I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know what I'm getting myself into. And it seems like whenever I say that, it turns out to be right.
I know for the last couple of weeks we've all been talking about this big blow-up history thing deal that happened on Tucker Carlson's podcast with this guy Daryl Cooper who claimed that Winston Churchill was not only a villain but the chief villain of the Second World War. I've participated in the chat with my friend JD on the History Underground that he had, kind of watched it along with a lot of you and was in the chat room talking to people and saw Saw some of people's opinions on that. And I've seen some of the reports about this, but I haven't actually watched it yet.
So this is not the full video. This is the kind of truncated version. It's about 12 minutes long. It looks like it kind of takes some of the highlights from the full video and condenses it down.
So haven't seen it yet. Don't fully know what to expect other than what I've seen other people talk about. But we're going to dive into this.
I'll put the link down in the description to the original video so you can watch it without my. my commentary and it itself then has in its description the link to the full conversation but i'm just going to watch and respond listen i'm no expert on winston churchill World War II history is not even kind of one of my areas where I consider myself an expert. But I feel like from everything I've read, I might know just a hair more than the guy in this video.
But let's see. Let's dive in. I'm not English, so I don't have any weird motive in asking this, but how would you assess Winston Churchill?
I got in trouble with my podcast partner, Jocko Willink, one time because he's a New England Dutchman. His family. it's near and dear to their dutch but very near and dear to their heart that winston churchill is a hero right everyone everyone thinks that he really thinks that and i told him that i think and maybe i'm being a little little hyperbolic maybe maybe 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 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.
Other than an invasion of Poland? Are we just going to ignore everything that happened before that? The Anschluss of Austria, the taking of the Sudetenland, the gobbling up of the rest of Czechoslovakia, remilitarizing the Rhineland.
gosh, what? We're going to say that it was just an invasion of Poland, no big deal, and we're going to act like Churchill is more responsible for that war than the regime in Germany? How can you even start...
start to think that without oh all right let's go or just i mean at every step of the way like people are very often i find surprised to learn there's a two-step process why don't you just make the case make the case for that okay so all right so first of all let's just say this because one of the things i keep seeing people in comment sections of videos like on jd's live stream about this is that it feels like people people want to peel the layers back and say hey hey, Winston Churchill was not necessarily a hero. And you know what? And they said, but we should do that with everybody.
And that's absolutely true. There's no person in history who is a perfect hero, who doesn't have flaws and dark areas, and some have more than others. And absolutely, Winston Churchill is not a perfect person. And there are plenty of things to criticize him for, just as we can criticize any other leader from any other time.
But to completely spin it all the way to the other side and say he's not only not a hero, he's the villain. Come on. You've made your statement.
A lot of people are thinking, well, wait a second. You said Churchill, my childhood hero, the guy with the cigar. Yeah.
Well, in the next thought that comes into their head, he's saying is that, oh, you're saying Churchill was the chief villain. And therefore his enemies, you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth were. Stalin.
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.
No, you're saying that he's more of a villain than Stalin and Hitler. Just let that sink in for a minute. More of a villain than them. You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is 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. Did he just say that?
It was just kind of, oops, like they had a war and they had all these prisoners and some of them died. The Holocaust wasn't intentional. All these millions of people didn't die because of an intentional choice.
Because guess what? Most of the captured soldiers from the UK and France and the United States did not end up dead because they had not a plan to deal with them. But that happened by the millions with Soviet prisoners.
It wasn't an accident. It wasn't an, oh my gosh, what do we do with all these people? It was an intentional choice by that regime because they saw Bolsheviks, Communists, Soviets, Russians. They saw them as every bit as detestable.
And subhuman as they saw Jews and other people. Wow. Wow. We're two minutes in and I'm already flabbergasted by this guy's logic. 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 are surrendering or people they're rounding up and they're so it's two months after a month or two after barbarosha 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 Just finish them off quickly now. Listen, I know he's not intentionally saying it this way, but the implication of what he's saying right now is that the mass extermination of millions of Russians and other Soviet soldiers in camps was an act of mercy. Then why didn't they do that with the British soldiers that they were holding and the Americans that they would hold later on? And so this is like two months into the invasion, right?
And Tucker Carlson's not even challenging any of this. He's just letting him say it. View on this?
