Andrew Roberts hits back at Churchill revisionist Darryl Cooper from the Tucker Carlson show

I mean this is classic conspiracy theory um and and pretty nutty too frankly in a free Society everything should be up for debate and that very much includes history when a popular historian says that Winston Churchill was perhaps the greatest villain of the second world war then you might be tempted to laugh it off but if he gets 34 million views into Tucker Carlson show it will be time to take it a bit more seriously every claim no matter how bizarre deserves proper consideration to test if it's true or false how else are you're supposed to discern truth and falsehood and who better to discuss Winston Churchill's record than the author of the greatest one volume history of Churchill Andrew Roberts who joins me now now Andrew I'm not quite sure if you'd heard of Daryl Cooper before he was in t Carlson's show but in that hourlong interview he made some quite serious claims now ideally we had wanted to bring him here to discuss with you individually I have one-onone debate because surely that's the best way of putting things to a test but he said that he doesn't want to debate you we failed but we're going to try to do the next best thing we're going to show you the clips of what he said and ask you to respond directly before we begin I wonder what you think of um tuer Carlson's basic point that it can be difficult to talk honestly about people who are national heroes and the way that church it was you wrote a book which reveals many uncomfortable things about Churchill I mean when you were writing I don't know for for example about his botch response to Hitler's Norway maneuver or things like in your book you know he you do come across quite often Churchill making a pretty bad mistake or making a wrong with judgment did you think to yourself actually here was only so far I can go as a storian because I am dealing with a nation's hero no I didn't feel like that at all I felt that Churchill made a lot of mistakes and admitted to it he wrote to his wife in January 1916 I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes and actually the uh process of learning from his mistakes was one of the things that uh set him above normal politicians and also put him in a position by the time he became prime minister in May 1940 where he was a better politician and Statesman because of it so actually the mistakes are an important part of of Winston Churchill and what about his character I mean Daryl ker was saying that he was a psychopath was one word to use but saying that he was certainly an alcoholic and you know we we've seen there's lots of evidence of how much he drank which by today's standards would ring alarm Bells I mean it's often said that great figures have got some moral corruption how did you find it um well I think the point that you made by today's standards Winston Churchill can't be judged by today's standards no historical figure should they should be judged by the standards of their own time as much as possible and the fact is that yes he drank an enormous amount um but he could take it he had a rhinoceri capacity for alcohol there's only one moment in the whole of the second World War one day when uh when he got drunk and that's an extraordinary thing considering the pressures and the stresses and strains that he was under so and as far as psychopath is concerned uh you know that I think says more about Daryl Cooper than it does about Winston Churchill frankly so let's go straight on to the points he made he can't be with us physically but we can bring him on in a clip now let's go to his main point he was saying that Churchill was the chief villain of the second world war but I told him maybe trying to provoke him a little bit that I thought Church was the chief villain of the second world war now he didn't kill the most people he didn't uh 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 or just I mean at every step of the way like people are very often I I find surprised to learn there there's a two-step process why don't you make Thea make the case for that okay so you've made your statement a lot of people are thinking well wait a second you said Churchill my childhood hero the guy with a cigar yeah well and the next thought that comes into their head is say is that oh you're saying Churchill was the chief villain therefore his enemies you know Adolf Hitler and so forth were Stalin the protagonists right that they're the good guys if you think he's a villain that's not the case that's know what I'm saying you know Germany look they they put themselves into a into a position and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this but his old 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 his point was basically Hitler was happy with his Conquest in the East and he was all to write sending notes to Britain saying look let's not fight I don't want to go here um but that Churchill wanted War um he doesn't want to fight Britain he feels it's going to weaken Europe when we've got this huge threat to the east the Communist threat over there and then he starts firing off peace proposals says let's not do this we can't do this Winston Churchill wanted a war he wanted to fight Germany so let's talk about this point in history that he points to where he thinks War could have been averted and it was Churchill who was spoiling for the fight um couldn't be more wrong it was Adolf Hitler who was um intending from 1933 when he became Chancellor onwards to rip up the Versa treaty and to uh set Germany on a path to uh heany in Europe that's why he uh entered the Rin land in 1936 why he had anchus with Austria in 1938 and also why he took the Sudan land and ultimately Czechoslovakia uh in 1938 and March 1939 it was a and why invaded Poland of course in September 1939 it was a clear attempt to dominate Europe what Winston Churchill had been doing all of that time was warning against this with extraordinary foresight and uh he also said that it was important to rearm um because he saw one day the uh the fact that there was going to be a war and after the um guarantee to Poland in April 1939 that was made