The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Historian Andrew Roberts on Churchill WWII Revisionism and the Tucker/Darryl Cooper Interview - Is It Anti-Semitic?

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Noted historian and Churchill Expert Lord Andrew Roberts gives us his take on the recent Darryl Cooper (@MartyrMade) interview controversy. Was Churchill the villain of WWII? Is Cooper's take anti-semitic? Roberts' books, including Churchill: Walking with Destiny, are available on Amazon and everywhere else. “Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill . . . A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain’s savior.” —Wall Street Journal https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Walking-Destiny-Andrew-Roberts-ebook/dp/B079R3VH13/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1OKHRQ2HF107X&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XRyoEwHDcO_pXSIzOvxrmoStMtBE8yO-BxvmRuYP9sB3dF1MCwBTx2m39dNbn4Cb42vo-A2qb4VqvzsVQUtt7DBPVMg9N_S2XWkzwLEKw0xMnIS5f5rpCniWhbTb2q-fOorNmj2mtUxKBbR15UR4eOt3MFgK_k3pryX3M_k0C_aP79_3gd4JqLJz4HDGFjdVzCUmtmu139osn2FgB-KVgDBi06kJMlwBf80yZsKOL78.JV8fiqjgDR74n1ERHiqpvYYZSgSxrKHicOQzisTuVJU&dib_tag=se&keywords=andrew+roberts+churchill&qid=1726529104&sprefix=andrew+rob%2Caps%2C95&sr=8-1

And maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic, maybe. But I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn't kill the most people. He didn't commit the most atrocities. But I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did becoming something other than an invasion of poland uh you know in terms of zionism but also uh his hostility just just you know i think his hostility to put it this way i think his hostility to germany was real um i don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But, you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who, you know, who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason. Oh, you're saying Churchill was the guy who, you know, who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason. Oh, you're saying Churchill was the chief villain, therefore his enemies, you know, Adolf

Hitler and so forth were the protagonists, right? They're the good guys if you think he's a villain. That's not the case. That's not what I'm saying. You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Ad hitler is chiefly responsible for this but his whole regime is responsible for it that when they went into the east uh in 1941 they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that. And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have like letters as early as July,

August, 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they're rounding up. And so it's two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched. And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people. We don't have the food to feed these people. And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now? Hello. On September 2nd, Tucker Carlson hosted on his podcast, Daryl Cooper, also known on Twitter

as MartyrMaid. Topics of the interview included history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Jonestown cult, how history is rewritten and propagandized, the civil rights movement in BLM, Christianity. But what made this the interview heard around the world was Daryl Cooper's take on Winston Churchill and World War II. Today, we interviewed noted Churchill historian, Andrew Roberts, who has a thing or two to say about Mr. Cooper's take on that historical

event hit it but andrew andrew will be fine as well lord roberts this is live from the table the official podcast of the world famous comedy seller coming at you on sirius xm 99 raw comedy also available wherever you get your podcasts, available on YouTube. This is Dan Natterman. I am a Comedy Cellar comedian and co-host of the podcast, along with Noam Dorman, owner of the Comedy Cellar. And with us today, a very special guest. He is the visiting professor at the War Studies Department at King's College, the Bonnie and

Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an author of numerous books including Churchill, Walking with Destiny, and a member of the House of Lords. But we're privileged to have him with us today. Please welcome Andrew Roberts to our show. Thank you, Andrew, for joining us via the miracle of Riverside Teleconferencing from England. Thank you very much. Indeed, it's a delight to be on the show. So, Lord Roberts, first of all, thank you so much for doing this. This is an issue which is very important to me. Now, full disclosure, I have a relationship with Daryl Cooper.

I've never met him in person, but I've kept a relationship with him. We disagree on basically everything, but I've had a relationship with him that I have enjoyed, and I've found the disagreements enriching. But this last thing has really disturbed me, as he knows. There's so much attention to the revision of World War II,

and I want to get to that. But as a Jewish person, given what's going on in the world since October 7th and kind of feeling a change in the climate as to the way the world views Jewish people, what he said really hit me between the eyes. This kind of a revisionism of the history of Israel, which is at the root of the protests and the Gaza conflict.

