The troubling rise of Hitler revisionism

The New Right wants to destigmatize bigotry, and it's bad

We had planned on running the post below for paid subscribers later in the week, with a trade deficit explainer today. But without overstating our knowledge of the specific motives or facts in play in the Passover arson attack on Governor Josh Shapiro’s house, this morning felt like the right time to send it to everyone. The Trump administration’s trade policies will still be chaotic and misinformed tomorrow, and probably forever.

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I’ve been reading Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries, and it’s striking how much anti-semitism there is in the early ones.

In Lord Edgware Dies, Poirot is talking about an actress and says, “She is shrewd and she is something more. You observed without doubt that she is Jewish?” His interlocutor reflects that, “I had not. But now that he mentioned it, I saw the faint traces of Semitic ancestry.” Poirot continues, “It makes for success — that. Though there is still one avenue of danger — since it is of danger we are talking.” What’s the danger? Well, Poirot explains, it’s a “love of money.”

In The Mystery of the Blue Train, Poirot is talking to a Greek gem merchant and says, “I believe that I am right in saying, Monsieur, that your race does not forget.”

“A Greek?” the merchant asks. “It was not as a Greek I meant,” Poirot replies, and the merchant clarifies, “You are right, Mr. Poirot … I am a Jew. And, as you say, our race does not forget.”

I’m an adult and a person of the world, so I’m not triggered or traumatized by this kind of thing, but I do find it jarring. And part of what’s especially jarring about it is that if you consider these works from the 1920s in the context of what was soon to happen in Europe, they’re really not hateful remarks as such. The idea that Jews have long memories isn’t a stereotype I’m familiar with — Poirot is saying that he’d expect a Jewish person to remember something that happened to him personally ten years ago, not remarking on long-standing cultural traditions — but Jews being successful is a well-known positive stereotype. Jews being greedy is less flattering. But this is very much not the eliminationist anti-semitism of the concentration camps or the conspiratorial anti-semitism that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Another one of her books, The Big Four, even briefly lampoons the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I read a bit more about this and learned that after World War II, Christie had her literary agent remove some of the anti-semitism from the older books.

She was, it seems, genuinely appalled by what had happened and no longer considered these little jokes funny or appropriate. Which I think lands us in the equilibrium that has dominated polite society for most of my lifetime, an equilibrium where I think most people are aware that it is factually true that Jewish Americans are more successful than average, but where you don’t say things like, “Well she’s Jewish so she’ll probably be successful.” You’re not supposed to say things that are hateful or mean or inaccurate, of course, but beyond that, you’re supposed to maintain a broad safety margin around overt stereotyping. Not because pre-war Poirot was talking like a Nazi, but because it was too close for comfort, given that the Nazis were so very bad.

And I think that these trends are why we’re suddenly seeing major media figures like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan so excited to do interviews with history podcaster Darryl Cooper, who’s offering a revisionist take on World War II.

The take itself is hardly new. It largely recapitulates arguments that Pat Buchanan made in his 2008 book “Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.” But when Buchanan’s book came out, it resulted in the final marginalization of a once-mainstream conservative figure who’d spent the prior decade becoming increasingly marginal. Today, it’s not just that Cooper’s shows are popular on their own terms, it’s that even more popular hosts want to promote him.

And I think this is less because we’re reconsidering the diplomatic moves of the 1930s and more because people on the right are reconsidering the wisdom of things like Christie’s revision of her own writing.

The ultimate evil

Back in 1992, Robert Harris published one of my favorite alternate history books, “Fatherland,” which is set in the 1960s at the height of a Cold War between the United States of America and a German-dominated Europe. The story itself is half detective plot and half spy thriller, but the idea is that the Nazis have not only successfully carried out the total elimination of European Jewry, but have also covered up the fact that this happened. Our heroes stumble onto the truth and are trying to expose it. The implicit premise is that this would be a really big deal, morally and geopolitically.