by the British government not the one that Churchill was in uh but nonetheless was made by the Chamberlain government um when Hitler invaded Poland that triggered a war and until he disgorged Poland um the British government had every right not to entertain peace negotiations with Hitler and um and they didn't what about the points that Hitler didn't expect Britain to declare war that after all Chamberlain had pretty much given everything he wanted at Munich so sure Britain had treaty with Poland saying look we'll come to your defense if you're invaded but um Daryl Cooper says that all the evidence shows that Hitler didn't expect the invasion of Poland to lead to war because he didn't think that um Britain or Churchill would would carry out this because Hitler made a massive miscalculation despite having been given this very clear guarantee about Britain going to war over Poland because Hitler ignored that or didn't believe in it that can hardly be blamed on Winston Churchill I mean that's Hitler's uh fault isn't it it I guess the point Daryl C was trying to make is that Hitler didn't actually want any more war that he would and could have stopped there and that he had no intention to expand to the North or to the West um and it was only it was it was it was only Churchill who basically kept pushing it and as a result of that brought the World War II to what it was well the whole fact is that of course in April uh 1940 when Hitler invaded Scandinavia and and uh Denmark and then in when he actually Unleashed Blitz cre in the West uh on the 10th of May 1940 Winston Churchill wasn't prime minister so how on Earth could it be Churchill's fault that Hitler invaded all these countries it doesn't make sense he only became prime minister later on after the uh invasion of these countries like like Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland had taken place right and the idea that Churchill basically wanted war that as you say he was warning about um Hitler years in advance he was as you detail in your book he was like almost prophetic in predicting what would happen but some would see him as being Belo as somebody who who you know you didn't need to go over there and take the fight to Hitler perhaps it was possible for Britain to have said look we deplore this but we're not going to put any British lives at a risk he did not take the war to Hitler Hitler took the war to the West the um guarantee to Poland was a guarantee to an independent sovereign country that um had not in any way provoked the attack that Hitler Unleashed against it and so um the British government had which I I say Churchill wasn't even in at the time of the guarantee had every right to guarantee Poland it doesn't uh setting a tripwire essentially which is what it was is not a warmongering thing to do unless the totalitarian power wants to um trip over the wire on the point that um Churchill came to power what kind of regime was nazzi Germany then I mean was it you you could argue of course and not question if Dar kuer does make this point but it was a bit of you know the anus itself wasn't exactly a sort of fullon invasion it was it was perhaps I don't know there might be an interpretation saying he wanted to unite the germane speaking peoples or something but it could have been okay that's true up until the 15th of March 1939 but then when he goes into Prague when Hitler takes the rump of Czechoslovakia and Bohemia and so on um that is far beyond just the Sudan Germans that at that point he takes slaves into the Third Reich something uh and of course he had been ranting against slaves uh for for years beforehand that was the point at which the West certainly the British people recognized that Adolf Hitler was not was lying essentially when he said that he had no territorial Ambitions in Europe Beyond bringing the Germans back into uh into Germany and so uh that's also the point of course that people turn to Churchill um and recognize that the warnings that he been giving um consistently eloquently um not for wanting War but for wanting rearmament in order to deter War had been right all along let's go to another one of Daryl Cooper's points he accuses Churchill of terrorism the reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way he had no way to go back and fight this war all he had were bombers he was literally by 1940 sending firebomb fleets sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest just to burn down sections of the Black Forest just just rank terrorism you know going through and uh starting to you know what eventually became just the carpet bombing the saturation bombing of Civilian neighborhoods you know to kill is the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible yeah the Black Forest attacks were nothing like the worst bombing we'd ever seen in history uh the Germans had already bombed um Warsaw by then Rotterdam they' they'd bombed open cities um the Black Forest where by the way the RAF um had intelligence reports of various Munitions uh that were in the Black Forest this was not a uh intended as a as a terror attack anyhow later on in the war yeah there were some um some absolutely devastating attacks on on German civilians but first of all the the uh Germans had Unleashed this form of warfare and secondly it was not intended to be uh to be terrorism um and also thirdly it was very small scale anyway because the black frest didn't catch far but the bombing campaigns in general um one of the themes that he makes is that the more distance we have from the second world war the more we're able to look back in that with dis passion so if I remember not so long ago we had a controversy about bomber Harris about should this man really be um given a statue should he really be heralded should he be really seen as National Champion when in fact he just sents men and planes to go and bomb civilians so already we have seen in the last sort of 15 20 years people looking at those bombing campaigns through Netherlands yeah but what people don't look at is the um graphs which you can actually see in my book storm of War which proves that the bombing campaign leveled off the rate of increase in war Munitions uh