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I have to admit, I'm struggling to feel a lot of sympathy for Cooper here. When you put out a bowl of honey, you don't really get to complain that flies show up. When you put a bird-feeder in your yard, you don't get to complain when it attracts birds. When you leave your food scraps uncovered, you don't get to complain when raccoons find their way to your bin. Likewise when you make a name for yourself sharing edgy anti-semitic views on the internet, you probably shouldn't complain when you get a following of edgy anti-semites. What did you think was going to happen?
(If anybody is inclined to quibble, I am taking Holocaust denial and sympathy for Hitler or the NSDAP as reasonable public signals of anti-semitism - that is, as views that a person would be vanishingly unlikely to voice for non-anti-semitic reasons. Even if you think that Cooper specifically is a disinterested truth-seeker who for some reason is inclined to doubt the reality of extremely well-attested historical events, there's no denying that what is communicated by the views he has shared is sympathy for anti-semitism.)
What should I do here other than point and laugh? Fuentes and the Groypers are ridiculous parodies of human beings. BAP and his crowd are also ridiculous parodies of human beings. Cooper attracted them. Well then. Let them fight.
I don’t know about Holocaust denial, but sympathy for Hitler on the basis of ‘communism is the literal worse thing in the universe, we erred by going into Berlin instead of Moscow, this is chapter one in democrat’s untrustworthiness on the issue, 6 million Jews would have been a small price to pay to end communism there and then’ is not an opinion that you would never hear from not-otherwise-antisemitic anti communist hardliners.
I feel like the widespread availability of other anti-communist icons means that I would still be quite suspicious of someone who claims to admire Hitler on purely anti-communist grounds.
That is, 1) there are countless other figures you could choose, so the choice of Hitler specifically, given all his other baggage, causes me to wonder about the person's motives, 2) Hitler failed to stop the communists and his tenure ended with a self-inflicted bullet wound to his own head while the hammer and sickle flew over the Reichstag; why not hold up a successful anti-communist instead?, and 3) it seems like most of the obvious reasons why someone would hate communism should also incline one to hate Hitler and Nazism. Do you hate tyrannical governments? Eccentric dictators who kill millions of their own people? Totalitarianism, or rule by terror? The over-centralisation of power and destruction of both political and civic liberty? It seems like most of the convictions that would plausibly make you anti-communist, at least in the 21st century, would make you anti-Nazi as well.
So if I met somebody who was vocally sympathising with Hitler on the basis of anti-communism, I think I would still raise an eyebrow, to say the least.
I think the best case scenario for unironc admirers of Hitler, for me, would be the number of colonial or post-colonial leaders outside the West who've been fond of him. The narrative there is fairly straightforward - he was a nationalist leader of a country defeated by the Western powers who embarked on self-strengthening projects. It does not hurt that postcolonial leaders themselves are often dictators and therefore more inclined to judge another dictator positively. Add in that many such leaders either don't know and don't care about Jews at all (e.g. East Asian leaders), or have some level of anti-semitism themselves (e.g. Arab leaders), and that part isn't decisive for them.
Cooper is not merely angling towards anti-communism (where, as you note, there'd be a number of more successful and less odious icons you could hitch your wagon to). He, as far as I can tell, genuinely favors something fascism-adjacent* and is trying to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism.
Even extending him the charity of assuming he's merely interested in the hard core right-wing authoritarianism and not the genocide, this is awkward for him in several respects. The first is simply that most of his co-partisans are howling bigots, which is embarrassing when you're trying to come across as serious and respectable. Even if you yourself are immaculately well-behaved, you're going to be tarnished by association. The second is that if you're trying to pitch respectable fascism, the historical record of the Nazis is a big problem. Even people who might be on board for the strict top-down social regulation are liable to balk at the aggressive expansionist wars and industrialized mass murder.
So on the one side, you have him here rebuking other parts of the far-right for being indecorous. On the other side, you have him downplaying Nazi atrocities as a combination of tragic misadventure and "the commies made me do it". The end goal is to move fascism closer to the Overton Window and people like the groypers are an impediment to that goal.
*he seems to be somewhat cagey about his actual preferred political arrangement, but his anti-liberalism combined with some of his other statements plus that very caginess makes me strongly suspect that his actual views are well beyond the pale and he's hiding his power level.
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IMO it was reasonable for people at the time to throw their lot in with the Hitlerites in order to stave off the communist takeover of Germany. It seems less reasonable to consider Hitler a model anti-communist nowadays, with the benefit of hindsight. Even entirely without going into counterfactuals, I think it unfair to condemn the Germans of the 1930s for their making a bad choice in a highly uncertain and volatile epistemic environment given insufficient information, especially since the other choice was already very visibly proven to be calamitous.
In the end, we got something that was, I would say, just about as bad as some of the worst communist regimes. I wouldn't even blame it all on Hitler himself or just the hard core of the NSDAP - it was a fast-moving and overall somewhat shitty time for making reasonable political decisions, no matter who you were.
