‘Just asking questions’ makes its dumbest query yet.
T here are different forms of obsession with the Nazis.
Lefties tend to accuse anyone they disagree with of being a Nazi.
Foreign-policy hawks can see every confrontation with an adversary through the prism of how the West grappled with Hitler’s rising threat in the 1930s.
And then there are elements of the right that want us to know that Nazi Germany might have been misunderstood.
Which brings us to Tucker Carlson’s latest foray into World War II revisionism with his podcast guest Dave Collum, the iconoclastic Cornell University chemistry professor who has some thoughts about how we messed up the war.
Carlson agrees with Collum’s contention that we have gotten World War II all wrong, and he lodges no objection when a guest to whom he’s very deferential says that we arguably should have allied with Hitler’s Germany in World War II to fight Stalin.
In this, Tucker is really out-Tuckering himself.
He has gone from nodding along with a guest who maintained that Hitler was misunderstood and killed millions of people as a function of unfortunate circumstances, to giving a fawning interview to someone who muses that we, literally, should have sided with the Nazis.
He doesn’t make it clear when we should have forged this alliance. When Hitler undertook the Anschluss in 1938, the invasion of what was left of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, the next month’s Blitzkrieg in the West, or the Battle of Britain beginning that summer?
All of these might have seemed opportune moments to get on board the Nazi conquest of Europe, although it’s a bit of a problem that during much of this period Hitler was allied with Stalin.
For anti-Soviet purposes, the window of allying with the Nazis would have opened in June 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa.
Put aside the moral question of opportunistically joining an attack that was conceived from the beginning as a war of annihilation, the Nazis at the outset didn’t seem like they needed anyone’s help subduing the Soviets.
Of course, in June 1941, we also weren’t in the war (although we were doing everything we could short of engaging in formal hostilities to help the Brits).
After Pearl Harbor brought us in, there’s still the complicating historical detail that Hitler declared war on us! We could, I suppose, have tried to chalk it up to a misunderstanding and asked him to reconsider.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, by the way, Hitler was on the outskirts of Moscow. No one was thinking at that moment, “The Soviets are bound to be a colossus dominating half of Europe, and here’s our last chance to crush them before it’s too late.” They’d struggled to beat Finland in the Winter War in 1939–40 and then suffered one catastrophic defeat after another in the initial months of the Nazi invasion.
The Nazis were disastrously overextending themselves in the Soviet Union, but still had made enormous advances. Imperial Japan, too, initially made sweeping conquests, vindicating Admiral Yamamoto’s prediction that Imperial Japan would “run wild” in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor.
In short, nothing in the situation justified even the belief that we could spare any help in defeating the Axis. Even with the Grand Alliance and its vast productive capacity arrayed against it, it took years to wrestle Nazi Germany to the ground.
There was, in effect, a division of labor in taking on the Nazis — to simplify, the Americans and British provided the matériel and waged the air and sea war, while the Soviets concentrated on the grinding ground war. The Soviets ended up suffering nearly 9 million military casualties, taking considerable pressure off the Anglo-American war effort.
But, again, what Collum favorably mentioned was the idea of not just refusing an alliance of convenience with the Soviets but affirmatively siding with the Nazis in their murderous rampage through Russia.
Surely, this would have meant ceding to the Nazis all that they had grabbed in Western and Central Europe — and assuming the war in Russia would have gone better for them — Ukraine and swaths of the western Soviet Union. We would have had to accept a Nazi behemoth in control of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, a gift of immense power to a genocidal regime that was fundamentally hostile to the United States and would have inevitably become an even more formidable adversary than the Soviet Union ever proved to be.
Centuries of Anglo-American effort had been devoted to preventing anyone, even less malevolent powers, from gaining this geopolitical advantage — in fact, the fight to prevent this from happening was a defining feature of European history.
As Brendan Simms writes in his magisterial book, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present, “it has been the unshakeable conviction of European leaders over the past 550 years, even those who had no imperial aspirations themselves, that the struggle for mastery would be decided by or in the [Holy Roman] Empire and its German successor states.”
“Queen Elizabeth I,” he continues, “knew it; Cromwell knew it; Marlborough knew it; the two Pitts knew it; Bismarck knew it; the Allied high command in the First World War knew it; Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew it; Stalin knew it; Gorbachev knew it.”
In sum, he writes, “Whoever controlled central Europe for any length of time controlled Europe, and whoever controlled all of Europe would ultimately dominate the world.”
Hitler said this almost exactly in May 1943: “Whoever controls Europe will thereby seize the leadership of the world.”
Why would we hand him that? It’s hard to see how U.S. grand strategy in World War II is such a failure when we defeated the Germans and the Japanese, turned them into faithful and productive (if occasionally annoying, in the case of Germany) allies, and defeated the Soviet Union in the ensuing Cold War without a major war.
Yes, of course, the Soviet Union was a monstrous regime that repressed a swath of Europe for decades, and it would have been better if hadn’t existed or had been beaten back earlier at some acceptable moral and geopolitical cost, but reality imposes unwelcome choices on statesmen all the time, and the sequencing of our grand strategy — first, defeat the Nazis, then, outlast the Soviets — was the correct one.
Collum throws out some other jaw-dropping idiocies as asides. He says that General George Patton agreed that we should ally with the Nazis against the Soviets. No, Patton wanted to go after the Soviets after defeating the Nazis.
Collum says that we abandoned 20,000 of our POWs in the Soviet Union after World War II, which is rank nonsense. (Check out this extensive report on the disposition of American POWs after the war, beginning on page 28.)
He maintains that the U.S. allying with the Nazis might have prevented the Holocaust, never mind that German forces were slaughtering Jews as early as the invasion of Poland.
And, inevitably, he declares that we knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor beforehand, and since it is a witless conspiracy theory, inevitably, Carlson agrees.
The idea here is that FDR was so desperate to get into the war that he maneuvered us into suffering one of the worst attacks in our history. We certainly knew that a Japanese strike somewhere, perhaps including U.S. bases in the Philippines, was probably imminent, but we didn’t know it would be at Pearl Harbor — that was unexpected, hence the surprise.
If we had known that the Japanese fleet was steaming toward Hawaii, surely we could have intercepted it somewhere at sea, and hostilities would have begun without the nearly uncontested sinking of eight U.S. battleships, the loss of 300 aircraft, and the deaths of more than 2,000 American servicemen.
But who can resist the emotional satisfaction of believing that malevolent forces are at work everywhere and that we, through doggedness, brilliant insight, and great personal courage, are onto them?
According to Carlson and his esteemed guests, those forces have misled us about the Nazis, who weren’t as bad as we’ve been told and shouldn’t have been resisted so strenuously — or, at all — by the West.
This is ignorance and perversity masquerading as brave truth-telling.