. Advocacy for whites is likened to ‘Nazism’, which is the ultimate evil. Following the example of Churchill, who followed that of Disraeli, the same people treat advocacy for Jews as obviously necessary and laudable. The Churchillian version of the history of 1933-45 is the argumentational basis of post-war anti-fascism, the ideology of the pro-Jewish, anti-white regimes that control Britain, the USA, Canada, France, Germany and nearly every other white country. For Cooper and Carlson to say or imply this to an audience of tens of millions did indeed warrant a defence of the crucial narrative; this was especially so as X has permitted a large degree of free discussion since Elon Musk’s purchase of the site in 2022, an act which itself repudiated the authoritarian demands of the Jewish advocacy groups for whom “the guilt of the Holocaust” is an asset.

Cooper and the historians’ dispute is over what is true but also over who should rule. People on both sides of the debate agreed that the pro-Churchill history of the Second World War constitutes, in Cooper’s phrase, the “founding mythology of the… current global order.” Cooper stated that “The post-World War II order is really defined by the fact that after Nuremberg, it became effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right wing...”, to which Niall Ferguson responded: “The only right-wing parties that are illegal in Europe today are Nazi parties. And the only people who regard the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a “sacrificial ritual”—Cooper again—are Nazis.” Ferguson was side-stepping a true statement: it did become effectively illegal to be genuinely right-wing. In all but a few insignificant instances, that is what ‘Nazi’ has meant since the war. Anti-fascism is a collaboration of the ‘centre right’ with the left against everyone else; it is an acid test to distinguish the real right from the fake. It is also a pretext for ruling elites to act against those they rule. In politics it is approvingly called the cordon sanitaire, the disease being ‘the far right’, or white people attempting to organise and defend themselves. The aim of anti-fascism is to render them defenceless. Refuting its historical justification is thus an existential imperative for whites, just as maintaining it is for the present regime.

Ferguson spoke approvingly to Ben Shapiro of the “emergence of multi-racial societies”, i.e. the presence of foreign races in large and growing numbers in white countries (not Israel), as though it were not brought about intentionally by politicians and activists. He objected to the following:

Carlson: “If Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the streets of London and London is not majority-English now?”

Cooper: “The people who formulated the version of history that considers Churchill a hero, they like London the way it is now.”

Carlson: “But that’s not victory, that’s the worst kind of defeat, is it not?”

Cooper: “If you’re an English person who cares about England, it is.”

Ferguson accuses them of implying that “some terrible degradation has happened to Britain because of immigration”. He grants that “They don’t quite go right into Great Replacement theory” but, still, “that’s clearly where the conversation is heading by the end”. Andrew Roberts agrees that it was “a racist rant”. Ferguson warns that the Nazis emerged as a reaction against the formation of multi-ethnic societies in the previous century and informs us that “We can’t unmake the multi-cultural societies that have evolved since Churchill’s death”, as though infeasibility is his real objection. One could hardly disagree that the “worst possible way to react to the emergence of multi-racial societies is racial policies that aspire not just to forced resettlement but to genocide”, but racial policies that effect resettlement without genocide would obviously be the best possible way to react, if only those with the will had the power.

Roberts, Hanson and Ferguson

Sohrab Amari appears to see clearly how historical narrative relates to power. He warns us against “the Barbarian Right”, which, he explains, has

“a revulsion for the mildly egalitarian conservatism that took hold across the West in the postwar period. That conservatism made its peace with the civil rights movement and marginalized Jew-haters. The barbarians cannot stand the resulting state of affairs, since it has meant granting the grubby demands of the ‘dysgenic’ many… Therefore, they feel compelled to attack what they see as the founding ‘mythology’ of the postwar world...”

Cooper and Carlson deserve some gratitude for provoking the defenders of the “resulting state of affairs” to be so plain about their allegiance.

Andrew Roberts, responding to Aaron McLean's suggestion that “the Second World War, its contemporary understanding, and Churchill’s iconic status form a kind of founding mythology for our current world”, said, “Yes. Absolutely. Thank God it does”. He cited the legacy of anti-appeasement, anti-totalitarianism, anti-isolationism, and standing up for small nations against invasion by larger neighbors, asserting that “we should be thankful” to Churchill for it. Perhaps Baron Roberts has more reason to be thankful than most. At any rate, his answer accurately identified nearly all the foreign policy components of Amari's “mildly egalitarian conservatism,” only omitting unconditional support for Israel. Of the places ‘egalitarian conservatives’ identify as suitable objects of military intervention, including Gaza, the populations are invited to move to white countries to accelerate Ferguson’s “emergence”. Authentic conservatives like Patrick Buchanan and Joseph Sobran perceived decades ago that advocates of invasion tended also to be those of invitation; they were condemned and excluded as anti-Semites by the likes of John Lukacs, a comrade of Lord Roberts, for straying outside the cordon. That the same charge, anti-Semitism, is levelled at all opponents of immigration into the West tells its own story.

Britain, in Victor Davis Hanson’s words, “went to war on the principle of a third-party nation’s territorial integrity”. As Hanson says, Britain “saw World War II through from the first day to the very last” and, “of the victorious Big Three, …alone foresaw well before the war that it would likely end any cataclysmic war strategically diminished, its empire gone, and without its centuries-long global stature.” While for Hanson this is laudable, he describes what made the war a triumphant, ascendant moment for the left: the complete abandonment of British interests by British leaders.

Ferguson says that while AJP Taylor called Churchill the saviour of his nation, he was inclined to credit him with saving the whole of the West or even the world. The ‘Nazi menace’ must have been terrible indeed, as, in delivering us from it, and from our own “Barbarian” tendencies, our saviours have shamelessly afflicted us with Rotherham and Rochdale, where British girls are lured into “granting the grubby demands of the ‘dysgenic’ many” thanks to ‘egalitarian conservatives’ “making peace”, and laws, with the “civil rights movement”. That movement, really a network of anti-white activists, went under the name ‘race relations’ in Britain and was instigated primarily by Anthony Lester and Richard Stone, neither of whom, recalling Cooper’s allusion, was “an English person” or “care[d] about England”. Both were strongly-identifying Jews, as is Bari Weiss, organiser of the anti-Cooper reaction, who sees Cooper and Carlson’s remarks as part of “the war on our history”. The Churchillian telling is, indeed, her history, the one that convinces whites to submit to the demands of her kind and the decline of their own: ‘anything but Nazism’. The more whites become aware of its speciousness, the less they yield. Bravo, Cooper.