2999 Words

Last month Tucker Carlson had chemistry professor David Collum on his podcast to discuss Collum’s original takes on a host of topics. These include the Hunter Biden laptop, the origin of COVID, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the Diddy Trial, Q-Anon, and many others. A fascinating discussion. Fairly soon, however, a theme emerged—all is not as it seems, and if you dig deeper you’ll likely find cynical actors doing nasty things in the name of some ideal. A pretty safe bet, it would seem. Then, in the middle of the interview, after an amusing anecdote about bass fishing, the pair briefly ventured into the ultimate taboo, World War II (~1:04)

COLLUM: Well, you know, now, first of all what is the truth right? The truth is now becoming very ambiguous. Last year I wrote about the history of World War II. I did a mini Daryl Cooper.[1]

CARLSON: Yes.

COLLUM: And it started when I read a book by Diana West[2], who would be good if you interviewed her. And it was a revisionist history of World War II. And you go, “Well, why would you want to read that?” Well, it turns out I think the story we got about World War II is all wrong.

CARLSON: Actually, I think that’s right.

COLLUM: And then I read about FDR and FDR’s right-hand man was a Soviet spy.[3]

CARLSON: Certainly was. Confirmed, confirmed, by the way.

COLLUM: One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin. Patton said that. And maybe there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust, right? But Stalin was awful by any metric and we weren’t his ally. The story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War II in Russian territory.

CARLSON: No!

COLLUM: 15 to 20,000 were missing and we left them there. And then you read about Pearl Harbor. We all sort of know the Pearl Harbor story’s not what we’re told. But I dug into that, and you find out that we knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor was going to get attacked. Stalin knew it was going to be attacked. He wanted us to take the Japanese off his flank. And FDR’s right-hand man was okay with that because he was a Soviet spy, right?

By refusing to demonize Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Collum enters the sometimes murky and always dangerous territory of Second World War revisionism. As the traditional narrative justifying America’s role in it grows ever shakier, Collum asks whether America should have sided with Hitler rather than Stalin. Not only have we uncovered historical evidence which counters this narrative, but Collum seems to imply that the Nazis were in higher moral ground than the Soviets. And this comes while the West begins to succumb to forces the Nazis would never have tolerated, namely, cultural Marzism, mass-immigration, and Islam.

In response to Collum’s broad-brush analysis, historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a fine-point rebuttal. Only, he fails to answer Collum’s main question directly. Hanson seems to assume that if he can refute the four points which Collum offhandedly produces to bolster his argument, he can discredit the question entirely. (Here he discusses the topic at greater length.)

This is a false assumption. First, there could have been more to the story. Collum and Carlson spent less than two minutes discussing the Second World War, while Hanson, in his Daily Signal piece, refutes it in seven (seventeen in the longer video linked above). Clearly Collum wasn’t prepared to revise the war on Carlson’s show, and likely would have shored up his arguments in a more formal setting. Perhaps a more fair-minded response from Hanson would have been either to read what Collum has already written on the subject before commenting, or invite him on his show to discuss it further. Unfortunately, he did neither. Second, VDH does not offer affirmative reasons why America should have sided with Stalin rather than Hitler. Instead, he nitpicks the bark off the trees, while missing the forest entirely. Finally, by casually mentioning that Stalin was a “monster” who had “killed twenty million people” before the war, Hanson invalidates his own position and doesn’t seem to realize it.

Hanson:

Number one, he said the Soviets had killed 15 to 20,000 POWs when they inherited them after freeing the American POWS from German prisoner of war camps in the east. That’s not true. There was a joint Soviet American commission. There were agreements that the Soviets would return American prisoners. There were disagreements about whether the allies would return Russian prisoners to Russia because some of them had been captured fighting, most of them, for Germany. And Stalin wanted to kill them or work them to death, and they wanted asylum. But other than that, eventually most of the Americans found their way back to Allied lines and were repatriated. Were there some that we don’t know about today? Yes. But over a four-year period, there were a lot of Americans that were captured and held in German prisoner war camps, were shot on the battlefield, were blown—We didn’t know what happened to them. But the idea that we would allow 15 to 20,000 American POWS in Russian hands to die is not true. It can’t be substantiated.