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I think you should evaluate this not only in the context of the war. German democracy was deeply unpopular and due to end soon, and the communists and nazis where fighting for who would replace it. In retrospect, it seems clear that the germans are better of with their choice, despite everything. Communism really is that bad that youd rather lose a world war.
Well, I suspect that a Germany that went communist in the 20s or 30s would also end up on the losing side of a world war. A communist Germany, it seems to me, would be likely to feud with Russia over who the de facto leader of European communism is. The Soviets were very invested in that, and they would rather a foreign communist movement fail than turn into a rival to them - as with Spain, for instance, where they prioritised defeating left-wing rivals over defeating the Nationalists. Communist Germany likely either gets absorbed into the Soviet sphere, or it has to fight to prevent it. That's either an earlier GDR, or it's a world war. Neither outcome seems particularly rosy for Germany.
Is either worse than our WWII? I really don't know. It's very difficult to speculate about counterfactuals, especially in a case like WWII where we might have to weigh up competing moral intuitions. Suppose OTL-WWII is on average better for all Germans, but far, far worse for German Jews, whereas AU-communist-Germany is on average worse for all Germans, but German Jews are only a little bit worse than average. A strict calculation of utility favours OTL-WWII, but it's also singled out a small minority for especial suffering. How do you weight that in your calculation? Does it matter? Does it not? I know that to me it feels rather icky to say that I'd prefer the timeline which is slightly better for everyone but which requires throwing a minority group that I'm not in under the bus.
(Maybe it makes a difference that in this alternate history, we, in addition to not having a Holocaust, also probably don't have Israel either. From a Jewish perspective, is it better or worse to never found the state of Israel? Another question that depends a lot on your values.)
You think? German communism was on good terms with and supported by Russia generally. The less-authoritarian socialists who were critical would face the wall anyway. I think the germans expected international cooperation, Stalin didnt have anything but Russia at this point so its not clear why he would turn them down, and then maybe this becomes a political conflict in international communism and eventually a german-soviet split, but actual war seems very unlikely.
Theres some variation in these scenarios but I think they play out pretty similar to "early GDR" anyway - GDR problems are mostly not the fault of the russians, IMO. And I assumed a capitalist coalition does survive and cold war and both german and russian communism eventually collapse like they did, which Im now less sure about - full Germany is much more powerful than the actual GDR territory, and they may have been able to stabilise the russians when their leaders lost faith, and Im pretty vague on what happens to the rest of the Warsaw Pact in all of this. I went with this because I consider it the optimistic scenario for german communism - which is still worse than actual, and thats sufficient for my point.
If there is a worldwar anyway at a similar time, it would have to be France going fascist in response, massively cleaning up its act with the army, and either being attacked late in the process or getting it through and starting it themselves, and Im not sure Roosevelt would have been on their side (though at that point he may be couped).
This isn't why they wouldn't feud, it's why they would feud. Communism did indeed turn out to be one of those systems where the people who got into power were the ones ruthless enough to murder the idealists who might object to ruthlessness ... and ideas like "we should stay on good terms with those foreigners" and "we should support those foreigners", if held as terminal values rather than just means to an end, are just another form of idealism. If your leaders are all selected by a process that winnows out the ones foolish enough to not betray their competition before they can be betrayed by them, or even if you just suspect that the other guys' leaders were selected by such a process, your only non-idealistic option is to try to maneuver yourself into a good position to strike first yet again, before they succeed at doing the same. It takes ambition to climb to the top of an authoritarian pyramid, and ambitious authoritarians can only safely collaborate with underlings who are too humble to worry about or rulers who are too strong to challenge, not with other ambitious authoritarians.
I often hammer on FDR and FDR apologetics, but to be fair I do think there's a reasonable argument that can be made that some fraction of the wrecking ball he took to United States and classical-liberal values was actually necessary to avoid even worse. In an atmosphere of uncertainty and panic spawning significant socialist and fascist movements, perhaps the only escape was to adopt some of their less-murderous tenets so that the more-murderous movements could no longer use those to appeal to the populace and win with the whole package. And although it dismays me that FDR was and still remains so popular, the knowledge that his values won out through popularity rather than through war or murder means we never got stuck in that same cycle where nobody can imagine any way out except more war and murder.
Yes, but the russian communists did not fight civil wars among each other, and neither did they fight with the chinese after those left.
In the OTL Russia had a very direct hand in setting up communist governments in places it had effectively conquered post WW2, which gave them a very central position. The communist Germany timeline has a big questionmark to the how, not just the who, of communist international organisation.
They hunted Trotsky all the way to Mexico to assassinate him, in between their massive internal purges. Out of the first Politburo, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, Bubnov Kamenev and Zinoviev executed, and Sokolnikov assassinated in a Soviet prison. Lenin and (unless you believe the Beria-assassination theory) Stalin were the only two of those seven not to be killed by other Russian Communists.
A few hundred dead here and there wasn't much of a fight in the end, but it did risk going nuclear before tensions cooled. Relying on Richard Nixon's firm hand and cool head to avert thermonuclear armageddon is like the final stage of international desperation, if not outright evidence for ongoing Anthropic-Principle effects; it is not a desirable or peaceful relationship.
