re: The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe

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Cooper is a must listen to. He brings context and texture to historical events.

He's not saying anything that hasn't been talked about in bits and pieces. He brings them together.

It's interesting as to what he talks about as it pertains to the Germans in WWII and Eastern Europe as it applies to captured Russians and others. My grandfather who served in the British Navy would say much the same thing. " The Germans had all these captured people but they did not know what to do with them. Do you feed them and let Germans starve? I suppose your choices become limited at that point." He did not in any way absolve the Nazis from their deeds, but he said that the British ran into the same problem in Asia during the war but the victims were Indians . It's something that is not really known in America or for that matter throughout Europe. But, Churchill actually created a famine in India during the War because grain needed to be diverted to Europe to feed the troops and populace of the home country

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This is such an excellent point. You’re absolutely correct

The main problem with WW2 narratives is people have a vague understanding of the events. And the events themselves aren’t fake, but the framing of them is strategic, and the context is missing.

Many aspects of right wing nationalist systems of governance are valuable and necessary for certain situations, but because of our WW2 narrative these discussions went the way of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

What’s extremely frustrating to me is when I look at the whole picture objectively, it seems clear to me that the so called anti fascist sentiments and soft power (with sprinklings of hard power) moves the state enacts in modern times cause backlash and resentment leading to the exact so called fascist tendencies they are supposed to be preventing.

It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy, and many of these elements were played out in almost the exact same kind of way a century ago.

From my point of view, the logical action would be to look at events of the past objectively. Note that some list of X actions by the Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler regimes were actually smart and beneficial to their societies, and then these Y actions by those same regimes were detrimental and led to terrible outcomes. But more importantly, what were the actions from outside actors that led to these conditions in the first place?

Instead we create vague generalities and have understood boundaries that when you approach some topic in a certain way, well that’s what Hitler did so it must be evil. That is so crude and fundamentally flawed that it is hard to fathom how people can act like they believe it. So I have to conclude they don’t believe it, but they do believe they can socially engineer humans to fit into the mold of where they want to world to be. And I just fundamentally disagree with that, or at least think there’s a large segment that will never be ok with that.

Sometimes I feel like I’m being pulled in directions against my will even though I’m aware of what’s going on and know where it ends, and I wonder if the globohomo rulers of the American empire feel exactly the same way. Why can’t anyone stop this train?

Something else I’ve been thinking about is how nuggets of the truth are cloaked in canned talking points designed to tie loose ends where some want the discussion to stop. Growing up, you would read in school books or hear in WW2 documentaries that the treaty of Versailles was too harsh and led to the rise of the Nazis and WW2. But that is usually the end of that discussion.

Studying this in depth as I’ve gotten older, this IS the discussion.

Not only was it harsh, but it was borderline genocidal. And even worse than that, there is implicit insinuation that we learned our lesson from the treaty of Versailles and never did anything like that again, but this is another egregious lie. The fate of the Germans after the war was horrific on multiple fronts, and no one talks about it. Plus they are occupied and subjugated to this day. What does that kind of subjugation do to a whole people? Look at the nordstream pipeline disaster as an example. You have a key piece of critical infrastructure to their national security, their overlord “ally” blows it up and everyone knows it, and no one makes a peep. Meanwhile their economy is in ruins. It’s disgusting and fascinating

So what is the correct approach then in your opinion?

As someone that has read/listened to about every piece of work Darryl Cooper has ever put out, I can tell you this isn’t going to be Europa the Final Battle 2.0.

This will likely be some of the best objective and unbiased work on the war that has ever been produced. Why do I think that? Because that’s what he’s done with everything else, with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict being the most obvious example. He covered every corner of both sides.

The only reason this is controversial is because, in polite society, only one angle is covered on many of these polarizing topics.

ETA I realize you said “this is my approach” but it doesn’t line up with the work Darryl Cooper does, and it leads me to believe you are assuming his style because of the types of specific questions Tucker Carlson personally wanted to ask and the direction he wanted one interview to go.

I'm not following what you're asking I guess?

I'm not particularly blaming Cooper for the ensuing fracas, although I think he has an interest in it. Same for Tucker.

I think my post puts most of the blame on the Cooper (or whoever) types who are so quick to trade one belief system or narrative for another for reasons mostly unrelated to the substance of the belief/narrative. It's a knee jerk reaction to their desire to reject the expert class and conventional wisdom.

And I put the remaining blame, quite a lot, on the institutional types who will wring their hands over it and ultimately continue the cycle by reinforcing it ("Well if so and so is pissed off about it I know we're on the right path!").