First of all, since all this happened well after the war started, it has little bearing on the comparative moral status of the belligerents in 1939, which, presumably, would have helped the United States determine a side to favor. So it’s a bit of a red herring. In any event, after Stalin’s atrocities in the 1920s and 1930s, 20,000 unaccounted Allied POWs is a drop in the bucket (0.1%). Still, by dismissing Collum’s claim that the US abandoned so many POWs, VDH runs into the research of James Sanders in his 1992 work Soldiers of Misfortune. Subtitle: “Washington’s Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union.” Also standing in his way is John M.G. Brown who, in a 1990 Veteran Views article, stated that Stalin used tens of thousands of Allied POWs as pawns to blackmail the Allies into returning millions of captured Soviets for him to kill or enslave. Brown reports that while some Allied POWs were returned, “Stalin reneged on full reciprocation and most of the Allied POWs disappeared into secret, special camps.” To save face, the Allies then scaled down the number of soldiers lost to the Soviets.

I’m sure Hanson is aware of these sources, which were possibly also Collum’s. In any event, either Hanson is right, or Sanders and Brown are. There is no middle ground. If it’s the former, then Hanson needs to state categorically that the work of Sanders and Brown have been debunked since their publication dates. But even if he could do that, it does not refute Collum’s main thesis that Stalin was worse than Hitler. After all, Stalin was cold-blooded enough to hold tens of thousands of his allies hostage in order to murder a much larger number of expat or captured Russians after the war ended— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn places it at over 1.5 million in his 1975 volume Warning to the West. Doesn’t such grotesque behavior make Stalin worse than Hitler, who at least waited until war was declared before doing his killing?

VDH then takes on Collum’s claim that General George Patton believed that America “should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Here he sets up a strawman and slaps it down. As pro-consul of Bavaria, Patton was not above enlisting former Nazis—rehabilitated or not—to help administer the region since postwar conditions were dire and manpower limited.

Hanson explains:

That led to further statements, he said, as the Red Army violated the Yalta agreements and the Potsdam agreements and did not hold free elections or free communications and transportation and intercourse between occupied Russian territory and occupied Allied territory. A new proto-, I guess you would call it, a proto-iron curtain had already emerged. And Patton at one point said to Eisenhower and others, “I know we’re going to be in a war cold or hot with the Soviet Union and we’re here. Let’s not go back to the United States. Let’s confront them militarily to make them honor their agreements, and if we don’t have the manpower, the wherewithal . . . ”—Russia had 500 divisions; the allies had about 200— “. . . we can always use veterans from the German army.” That’s about as close to lunacy as he said. It was an unfortunate remark, but he didn’t say while Hitler was alive, we should have joined the Nazis to fight Stalin.

VDH fails to note that Collum’s claim about Patton implies looking back in time. According to Collum, it seems, Patton felt this way after the war ended, and not while the Wehrmacht was raining down lethal fire upon his beloved Third Army. So VDH’s possibly true claim that Patton never said such outlandish things “while Hitler was alive” is a completely useless point. Sophistry, if you will.

Further, it flies in the face of evidence revealing that Patton did say after the war that the US had fought the wrong enemy. If not, then Hanson must contend with research and reminiscences by Anthony Cave Brown in his 1975 work Bodyguard of Lies Volume II, Phillip Coleman in his 1987 work Cannon Fodder: Growing up for Vietnam, and Betty South in her 1953 National Guardsman article “We Called Him Uncle Georgie,” all of which cite how Patton stated that the US had faced the wrong enemy all along.

Finally, why was the remark unfortunate? Because it put General Eisenhower in the hot seat? Because it offended the “monster” Josef Stalin? Because it caused Patton to be sacked from Third Army command? Eighty years after the fact, are these really good reasons? Were they ever? This would be like calling Galileo’s claims of planetary motion “unfortunate” because they put him under house arrest by the Pope. The only good reason to consider Patton’s remark unfortunate today would be if they were wrong. And VDH has yet to prove that they were.