It went from what was traditionally a consideration of Israel and how it came to occupy the West Bank and Gaza to a, now the issue is 1948 and river to the sea and whether Israel should exist at all. And I did some research, and I'll just read a little bit from my notes and then you'll talk most of everything, that casting historical events as the result of Jewish misbehavior is rampant throughout history and much more than I even realized. Obviously, I knew about the Jews being blamed for killing Christ, but the Hamas charter blames them for starting World War I, World War II.

I have a quote here. They were behind World War I when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling our resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations, and it goes on. There is no war going on anywhere without having their finger in it. Last week, Candace Owens was talking about the Jews being behind 9-11. Alex Jones was talking about the Jews killing RFK. The Jews have been blamed for the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution,

the Spanish Civil War, the Great Depression, the bubonic plague. And of course, people like Mearsheimer blame Jewish neocons for pulling the strings to get America involved in the war in Iraq. So last week, what I thought was the most important answer that Daryl Cooper gave, and I'm almost finished, was about the Zionist influence behind World War II. When Tucker asks him what was Churchill's motive, he says that Churchill was a drunk, a psychopath, he played with toys,

wanted to redeem himself for World War I, for whatever mistakes he made then, and then he says the following. But then you get into it, which to me is like then the heart of the matter. You know, why was Winston Churchill such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life, right?

There was an ideological component of it, but then as time goes on, you know, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests, you know, in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility. I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling, but you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the worst event in human history, at the hands of a Jewish interest. Okay, that's a long introduction. So what do you feel? Am I wrong? Am I paranoid? We Jews can be paranoid sometimes. So tell me how you feel about it.

My very strong sense of this is that anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred in the world, and it has metastasized again and again over history. Jews have been accused of all of those things you mentioned, and very, very many others, especially if you go back in history, go back to the 14th, 15th century and earlier. And the inevitable result of this, this long history of conspiracy theories, none of which, none of which, it's very important to underline this, has been backed up by serious historical research. It's all just lies. And it has led to the most terrible series of consequences for the Jewish people throughout history and to think that at this stage in the 21st century when we've had two centuries of enlightenment and progressive thought and so on, to think that these monstrous blood libels are still being put on the Jewish people is utterly monstrous. If you want me to go through a few of the details of what you've just read out, I'd like to. First of all, Churchill did not go bankrupt. Never was. The second thing was, of course, he wasn't bribed.

He did have friends, Jewish friends. By the way, they weren't Zionists. Neither Bernie Baruch nor Henry Strzokoch were Zionists, but they were friends of Churchill. And Bernie Baruch bailed him out when he lost a lot of money on the Wall Street crash. Now, the Wall Street crash happened four years before Adolf Hitler came to power. The idea that, therefore therefore it was some kind of bribe to ensure that he was Prime Minister when war came is ludicrous. And the very phrase, in my view, Zionist financiers, is an anti-Semitic one in and of itself. And when you also look at the idea that Churchill was made prime minister by Zionist financiers and the media complex, which has lots of modern resonances, but didn't exist in the 1930s. You had newspapers which weren't owned by Jews, which were all competing in the same way that newspapers do today,

and which throughout the 1930s opposed Winston Churchill and belittled him and ridiculed him and mocked him. The idea that therefore they put him into place is just utterly historically incorrect. Read the newspapers of the 1930s and indeed 1940 when he came to power. You have the three major newspaper groups immensely in favour of appeasement in the 1930s and not pro-Churchill. And he was appointed Prime Minister in the May of 1940 by the King, unless you think that the King is being bribed by Zionist financiers, then it makes no sense either. But by the King, after the Norway debate in May 1940, when the Chamberlain government fell, there is no evidence whatever of Jewish financiers or the media complex having anything to do with this process. It's a very straightforward political process.