You know, I argue with my Zionist 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 invade to the east maybe you thought that stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized 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 all right, time out. All right. So I wanted to look up a few things just to have some facts and figures in front of me. And it looks like somewhere around three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German custody. They weren't put in gas chambers.
They weren't shot. by the millions, though many of them were shot, most of them died from exposure and starvation. So this argument he's making that it was mercy killing is ridiculous because that's not how they died. They died of starvation. Also, the German government came right out and said, we are not obligated to protect Soviet prisoners of war because the Soviet Union did not sign the Geneva Conventions.
Therefore, we'll honor it with the other countries, but we are under no obligation to offer protected status. us to these prisoners of war. They acknowledged that up front. They didn't try to pretend that all we couldn't feed them. They themselves said, we're going to let them die.
We're going to use them as forced labor. We're going to use them as slave labor until they die of exposure or starvation because they don't deserve protection. So you're making an argument that not even Germany themselves made. Millions of people died because of that, right? And you can look at it and say, like, um...
You know, there is. Well, yeah. So get back to your like your main question about Churchill. You know, if you go to 1939, when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland, as soon. as that war's wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain, France, because they had already declared...
Well, yeah, because he got what he wanted. He didn't want to go to war with all of them, because he was preparing for the next war, which was going to be the Soviet Union. If he could have...
Void fighting France and Britain. He was all for that. This wasn't an attempt at peace.
This was an attempt to get out of having to fight them. Declared war. He didn't expect them to declare war, actually. That's true.
There's a famous scene where he kind of throws a fit when he finds out that they actually did do it. that and so he surprised surprise they upheld their treaty obligations they were in a defensive treaty with poland that if germany invaded poland in an aggressive war they would declare war on germany and they did he doesn't want to fight france he doesn't want to fight britain he feels that's going to weaken europe um when we've got this huge threat to the east the communist threat over there you And he starts firing off peace proposals, says, let's not do this. Like, we can't do this. And of course, you know, year goes by, 1940 comes around and they're still at war. And so he launches his invasion to the West, takes over France, takes over.
And of course, I mean. I mean, like, because Churchill and the French and the English, they didn't give him any choice, right? I mean, he had to invade the West because at this point, what else is he going to do?
The evil Churchill didn't accept his peace proposal, even though he literally launched... Launches his invasion of the West the day that Churchill becomes prime minister. Western and northern Europe.
Once that's done, the British have, you know, escaped at Dunkirk. There's no British force left on the continent. There's no opposing force left on the continent.
In other words, the war is over. No, it's not. The Germans won.
The war is not over. They didn't win. Okay.
But by what point? Fall of 1940, right? So.
So there's just there's literally no opposing force on the on the continent. Yeah. So everybody should just give in and let Hitler win. Right. So he's arguing.
And throughout that summer. Hitler is firing off radio broadcasts, giving speeches, literally sending planes over to drop leaflets over London and other British cities, trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you. He was such a peaceful guy. He tried everything to not fight the British. But evil dictator, evil villain, chief villain of World War II, Winston Churchill, wouldn't accept peace.
We don't want to fight you. Offering peace proposals that... I don't know if he ever actually said it, but in the movie version of Winston Churchill, he said, you don't negotiate with a lion when your head it's in its mouth. That's true.
You know, it said, you keep all your overseas colonies. We don't want any of that. We want Britain to be strong. world needs britain to be strong what a guy what a guy and so forth like this this what's going on and i think that if there were people in britain who uh well if they hadn't put it this way if they hadn't been so successful at delegitimizing uh the peace approach by demonizing neville chamberlain and so forth demonizing neville chamberlain he walked around saying peace in our time and no sooner had he said it than the things that he said he negotiated were lost Come on, are you kidding me? They delegitimized Chamberlain's peace proposal.
Come on. And holding him responsible for the invasion of Poland. Well, yeah, it was appeasement. People would have been, they would have understood. Like, we don't need another.
A repeat of the First World War. You're right. We should have just let Hitler have the continent, let him massacre millions of people, let him have Aryan domination, let him take care of the Soviet threat, and the world will be a wonderful place, right? Okay, so before we go any further, I want to back up a little bit and cover some of the stuff he's been talking about, particularly this idea that Germany wanted peace and didn't really want to fight against France and Britain and really had no plans and did everything they could to avoid it.
including dropping leaflets and things like that. First of all, that ignores the Blitz, which was going on in the summer of 1940, which was bombing of the British towns and cities. It was an air war against the British home front, but also against their navy. And it also ignores the plans that Hitler himself gave in his directives to his army. So I want to start with...