Although Hanson does not list this as one of Collum’s three main points, in the longer piece I link above he also addresses Colllum’s claim that the Pearl Harbor attack was a set up. Basically, President Roosevelt wanted to enter the war against Germany and did everything he could to provoke the militaristic Japan, Germany’s ally, into attacking US forces which were conveniently placed at Pearl Harbor. Hanson respects this position up to a point, but doesn’t seem to realize that he respects it enough to validate Collum.

I do know that FDR ordered in May of 1940, Admiral Richardson, the head of the Seventh Fleet, to move the base in San Diego all the way to Pearl Harbor. And he said, “I’m putting my head in a noose. The Seventh Fleet is not able to deter the Japanese Imperial Fleet in the Pacific. If you put me way out in the middle of nowhere in Hawaii, I will not have the infrastructure, the air support that I would have in San Diego.” And he kept complaining and they relieved him. Then Admiral Kimmel took over and he was relieved of command. I think 3 weeks afterwards, he was the fall guy. And out of that came a conspiracy that Roosevelt was doing anything he could to provoke the Japanese with sanctions, putting us out very vulnerable so we would be attacked. There may be some truth to that, but the idea that there’s a big untold story of Pearl Harbor is not true. We pretty much know that Roosevelt wanted to get in the war sooner or later. He felt that Europe would fall and he underestimated the ability of the Japanese to harm the US Navy, but he didn’t plan to have Pearl Harbor attacked.

This seems like a distinction without a difference. How could there be “some truth” to this conspiracy, but not enough to validate Collum’s claim that “the Pearl Harbor story’s not what we’re told?” Also, if FDR really “underestimated the ability of the Japanese to harm the US Navy” wouldn’t that support the idea that he deliberately made the Pacific fleet vulnerable to an attack by a not-so-harmful enemy? Unfortunately, Hanson does not bring up evidence discovered by Robert Stinnett in his 1999 work Day of Deceit which all but proves that FDR wanted Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. This evidence includes:

1. The Eight-Point McCollum Memorandum, written in October 1940, which outlines the strategy the US employed during the 14-month lead up to the attack;
2. The sophistication of US cryptoanalysis, which had broken Japanese codes and reveals that US forces knew the attack was coming and did nothing to stop it;
3. The fact that Kimmel had been kept in the dark regarding this cryptoanalysis;
4. The myth of Japanese “radio silence” as their ships sailed towards Pearl Harbor;
5. There is also all the suspicious secrecy which still surrounds the Pearl Harbor attack, such as logs and encrypted messages which have disappeared from the National Archives.

Hanson’s strongest point comes in response to Collum’s weakest claim—that maybe the Jewish Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the US had sided with Germany. In staking this claim so delicately, I’m sure Collum would be the first to switch that “maybe” into a “maybe not.” Regardless, Hanson delves into German anti-Jewish atrocities which he says commenced on the very day of the invasion of Poland in 1939, and then suggests that the industrialized Jewish Holocaust would have happened one way or the other. Maybe that’s true. That the Germans killed large numbers of Jews during the war—perhaps up to the high end of four million as cited by David Cole in this 2013 Guardian article—won’t be contested here. At the time, Eastern European Jews (or Ostjuden) were notorious for their left-wing radicalism. Any Jew captured in enemy territory would have been more likely than anyone else to cause problems for the Reich as partisans. And this says nothing of all the atrocities that Soviet Jews had committed during the interwar period, which the Nazis were fully aware of and rightly feared.

Since the Nazis were in effect fighting Ragnarök against an evil enemy in the Soviets, as well as deceitful ones in the United States (according to Stinnett) and England (according to David Hoggan in his 1961 work The Forced War) they had little reason to keep Jews around once they got their mitts on them. Cruel? Yes. And did a goodly number of Germans overdo it on the cruelty? I’m sure they did. But VDH has his work cut out for him persuading us that Hitler deserved to be America’s enemy more than Stalin when Stalin with his twenty million victims had been worse on the Russians than Hitler was. According to numbers compiled by Louis Rapoport in his 1990 work Stalin’s War Against the Jews, Stalin may even have approached Hitler’s numbers when it came to killing Jews.