And in fact, there was such anti-Semitism on all sides of the House of Commons and the House of Lords at the time, that were there any Jewish involvement in making Churchill Prime Minister, you can be absolutely certain that we would have letters and papers and diaries and correspondence and so on about it, and it's not mentioned. So, you know, this should be seen not as a serious historical statement, but as the latest metastasization of the oldest hatred. So, just to be fair to Daryl, he did say,

I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. That's a construction that could say that he might have been bribed, he might not have been bribed. Precisely. The very wording of that in any court of law would imply that he's trying to put an idea into your head that has no justification justification for being i'm not saying your wife is necessarily cheating on you precisely precisely yeah but uh but one more just one more thing because i i really want to make sure that i am beyond reproach daryl did say that some of the stuff that he said on the interview he hadn't um was off the top of his head and that he spoke in precisely so let me just read one tweet that he wrote

to kind of clarify his feelings on this matter, because it belongs in the record, right? Churchill's public attitude toward Hitler and Germany was openly hostile after 1938. Some have pointed out that he faced bankruptcy and a loss of his family estate

when he was bailed out with a gift, not a loan, by a wealthy Zionist. If there is any direct evidence that Churchill was bought, though, I am not aware of it, and there are many simpler explanations for his change of heart, given that the war faction of which he was seeking leadership became more prominent and belligerent after Hitler's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland. Also, Churchill had been a booster of Zionism for at least 20 years, so there is no need to point to under-the-table payments as a source of his opinions. Finally, while there were many wealthy Zionists, both Jews and converts of the Disraeli type, in the war faction, the war faction would have gotten along fine without them. In other words, from what I know at least, subject to

change, of course, since I have not gone deeply into this aspect of the story as some others have, Churchill's dependency on Zionist Jewish interests is based on a lot of speculation and extrapolating a few known facts into a grand narrative. Now, I'm going to let you answer, but having said that, if this is just some speculation without, he hasn't really looked into it. Why in the world would his reflex be to make that his answer to Tucker's question?

The one thing he doesn't have evidence for and is just kind of somebody's theory. That's amazing to me that he would do that. But go ahead, Mr. Roberts, Lord Roberts. Well, 33 million people have downloaded that now. We've got 33, that was a few days ago, it's probably more now,

million people who've heard this complete untruth, which, as you say, even he now has said that he doesn't have any evidence for. But it's been around for a long time these accusations. Joseph Goebbels of course made them during the Second World War, David Irving made them when his various inventions came up in a court of law over a very long legal case, in fact I was present for one of the days of it, Irving lost and had to pay damages and expenses. Because when you actually analyse it in something like a court of law, it completely collapses. It's only when you have the ability to go on social media and spew out these lies, that they can catch fire. And that says much more about the Internet and cyberspace than it does about historical

truth, evidence, rationality or anything else. I mean, is there anything, if you had to be his lawyer, is there anything you could say in his defense? You know, he exaggerates this, but there is a grain of truth, or he misunderstands something. I understand why he says this, but he's, you know, if he only knew this fact, he would see it differently. Is there anything that can be said in his behalf? Well, you know, Churchill did take money from people. he allowed friends to bail him out and um not just jews and not um and as i say the two jews that he uh took the most money from weren't zionists

but nonetheless yeah um he always spent an awful lot more than he uh than he earned you know he that's why he wrote 37 books and uh,000 or so, sorry, 800 articles. And he was constantly financially on the verge of being broke because he employed loads of servants and always drank the best champagne and smoked 160,000 cigars and basically was a massive, he gambled and so on. He was a massive, he gambled and so on, he was a massive spender. But the way to see him is in his genuine context of being essentially like a Regency 18th century aristocrat. He was the grandson of a duke, he was born in a palace, not just any palace, but Blenheim Palace. He lived on the big scale and he couldn't always finance it. But the idea that a man like him, with all of his extraordinary talents and abilities and having held important

offices of states from the age of 30 onwards, that he would change his political views or in any way sort of mould them as a result of the cash that friends occasionally gave him when his stock market speculations collapsed. Just shows a fantastic ignorance of the nature of Winston Churchill. Now, what about these accusations about playing with toys and these kind of weird, is this true stuff or is this just character assassination i've never heard that um and uh i mean he played with toys as a child he was he's well known to have had a big sort of army of um of toy soldiers that he uh he played with very occasionally with his father who who didn't spend much time with him but uh but um once or twice did play toy soldiers with him. And he would also, during dinner,