His Fuhrer Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War. And this was issued on the 31st of August 1939, the day before the invasion of Poland. So there's a lot here, but among other things, he's covering the distinct likelihood of war against France and Britain, which he knows is quite possible.
So one of the things he says here, No. 3, is in the West... it is important to leave the responsibility for opening hostilities unmistakably to England and France. So he's anticipating that... There's going to be fighting, but we need to make it look like they started it. So that's one part.
But then he also talks about, he says, defensive activity of the Air Force will be restricted for the time being to the firm repulse of enemy air attacks on the frontiers of the Reich. In taking action against individual aircraft or small formations, care will be taken to respect the frontiers of neutral countries as far as possible. Only if considerable forces of French or British bombers are employed against German territory across neutral areas will the Air Force be permitted to go into defensive action over neutral soil. So he hasn't declared war on Holland, on the Netherlands, on Belgium yet. And so he says, should England and France open hostilities against Germany, it will be the duty of the armed forces operating in the West while conserving their strength as much as possible to main conditions for the successful conclusion of operations against Germany.
It's Poland. Hold off the West while we finish off Poland. Then we'll deal with them.
So then he goes on then near the bottom. I want to read this. Attacks on the English homeland are to be prepared, bearing in mind the inconclusive results with insufficient forces are to be avoided in all circumstances. He also says operations against England, the task of the air force is to take measures to dislocate English imports, the armaments industry, the transport of troops to France.
any favorable opportunity of an effective attack on concentrated units of the English Navy, particularly battleships or aircraft carriers, will be exploited. So what he's saying is, he's not saying, let's avoid fighting the British. He's like, no, our primary goal right now is Poland, but if you see an opportunity against the British, take it. And don't let them bring any troops to France.
Fight them. Take out their ports. Go after their imports. Go after their battleships.
This is not the work of someone who... who was trying to avoid war with the British at all costs. This is someone who is accounting for all possibilities.
But what I really want to look at is directive number six. So this is October 1939. This is a month after the invasion of Poland. This is November, December, January, February, March, April, May. Seven months before Winston Churchill becomes prime minister. At this point, Churchill is first lord of the admiralty.
He takes over that job a couple of days after the invasion of Poland. So this is directive number six. Tell me if this sounds to you like somebody who's avoiding war with Britain and is trying at all costs to make peace with the British. Should it become evident in the near future that England and under her influence France also are not disposed to bring the war to an end, I have decided without further loss of time to go over to the offensive. Any further delay will not only entail the end of Belgian and perhaps of Dutch neutrality to the advantage of the Allies.
It will also increasingly strengthen the military power of the enemy, reduce the confidence of neutral nations in Germany's final victory, and make it more difficult to bring Italy into the war on our side as a full ally. Therefore, I issue the following orders for further conduct of military operations. An offensive will be planned on the northern flank of the Western Front through Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland.
This offensive must be launched at the earliest possible moment and in the greatest possible strength. The purpose of this offensive will be to defeat as much as possible of the French army and of the forces of the Allies fighting on their side, and at the same time to win as much territory as possible in Holland, Belgium, and northern France, to serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air and sea war against England, and as a wide protective area for the economically vital Ruhr Basin. And so he's talking about then the timing of this, and how we need to do it when we have the biggest advantage possible. The Air Force will prevent attacks by the Anglo-French Air Forces on our army and will give all necessary direct support to its advance.
The timing of it all will depend on the readiness for action of armored and motorized units involved. He's not saying we're trying to deal with peace and if that fails only then will we have to do this. No, he's saying let's make plans to do this at our earliest advantageous position. Apart from these preparations for the beginning of the offensive in the West according to plan, the army and air force must be ready at all times at increasing strength to meet Anglo-French invasion of Belgium immediately as far forward as possible on Belgian soil.
And so he says, these preparations will be camouflaged in such a way that they appear to be merely precautionary measures made necessary by the threatening increase in the strength of the French and English forces on the frontiers. So we're going to make it look like we're just protecting ourselves, but really we're preparing for an invasion. That does not sound like a guy who just wants peace. You know, we don't, which is not what ended up happening, but that's what everybody thought was going to happen. And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy, Churchill wanted a war.