Which is to say that while Harris posits a certain structural similarity between America’s relationship with a victorious Nazi Germany and our real world relationship with the Soviet Union, he’s also drawing a distinction. You’re supposed to read Harris’s history and be glad that you’re living in the real timeline. The Soviet Union was bad, but Nazi Germany was a kind of ultimate evil, and the characters in that book are working to expose that evil.

Buchanan’s writing, fifteen years later, specifically contested this.

After the failure of the Munich Agreement, Britain and France drew a hard line in the sand around Poland. Hitler, full of hubris due to his earlier successes, marched on in. Britain and France went to war. Hitler overran Denmark and Norway to shore up the flanks of his nascent empire, and then he blitzkrieged through Belgium and the Netherlands into France, where he defeated the French army. At this point, France surrendered and Britain did not, and “everyone knows” that Churchill is a hero and that Britain stood alone during her finest hour, while Pétain and the leaders of Vichy France are villains. Buchanan says this does not make sense. The casus belli was the independence of Poland, and after many years of fighting and many deaths, Poland came under the Soviet yoke and was not independent at all. The British Empire was sacrificed for essentially nothing, to secure Soviet rather than German domination of Eastern and Central Europe.

The view Cooper articulates in his interviews is broadly similar. Trying to defend Poland might have been a defensible idea, but the British had no plan to achieve it. Rather than admitting defeat in a small, unwinnable war over Poland and achieving a modus vivendi with Hitler, Cooper alleges that Churchill greatly expanded the war, leading to much more death and destruction and, ultimately, no independent Poland.

Note that this revisionist critique operates on two separate but related levels:

1. You need to revise the moral judgment that the Nazis were a kind of ultimate evil against which even Stalin is a preferable ally.

2. You need to revise the pragmatic judgment Britain reached after Munich that no modus vivendi with Hitler was possible and that his promises were worthless.

These are distinct points. But in practice, they tend to run together. The fanaticism and brutality of the Holocaust works as a stand-in for the overall view that the Nazi regime was a transcendent evil with which no compromise was possible.

The postwar order

This idea that the Nazis were really bad became the cornerstone of the moral order that emerged in the late-1940s.

Christie reconsidered her own anti-semitism. Harry Truman risked the blowup of the Democratic Party coalition to desegregate the armed forces. Bigoted people and racist policies persisted long after the war, of course. But they were in steady retreat, especially in elite discourse. Truman’s desegregation order came in 1948. Brown v Board of Education was in 1954, followed by a Civil Rights Act in 1957 and then another one in 1960. The big Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Interracial marriage remained unpopular until the surprisingly recent past, but the Supreme Court tossed out miscegenation laws in 1967.

Notably, even though polling suggests that Reagan or Nixon could have made hay out of this alongside various other liberal Supreme Court rulings they criticized, they basically don’t.

It’s officially Not Okay to be racist anymore after World War II. A big part of the story of the (in retrospect minor and mostly forgotten) ’57 Civil Rights Act is that everyone felt Lyndon Johnson would not be acceptable as a presidential nominee if he were seen as a southern Jim Crow supporter. There’s a lot that’s controversial and complicated about how Jim Crow was dismantled, and it took a lot of work and activism to get northern whites to actually act on the issue. But dating back to well before the March on Washington, the writing was on the wall — nobody who wanted to be received in elite circles was prepared to explicitly defend segregation anymore.

And this is one of the big rules of post-war discourse.

It’s not that there are no racists or that nobody ever says or does anything motivated by racial prejudice. But nobody says they are a racist. This is a big change. When Karl Lueger was mayor of Vienna, he wasn’t engaged in anti-Jewish dog whistles — he was avowedly anti-semitic. That was his program. There were Ku Klux Klan delegates at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. By 1963, George Wallace is still saying, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” But this marks him out as fairly extreme, even among southern white politicians, and by the 1970s, everyone is backpedaling.

Words themselves have somewhat changed meaning as a result.

