“The idea that Hitler arrived in Poland by chance is a lie,” Tucker Carlson told Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg in a recent television debate, “and everyone believes it because they know nothing of the real facts. But the truth is that large parts of Germany were cut off, including parts of Prussia.” As for the Treaty of Versailles, which effectively awarded Poland the former German provinces of Posen and West Prussia, Carlson says: “The United Kingdom had nothing to do with it.”
Perhaps Mr. Carlson needs to be reminded of his history. In fact, the United Kingdom was one of the main organizers and signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, negotiated by its Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. The ethnolinguistic dividing line between Poland and Russia was called the Curzon Line, after the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, who demarcated it. And when it came to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain was closely involved after guaranteeing Poland’s integrity on March 31, 1939.
This is not the first time Carlson has apologized to Hitler. Last September, he interviewed Darryl Cooper, who told him that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “main villain” of World War II. A few weeks later, Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, the livestreamer who described Hitler as “great,” “righteous,” and “fucking cool.”
These commentators are not extreme cases; they are part of a larger movement of ultra-MAGA propagandists who want to rewrite the history of World War II, with Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt as the villains, and with Hitler as a visionary but misunderstood leader who was simply trying to do the best for his people. They are helped by the sad fact that much of the generation who remembered the war, and who can thus bear direct witness to the ridiculous rottenness of it all, are naturally slowly succumbing to the inevitable passage of time. In Britain, there are aspiring MAGA types, including “groypers”, “incels” and “chuds”, as well as followers of the manosphere, who also revolve around strange anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Nazi-adjacent worldviews.
But when we examine “the real facts”, we quickly recognize that it is Carlson himself who is engaged in “lies”. And Rees-Mogg deserves praise for fending off Carlson in turn fake naiveignorant and fascist statements and questions.
After all, if Hitler had simply wanted to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, as he himself claimed and as Carlson seems to believe, he would have stopped at Posen and the (formerly German) Danzig Corridor, rather than occupying all of western Poland in September 1939. A month later, Hitler allowed the Russians to occupy all of eastern Poland, under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact that his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had negotiated with the Soviet Foreign Minister. Vyacheslav Molotov in August.
As was clear to everyone then – and should be even clearer to Carlson today – Hitler’s plans since he wrote My Kampf at the beginning of the twenties were to seize Living space (“living space”) for its Aryan empire in Eastern Europe. In March 1939, he had proven that overthrowing Versailles was not the limit of his territorial ambitions, when he invaded Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia, which had not been taken from Germany at Versailles.
If overthrowing Versailles had been Hitler’s goal, why then did he invade Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and then, the following month, attack neutral Holland and Luxembourg, which had not gained territory from Germany on the terms of Versailles? The obvious answer, that the Führer aspired to hegemony over Europe, seems to have been lost on Carlson. Whether out of non-conformism, naivety, or misplaced curiosity about alternatives for perceiving Western weakness, Carlson and his fellow travelers are only too willing to explain the terrible misdeeds of tyrants.
Just as Carlson denies that Hitler was wrong to overturn an international treaty, he makes excuses for Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. “For the record, I didn’t care,” Carlson told Rees-Mogg of Putin’s capture of Crimea in 2014, because Ukraine “is the most corrupt country in the world.” He also denounced Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” claimed that the United States “was not in a state of total war” against Japan in 1945, and even claimed that “Russia has a much larger economy than Britain.” Flattering, but false. The UK has a GDP of $4.66 trillion according to IMF forecasts for 2036, compared to Russia’s $2.66 trillion, and Britain’s GDP per capita, at $61,000, is more than three times that of Russia, at $18,525. Carlson is so sympathetic to Putin that even the Russian president himself, reflecting on Carlson’s interview with him in 2024, remarked that it was softball.
This same instinct led Carlson to ignore some of the darkest acts in Western history. Carlson’s belief that Britain and America were no “better than the people you were fighting” in World War II ignores the fact that, by and large, the Allies respected the Geneva Convention, while the Nazis and Japanese systematically ignored its provisions. Germany let the POWs starve to death while the Japanese brutalized them.
“Far from the British having ‘lost self-respect’ because of the Second World War, it is in fact one of the main reasons why we are, rightly, proud of our country. »
Far from the British having “lost self-respect” as a result of the Second World War, it is in fact one of the main reasons why we are, rightly, proud of our country. We were, along with the British Commonwealth, the only countries to fight the Axis throughout the war, from start to finish, and therefore gained lasting glory by standing against the most evil regime in history.
Carlson’s attempts to smear this case are baseless and destructive. When Rees-Mogg rightly pointed out that if Hitler had won the war, the British would be speaking German today, Carlson replied: “Who cares? There are a lot of people in Britain who don’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least one European language spoken in your country.” According to the Office for National Statistics, around 0.3% of residents in England and Wales do not speak English at all. Once again, Mr. Carlson falls into the category of those who, in his words, “know nothing of the real facts.”
Nor is it true that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally wrong because, in Carlson’s words, Japan “was already a defeated nation.” When the nuclear bombs were dropped in August 1945, Japan still had 1.5 million men occupying the major urban, industrial, and coastal regions of eastern and northern China, as well as Inner Mongolia and Japan’s puppet state, Manchuria. Japanese submarines still operated widely in the Pacific.
In early August 1945, Japan occupied Formosa (present-day Taiwan) and the entire Korean Peninsula, and had forces in Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies, and New Guinea. She was further preparing for an invasion of the Japanese islands and considered herself far from defeated. Indeed, his war cabinet considered surrendering after the dropping of the first bomb on Hiroshima and formally decided not to do so. It took the attack on Nagasaki for Emperor Hirohito to declare that the war “did not necessarily turn to Japan’s advantage.”
We may be disgusted by the revisionist way in which Mr Carlson distorts history – he even considers Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, to be one of Britain’s “great war heroes” – but we should not be shocked. He has long had the means to do just that, and Rees-Mogg was right to accuse Carlson of “on the verge of defending Hitler,” which is precisely what the remarks about the Treaty of Versailles were intended to do.
We should be concerned, however, that Vice President JD Vance has not yet distanced himself from Carlson. Vance has a serious chance of becoming president of the United States, but remains friends with a man who does not consider World War II a just war worth fighting.
Fortunately, the current ultra-MAGA movement centered around Carlson bases its entire argument regarding World War II on historical lies that are relatively easy to disprove. And their motivation is just as easy to understand: by trying to relativize the aggression and crimes of Adolf Hitler, while using anti-Semitic tropes to relativize the actions of the Nazis, they are trying to sow doubt on the critics of Vladimir Putin. It is vital that these revisionists do not win the battle for the historical record, otherwise Hitler will posthumously win the peace in a way that he and his vile creed fortunately could not win the war.
It’s all so transparent, and the best way to refute it is to do what Jacob Rees-Mogg did so admirably: stay calm and tell the historical truth through factual evidence. As Sir Winston Churchill – whom Carlson considers a “bad guy” – said: “Study history, study history. Because this is where all the secrets of the art of governing reside. »
Gn world