He wanted to fight Germany. And the reason that I, I don't begrudge him that, you know. People can, national leaders, you can fight whoever you want. If, you know, if you feel like your long-term, the long-term interests of the British Empire are threatened by the rise of a powerful continental power like Germany, and you need to check that, those are great power games. It's not a power game.
They had a defensive agreement with Poland to protect the integrity of Poland as a country against German aggression. And they honored that agreement. Play them the way you feel like you need to play them.
That's fine. 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.
By 1940, Churchill didn't even become prime minister until May of 1940. And again, it happened at the same moment Germany was invading France and Belgium and the Netherlands. This was not something that was going on. After Churchill became prime minister. Bomber fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest just to burn down sections of the Black Forest.
Just rank terrorism, you know. It's not rank terrorism, it's war. Going through and starting to, you know, what eventually became just a carpet bombing, saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods. You know, to kill, the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible. So here's my question about that.
And I'm not arguing otherwise that. you know civilians didn't suffer terribly on this war and that there was a lot of bombing you know firebombing of dresden that happens late in the war for example but here's my question in an industrial and this is a question i'm not making an argument in an industrial war where your ability to To make aggressive war on other nations. Is dependent on your industry.
And the amount of tanks and planes. And other weapons that you can produce on a mass scale. In that scenario.
area who is a civilian because you can't make that war without the the hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians in these factories doing that and all the men were out in the field all the fighting age men were out in the field and so this is old people it's women and children and they knew that and they were wiping these places out it was gigantic scaled terrorist attacks agree and what was the german luftwaffe doing in the summer of 1940, if not bombing civilians. This, you know, scale of terrorist attacks you've ever seen in world history. Why would he do that? Because it was the only means that they had to continue fighting at the time. You know, they didn't have the ability to read.
So, the leader of a country that was at war used every means at his disposal to win the war. That's what he's saying. Invade Europe. And so he needed to keep this war going until he accomplished what is, you know, what he what he hoped to accomplish. We know now there's actually a really great series of books.
It's one of the best. I recommend to everybody, but it's really expensive now. It's six long volumes called History of British Special Operations in the Second World War.
And one of the books gets into the level of just the extent of media operations, propaganda operations, everything that they were running. running in the United States to eventually drag us into that war. Well, that makes total sense. And what was Germany doing at all this time, except also running media and propaganda operations?
He makes it sound like this stuff was happening in a vacuum and that all of the things that happened were Churchill's responsibility. That Churchill was the one who made Germany invade Poland. Take the Sudetenland. Take Czechoslovakia. Take Austria.
the deaths of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. Well, I mean, it was mercy killing, right? It was, what choice did he have?
And then he starts bombing Germany because he can't actually go in and defend their allies like France and Belgium. and the Netherlands and Poland with land troops because the British don't have a massive land army. And that was his whole plan.
His whole plan was we don't have a way to fight this war ourselves. This war is over. No. That's what you do. You're facing the tyranny of the Nazi regime over continental Europe.
And you know that things are happening there that need to be dealt with and that this menace of Germany needs to be rolled back. And you are desperate to bring in the big, you know, when you're facing a bully, you need to go get a bigger bully to deal with them. And of course he needed the United States.
Why are we making it sound like this was some evil act on the part of Churchill to get the United States? involved in this war. Franklin Roosevelt wanted the U.S. involved in the war too, but he was in a situation where the U.S. public sentiment was not as good as it was in the U.S. was against the war and so they weren't in a place yet to do that the soviet union or the united states to do it for us and that was the plan and kept the war going long enough for that plan to come to fruition and to me that's just it's a craven uh ugly way to to fight a war and what was the motive you this is insanity absolute and see that smile that smile betrays the fact that there's some conspiracy theories shooting around in this tiny pea-sized brain of his about why churchill would do this I guarantee you what he thought in that moment was it was the Jews, but he's not going to say that. Well, you know, Churchill's got a long, complicated history.
I mean, he's somebody who... That was the riest smile I think I've ever seen. Uh-huh.
Yeah. Say what you think. You've been doing it so far I think on one level There was a sense that Churchill was sort of humiliated By his performance in the first world war Wait so World war 2 happened because Churchill was humiliated by Gallipoli. Is that what we're saying here? Yeah.