when the subject of a particular battle, the Battle of Blenheim or the Battle of Jutland or so on, when the subject came up and he was explaining to the table, because he was a very serious and significant historian, how the battle was fought he would use um knives and forks and and glasses and so on to explain where the different uh battleships were say or regiments were in a in a um land engagement but those aren't really toys are they they don't i don't think they count as toys so i'm not really sure what um what uh cooper

is uh is talking about that what about he also he also had nephews who um who enjoyed playing with um it was called meccano i don't know if you remember it or whether you have it in america it's it's a series of sort of building blocks a bit like lego where you where you build things but that was because he was playing with his with his with his children and nephews and nieces and so on. What about the more Freudian type explanations? You know, they say that George W. Bush went to Iraq to show his father, you know, to show up his father. And here, Daryl suggests that Churchill wanted to redeem himself for his mistakes at World War I.

Do you give that any credence? None whatsoever. And by the way, I don't give any credence to the idea that George W. Bush went into a war because of his father either. Although, obviously, Saddam did try to assassinate his father. Nonetheless, you know, the reasons are very well set out. But God, Churchill. I mean, Churchill, what Cooper essentially states is that Churchill was a failure in the First World War and wanted the Second World War in order to exculpate himself and redeem himself. I think redemption is the word that he uses.

And, of course, the Gallipoli campaign, which was primarily Churchill's fault. He came up with the idea, although the whole of the war cabinet supported it when it was proposed by Churchill. But the rest of the war, you have to see the whole thing in the context, and he doesn't. In the First World War, Winston Churchill, first of all, he was First Lord of the Admiralty, he was in charge of the British Navy. He had got that Navy ready for that war, knowing that that war was going to come. This is one of the great acts of thermistically and foresight that Churchill had. And he got the Royal Navy ready. He brought the whole of the British Expeditionary Force from Britain over into France without the loss of a single man. He brought the whole of the British expeditionary force from Britain over

into France without the loss of a single man. He fought, of course, in the trenches himself. He undertook no fewer than 30 trench raids when he was a lieutenant colonel there. He then became Minister of Munitions and created the munitions necessary for the the final push in which uh the um british army used those weapons along with the american army and the french army to destroy the german army so the idea that he was he was sort of suffering from some kind of a psychological weakness because of um of um the dardanelles is complete and utter rot i have kind of one more comment question about all this um one of the things that goes on with israel now and i have no idea and i you know where you stand in israel but one of the things that in my mind that goes on with israel is that all this

attention to the history of it in in some way undermines the ground, the psychological ground, under support for Israel, such that people don't really view Israel as a real country anymore. Like, of course, if American cities were emptied out, everybody would understand that America would take military action so they could repopulate their cities. But somehow, if you can describe the creation of Israel as an illegitimate enterprise

from the beginning, then Israel is no longer allowed the same course of action to defend themselves. And part of this history of World War II that I'm just learning is, and I think this is part of what Churchill was trying to rail against, was that the Western European countries had a crisis of conscience about what Germany was going through in terms of how the treaty which they had imposed on Germany

was causing such misery within Germany. And because they lost their moral confidence in what they were putting Germany through, they then were paralyzed to take any actions to enforce the parts of the treaty which needed to be enforced, and lost their nerve, essentially, in the same way the world seems to be losing its nerve about defending Israel. Is that a correct parallel? Yes, absolutely it is. The appeasement of the 1930s can, to a very great degree, as well as, of course, not wanting to have another war, where so many people had died in the First World War, is to a very large degree explicable in terms of a guilt about having been too tough on Germany in 1919 at the Treaty of Versailles. Of course, there's another aspect to this.

