By Richard Martin, President, Alcera Consulting Inc.
TL;DR: Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper are pushing conspiratorial nonsense, not uncovering hidden truths about history. They cherry-pick information to fit their baseless narratives, offering no real evidence or scholarly rigor. Instead of contributing to genuine historical understanding, they spread disinformation and serve their own propaganda aims.
Tucker Carlson claims that Darryl Cooper is the most important historian in America right now. I’ve listened to Cooper’s opinions in the interview concerning what he repeatedly calls the “mythology” and “official history” of the Second World War, including his ramblings on Churchill. People like Tucker Carlson and pretend historian Darryl Cooper think they are discovering truth. They are nothing of the sort. They are merely propagandists.
Cooper and Carlson start from the axiom that there is a “hidden history” that only courageous skeptics like themselves are willing to uncover. Just to put that in context, Tucker thinks that the US government is covering up UFOs and that we still don’t know who “really” shot JFK! You can’t make this stuff up. In fact, you can, because that’s what these two are doing throughout the interview.
It’s important to point out that Cooper is not a professional historian. He’s a social media “influencer” and podcaster. To my knowledge, he has no credentials or credibility as a real historian. This is not an argument from authority. He could be a credible historian without an academic pedigree or working outside academia. There are such historians, and they are respected to the extent that they apply scientific methods of historical research and writing that make clear their sources, their methods of evaluation, and their logical framework.
There is an enormous body of research, literature, and history on the Second World War, its causes, conduct, and outcomes. Other than what was produced in the Communist USSR, there is no official, mythologized, authorized, and exclusive history of the war anywhere. There may be mistakes, misunderstandings, biased perspectives, provisional observations and conclusions. But these tend to be corrected through time, if there is an honest effort to uncover the truth and interpret it scientifically and logically.
New information or claims must always be weighed against the existing and validated body of evidence, knowledge and interpretation. As Carl Sagan used to say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Darryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson make extraordinary claims but provide no evidence. They are merely cherry pick information and make specious arguments to fulfill their narrative.
The history of any event and era evolves through stages, and this is especially the case for military history. First are the journalistic reports. Then come the memoirs and first-hand accounts by those who were there at all levels. This is usually followed official military histories, which are in reality part of the learning process for armed forces; they are also written to highlight the most salient aspects of a country’s military contributions to conflicts and operations. This phase will also include the first serious, academic histories of the events. This first phase can last for decades.
However, where there is freedom of speech and academic freedom, historians will delve deeper into the causes and evolution of the war, on all sides. This usually corresponds to the opening of selected archives and the discovery of new primary sources. With time, there is also a willingness to question basic assumptions and to reexamine what “everyone knows” about the war, its strategy and tactics, and the conduct of the battles and campaigns. Historians frequently refer to the work in this phase as revisionist history. This doesn’t mean that the previous historical consensus is overturned.
The discoveries and fresh perspectives that arise during this phase nonetheless bring a lot of new debates and controversy. In this dynamic situation a revised consensus can arise, often limited to the most salient aspects of the events and era. On the other hand, schools of thought will form based on different methodologies, perspectives (including national ones), ideologies, and sources.
The result of this work is to launch a revision to the revision. This dialectical process can continue for decades, and even centuries, as historians engage in thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of research efforts and interpretation. Social scientists also join the fray, with political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and many others, providing deeper understanding of the motives and thoughts of all the actors, on all sides of the struggle, whether they be front-line soldiers, their loved ones on the home front, government leaders, media moguls, industrialists, longshoremen, merchant mariners, or factory labourers.
We now have hundreds of thousands of books, monographs, papers, and reports based on hundreds of millions of primary sources. These include battle maps, speech transcripts, war diaries, personal diaries, government plans, proceedings of planning conferences, meeting minutes, letters, recordings, film, and so on and so forth. These documents and other pieces of evidence have been sources in all countries involved in the war. They are back up by physical evidence, including battlefield archeology, and leftover equipment from the battles.
In conclusion, the historical record of the Second World War is a monumental body of work built on decades of meticulous research, rigorous scrutiny, and vast collections of primary sources. True historians engage in a disciplined, evidence-based process to challenge assumptions and uncover new insights. In stark contrast, Darryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson peddle baseless, conspiratorial drivel, dressing up their ignorance as “hidden truths” while cherry-picking information to fit their outlandish narratives. They are not revisionists uncovering lost history, but opportunistic propagandists preying on public gullibility. Their disregard for genuine evidence and scholarly rigor reduces complex historical events to a stage for their paranoid delusions. In the end, they add nothing to our understanding of history, serving only to poison public discourse with disinformation and self-serving myths.
© 2024 Richard Martin
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