Indeed. Yesterday, in the wake of Tucker Carlson's bizarrely laudatory interview with a crank historian that casts Winston Churchill as the chief villain of World War II, a number of conservative commentators spoke out to rebut and debunk some of the revisionist claims made in the podcast. I aggregated some of the better observations in last night's Final Word, but absent at that point was a definitive response from any historian with deep credibility on the Right, of the same stature (or at least reach) of Carlson. 

Today, Victor Davis Hanson has entered the chat. In a lengthy essay at The Free Press, Hanson pierces every claim in the interview, and then some. The "gravity of [Darryl] Cooper's falsehoods" requires a full-spectrum response, Hanson writes, and that's what he delivers. 

It's almost too detailed to excerpt effectively, but this may sum up his case for historical accuracy about Churchill himself:

In sum, Churchill was not eager for war, and on occasion expressed hope that Hitler would focus on rebuilding Germany, settle down, and stay within his borders. Nonetheless, throughout the late 1930s he had begged and cajoled the Baldwin, and later, the Chamberlain governments to rearm to the teeth to deter what he felt would be inevitable and destructive Nazi and Japanese offensive wars. 

It is true Churchill wanted to preserve the British Empire at all costs. Yet integral to that strategy was rearming to a degree that would deter both Germany and Japan, given he privately grew despondent that post–Depression British financial and military weakness signaled to both Hitler and the Japanese that London would not be able to hold on to its empire or deter its enemies and thus would inevitably invite aggression. 

So, if believing a strong military would deter Hitler and avoid war is somehow bellicose, then Churchill might conceivably have pleaded guilty.

As far as being a “terrorist,” Churchill soon and almost alone grasped the ultimate fantasies of Hitler’s planned genocide, world domination, the end of free nations, and a nightmarish global future. He had good reason for such pessimism after Hitler had once again, for the nth time, broken his word; he invaded Poland and began a policy of slaughtering civilians, and rounding up and murdering Jews. Most of his military planners realized after summer 1940 that the evacuated and depleted British army could not stop Hitler in Europe. Even the British fleet could not guarantee a successful blockade of German ports. That bleak reality left the RAF’s bomber command as the only tool to slow Hitler down.

And, as Hanson points out, even there the Nazis came first. The Luftwaffe air campaigns against civilian population centers in Poland and Holland came before the Blitz, and well before Churchill even joined Chamberlain's government. Hitler used these bombings as a tactic of terror, and explicitly so. The main platform for these attacks was the Ju-97 'Stuka' dive bomber that the Nazis fitted with sirens, which had no other purpose but to cause panic in the cities where they attacked, and demoralize everyone else through fear. (The Germans called them "Jericho Trumpets.") Later, they would attach whistles to bombs instead to achieve a similar effect.

Hanson provides a substantive, fact-based rebuttal on each point raised by Cooper and Carlson in the podcast. He does so dispassionately and precisely, as befitting a reliable historian and scholar. Those who have not studied the period in detail will find much to learn; for those of us who have, it still serves as a good reminder of how little there is to debate about the Third Reich, or for that matter imperial Japan. The complete defeat of both enemies allowed the capture of vast archives of the records of both regimes, on which histories such as William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Richard Frank's Downfall became definitive. Churchill himself wrote a heavily footnoted six-volume history titled The Second World War, told from his perspective but still entirely substantiated by massive volumes of evidence.

And even if you don't put much faith into either, both Mein Kampf and the minutes of the Wansee Conference debunk the idea that Hitler didn't want war and conquest or that the Holocaust was an accident of incompetent logistics. 

One could easily go on for days in picking apart the ludicrous revisionism on display. Rather, let's focus on why it matters. We have seen attempts to rewrite history to warp its conclusions on the Left, and seeing it happen on the Right would be dispiriting if not for the pushback it has rightly received. We need clarity, not contrarianism for contrarianism's sake, to defeat the Left's attempts to pervert the record.

First: Over the last ten-plus months, the Left has pushed a corrupt history to support Hamas and its terror operations against Israel, especially the October 7 massacre. The Left casts the Jews as "occupiers" in "Palestine," when the Arabs colonized Judea and Samaria relatively recently in history. The Jews have consistently lived in these regions for nearly 4,000 years, and Zionism offered more of them a haven there through legitimate land purchases and political negotiations with the then-British occupation after World War One. The Left has inverted the real occupation by inventing a history where Mizrahi Jews don't exist, and claiming Arabs as indigenous on the basis of military conquest that took place nearly three millennia after Jews had established themselves in Israel. 

Second, and more importantly: The Left has continued to warp the history of the 20th Century's disastrous experiments with Marxism and socialism. They rightly focus on the deaths and destruction caused by the Nazis (and as Hanson argues, Imperial Japan may have been worse), while completely ignoring the tens of millions of victims of communism. Mao, Castro, Guevara, and other heroes of the Left had massive amounts of blood on their hands, and their systems have resulted in nothing other than misery and subservience to totalitarian states for the populations trapped in them. And yet the Left, especially in Academia, warp history on a constant basis to demonize capitalism, which has liberated and enriched populations around the globe.  

How can we argue for history there while refusing to defend it from cranks on the Right?

Lastly: the Protection Racket Media has gone all-in on the ahistorical propaganda in both of these examples. As an industry, they have dispensed with truth and objective reporting to embrace the Year One approach of the Left in erasing not just history but also disposing of the pillars of Western civilization, as well as biological reality. They can only succeed in this if we collaborate in indulging fantasy over facts and fantasy over evidence, and that means we have to remain vigilant in making sure that independent voices are focused as intently as possible on real history and actual objective reality. That is why we push so hard for our readers to join us in this fight by becoming part of our VIP and VIP Gold membership. Join today and use promo code FAKENEWS to receive a 50% discount on your membership.

As John Philpot Curran first said, "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." That eternal vigilance is to both liberty and the truth, because to deny one is to deny both. And we have our hands full already exercising that vigilance on the Left.