The latest contretemps in the corners of social media is a claim that Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II. It would hardly warrant refuting if not for the venue of the claim — “The Tucker Carlson Show” — and the former Fox host’s idea that “myths about World War Two” are being misapplied “in the context of modern foreign policy — particularly the war in Ukraine.” All the more reason to get the world war’s lessons right.The confusion arose in Mr. Carlson’s interview of Substack author Darryl Cooper, who identified Churchill as the war’s anti-hero and who suggested that the Holocaust happened by accident. That didn’t bar Mr. Carlson from praising Mr. Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Elon Musk called the episode “Very interesting. Worth watching.” Antisemites on his X platform piled on, denouncing Churchill as a “Zionist.”Churchill did support the Zionist movement from as far back as the Balfour Declaration, as he related in his third address to a Joint Meeting of Congress. Today’s criticism reflects the moral murk behind World War II revisionism. “You know,” Mr. Carlson mused, “Churchill’s the good guy, Neville Chamberlain’s the bad guy.” Even if Churchill “didn’t kill the most people,” Mr. Cooper said, he was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.” We don’t buy for a second that notion, no matter that Mr. Cooper divines that it was Britain and France who antagonized the dictator after his invasion of Poland. “Let’s not do this, like, we can’t do this,” is how Mr. Cooper sums up Hitler’s position. Even after France fell in 1940, Mr. Cooper suggests Hitler wanted to leave a “strong” Britain alone and focus on the Soviet threat. Yet “Churchill wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany.”Mr. Cooper’s ramblings recall Alexander Pope’s warning that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Yet they do reflect a school of thought put forward by historians, like John Charmley, suggesting that in 1940 Britain had indeed lost the war and should have taken Hitler’s suggestion to enter into peace talks. Such a peace, these historians contend, might have enabled Britain to preserve its empire and its role as a great power on the world stage.That notion seems to appeal to figures like Mr. Carlson who professes to be “highly distressed” that World War II’s “myths” — like the demonization of Neville Chamberlain as an appeaser — have “justified, like, the killing of millions of people since the end of the Second World War.” These latter-day revisionists would take President Putin’s word that he would be satisfied, as Hitler vowed over the Czech Sudetenland, with seizing Ukraine’s Donbas.All this skirts the lessons of World War II that emerge from in the 1930s, when the West — especially Britain and France — refused to confront Nazi Germany’s rearmament. At the time, France and Britain could have quashed Hitler’s still-nascent military, historians reckon. The failure to do so reflected pacifist sentiment, war fatigue, and a lack of fortitude. As late as 1938, Hitler could have been stopped before seizing the Sudetenland. Chamberlain shrank.“A quarrel in a faraway country,” is how Chamberlain dismissed the matter, “between people of whom we know nothing.” The betrayal at Munich, Churchill said, was “a disaster of the first magnitude.” Indeed, Churchill’s warnings about the Nazi threat were ignored throughout what Auden called that “low dishonest decade.” So, in May 1940, when Churchill rose to power, he knew better than to yield to Hitler’s siren song of negotiated peace with Britain.“Whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on,” Churchill, “quite casually,” told the Cabinet then, glossing over the faction that wanted to give in. The cabinet agreed, Churchill later noted, and defeatist sentiment ebbed. The mood took on a light of moral clarity lacking in today’s debates — on X and off, whether over Gaza or Ukraine. Churchill called it a “glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end.”