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The steelman of the case would be that WWII was, by the USSR’s own admission, a unique opportunity to destroy communism before it spread too far.
I suppose to be fair I've misunderstood you a little - the hypothetical anti-communist here does not have to take the position that Hitler is a maximally effective anti-communist, or even good in any respect.
Reading you again, I think the case would be something like this. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were similarly bad. Stalin was around as bad as Hitler if not more so. In OTL, the liberal West allied with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis. Hypothetically, the liberal West could have allied instead with the Nazis to defeat the Soviets. Given that the Nazis and Soviets were similarly bad, this hypothetical world is not obviously worse than the one we actually live in. Even if the result is a Cold War against Nazi Europe rather than against the greater Eastern bloc, is that actually worse?
I don't think I'm convinced by that argument, but I'm open to hearing it. I think I'd want to delve a lot more into what that alternate history would look like, and I have questions regarding how much the Allies moderate hypothetical-alternate-Germany versus how much alternate-Germany influences the Allies, but it would be a real discussion.
The argument would rest on communism being worse than Nazism, which is doable from within mainstream history- you'd have to take maximalist death tolls from the great leap forwards etc, but you don't have to pretend the holocaust never happened- and also claim that with the defeat of the soviet union communism wouldn't have expanded to half the world(probably China in particular).
Yes, you don't have to deny the Holocaust to assert that communism was worse than fascism. They - or at least, the Nazi and Leninist/Stalinist incarnations thereof - were both unquestionably genocidal, and killed millions of innocents.
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There’s an alternate history novel called Fatherland that fits the scenario you described pretty well. In that book the US didn’t ally with Nazi Germany, but Germany did win and the two superpowers are locked in a nuclear Cold War with Germany taking the place of the Soviet Union. It’s 1962 and President (Joseph P.) Kennedy is trying to figure out how much to turn a blind eye toward past atrocities in the name of averting nuclear war and securing global peace. It’s also one of the very few alternate history novels about Nazi Germany winning the war that is even remotely plausible and not Man in the High Castle Wolfenstein style loopiness.
That's the one about a detective uncovering the Holocaust?
One of the questions I would have about that scenario is whether the Holocaust happens at all. The Nazis began it on a large scale only after 1942, and they were aware that the Western Allies would be opposed - that was why they hid it, and why Himmler, purely out of self-preservation, tried to reverse course when it was obvious the war was lost. If Germany is allied with the Western powers, potentially receiving Lend-Lease style aid against the Russians, and is interested in maintaining good relations with the Allies after the war, there's a chance that they're rational enough to not attempt it.
I don't think the Nazis are that rational, but if we're positing a world where the Nazis are allied with the West, we're already positing Nazis significantly more rational and more restrained than the real ones. After the Battle of France there's no very realistic chance, I think, of the UK and US turning around and becoming pro-German, and Hitler was aggressive by disposition. I don't see Hitler restraining his ambitions, either internationally (re: not attacking or conciliating the West) or domestically (re: not attempting to exterminate the Jews). Right up to the beginning of WWII, Hitler's foreign policy was generally to make aggressive demands, daring his enemies to call his bluff, and they rarely did. The Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, etc., all convinced him that making extreme demands paid off, and he continued with that strategy with Poland, France, and then proactively invading Russia in a way that even the highly paranoid Stalin had not expected that early. So an alternate world in which Hitler doesn't pick all these fights is already changing a fair bit.
Of course, you might think an emphasis on Hitler's character is misplaced relative to structural factors - there's the economic case for the war from The Wages of Destruction. But if we follow that case, one of the primary German concerns is dependence on economic networks dominated by Britain and America (and implicitly the Jewish bankers who run them), which seems like it would discourage Nazi Germany from relying too much on their aid. In that situation I'd expect the German aim to be effectively to scam as much resources from the West as possible, use them to conquer the East, and then turn back against the West again - which perhaps gets us back to the 'Cold War with Nazi Europe' scenario.
However, I think the next complicating factor there is Japan. Japan isn't particularly invested in the European front, and the Japanese are probably going to attack the British and the Americans in the Pacific. So we need to posit a timeline in which the Germans junk their alliance with Japan, or potentially one where the Japanese don't attack the British and Americans. So maybe we need another butterfly? The Japanese win at Khalkhin Gol and settle on Strike North?
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To take your bowl of honey analogy a step further, Coopers problem isn't necessarily the honey or the bees. It's more the people coming around accusing him of being a beekeeper because there are a lot of bees in his garden.
To that extent I am sympathetic to Cooper since the people complaining about bees seem to have no reasonable cause to do so. They just go around finger wagging at other people who associated with Cooper, telling them: 'Don't you know he's a beekeeper?! Imagine if the bees multiply and start questioning the holocaust?'
To that extent I find the whole thing ridiculous. It seems that on the orthodox right, their only raison d'être is the consecration of the post war consensus.
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People often complain when they get squirrels.
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I mean, I complain about the starlings. I like most of the birds that show up.
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