I've listened to a few and I'm familiar with him from Jocko, but I'm not a big podcast guy.

But I'm not accusing Cooper of being an edge lord. But the reality is he is going to occupy some of that space, whether he likes it or not. I suspect that it's not his primary ambition to be in that space, but that he profits from it, and I think it's reasonable to note the messiness of non-conventional scholarship running up against sort of pop-right wing subculture.

I think it's similar for JP in a different discipline. You could argue Cooper hasn't embraced that role as much as JP and I'd be receptive to it, but I think the inherent conflict of interest (to an extent, I'm not calling either unprofessional or immoral, etc.) remains. It's profitable to be controversial.

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All of the UKs present day issues can be tied to Labour Party policies:

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Not wrong, but the Tories didn't do anything to roll those back once they were in power either.

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Where I’m going to as least partially disagree with you is the notion that the conventional wisdom itself should not be examined and tested. And maybe you aren’t outright saying that, but you’re implying it by having suspicions on these pop right wing subcultures as you put it putting the conventional wisdom on the examination table.

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dude, I definitely did/do not

I explicitly said that Pandy's approach was the same as mine:

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History is seldom as simple as good and evil, right and wrong. I get the overall point he's trying to make and I appreciate alternative historical thought.

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I do think there is an element of "our side" that is so consumed by being the enemy of the left/elites/experts/etc. that they'll wholesale accept any alternative, and that's obviously a dangerous and stupid inclination.

What I don’t understand is what your gripe is.

I mean I do understand it, but what are you suggesting as the alternative? That this doesn’t get discussed at all because it leads to problems in other areas?

Do you not think it’s a problem that every time our foreign policy ventures are presented to people it’s framed through the lens of primarily WW2 lore? Putin is going to conquer Europe like Hitler, don’t be a Chamberlain. This happens all the time. And not just big policy foreign policy, but smaller discussions get detailed with Hitler this, Hitler that.

That cudgel is being weakened, but is not the reason it is because of these discussions?


And once again, I think Darryl Cooper is the most responsible messenger for this, because he is not going to gloss over the bad, and personally I think this message is important because it still so obviously effects other aspects of our modern society.

That makes sense and I pretty much agree with you.

Here’s my view of why this subject is important. Of your two fallout examples, the main reason the former (the reactionary edgelords) is a problem is because of the power normal people grant to the latter (opportunist power brokers with no real values).

Shifting the discussion in a responsible manner that is palatable by the “normies” is how the power dynamic of the opportunists pointing out the extremists is broken. This is naturally occurring, though relatively slowly, through a lot of small players like Cooper over time.

What people need to get through their skulls is the edgy extremists have no power, and I don’t think it’s likely they will ever have any power. However the other types have all the power, and they are using it in ways I vehemently disagree with. These types of topics like the one of this thread are the mechanism that the power brokers use for control, and that has to be broken somehow.

I love it when I find someone else's take that so perfectly aligns with mine that I can just reference/post it:

@justindeanlee

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79 years later, we still need WWII to convince ourselves we are righteous. We deconstruct every other American/Western achievement, but too much depends on the WWII morality play. The "rules-based international order" requires a founding myth. We cannot be complicated heroes. Nor can our enemies be complicated villains.

I happen to believe the morality play version of WWII: the Nazis were orcs, the Allies (minus the Soviets) were elves & men. But I'm open to evidence that complicates that narrative, because I don't need it to operate in a mythic register to justify my politics. I'm open to the possibility that Churchill was a warmonger, & that the Nazis might not have realized the fullness of their barbarity were it not for how he prosecuted the war. Being interested in how orcs became orcs is not the same thing as denying they became orcs.

Cooper may be wrong about Churchill—scholarly consensus seems to be against him—but nothing he says in the Tucker interview qualifies as "Nazi apologetics." Anyone familiar with radical pacifist scholarship on WWII will recognize the argument he's making. It used to be considered a leftwing argument. Nicholson Baker made an exhaustive case for it in Human Smoke; he was also unjustly slandered as a Nazi apologist.

Eric Voegelin wrote that the heart of totalitarianism is that certain questions are forbidden. Most forbidden of all are those questions which challenge a regime's legitimating myth.

If your knee-jerk response to the Tucker segment is the same as Erickson's below, this is a good opportunity to reflect on the role the received narrative plays in your worldview. Even granting that it's true, does it function as a legitimating myth for your politics?

Conversely, if you eagerly accept the counter-narrative, are you doing so because you're convinced by evidence or because you're powerfully motivated to counter-signal the regime?

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