Tea at Trianon: Adolf Hitler, What a Painter!

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, September 5, 2024

Adolf Hitler, What a Painter!

The Tucker Carlson interview with Darryl Cooper about Nazi Germany was so bizarre I had to turn it off. I have read too many primary sources from witnesses of the Holocaust not to be nauseated by anyone trying to defend the Nazis. And yet Tucker said Cooper was a great historian? Has he (Tucker) lost his mind? From The Transom:

Tucker Carlson is just asking questions. Questions like: what if Andrew Tate’s camgirl harem is actually the height of masculinity? And: isn’t the Russian grocery equivalent of Aldi absolutely incredible, just as the Moscow train station is perhaps the most beautiful thing mankind has created? And this week: why don’t we fully appreciate the total bind Adolf Hitler was in when he had just so many prisoners of war thanks to German success on the battlefield?

The decisions Carlson has made in the past several months have struck his former friends and ideological allies as veering in the space between the eccentric and the outrageous. But his most recent foray into the undiscovered country of whackadoo revisionism has broken off even some of his last cadre of conservative defenders, who maintained despite all the signals that this man, once the most influential media figure on the right, was still a good, brave, stable Christian conservative with the best interests of America at heart.

Sometimes it is extremely disappointing to have your worst instincts about a person rewarded, and that is the case for many on the right today. Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper, an amateur revisionist historian and podcaster, attempted to rewrite the history of World War Two with Winston Churchill cast as a malevolent villain and Adolf Hitler as a misunderstood man of peace:
You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east 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, 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 they’re… 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?”
The conclusion is framed as a destruction of moral mythology, in service of the same view that Carlson has been advocating for deliberately and loudly ever since his career in mainstream media was cut short: that America, rather than being the greatest nation in the history of the world, is at home and abroad a force for evil.

There are numerous problems with this conclusion, beginning with actual facts. But the more interesting aspect is why so many confused conservatives are all asking the same question: why? Why is Tucker doing this? Why has he gone from skirting the edge of acceptable discourse in a wisecracking jester act to jumping over the edge handcuffed to Candace Owens? (Read more.)