Megan Garber writes:

In the movie The History Boys, based on Alan Bennett’s play, a student wins a scholarship to Oxford with the help of an argument he makes on an entrance exam: Hitler, he claims, was “much misunderstood.” As fiction, this is mordant comedy—a mockery of the particular type of arrogance required to twist the tragedies of the Holocaust into personal gain. But now the satire has come for our news cycle.

In a long and meandering interview on Tucker Carlson’s show this week, the podcaster Darryl Cooper offered musings about the “mythology”—the heroes, the villains, the plot, the moral stakes—of World War II. In his version, however, it is Winston Churchill who has been much misunderstood. Churchill, Cooper told Carlson, with dramatic flair, “was the chief villain of the Second World War.”

The claim is wrong, in every sense. The gravity of its error was highlighted by a resonant coincidence: Around the time the interview was posted, Alternative for Germany became the first far-right party to win a German state election since the Nazi era. The past is never dead, the old line goes; it is not even past. But Cooper and his enthusiastic host, these history boys with microphones, were not talking about history—not really. They were talking about themselves. They were treating World War II as a branding exercise. And this was, though not surprising in the context of Carlson’s show, a new nadir.

Consensus reality relies on consensus history. In this time of fragile facts, one point most people have been able to agree on is that Hitler was a bad guy. But the time for consensus is over, Cooper implied. Instead, as a phrase in the title of his episode summed things up: “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.”

What becomes clear during the interview, as Cooper makes his convoluted case (“maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic,” he allows at one point), is that the true villains of his story are not, in the end, Hitler or Churchill, Axis or Allies. Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the mobs, the ruling class—the people who will be offended by claims such as “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” And the true heroes, consequently, are those who dare to say the unsayable. [Continue reading…]