In fact, maybe it would have been better if we had been more tough and actually split up Germany into smaller parts than we did. When Germany was in two parts after the Second World War, we didn't have a resurgent Germany. If it had gone back to being a dozen or maybe even hundreds of parts as it was in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, you certainly wouldn't have had a resurgent Germany. The great tragedy of the 20th century, i.e. the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, which Winston Churchill foresaw, again like the First World War, foresaw it and set out the ways to prevent it and begged the Western allies to arm properly, in time. That is the great tragedy, not the idea that Nazi Germany essentially needs to

feel sorry for it. Adolf Hitler had a straightforward plan to eventually fight against the Soviet Union and a plan to annihilate the Jewish race in Europe and a plan to rip up all the agreements made in the Versailles Treaty. And because we essentially allowed him to do the last of those things, he was able also to do the first two of those things. You regard, I've read in a recent article, that Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm was a threat to Western civilization and democracy. And Jews, by the way. He also writes privately to a friend that he'd like to see the Jews all gassed.

This is Kaiser Wilhelm I, second, not Adolf Hitler. I mean, Adolf Hitler, of course, actually did do that, but the Kaiser also wanted to do it. He's a much more vicious character than most people recognize. I think a lot of people think of Germany in World War I as everybody was sort of at fault. You know, they don't regard Germany during World War I as quite the bad monster that was during

World War II, but you seem to think it was a great threat even during the First World War. Oh, certainly. Everyone was not at fault. It was Germany that invaded neutral Belgium. Totally unnecessarily, it was Germany that built up the largest, second largest fleet in the world and attempted to make it the largest fleet. It was Germany that turned what was essentially a very sad and tragic assassination of an Archduke on the 28th of July 1914 into a world war by the 4th of August by supporting Austria that supported Serbia. It was Germany that planned from 1905 onwards, i.e. nearly a decade beforehand, the Schlieffland plan

to try to crush France. And it was Wilhelm II who ran an increasingly authoritarian war once the war had started. And as I say, he also wanted to gas Jews. So the idea that we just give him a free pass and just say everyone was at fault is completely wrong. Now, last thing on this part, what did Churchill mean by the unnecessary war? I've heard three times already from three different of the revisionist types that this is kind of Churchill's admission that World War Two was a mistake. Oh, the ignorance is just astonishing. I mean, just pick up the book and read the actual context. It's not the most difficult thing in the world. He wrote his history of the Second World War from 1948 onwards.

It sold literally millions of copies. You can get them copies for pennies nowadays, just please get it. It's a wonderful book, by the way, also. Pick it up, and he explains precisely it is an unnecessary war, because if the West had listened to his warnings, and had armed sufficiently, and at the times that Adolf Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland in 1936 and took Austria by Anschluss in 1938, and then the Sudetenland in the October of 1938, and then took the rest of the rump of Czechoslovakia in the March of 1939. If at any stage along that long via via dolorosa for europe and the world um hitler had been stood up to by a strong west then the war would not have taken place that is why he calls it

the unnecessary war it's not some kind of an omission that he that he recognized that hitler didn't need to be stopped it's that people, it's extraordinary anyone can think this kind of thing. A very quick personal story. My father was born in Israel in 1938. He moved to America in 1930. He moved to America in 1938 or maybe the end of 37. And he grew up, you know, in between not having a first language

and struggling in school. And he entered into adulthood, he told me, thinking that he was not intelligent with a tremendous insecurity and he would often read things in English and couldn't really understand them or felt that they didn't make sense and assumed that it was his own inability to understand. And he said his life changed and his outlook on himself changed when he read The Gathering Storm. And he said that it was so easy for him to understand and the clarity of the thinking was so clear to him

that it changed his opinion of his own ability to understand other people's writings. At that point on, he said, no, it's their fault that I don't understand. They're just not writing clearly. So it's interesting. And that point on, he said, no, it's their fault that I don't understand. They're just not writing clearly. So it's interesting, and that was really a pivotal moment for him. All right.

There's another part to all of this, which I find less offensive, but I'm sure you think it's no less ridiculous, which is the notion that, essentially, given everything that we know in hindsight, how many people died in World War II? 70 million people, something like that? Around that number, yeah.