production um from from going right up to um plateau and so it was essential and uh and you know maybe it's because we no longer have people who remember um the second world war still alive today who were able to say that nobody knew how that war was going to end and that uh you had to fight it with every means you had and uh the Munitions factories that we did take out were absolutely essential to War uh production and and material and frankly you know it's very difficult to ever um as an historian uh see the world through the eyes of people now long dead but nonetheless imagine if um the second world war had been won by um by Daryl Cooper's hero instead of Winston Churchill he also has an interesting theory about gen SI not a word he uses he basically describes it as a logistical problem that get out of control here's the clip 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 barbar rosha 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 and so this is like two months into the invasion right and like my view on this uh you know I argue with my Zionist uh interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza look man like maybe you as the you know the Germans you felt like you had to in invade to the e maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seiz the oil fields in Romania that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat and whatever it was whatever it was that like maybe you thought you had to do that but at the end of the day you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control and millions of people died because of that right um just utterly morally bereft frankly uh the some 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of War were taken in the first 6 weeks of operation Barbarosa and the idea that um the German generals uh and the general general staff who were tremendously efficient it has to be said had no idea about what to do with uh large numbers of prisoners is complete tripe they knew perfectly well but they didn't care uh you look at Hitler's speech is both public and private and you realize when he talks about slaves and un mench and so on let alone Jews of course he was going to kill millions of them and that was the way that there was going to be the creation of laan's Realm living space in the East uh in places like Ukraine and bellarus where this new master race of German Aryans were going to uh to live and and rule for a thousand years the idea that the deaths of of um Soviet prisoners of War were was was some kind of an accident uh because of lack of for foresight is um is complete rot but what about the Bel letters that darl Cooper sites of German Commander saying look we hadn't quite worked this out this is a logistical problem we've taken all these guys prisoners we don't know what to do with them he sort of presents I these are these are captains and Majors they weren't uh allowed into the overall strategic thinking of uh of Hitler and his immediate left tenants another point he makes is Churchill's motives um suggesting of course that he was perhaps controlled but by higher forces he doesn't quite say who they are he sort of does doesn't he because um uh well listen to the to the clip 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 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 um but you know I think he was to an extent put in place by by people the financiers by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who you know uh who was who was representing Britain in that Conflict for for for a reason I mean this is classic conspiracy theory um and and pretty nutty too frankly the idea that Winston Churchill um a man of so much self-belief and uh who had an entire political philosophy was going to be um bribed by Zionist financiers and the media complex by the way what was the media complex uh you had some very good anti- appeasement magazines like The Spectator but overall the uh newspapers in the 1930s ridiculed and mocked Winston Churchill because they were um totally opposed to his stance on appeasement and uh it wasn't until the um invasion of Prague that we mentioned earlier in the march of 1939 that people in the newspapers came around to uh support Churchill and try to get him into the cabinets which didn't of course happen until the outbreak of war in September 1939 but the the phrase about Zionist financiers is a dog whistle frankly an anti-semitic dog whistle and the problem with it apart from how loathsome it is in and of itself is actually it's also completely untrue um not least because the financiers who did support him people like Bernie baroo and uh Sir Henry stakos um were not zionists so what he's really saying is Jewish financiers and I think we all can recognize what uh what that's all about might I also point out that one of the people who has um said that uh he's thrilled that his ideas are now in the mainstream um and asking for recognition um is uh he tweeted this this morning is David Irving right now you mentioned David Irving but this is one of the um examples talking Carlson says he makes a reference to it he says basically if you contradict the official narrative on Churchill you're pretty much put in prison you're cast out Etc now David Irving has never recovered um from from his theories about the Holocaust but I imagine what Carlson is saying is that how can we be sure we're really getting the facts here of those who demer from what I imagine he calls The Establishment narrative are treated in the way that David R was treated you get your book published um you get uh look at T Ali who brought out a book saying how terrible Churchill was uh which you kindly allowed me to review in The Spectator Jeffrey weof did the same thing as well um the idea that you're silenced is rubbish you you you sell books the fact is you don't sell that many books because certainly nothing like as many as the half million um copies that I've sold of church or Walking With Destiny because the books are full of hyperbole exaggeration and uh and um bad facts no You' sold half a million books as you say and that of course isn't just about the past is it there is something about the church who'll debate aspects