For days now, my timeline has been full of clips from the allegedly blockbuster showdown between American podcaster Tucker Carlson and British politician and broadcaster Jacob Rees-Mogg in which they clashed on the subject of the Second World War. Based on the excerpts, I prepared myself for something genuinely dark. One clip, in which Carlson claims he has “no idea why Britain fought WW2” was particularly worrying. This, I thought, is the moment. Tucker has finally gone all the way. He has crossed the Rubicon, set up a tent on the other side and started selling merch with “My Struggle” on it.
And so, despite wanting to watch the entire thing less than a remake of Downfall directed by Darryl Cooper, I forced myself to. Sadly, far from being “disgusting” or even “outrageous”, it’s mostly just disappointing. As he correctly says in the discussion, Carlson isn’t “a secret Nazi”. He’s just ideologically captured and not very bright. A typical podcaster, in other words.
As regular readers will know, I’ve written extensively about what I call the Woke Right. This is a term that has caused much consternation because to many people wokeness is definitionally a pathology of the far left: to be woke is to be extremely left wing.
I take a different view. To me, wokeness is a pathology of human beings that is reflected not in the views people hold but in the behaviour its adherents feel entitled to engage in.
Most people have been implicitly taught to think of the political spectrum as a line with communism on the far left and fascism on the far right. Horseshoe theory, on the other hand, sees these far ends of the spectrum bending towards each other and meeting as they reach for the same methods. We saw this in the 1930s when the hostility to and active destruction of democracy, suppression of criticism, scapegoating and extermination of outgroups, socialist economics, militarism and so on were prevalent both in the communist world and in the fascist countries of Europe and beyond.
The horseshoe theory of wokeness is no different. The ideology which is parodied as “gay race communism” is different from the post-liberal right but the methodology is similar. Identitarian victimhood, a belief in the fundamental immorality and irredeemability of their political opponents and a general black & white thinking about everything, including war, history and politics.
The woke left’s approach to history is simple: imagine a perfect world. Now look at people who lived two hundred years ago and notice that they did not live in it. Conclude that they were monsters. Tear down their statues.
And what about the woke right’s approach? Imagine a perfect world. Now look at people who were making impossible decisions before and during WW2 and notice that both the process and the outcome were not perfect either. Conclude they too were monsters and invert the moral order. This is how you get to the “Churchill was the greatest villain of WW2” rhetoric and what is that if not the metaphorical tearing down of his statue?
“Killing innocent people is always wrong,” Tucker emotes. And, of course, in a utopian vacuum, we’d all agree with him because it’s superficially true and important. Proportionality, discrimination, the whole apparatus of just war theory exists precisely because we take it seriously. But as a moral position about the Second World War, it is not profound. It’s childish.
Because the Second World War was a mass slaughter of civilians. That was its defining characteristic. The Axis powers murdered civilians on an industrial scale, as policy, continuously, until the moment they were physically prevented from continuing. Six million Jews. Millions of Slavs. And that’s just Hitler’s Germany. Japan had been in Manchuria since 1931 and at full-scale war with China since 1937. By the time Hitler invaded Poland, millions of Chinese civilians were already dead, with much of the killing done in close quarters and by hand: beheaded with swords, burned or buried alive, used for bayonet practice.
So the actual question — the one any serious person has to answer — is not “is killing innocents wrong?” It’s this: given that the mass killing of innocents is already happening, at vast scale, every single day, are you willing to use force to stop it, knowing that doing so will kill enemy combatants and civilians too but in far smaller numbers?
When moral perfection is the standard, Carlson’s whataboutism almost works. In fact, it seems to work on millions of people who want simple explanations for complex problems.
“Look over here,” says Tucker - “Britain locked up political opponents and their wives during the war, how undemocratic”. To disrupt the framing of “Churchill good, Nazis bad”, Britain did X-Less-Than-Perfect-Thing is close to compelling. Less so when you know the facts.
The person he is talking about is Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley was interned in May 1940, with the invasion expected within weeks; he had married Diana Mitford at Goebbels’ house with Hitler as a guest; Diana had met Hitler repeatedly and was lobbying for a pro-Nazi radio station. He was released in 1943, on health grounds despite a public outcry and lived on until his death in 1980. Such tyranny!
Next, Carlson explains that Hitler never wanted war with Britain. After all, he said so! And if you can’t trust Adolf Hitler who can you trust?
Seriously though, ask yourself: is this a coherent position for someone who has built a career on being suspicious of powerful elites? Would Tucker accept this line of argument regarding Joe Biden, or Anthony Fauci, or even Donald Trump?
We know exactly what Hitler wanted.