And the fact that the Iron Curtain descended, despite Churchill's warnings, but the Iron Curtain descended right afterwards. If Churchill had known all of this, would he have done anything differently? he wasn't in power this is the problem you see he he was out of power all the way through the 1930s during that via dola rosa that i spoke of he um didn't get into uh office and that was as lord um first lord of the admiralty until the september of 1939 on the day that war broke out. He wasn't

Prime Minister until Adolf Hitler had already invaded Poland and had launched his attack on Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland and was shortly afterwards course, also to invade France. So he didn't have the opportunity to stop any of this. He did everything he could. He got up in the House of Lords and denounced all of the things that Hitler was doing. He warned. Of course he did. And he said that we needed more defences, especially in the air. There's only a certain amount that you can possibly do as a backbencher in an MP. And so

for him to be blamed in the way that Daryl Cooper does for various acts of Adolf Hitler's when he wasn't either in power or as Prime Minister, strikes me as just straightforward, ahistorical nonsense.

Leaving Churchill out of it then, do you think, given how it all turned out, that the West, the Allies, made any mistakes? I know it's a ridiculous question in retrospect, but just, you know, to entertain it as a parlor game. Yes, of course they made mistakes. They should have stood up against Hitler when he was weak. When he moved into the Rhineland in March 1936, they should have just prevented it, which they could have done.

The German generals were on the verge of overthrowing him if it had gone wrong. He himself said he was going to pull back his forces if the French fired so much as a shot. And unfortunately, he was allowed to get away with the first of these coups, essentially, in Europe. I mean, I say it's an impossible question, because here we're standing up for Ukraine now. Now, Putin could drop an atom bomb in Ukraine, and it could lead to horrors for the world. And then people will say, it's our fault. We shouldn't have stood up to Putin.

I don't know how to approach that argument. That logic leads you to capitulate to any tyrant at any time. Especially ones who have the nuclear bomb, which Iran is trying to get at the moment and so on. So, yes, I mean, of course, geo strategy changes very, very significantly once any country gets the bomb. But let's imagine Adolf Hitler with the bomb. If we'd allowed him to, if we'd essentially continue to appease him, which is what Daryl Cooper is effectively suggesting, then who's to say by the end of the 1940s he wouldn't have got the bomb himself? And a world war against Hitler with control of nuclear weapons is something so horrific as not to bear thinking about.

Now, what about this speech? I think Dan alluded to it. What about this speech that Daryl says where the Brits had evacuated Dunkirk and Hitler was talking about some sort of peace proposal and a solution for the Jewish problem? Why Daryl chose that phrase, the Jewish problem, is just, it's really something.

Yeah, and also, by the way, the word solution as well is, in my book, so close to the concept of the final solution as to be a sort of red rag, really. Maybe the same reason he posted a picture of a mug with that Iron Eagle symbol and the words Gooden Morgan. So what do we know about that? There are lots of dog whistles that he makes. We've already mentioned Zionist financiers, obviously, but there are plenty more as well.

What about that speech? Should the Allies have taken Hitler more at his word? Was Hitler looking actually to end uh war at that point of course not he was trying to make peace in the west so that he could unleash his entire army in the east and fulfill the um the prophecies that he made in mein kampf um and uh and mean that he could attack with 100% of his forces rather than 70% which he eventually did unleash in Operation Barbarossa on the 22nd of June 1941 where he had 180 divisions across the border. I mean had he had his entire force he might well have beaten um the russians which were obviously meant that in complete control of the um uh of of the european land mass um between uh between the dunkirk and

and the invasion of um a successful invasion of of russia and, Britain's sovereignty would have been worth nothing. So it was the correct decision by Churchill to keep fighting and to keep in the war. And remember, we weren't just on our own. We had the British Empire. We had hundreds of thousands of troops from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and so on, South Africa. And we also had the strongest navy in the world. And we were fighting on the North African littoral. So the idea that we've just been completely knocked out and had no way of fighting back

is not right. But of course, in order to win that war, Britain needed allies such as the Soviet Union, which would come in when Hitler invaded, and the United States, which would come in on the 11th of December 1941 when Hitler declared war against you. Churchill was some sort of evil mastermind who was going to bring down this peace-loving Fuhrer. It could not be more wrong. Hitler only made the offer out of a cynical attempt to clear the West so that he could attack more efficiently in the East. Dan, do you have a question um the appeasement that we were talking about um to what extent do you think that was based on just the fact that world war one was such a horrific um slaughter and and and nobody wanted to go through that again precisely and and and churchill was foremost amongst them he had course, fought in that war himself. He had lost friends. I visited the graves of troops that he led in that war.