of his character aspects of his career his long life very many examples when people look pick up a history book they are thinking about today conundrums they are of course they are and they're and they're right to because a lot of what Winston Churchill warned about still exists um and and that is one area where I do agree with Tucker Carlson um which is that of course it's impossible to look at things like um Putin's invasion of Ukraine um The Invasion by a totalitarian power against an unprovoked invasion against a democracy a neighboring democracy without having a few um Sparks of memory um that uh that are are lit in one's mind about places like Czechoslovakia and and Belgium and Denmark and and Norway and so on so of course there are historical Echoes there but what um Carlson and Cooper do is to squeeze their um their beliefs their prutin beliefs in in in this case which had already been established pretty well by Tucker Carlson um into the past and to um and to sort of force their present day ideological beliefs um into a um a view of the past which the historic hisorical facts just simply don't um don't permit so what space is there then for revisionism in the Second World War I mean we're going to be looking I guess darl Cooper's point was you are going to be asking more difficult questions now you could I mean to talk about the Holocaust is incredibly difficult but there even if you look at what her Hannah rent wrote in her contemporaneous report she caused a huge uproar at the time simply by saying if you look at if you look at the architects of the Holocaust they weren't terribly evil they were just banale bureaucrats every body just got hu hugely costic reaction which is a very which is a was um at the time as you say a uh hugely controversial thing but I think it's much more controversial to do what Cooper and uh and um Carlson do which is to ignore the holocauster together they don't mention it right in a in a in a discussion in a two-hour discussion on the second world war now what does that tell you and could it be though that we the second world war is an analogy we reach for too often that everybody's familiar with it of course we're not familiar I mean you've written You' BR Salsbury for example is excellent though I don't think half manyon people have bought that I mean could it be simply because we we are over indow with knowledge about analogies of second world war and that sometimes we wrongly place them on today's situation so we take it for granted that if we don't stop Putin in Ukraine he's going to come for the Baltic states I mean maybe that is simply an incorrect muscle memory maybe it is and uh also one has to remember um that the seers for for example in 1956 um Anthony Eden um thought of General nassa the um the the president of Egypt as another musolini and so you can't which he wasn't um he was an Arab Nationalist and so on but but he wasn't a uh a sort of um musolini figure and so it has been possible in the past to um make everybody into Hitler um and of course that by the way I think is also and you get that in the interview something that Daryl Cooper and uh taker Carlson are wanting to do with regard to the um to the Iraq War and the Afghanistan um War to to to make this point that not everybody is uh is Hitler um but overall there are enough uh historical Echoes to um make one fear that were Putin to be victorious in Ukraine he would not stop there and uh his own essay for example that he wrote uh one should listen to dictators one should read what they say one shouldn't ignore them and think that they're they're automatically um uh exaggerating look at Stalin for example and the things he said and then went on to do um and you get this uh this very strong sense I think with Putin that if he writes a 6500w article in which Lithuania is mentioned the article is actually ostensively about um on the historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples but he mentions Lithuania 17 times in that article then I think it's perfectly legitimate to wonder whether or not Lithuania would be in his sights after a victory in Ukraine which is another reason why he shouldn't be allowed to win in Ukraine final question and Primo Levy was famously haunted with the idea that eventually enough time would pass and people wouldn't care about the Holocaust the memories would fade um and that when people talk about the plight of the Jewish people there would come a point where that wasn't your parents wasn't even even your grandparents it's just simply not in the memory anymore and that creates a space for history to repeat do you think we're getting to that stage now when you look at opinion polls asking young people for example if they believe in in freedom of speech a lot of them don't anymore we can see a waning of liberal values and in many cases in many spheres whether it's in Social media and other is a kind of Rise of what you might call I don't know a liberal conservatism or the new barbarism actually as it's been called with relation to this very uh interview the the the um Cooper um yes I it does it does worry me um the late historian and a friend of mine John lucash uh in a book called The Hitler of History said that he was very concerned that um that Hitler would start to be seen as another Dian as a defender of an old order um and that's a um that is a a serious Wonder worry and what one needs to do it strikes me is to go back to the uh original values that um Winston churcher wanted to defend and to read um to learn the actual facts uh to uh debate and and discuss like uh like we're doing um and Mr Cooper says he's not willing to do um and to realize again that again and again um all of these things that we believe in have to be argued for and fought for because they don't come naturally and if there is a going to be a new barbarism a new kind of Dark Age um such as Winston Churchill warned against in his great 18th of June 1940 speech then the important thing is that we should be intellectually armed um as uh as much as we needed in the 1930s to be physically militarily armed Andrew robers thank you so much for taking that fight to us today on spectator TV [Music]