Hanson also does not step far enough into Collum’s thought experiment. Yes, it is absurd that FDR and his disproportionately Jewish Brain Trust would have sided with the anti-Semitic Hitler against the disproportionately Jewish-led Soviet Union. But if, in Bizarro world, this had happened, the star-spangled Axis would have smashed the Anglo-Soviet alliance in less than a year. As such, the Germans, now on the winning side, would have had less reason to commit such a cruel and desperate act as the Jewish Holocaust, and, more importantly, less time. So Collum is on firm ground proposing the Jewish Holocaust as it known today might have not happened had FDR plopped for the Axis, despite Hanson’s presentation of Germany’s violent anti-Semitic bona fides.[4]

Most importantly, Hanson neglects to recognize how he himself immolates his own argument. By August 1939, Stalin had killed twenty million people during peacetime, whereas the Nazis had bumped off a microscopic fraction of that. Further, all Nazi atrocities occurred during wartime, after the British and French had declared war on them. Isn’t that enough to prove David Collum correct? If not, then what reason could there possibly have been for Roosevelt to see the Nazis as the more deserving enemy?

Despite Hanson’s best efforts, there isn’t one. Instead, he notes both astutely and regrettably a recent theme in Tucker Carlson’s podcasts, that “the Jews are at the problem of all these things.”

Victor Davis Hanson may be wrong in his assessment of David Collum, but he is certainly right about that.

[1] “[M]ini-Darryl Cooper,” refers to Tucker Carlson’s 2024 interview with podcaster and historian Darryl Cooper, who shares much of Collum’s Second World War skepticism. The internet pretty much exploded as a result, with the Left denouncing Cooper as a Nazi apologist, and the mainstream Right—Hanson included—taking Cooper to task over the facts.

[2]The Diana West book Collum refers to refers to is American Betrayal, published in 2013. “Read her lively response to Collum here in which she rejects both Collum’s and Hanson’s characterizations of her work.

[3]The “right-hand man” of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been his advisor Harry Hopkins, whom historian Sean McMeekin claims in chapter 29 of his 2021 work Stalin’s War had passed American nuclear secrets and fissile material to his Soviet spymasters as part of the Lend-Lease program. More likely, however, the Soviet mole in the White House was the Jewish Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, whom McMeekin bluntly describes as an “NKVD asset.” Former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers said as much in chapter ten of his famous 1952 work Witness.

[4] Surprisingly, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir shared a similar opinion, as revealed by Gordon Thomas in his 1999 history of the Mossad Gideon’s Spies. Shamir felt a rapprochement between Roosevelt and Hitler would have allowed Hitler to complete his repatriation of Jews to Palestine as part of his “Transfer Agreement,” thus preventing the Jewish Holocaust from ever happening.

Modern Western culture has little in common with the pre-1960s West. The values which pertained in Western Europe up to the 1960s were based around the traditional family, with homosexuality and abortion being taboo and/ or illegal. This contrasts with the relatively recent obsession with the promotion of homosexuality, abortion, and transgenderism. Additionally, when the European Convention of Human Rights was written in 1950, capital punishment was considered consistent with human rights, though now it is not.

It was in the 1960s that Western countries began moving away from their traditional values and towards their present decadence. This entailed the cultural dominance of pop and rock music, and the decriminalisation of sodomy, abortion, pornography, and prostitution. A Westerner from the 1950s would recognise their values today in the societies of Hungary or Poland more so than in a Western European country.

From the death of Stalin, the whole of Eastern Europe, which had been oppressed under his totalitarian rule, began to proceed towards the ideals of dignified persons within a family and within the Nation-State. This has been a long, slow process which has led to the present situation whereby the countries of Eastern Europe somewhat resemble the societies of Westen Europe from before the 1960s. They are ethno-states which oppose mass migration, and which are opposed to the LGBT agenda.