You only have to read about the various eulogies that he gave to various friends of his to appreciate that, of course, he was not a warmonger he was somebody who understood and had come very much up close to the realities of um of death in combat he'd been he'd fought on um in five campaigns on on four continents by the time the second world war broke out. He understood how terrible war was. And so for people to just throw out this idea of him being a warmonger is quite wrong. But you might like this. I don't know if you know this. This was in Kissinger's book, Diplomacy, but it's very much up the alley of what you were describing to us about Hitler. It says, in September 1943, eight months after Stalingrad and two months after the Battle of Kursk, which wiped out most of the German offensive armor, Ribbentrop presented Hitler with a strange tale indeed. A Soviet deputy foreign minister who had at one time been ambassador to Berlin was visiting Stockholm,

and Ribbentrop interpreted this as an opportunity for exploratory talks of a separate peace along the 1941 borders. Hitler rejected the alleged opportunity, telling his foreign minister, quote, you know, Ribbentrop, if I came to an agreement with Russia today, I'd attack her again tomorrow. I just can't help myself. Yes, and also there was also a marvellous moment in Hitler's 50th birthday party where the German Foreign Office, Ribbentrop again, put together a sort of silver casket and inside were the scrolls of all the treaties that Hitler had signed. And they were a little bit concerned before they gave them to Hitler because he had actually ripped up every single one of those treaties. He had taken no notice of any of them. So the idea is literally, I think, only Daryl Cooper. Can it be anybody else who, apart from David Irving, of course, who believes that Hitler would have stuck to the terms of any treaty that he made in August 1940.

Now, Cooper is accused very often of, snidely, of being an amateur historian. And I kind of bristle at that criticism because, first of all, so many professional historians are unscrupulous and dishonest. And I'm an amateur, and I feel like I can read things fairly. I think it's more that he's an unfair historian. But would you agree there's a trend these days of kind of cut-and-paste, control-F history,

where people just scour documents and they search on keywords and they find a quote here and a quote there and they piece together like a Frankenstein monster version of any event that they want. You can find a quote from any great world leader

who spoke a lot and had a diary to make any case that you want. And you need people to be a fair spirit and that's really the problem what it is really is context um if you're going to make a quotation um you really should try to put it in some kind of a context and in order to do that you have to um really very often go to the original sources and that involves visiting archives and and reading the evidence and that's i think the um the problem with uh with cooper is that um he certainly doesn't do that i don't know whether he's written any books

or anything like that it's a it's a i think that would be a prerequisite for being considered to be an historian. I like you. I don't like the difference between supposedly professional and amateur in the world of history. I've been a freelance for a very long time and since going down from Cambridge University. And so there is a very big difference between academic historians, popular historians, amateur historians, and so on. But the key differential should be whether or not, as you say, you're fair-minded,

and whether or not you try to put a phrase here, a sentence there, into its proper historical context. And if you don't, if you're essentially driven by ideology and not a thirst for truth, then I don't care whether you're an academic or a professional or a popular historian, you're just a bad one. I've got to give Morrow credit for one thing. He did get perhaps people interested in this aspect of history

do you think people were interested in the history of the second world war before well i suppose so but i myself just personally i'm sure noam delved into this more deeply i delved into it a bit more deeply and we got to talk to you so some people i'm happy that this uh thing came out from under its rock because this was a hot thing uh in a certain group of people and we weren't aware of it and now we have eminent historians which are uh pouring cold water on it and for a certain number of people who are actually fooled this will will disabuse them, and hopefully they'll snap out of it. And it puts Daryl on the defensive. He's had to revise and make excuses and explain why he made this mistake or that mistake.

