Tucker Carlson Is Now a World War II Revisionist

I n the course of his interminable descent through Dante’s many circles, Tucker Carlson has gone from indulging crazed World War II revisionists to becoming one himself. In a conversation last week with the English politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, Carlson repeatedly inquired why it had been necessary for Britain to go to war with Nazi Germany when it did. “Hitler did not want to go to war with the U.K.,” he insisted. “You attacked the Germans; they didn’t attack you.”

That is, in a boringly literal sense, a true statement. But it obscures so much that, once any measure of context has been added, it becomes meaningless, misleading, and, above all else, indicative of a political agenda that has gone badly awry. I will confess that it feels rather extraordinary to have to rehearse this argument in public, but, rehearse it I evidently must: Whatever Tucker Carlson might like to believe, Adolf Hitler could not be trusted to keep his word, and the existence of private statements, public declarations, or treaties that nodded toward peace with Britain in no way alters that fact. It is fair to conclude that Hitler did not want to go to war with Britain in the late 1930s. It is not fair to assume that Hitler would have declined to go to war with Britain later on, once his position was stronger. I am unashamedly of the view that Britain’s decision to stop Hitler’s advance early was morally imperative, irrespective of his designs on Britain itself. Among other things, I think that the discovery of the Holocaust bears that decision out. But even if one does not agree with me on that, it ought to be patently obvious that, as a matter of realpolitik, the British Foreign Office was correct to consider every last one of Hitler’s assurances to be worthless.

Tucker Carlson makes a great deal of Hitler’s insistence that he “did not want to go to war with the U.K.” But Carlson steadfastly ignores that Not Wanting to Go to War was the pose that Hitler struck at every step of his journey across Europe. In September 1938, he promised in writing that acquiring the Sudetenland would satisfy Germany’s territorial ambitions in Europe and then made a speech in which he declared that once that issue was settled — an issue, you will note, that was only an issue because he had made it one — “there will be no more territorial problems for Germany in Europe.” Six months later, in flagrant violation of his vow, he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, Hitler invaded Poland — a country with which he had until recently had a peace deal. This was a pattern. Nine days before his invasion of Poland, Hitler had struck a ten-year non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union — a pact that, like all the others, was broken just two years later when, to the great surprise of Joseph Stalin, he invaded the Soviet Union with 3.8 million troops. Narrowly, it is accurate to suppose that, during this period, Hitler did “not want to go to war with the U.K.” But it was also true that, at various points in the past, Hitler had not wanted to go to war with Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Russia — or, for that matter, with Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. It is fair to say, I’d venture, that in the realm of Not Wanting to Go to War, Hitler lacked aptitude.

Elsewhere in the interview, Carlson went even further, asking Rees-Mogg, “Who cares?” in response to Rees-Mogg’s claim that, had Britain not fought the Nazis, they’d “be speaking German.” Who cares? Before answering that, it ought to be noted that this question implicitly contains a concession: that, had the British let Hitler be, he would eventually have turned his attention to their island. But, that aside: “Who cares?” I care. Because he is glib and cynical, Carlson treated Rees-Mogg’s contention as if it were a literalist declaration about language. “There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English,” Carlson said. “So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” But, of course, by invoking the prospect of the British “speaking German,” Rees-Mogg was not debating the merits of the two languages; he was deploying a common metonym for “Nazi rule.” Because he has not lost his mind, Rees-Mogg assumed that he could use shorthand to reference the near-universally shared notion that being ruled by the Nazis was a bad thing. Alas, with Carlson he was apparently wrong in believing that to be a shared premise. After their invasion of Poland — which Carlson thinks the British should have left alone — the Nazis killed 3 million Polish Jews. After their invasion of Russia — which Carlson thinks was Hitler’s real desire, which he should have been allowed to indulge — the Nazis killed a million Soviet Jews and 3 million prisoners of war. A devoted, if shockingly amoral, isolationist might well insist that this death toll was tragic but preventing it was not Britain’s responsibility. But Carlson didn’t do that, did he? Rather, he said that “there are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English, so it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” Honest observers must ask themselves what this means. Britain won the war, which means that, rather than “speaking German,” the British continued to rule themselves. That being so, what else can this possibly suggest than that Britain might have been better off if, instead, it had been taken over by the forces of industrial genocide?

As a rule, I am of the view that the participants within our political and historical debates ought to be taken at face value, without being accused at every juncture of harboring secret desires or of pursuing an indirect program that they are too cowardly to candidly delineate. By dint of his uninterrupted behavior over the last couple of years, Tucker Carlson has forfeited that presumption. Something is rotten in the state of Maine.