Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson fawned over Darryl Cooper, whom he described as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” during a recent interview in which Cooper identified Winston Churchill as the “chief villain” of World War Two and appeared to argue that the Holocaust was an accident.

Cooper’s claims followed Carlson’s profession to be “highly distressed by the uses to which the myths about World War Two have been put in the context of modern foreign policy — particularly the war in Ukraine.”

“You know, Churchill’s the good guy, Neville Chamberlain’s the bad guy. You know it’s just, it’s too pat, it’s too, obviously, quite banal. But it also has justified, like, the killing of millions of people since the end of the Second World War. And so I do think it’s fair to ask like ‘What really was going on?’ So for example, I’m American, I’m not English so I don’t have any weird motive in asking this but how would you assess Winston Churchill?” Carlson asked Cooper.

Cooper replied by saying he’s “gotten in trouble” with his podcast partner, whose family admires Churchill, over this very question.

“I told him that I think — and maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, maybe — but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War,” said Cooper. “Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe and I don’t really — I really think that when you get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”

“Why don’t you just make the case, make the case for that,” interjected Carlson. “You’ve made your statement, a lot of people are thinking ‘Well, wait a second. You said Churchill, my childhood hero, the guy with the cigar-”

“Yeah, well and the next thought that comes into their head is ‘Oh, you’re saying Churchill was the chief villain therefore his enemies —  you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth — were the protagonists, right? They’re the good guys if you think he’s a villain.’ That’s not the case,” said Cooper.

He continued:

You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re- so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”

After taking that detour to whitewash the Holocaust, Cooper returned to his indictment of Churchill:

So get back to your like your main question about Churchill. You know, if you go to 1939, when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland, as soon as that war’s wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain. France, because they had already declared war. He was, he didn’t expect them to declare war, actually. There’s a, you know, a famous scene where he kind of throws a fit when he finds out that they actually did, that did they did do that. And so he doesn’t want to fight France, he doesn’t want to fight Britain. He feels that’s going to weaken Europe when we’ve got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there.

And he starts firing off peace proposals, says, “Let’s not do this, like, we can’t do this.” And of course, you know, year goes by, 1940 comes around and they’re still at war. And so he launches his invasion to the west, takes over France, takes over western and northern Europe. Once that’s done, the British have, you know, escaped at Dunkirk. There’s no British force left on the continent, there’s no opposing force left on the continent. In other words, the war is over and the Germans won, okay?

After arguing that Hitler again sought peace and a “strong” Britain to take on the communist threat, Cooper refocused on the British prime minister:

And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy who once he- Churchill wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany. And the reason that I don’t begrudge him that, you know, people can, national leaders, you can fight whoever you want. If, you know, if you feel like your long-term, the long-term interests of the British Empire threatened by the rise of a powerful continental power like Germany, and you need to check that, those are great power games, and you play them the way you feel like you need to play them — that’s fine. The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way, he had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers. He was literally, by 1940, sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest just to burn down sections of the Black Forest.

“Just rank terrorism, you know, going through and, starting to, you know, what eventually became just the carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods, you know, to kill- the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible,” he concluded. “And all the men were out in the field, all the fighting age men were out in the field. And so this is old people, it’s women and children. And they knew that, and they were wiping these places out, as gigantic-scale terrorist attacks, the greatest, you know, scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history.”

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