Two of my favorite historians: Norm Macdonald and Darryl Cooper.

One is funny. Both are essential.

One of my all-time favorite stand-up comedians is Norm MacDonald. He had trouble translating into TV and movies, but all alone on stage with a microphone? Fire. One of the best. If you’re ever bored, search his name on YouTube and go down the rabbit hole. You’ll love it!

One of the things I loved about him is how surprisingly smart the guy was. He deliberately presented a dim “everyman” persona, but he was a surprisingly deep thinker, and his stand-up act reflected that.

As a very minor example, here is one of his lines about history:

I bring up Norm and that great line of his because as my readers know, I love history. I love to think about the stories we tell ourselves about our past. I wonder how true they are. I wonder how true our narratives have to be to serve their purpose.

The history of a people defines who they are, who they have been, and how they should be in the future. That’s why there are so many attempts to revise our histories to include some ignored but important aspects, or to frame events in a different light, to highlight some new insights, to bring forth some new wisdom — or shame.

It’s fascinating, and contentious. Some of these efforts at revisionism are excellent and much-needed. Others have less noble motivations.

It can be very confusing for the layman.

Recently Darryl Cooper of the Martyrmade Podcast went on Tucker Carlson’s show and dropped some revisionist truth bombs that made quite a splash. In the wake of that show, Dave Smith also covered the subject on an episode of his show, Part of the Problem. I highly recommend both.

I also highly recommend Darryl’s multi-part series on the formation of the state of Israel, called Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. It’s an eye-opener. Whatever you think about that conflict and its origins, it’s probably incomplete. This series is a nice corrective for that.

On Tucker’s show, Darryl Cooper shattered the myth that Winston Churchill was an unqualified hero, and that in fact, much of the blame for the horrors of World War Two lay at the feet of the famous cigar-chomping British Prime Minister.

People were hopping mad about this blasphemy. Nobody likes their foundational myths messed with. But Darryl brought receipts, including admissions by Churchill himself and a revealing analysis you can find in Pat Buchanan’s excellent book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.*

People naturally get rocked when you challenge their historical belief system. WWII is “the good war”. It was fought by “the greatest generation” in a purely black and white contest of good versus evil. The Axis was evil, the Allies were good! Shut up and move on! Don’t ask any more questions!

The truth of history is never that cartoonish, though.

And because our minds prefer cartoonish stories, if someone like Darryl criticizes Churchill, we quickly suspect perhaps he thought Hitler was “the good guy” in that horrible war.

It’s a perfectly natural reflex. It’s also completely wrong. Of course Hitler was evil. Just because I think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are evil for what they did, it doesn’t mean I think Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Ladin aren’t also evil for what they did.

It’s almost never white hats and black hats when it comes to war. The best you’ll find, usually, are black hats and dark grey hats with some bewildered citizens (hatless) caught in the crossfire.

It’s those “hatless” people that got firebombed in Dresden, or nuked in Hiroshima, or raped in Stalin’s horror-filled march west through Europe.

The bloodthirsty monster Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union was part of the “good and virtuous” Allied cause in WWII. “We” sided with Stalin to fight Hitler knowing full well that Stalin (and Lenin before him) had murdered tens of millions of their own people.

The gulag system that Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote about* was fully in place by the start of WWII. The massive starvation campaign in Ukraine called the Holodomor had already happened. And it’s not like those evils should be overlooked because the results of WWII and siding with Stalin were an unqualified good.

Hardly. The West denounced Hitler for invading Chechoslovakia and Poland. After the war, we handed these countries and many more over to the murderous Stalin.

Surely, this conflict cannot be considered an unqualified success.

We must challenge our conventional historical myths. Even if we love them, we must challenge them. We must evolve to better understand our complex and checkered past. If we don’t, we are doomed.

We need “revisionist historians”, even if sometimes they get it wrong. We need to constantly reexamine the history fed to us in those books written by the winners. Often history is accurate and useful. Also, often history is pablum and propaganda designed to keep the masses obedient — and primed to support the next war.

That’s the truly evil part of our WWII histories. These myths are constantly trotted out as justification for the next stupid, destructive, and crony wars. The new enemy is always “the next Hitler”. Anyone advising against the new war is always “the appeaser Neville Chamberlain”.

We have to grow past this. We have to quit being suckers for a comfortable narrative that makes us docile and compliant supporters of the regime. Take some time to read a book or listen to a podcast that challenges your belief system. The effort will reward you with more wisdom, more strength, and more healthy skepticism.

And if you really want a deep dive into history, check out Liberty Classroom*. I highly recommend it!

Naturally,

Adam

*promotional link