It's pretty – I don't want to blow my own trumpet here, but half a million people have read my book, Churchill Walking with Destiny. If you want to know the answers to and the truth about all of these issues that Cooper has brought up, then it's not difficult, frankly, to do that. You just have to read the good books on the subject. But I find it worrying, frankly, that 33 million people have been listening to something that is so wrong, one-sided, based on no evidence, essentially. I don't think that that's something to be celebrated particularly. Well, we've got to fight the fight. One example, if you listen to his Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem, is that what it's called, Dan?

Yeah, I think so. He quotes Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the T.E. Lawrence book, and he quotes it for something that suits his case. There it is. Just there. There's a first edition of it. Just there. Wow. And I went back and read it, skimmed it.

It's very, very long. And in it, Lawrence just really is harshly, harshly describes the Arab mentality as he sees it. And as my first encounter with Daryl, I was like, look, if you want to quote Lawrence, that's fine. But don't let your listeners not understand that he regarded them as an illogical people capable of holding mutually self-contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time with no apparent uncomfortableness about it. Just an example of how, you know, you take one quote, it needs to be known that Lawrence,

as much as he was a champion of the Arabic people, he had a low opinion of them in certain ways. So tell your listeners that and then give whatever quote you want. But he doesn't tell the listeners that. And that separates the men from the boys, in my opinion, in terms of historians and intellectuals in general. Well, when you look at the people who've looked at this or at least watched the video and then denounced it very eloquently people like um victor davis hansen and neil ferguson and um steve haywood and there's another guy just did it today you know it is um it's intellectually it's an open and shut case frankly but you know that's not necessarily the way the um the internet works is it no all right we have a few more minutes we both have hard outs is there anything else at the top of your mind

about what you what he said that you think needs to be discussed yeah i um it was something you said right at the very beginning of this conversation. It's a very interesting and stimulating conversation. You said that you thought that there had been a change in the climate since the 7th of October with regard to people's views about Jews. And my sense is slightly different. And that is that there has always been a sort of hatred that dare not speak its name. And what 7th of October did, and of course Israel's response three weeks after the 7th of October, was essentially to encourage people to speak its name, to be much more openly anti-Semitic. I consider the phrase from the river to the sea to be an anti-semitic statement and um the way in which it's been seen um out in uh in our streets here in london we have um we have pro-palestinian

demonstrations every single saturday uh still and um the uh where that where that statement is seen on banners and t-shirts and and so on and uh so I don't agree with you that there's been a change in the climate. I think what there's been is the same underlying hatred, but the change is that it's a bit more, it's much more sort of legitimised and relativised and public. And I find all of that very, very disturbing. To what extent do you think anti-Semitism underlies this desire to cast Churchill as the villain and perhaps exonerate Hitler to some extent? Or there's other factors involved, perhaps, as well? I think there are many other factors, including obviously the war in Ukraine, I think has been mentioned in this conversation as well. The idea that we need to, that at least pro-Putin elements need to legitimize and relativize the unprovoked

assault of a large country against a smaller one, which is what happened to Poland in September 1939 and which happened to Ukraine in February of 2022. This is another example of an ideological position trying to use history and squeeze history into pre-considered ideological stances. So it's not just anti-Semitism. There's also an element of ultra-isolationism as well, an anti-NATO feeling and so on.

But wherever it comes from, it needs to be fought, especially through rational discourse, which is what, of course, we've been trying to do today. All right, sir, I'm going to let you go. I ordered your book, and I'm hoping that if you ever come to New York and you could stop through the comedy show, that you might sign it for me. I must say, you guys, you've got a very strange view of comedy. We've been talking about the Holocaust.

We've been talking about the outbreak of Adolf Hitler. I mean, wow uh the things you guys find funny well it's been one of the joys of my life that somehow i managed to take my position as owning a comedy club into a podcast and find myself with the ability to speak to great uh intellects and and and people like you. I pinched myself. I'm so happy to be able to do this. And I've so enjoyed our conversation.

Do you get to New York at all? My daughter lives there. So, yes, I do try to. Yeah, absolutely. You have to come down and say hello, see a show. A lot of intellectual people that you would know hang out at our club actually it's become like a little salon i don't know that we've ever had a member of the house of lords no we haven't okay well noom and dan thank you very much indeed i've much enjoyed uh being on your show