The Alt-Historians

Rewriting History from Right to Left

Tucker Carlson with his court historian, Darryl Cooper

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From where I’m sitting, I can see on my bookshelf For Want of a Nail, historian Robert Sobel’s celebrated alternate history of North America wherein General Sir John Burgoyne won the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. Not far away is Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore’s novel of another alternate American history, predicated on General Robert E. Lee’s great victory at Gettysburg. And farther along the shelves there’s a volume containing four novels by Philip K. Dick, one of which is The Man in the High Castle.

Alternate history has long been a popular sub-genre of science fiction, and the historical counterfactual as a tool of analysis has attained a certain respectability: The what if can sometimes clarify the what it was. Suppose, for instance, that Gefreiter Adolf Hitler of the 14th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment had been killed in action on the Western Front at some time between 1914 and 1918? How and to what extent would that have changed the courses of German, European, and world history?

There is, however, another strain of alternate history that neither entertains nor enlightens. It is, rather, a tool of ideology whose purpose is to align the events of the past with the politics of the present.

Alt-history, as I shall call it, has been with us for a long time. Most often it’s nothing more than a sketchy conspiracy theory, based on the paranoid notion that nothing bad ever happens by accident. Thus industrialist “merchants of death” started the First World War, FDR knew in advance that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, the CIA engineered the assassination of JFK, the International Zionist Conspiracy was behind 9/11, and so on and so forth.

The Jews, indeed, tend to attract the obsessive attention of the alt-historians. Their 2,000-year history of oppression and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust and leading to the foundation of the state of Israel, stands as an infuriating refutation of ideologies both Right and Left. Therefore, the Holocaust did not happen, or the accepted account of it has been greatly exaggerated, or the Jews simply got what was coming.

But the claim that the Holocaust never happened is of course untenable, as is the argument that the Jews themselves asked for it. So alt-historians tend to fall back on the argument that while the Nazi regime did persecute the Jews, there was no genocidal master plan, no Final Solution. The British historian David Irving and the American pundit/politician Pat Buchanan adopted that line. Buchanan, for instance, claimed that it would have been impossible for the SS to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews at Treblinka with diesel exhaust, which he falsely argued was insufficiently toxic. He also claimed that Treblinka was not a death factory but merely a transit camp. In fact, historians of the Holocaust estimate that 900,000 Jews were done to death in that camp alone.

It may well be asked why many on the Right, from national conservatives to neofascists, have invested so heavily in Holocaust denial. The answer, I believe, is that National Socialism’s genocidal crimes cast the Second World War in a heroic light. This justified America’s participation in the war and, by extension, justified the postwar world order that America did so much to shape and direct. But the natcons and their ilk revile that postwar world which, they believe, spawned soulless globalism, forever wars and other horrors. For America, they say, the Second World War brought nothing but calamity. How could it possibly have been the “good war”?

This is the line taken by Tucker Carlson’s new best friend, Darryl Cooper. And since nothing happens by accident, there must be a villain. Not Hitler, though! This “most important historian in the United States,” as Carlson called him during their recent podcast, points the finger at Winston Churchill—the scheming warmonger and war criminal who lured an unwilling Hitler into war.

Actually, this is not a very original idea. Back in 2008, Pat Buchanan wrote a book propounding much the same thesis, and here he is regurgitating it in a 2009 article. Now Churchill was indeed a controversial figure in his day and some of his flaws were as glaring as his virtues were massive. Indeed, during his “wilderness years,” the Thirties, he was regarded as a public nuisance by much of the British establishment. Many people denounced Churchill as a warmonger, calling as he did for rearmament and a strong stand against Hitler at a time when appeasement was all the rage.

And because no alt-historical narrative is complete without a swipe at the Jews, Cooper also dismisses the Holocaust—which, he explains, was just one big misunderstanding. Having stumbled into war with an assist from the nefarious Churchill, the Nazi regime somehow managed to conquer Europe and invade the Soviet Union, taking millions of prisoners along the way. Unprepared for such a haul, the hapless Germans stood by wringing their hands while those millions starved to death behind barbed wire.

Let’s just say that “America’s most important historian”—who, incidentally, has never written a book about Churchill, Hitler, National Socialism, or any aspect of the Second World War—needs to do a lot more work on that part of his argument.

Nor do the Jews get much respect on the left flank of the political spectrum. The two master alt-historical narratives of the Left focus, respectively, on race and “anti-Zionism.” The first denounces America as a wicked nation, founded on slavery and irredeemably racist. The second denounces Israel as an imperialist, fascist, apartheid state whose Jewish citizens are white settler colonialists. And because postmodern progressivism is a Theory of Everything, these master narratives intersect at various points. For instance, the long-running conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs is framed as racist oppression on the American model: white Jews oppressing brown Arabs.

The Islamic Republic of Iran refers to America as the Great Satan and to Israel as the Little Satan. American progressives and leftists feel much the same.

Neither of these narratives need be described at length; their general outlines are all too familiar. In brief, the American founding dates from 1619, when the first black slaves were brought ashore in Virginia. That of Israel dates from 1948, when the settler-colonialist Jews ethnically cleansed “Palestine” of Arabs. These assertions and the narratives flowing from them are as patently nonsensical as Daryl Cooper’s version of the Second World War.

Example: In the narrative of American evil, it is claimed that the Constitution of the United States was drawn up with the express intention of protecting the institution of slavery. But the Constitution in its original form did not directly address the slavery issue, much less embody any formal statement of protection. Nor in the lead-up to succession and the Civil War did the leaders of the slave states feel they could rely on the Constitution to defend their “peculiar institution.” On the contrary, they feared that the political tide was turning against them, and that succession was their only hope of preserving slavery.

Example: In the narrative of Israeli evil, it all began with ethnic cleansing. But for all the blather today of a mythical two-state solution, there’s no acknowledgement that such a solution was on the table in 1948. When Great Britain notified the United Nations that it intended to terminate the Mandate for Palestine, and it became clear that a unitary state was not feasible, the UN approved a partition plan. Palestine would be divided into Jewish and Arab states, plus a UN-administered international zone encompassing Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The Jews accepted the partition plan. The Arabs, both within and without Palestine, did not.

In the war that followed, both sides committed atrocities, and some 700,000 Arabs were expelled or fled from their homes. But ultimately even more Jews were expelled from various Arab countries. For example, in 1948 there were 150,000 Jews living in Iraq: a community with ancient roots in that land. By 1952 there were 15,000 left. Today, there are none: Iraq is Judenrein.

The claim that Israel is a racist apartheid state can only be characterized as farcical. The population of the Jewish state includes over two million Arabs—who are Israeli citizens with full political and civil rights. Equally farcical is the idea that Israeli Jews are “white oppressors.” Today, an estimated 40% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, meaning that their ancestors were born in North Africa or Asia. An additional 3% are of Ethiopian origin.

The Left’s cartoonish alt-history of the Middle East ignores or distorts all of the above.

It remains to note that alt-historical narratives are not exercises in revisionist history as that term is generally understood. A revisionist account of, say, the origins of the First World War would be based on a reinterpretation or reordering of the established facts. Historians may be biased. Their judgement may be faulty. But they’re not supposed to suppress or distort the facts. They’re not supposed to lard their work with outright lies.

But suppression, distortion, and falsification are the alt-historians’ stock in trade. Their work is similar to that performed by Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth: the creation of an official record that aligns with ideology, not reality. If, as the natcons and the comrades both allege, contemporary America sucks, then a good deal of American history needs to be realigned. And alas, that work is well under way.