Podcast Pundits and the Rewriting of History

Recently, conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson’s show with a podcaster Darryl Cooper stirred huge controversy. Cooper, a podcaster with no formal historical credentials, echoed revisionist views pinning the blame for starting Word War II squarely on Winston Churchill’s shoulders, rather than on German dictator Adolf Hitler’s aggressive ambitions.

Carlson and Cooper, neither of whom are professional historians, framed Winston Churchill as the real “villain” of World War II.

Their argument criticized Churchill’s role in British diplomacy, echoing revisionist claims that he exacerbated the war, leading to Britain’s decline and the weakening of Western power.

Within days, the Carlson-Cooper show gained over 34 million views on X alone, making it necessary for historians from Niall Ferguson to Churchill’s biographer, Andrew Roberts, to strongly debunk Cooper. Roberts (like others before him) has argued that Churchill’s refusal to negotiate with Hitler allowed Britain to serve as a crucial bulwark against Nazi expansion. For all of Churchill’s flaws (many Indians still continue to pin the blame on him for the Bengal Famine), it was his determination and moral resolve that played a significant role in defeating Nazi Germany.

Ferguson observed that Cooper, who has never published a history book, made remarks calling Churchill “the warmonger who had Jewish financial backing” - a statement straight out of the playbook of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.

Cooper’s remarks not only starkly underlined the dangers of self-proclaimed ‘historians’ holding forth on podcasts, but also the enduring complexity of the origins of World War II as it enters its 85th anniversary this year.

In his 1961 book ‘The Origins of the Second World War,’ British historian A.J.P. Taylor controversially argued that Hitler’s foreign policy was more opportunistic than systematically planned. Taylor suggested that World War II resulted from diplomatic missteps, particularly from Britain and France, rather than a deliberate strategy by Hitler to conquer Europe. He portrayed Hitler as an astute politician who capitalized on weaknesses in the Versailles Treaty and the reluctance of European powers to confront Germany until it was too late.

Taylor’s thesis was both provocative and unorthodox: rather than painting Hitler as a singularly malevolent and deliberate architect of war, Taylor argued that the conflict emerged largely due to diplomatic failures and misunderstandings among European powers, particularly Britain and France. According to him, Hitler was an opportunist, seizing on blunders and vacillation in Western diplomacy rather than executing a master plan for conquest. He claimed that Hitler was not the sole instigator of the war, but rather an ordinary statesman whose ambitions were in line with previous German leaders.

The work did not exonerate Hitler, but it downplayed his personal responsibility for the war’s outbreak, arguing that his foreign policy, up until 1939, was no more aggressive than those of other European leaders in earlier times.

Unsurprisingly, it met with fierce criticism. Alan Bullock, who authored a classic biography of Hitler, dismissed Taylor’s interpretation as a gross distortion, accusing him of trivializing Hitler’s ideological fanaticism while Hugh Trevor-Roper charged that Taylor’s arguments verged on excusing Hitler’s behaviour and the violent dynamism of the Nazis.

Yet, Taylor’s book still holds the field in provocative thinking based on historical evidence.

In 2008, failed Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan (no historian like Taylor) extended this line of thinking further in his book ‘Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary War.’ According to Buchanan, Britain’s “unnecessary” guarantees to Poland emboldened Hitler to invade, leading to a global conflict that ultimately destroyed Europe and weakened the West. Buchanan viewed Churchill’s defiance of Hitler as both morally commendable but strategically ruinous, accelerating the decline of the British Empire and contributing to the rise of Soviet and American dominance in the postwar world.

Buchanan suggested that had Britain and France allowed Germany’s expansion to be limited to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany might have been left to clash without Western intervention. However, learned historians debunked Buchanan’s arguments and Spenglerian lamentations about the ‘decline of the West.’

Though an imperialist with his own political and moral shortcomings, Churchill recognized the existential threat posed by Nazi Germany. His warnings about the dangers of appeasement, and his eventual leadership during the war, were instrumental in halting Hitler’s expansionist ambitions.

The point here is that sensationalist amateurs like Cooper, whose views are unburdened by rigorous historical training, are increasingly shaping public discourse with oversimplified or revisionist narratives. As podcast ‘historians’ gain influence, the danger of history being reduced to sensationalism and provocative, but grossly ahistorical statements, is a clear and present one.

Legacies, be they of Chhatrapati Shivaji or Aurangzeb, Churchill or Savarkar or Gandhi, cannot, and must not be reduced to caricatures.

Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum ‘Wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘how it actually was’) is generally viewed as a clarion call for objective, fact-based history. It emphasizes that historians should accurately reconstruct the past by utilizing primary sources.

It is now up to the public to read more than one history book written by such historians rather than sacrifice their intellect on the altar of podcasts.