Following the death of Stalin, popular discontent in Hungary forced the removal of Matthias Rakosi, and while the Hungarian Revolution failed, it demonstrated the desire of Hungarians for liberation. The Prague Spring was also popularly supported, and its ideals lived on with the Charter 77 movement which criticised the Czechoslovak government. Mikhail Gorbachev stated that his Glasnost policy was predicated on the policies of the Prague Spring, while the Polish Solidarity movement was successful in ending Communism in Poland.

The mutual transformation of Western and Eastern societies was described in the commencement speech that Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard University in 1978 in which he outlined how Western culture had already by then reached a state that he could not recommend for Russia. This author’s article intersperses Solzhenitsyn’s speech within the text in italics.

Changing Consciousnesses

Under Stalin, and to a lesser extent until the end of the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc was oppressed by Communism which “spiritually trained” those populations, as Solzhenitsyn stated at Harvard:

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time, we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points.

This domination by Communism strengthened the resolve in the peoples of the Eastern bloc, which spurred the end of Communism; and since when, there has been no impediment to the development of a more organic culture. By contrast, in the West, egoism became dominant from the 1960s, and as described by Solzhenitsyn:

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

East and West have now two completely distinct attitudes towards “same-sex marriage”; while in Western Europe there is largely cross-party support in favour of this, in Eastern Europe there is cross-party support against it. This demonstrates how Eastern and Western European politics occur on different planes of consciousnesses, given that on social issues Polish liberals are to the right of Swedish conservatives, and Dutch conservatives are to the left of Hungarian liberals. It is the Eastern attitude which is organic whereas the Western attitude is symptomatic of a very modern decadence.

Execution and Abortion: A Western Inversion

Another illustration of this can be seen in regard to Western attitudes to execution and abortion. That the law regarding abortion and capital punishment changed around the same time in certain countries demonstrates how internally logical these issues are. In Britain, the last execution took place in 1965 while abortion became legal in 1967. In France, the law introducing abortion came into force in 1975 while the last execution took place in 1977. In the Unites States this can be seen by contrasting Roe v Wade with Furman v Georgia and Gregg v Georgia.

In Roe (1973), the Supreme Court found that there was a constitutional right to abortion, while in Furman (1972) execution was found to be unconstitutional due to inconsistent application; though this was then overturned in Gregg (1977) which found that execution was in general constitutional. In Roe, the two dissenting judges— Justices White and Rehnquist — were in the majority in Gregg, while the two dissenters in Gregg- Justices Brennan and Marshall — were in the majority in Roe.

In Gregg, Brennan stated that “The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person’s humanity […] An executed person has indeed ‘lost the right to have rights.'” Brennan did not reason thusly in Roe with regard to unborn babies but then as described here, being pro-abortion and anti-execution are logically correlated.

Thus, from the 1960s to 1990s both East and West displayed different forms of egoism:

…boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The transformation of Western and Eastern consciousnesses had occurred to such an extent by 1978 that Solzhenitsyn found that the West was not an attractive alternative:

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

Into The West

The reburial of Imre Nagy in 1989 at which Viktor Orban gave a speech demonstrates the continuity between Nagy and Orban. In Poland the two main parties, Law and Justice and Civic Platform, are descended from the anti-Communist Solidarity movement. In fact, Viktor Orban, Robert Fico, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Călin Georgescu are the heirs of Imre Nagy, Alexander Dubcek, Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, and Solzhenitsyn. It is therefore clear that since the 1990s Eastern Europe possesses family values in contrast to the permissive values of the modern West; this is the opposite of the nature of these societies before the 1960s.

It could be asked whether rising affluence in Eastern Europe could bring an end to their current cultures. This likely will not happen due to another factor unless there is an upsurge in Jewish influence. In the West, Jews have been at the forefront of making and promoting pornography and other degenerate media culture, and they are a pillar of the cultural left generally. Not coincidentally, the rise to political and cultural power of the Jews in the West, after increasing gradually throughout the twentieth century, surged after World War II, reaching a dominant position in the 1960s — exactly the period during which the dramatic changes alluded to above occurred throughout the West, and in addition saw the beginnings of replacement-level immigration of non-Europeans into the West, exemplified by the 1965 immigration law in the United States.