He was the head of the Admiralty, and he was out in the cold for a long time. You mean Gallipoli. Yeah. And which, you know, that was his operation.
And so he was rightly held responsible for that and seen as responsible for one of the great disasters that the British suffered during that war. It continues to amaze me how we focus so much on Gallipoli. So, for example, Australia and New Zealand, obviously, and Zack Day is based on the... invasion of Gallipoli, which was a complete disaster. And yet, the Australians suffered as many casualties in the span of a few weeks at Posiers during the Somme offensive as they did in the entire nearly, I don't know, eight months or so of Gallipoli.
But we don't talk about that. The Somme was way bigger a disaster than Gallipoli was. And so I think part of it is probably kind of personal.
You know, he wanted redemption. He wanted to go out there and prove that he's the warlord. So what exactly is happening in the time between September 1939 and May 1940, when Churchill is not prime minister, that could indicate that Churchill...
was the one who kept this war going in order to get personal glory for himself. They can go out there and fight this big war, probably. Probably.
There you go. Can we just for a second acknowledge that it wasn't like Churchill was doing this all by himself either. The majority of his cabinet was in favor of continuing this war.
The sentiment of the British people was to stand and to be defiant and stand up against tyranny. It's not like Churchill all by himself. himself dragged britain kicking and screaming into war with germany part of it i like i read about churchill and he strikes me as a psychopath psychopath oh my gosh but he's also a sort of i mean he was a drunk he was very childish in strange ways people you're very childish talk about how as an adult like at you know as prime minister they'd find him in his room and he's like playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff and would get mad when people would uh would would interrupt him, you know, when he was doing this.
This is a strange, strange fellow, you know. There's all those things. It's not got to do with anything. But then you get into, you know, why was Winston Churchill such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on?
There you go. Remember I said a minute ago when he smiled and I said what was bouncing around in his mind was it was the Jews. And now he finally admits it.
That's what this is all about, is that at the end of the day, it's about the Jews. And that's all the answer you need as to where this guy's mind is. And there's ideological reasons.
Like in 1920, he wrote a kind of infamous now article called Zionism versus Bolshevism. And he basically makes the case that, which was true to a large extent, that all of Eastern... Europe, the Pale of Settlement, which is where the vast majority of Jews lived other than the United States, which is where a lot of them had traveled to, that area had become so engulfed by a revolutionary spirit that all the young, the rebellious Jews, it's their fault. My God, this guy is absolutely insane. He's dangerous is what he is.
Ashkenazi Jews who were over there were getting swept up into it. It was the 60s here on steroids. And in a much more serious and ended up being destructive way.
And this is 1920. So this is shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. Basically, the point of his paper is he says these people who are over there, they're all going one direction or the other. They're going to be Bolshevik. They're going to be Zionists.
We want them to be Zionists, you know, and so we need to support this. And so that was early on. 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, so to summarize, World War Two happened because Churchill was a psychopath who played with toy soldiers who needed revenge for what happened at Gallipoli, who was broke, who supported the Zionist Jews. And Hitler. was just trying to make peace and darn Churchill wouldn't let it happen and even drag the United States into his into his scheme as well in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility. Just just, you know, I think his just flash a white power sign.
No, I know he didn't. But 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 by people, the financiers.
There again, read Jews. They put him in power. The rich Jew.
Oh, it was the Rothschilds. They put Churchill in power. They're the ones responsible for this war. Yeah, that's it.
By a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who, you know, who was who was representing Britain in that conflict for the for a reason. When I read about this conversation having taken place. I thought I knew what I was prepared for, but it's way worse than I thought.
Listen, there are things you can legitimately criticize Winston Churchill for. There are some serious questions and serious discussions to be had about policy in India, for example. And how much culpability he has for that.
But he doesn't go about any of that. He goes on this tangent about all this other stuff that I've already kind of summarized. This is absolute insanity to me.
And if this guy has any... guts whatsoever and stands by any of the stuff that he just said, then I dare him to go up against someone with even a tiny bit of knowledge of World War II history and have this argument in a debate format and back it up. I'd love to see that.
I would pay to see that. There's no chance he'll do that. Let me know what you think. Keep it civil. Keep it on the facts.
Keep it on the discussions. We'll see you again soon. Thanks for watching.
Thank you.