I completely understand what people mean when they say Donald Trump is racist, and I understand why they say it. It’s also true that he’s had Black cabinet secretaries in both of his administrations, which was a bridge too far for JFK. FDR wouldn’t endorse an anti-lynching bill, and Woodrow Wilson worked to increase the level of segregation in the federal civil service. You just don’t see anyone articulating a Wilson-like politics anymore. When Teddy Roosevelt had dinner with Booker T. Washington, inviting a Black guest to the White House was a major point of national controversy.

And I think the desire to promulgate revisionist accounts of World War II is intimately tied to a niche (but growing) audience on the right that may not want to bring back segregation but does want to undo the shift that made Christie rethink her anti-semitism.

What’s after “wokeness”?

A popular pseudonymous twitter account recently did a Holocaust denial post, prompting pushback from various corners, at which point Curtis Yarvin (an influential and well-regarded voice on the MAGA right) chimed in to push back on the pushers-back and clarify that though the Holocaust was real, he has nothing but scorn for “WW2 enjoyers.”

It’s of course quite true that the US and England did not go to war to stop the Holocaust — the US went to war because Germany declared war on us!

But I think that not only the Holocaust, but the broader tenor of Generalplan Ost is clearly indicative of a regime with which it is quite difficult to imagine coexisting.

That said, these popular historiographical disputes are really about the present rather than the past. Buchanan’s book came out in the midst of “compassionate conservatism,” George W. Bush’s embrace of immigration reform, and the chair of the RNC formally apologizing for Nixon’s southern strategy. Trump himself is not an ideas guy, but the ideas guys who are on the rise in Trump’s Republican Party are very much in the Buchanan tradition.

And the force of this is that while nearly everyone agrees that left-wing racial justice politics went too far 5-10 years ago, there’s big debate on the right about the implications of that.

Ibram Kendi said it wasn’t good enough to not be racist, you had to be anti-racist in a very specific way. And there’s a counter-view, perhaps most forcefully articulated by Nathan Cofnas, that it’s not good enough to reject Kendi’s brand of anti-racism, you need to work to rehabilitate racism so that people can hold their heads high and believe in a hierarchy of races. On this view, you (allegedly) don’t need to be hateful — you can acknowledge that Lazarus is one of the decent Jews, even while maintaining that most Jews are not decent — but it is necessary to destigmatize racism. Cofnas has a literalist’s way of going about this, doing blog posts urging conservatives to stop citing Thomas Sowell on race.

But I think coming in through the side door, trying to problematize Winston Churchill and normalize Hitler while destabilizing the pop culture consensus that Nazis are really bad, is probably a more potent way of achieving the same result.

Taboos can be good

I have noticed that Black people are significantly overrepresented in the top ranks of professional basketball, and my guess is that you have noticed this as well. You need to be more of an NBA fan, though, to have noticed that residents of the former Yugoslavia are also overrepresented. I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform other people experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones. You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.

In my opinion, it is completely correct to observe that dogmatic accounts of disparate impact à la Kendi are dangerous and bad.

Insisting on perfect racial balance in everything (automatic ticket enforcement, advanced math enrollment, etc) makes it very hard to design functioning social systems. Besides which, nobody has ever tried to apply this in a truly comprehensive way (do we need initiatives to get more white kids playing basketball?) or developed a principled account of exactly which ethnic groups matter in this accounting (is it necessary to inquire after the balance of WASPs to Irish Catholics on America’s police forces?).

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism.

Years ago, there was a take that what some disparage as “political correctness” is really nothing more than the basic habit of being polite.

I don’t think that holds up to much scrutiny.

What is true, though, is that politeness is a virtue, and that the habit of bending over backwards to try to be polite to people who are disadvantaged or groups that have historically been discriminated against makes sense.

And while not everything that right-wingers attack as “woke” or “PC” is just politeness, much of it is, and the impulse in some quarters of the right to say that we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politeness norms is bad. The mistake of anti-racist excess was in going beyond trying to downplay ethnic differences to insist on measures that in fact reify them and increase their salience. But going in the other direction, and doing it in a mean-spirited way, isn’t going to solve anything and poses massive downside risks.