Tucker Carlson Gives Credibility to a Hatemonger

Ezra Pound was an extraordinary and original poet who was emulated by T. S. Eliot and a hero of modernists of all sorts.

Yet for all his genius — or perhaps because of it — he fell under the spell of Mussolini and then Hitler. He scourged the Jews just as the speed of their disenfranchisement was accelerating and the outlines of their apocalyptic danger were starting to become clear. From his home in Italy, he broadcast on behalf of the Axis and continued to do so even after Pearl Harbor. (READ MORE: Six Hostages Murdered. Put Heat on Hamas, Not Netanyahu.)

He wrote: “Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.”

Ah, a modernist’s saint. All that was lacking was for Pound to start a modern order in honor of his saint, perhaps the Brothers of Zyklon B.

Oswald Mosley was a brilliant and well-placed Briton who distinguished himself on the battlefields of World War I. He won a seat in Parliament as a Tory, switched from the Conservative Party to Labour, and, as an undersecretary in the government, proposed a plan to deal with the skyrocketing unemployment of the Great Depression. It was a bold vision that FDR would embrace only a few years later in his New Deal.

When it was rejected, Mosley resigned and started his own British fascist party. He dressed in uniform and, in many ways, emulated the Nazis to a T. Intelligence had it that he was to be installed as ruler of Britain on its surrender to Germany, and so he was interned for a few years until the tide of war turned decisively in the Allies’ favor and Churchill figured he could do no serious harm.

Mosley wrote:

A Jewish financier, stock-exchange speculator, or bucket-shop keeper may amass a large fortune and leave it to his son. That son’s interest in the country may not extend beyond a night club and a liberal supply of champagne. Yet under the present system, such an owner of hereditary wealth is treated as altogether admirable.

Hitler thought Mosley too fawning an imitator, but said nothing to his face. He was an honored guest at Mosley’s second marriage, held secretly in Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin home in 1936.

Martin Heidegger was a deep and subtle philosopher, one of the most challenging of the 20th Century. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, stopped accepting Jewish students, and remained a Nazi Party member until the party was outlawed by the victorious Allies at the war’s end. He wrote:

History teaches us that nomads did not become what they are because of the bleakness of the desert and the steppes, but that they have even left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived, and that men rooted in the soil have been able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness…the nature of our German space would surely be apparent to a Slavic people in a different manner than to us; to a Semitic nomad, it may never be apparent.

Heidegger lent the considerable prestige of his name to the Nazi narrative of the super race ridding itself of inferior kinds, especially of the worst and most parasitic — the Semite.

Nazism Reborn: It Doesn’t Take Much to Set a Trend

Given these men and many more who peppered American and British upper classes and reputable universities, it is no surprise that intelligent people can go Nazi. The fascist glorification of the will as well as its rejection of the Biblical tradition’s emphasis on the need to accept the limitations imposed by our physical mortality (as well as the human proclivity to narcissism) appeals to fantasists and narcissists across time. They can imagine themselves utterly unlimited, and when the limitations imposed by Nature and Mature’s God inevitably manifest, they know whom to blame.

During World War II and its unprecedented horrors, it became much more difficult to take this route. Four-hundred thousand American dead, the obscenity of the Holocaust and other related Nazi atrocities, and its alliance with the even bloodier Japanese militarists — all of this made it hard for anyone to go in that direction without becoming a pariah. (READ MORE by Shmuel Klatzkin: The Face of Evil Is Masquerading as ‘Joy’)

But it doesn’t take a lot in our ahistorical age to set a new trend. Think of how long it took to mainstream antisemitism once the Democrats decided that Arab Americans could become a new client identity group. Instead of being banished to the fringes, now antisemitic haters like Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman with their fellow Squad members were lionized by the leftist press and shielded by the Democratic leadership from any meaningful consequences for their hateful transgressions. Influencers online regularly ballyhoo their imagined genius and blame their failures on Zionists.

And now, this reborn embrace of Nazism’s central tenet is everywhere that our kids are. It’s being taught and reinforced in our great universities.

But, dear fellow conservative, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. You have been valiant in combating this new strain of Jew-hatred that has burst like a boil on the left, spewing its noxious contents all over our politics and our children’s minds. Job well done!

Even Suburb People Have Fallen to the Nazi Mystique

But now, the ridiculously talented Tucker Carlson, one of the most listened-to voices on the new populist right, has given credibility to a new rightist hatemonger who is striving to rehabilitate Hitler — as if all we learned in World War II and its aftermath had suddenly been thrown down the memory hole and had never existed.

Tucker had a guest on his show, Darryl Cooper, whom he hyped as “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” Oh yeah. And what does this best and most honest scholar have to say? As reported by someone who has earned her stripes in the war for press freedom, Bari Weiss:

Cooper argued that the Nazi death camps, where more than six million Jews were systematically murdered, were the result of the Germans taking too many “prisoners of war.” (Nazi Germany “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war. . . and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”) Yes, indeed, millions of people “ended up dead.”

Cooper shows his Jew-hating bona fides in this tweet from last year:

God sent the Romans to destroy the leprous temple and put an end to the Israelite religion for all time.

Romans are an appropriate emphasis. Rome destroyed the Jewish state but found it could not destroy Jewish independence. Bidden by Jeremiah to seek the welfare of any sovereignty in which they lived, the Jews were nonetheless free as a people due to their choice to stay loyal to God in whose image all humans are made, and who forged their nation and its law. Even under the worst tyranny, they lived in inner freedom.

The tale of freedom in the ensuing centuries has been between the imperial, top-down law in the Roman–Justinian model, in which only the ruler is seen as godlike, and the ground-up model of a law that sees infinite value in each individual and so enshrines liberty as its core value — for only free people can truly serve God. (READ MORE: Jews, Muslims, and the Fate of Europe)

Imperialists don’t care whether it is leftist or rightist thought that gets them where they wish to go. The law will ultimately be theirs to shape as they please, with no one to gainsay them. As the Sun King was reported to say, “L’Etat, c’est moi!” And these people almost always hate Jews. Hitler, Stalin, Maduro, Erdogan, Communists, Nazis, and Islamists — their hatred of freedom and of Jews are all of one piece.

Tucker has stood up for us with courage and tenacity. He has paid a price and has soldiered on. But even superb people have fallen to the Nazi mystique in the past. Embracing men like Cooper will befoul him.

Don’t mistake the hatred for history. Read another valiant warrior and a far superior historian on Nazism and World War II, Victor Davis Hanson, in his superb article that Bari Weiss published together with her own piece in the Free Press. To praise Hitler, after all we know, is no better than extolling Russian communism after the publishing of The Gulag Archipelago.

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