Fatigue and Irritation - An Addendum (and Correction) to the Martyr Made Situation

And the story of the world's most infamous Holocaust denier

“Antisemitism is a prejudice that may sometimes be, but usually is not, lightly worn. It has great appeal to pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-aesthetes, such as [Mosley] was and is, because it has a great gossipy power and can draw on history and mythology and concepts like blood and gold. It can seem to explain a lot. And it can form a bond between upper-crust types and the plebeians, a bond of sturdy race and nation against the clever and the tricky and the ‘hard-to-place’ […] A dead giveaway, in distinguishing the obsessive or morbid antisemite from the garden variety, is an inability to stay off the subject.”
—Christopher Hitchens

I begin this pseudo-brief essay by being, as I said I would be, happy to eat my words. In my original, lengthy essay for Merion West critiquing the claims my fellow historical podcaster Darryl Cooper (better known as “Martyr Made”) made during and after his interview with Tucker Carlson at the beginning of September 2024, I wrote the following:

Some, like [historian Niall] Ferguson, have claimed there is inspiration to be found in the disgraced Holocaust denier and anti-Jewish bigot David Irving, but until Cooper starts citing the notorious historian, I see no reason to make such bad-faith implications.

As it would turn out, Darryl did not cite the “notorious historian,” but he was pulling from his work, at one particular point during his interview with Carlson, in which he said the following:

But then you get into, why was Winston Churchill such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life? And there's ideological reasons. In 1920, he wrote a kind of infamous now article called Zionism versus Bolshevism. And he basically makes the case that which was true to a large extent, that all of eastern Europe, the pale of settlement, which is where the vast majority of Jews lived, other than the United States, which is where a lot of them had traveled to that area, had become so engulfed by a revolutionary spirit that all the young Ashkenazi Jews who were over there were getting swept up into it. It was the sixties here on the steroids in a much more serious and ended up being destructive way. And this is 1920. So this is shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. Basically, the point of his paper is he says, these people who are over there, they’re all going one direction or the other, they’re going to be Bolsheviks. They’re going to be Zionists. We want them to be Zionists. And so we need to support this. And so that was early on. There was an ideological component of it. But then as time goes on, you read stories [about] Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility, I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason.

This claim—placed in bold within its full context of Darryl’s comments during the interview—does indeed come from David Irving. However, at the time of the interview, at the time of writing my essay, and even at the time of its initial publication, I did not know this for certain, and, not wanting to make claims that would turn out to be untrue, I held back from saying them. However, in the weeks that followed my initial writing on this subject, I had spoken to a few people about the interview who pointed out this claim as an area that was particularly problematic and were puzzled why I did not include it in my original essay. The truth is, I found the claim to be a bit on the outlandish side, and not one to which Darryl seemed particularly wedded when he expressed it to Carlson. This was mostly because of his phrasing, “you read stories about,” as well as his careful caveat that “I don’t think that he necessarily had to be bribed”; I found his phrasing “to an extent put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex,” to be overly provocative but perhaps too cliched to really take all that seriously.

Nevertheless, curiosity got the better of me and I began to search for the origin of this claim because it did seem a little too perfectly aligned with the kind of conspiratorial claims made by antisemites, and I continued to come up short. There really was nothing out there that I could find apart from people talking about the original interview and pointing out how wrong (or, in the cases of X’s Jew-hating brigade, correct) the reference to Churchill’s Zionist funders was. So I turned to AI, first ChatGPT, and then, when I finally got fed up with that garbage service’s hallucinations and fake sources, to the much superior Perplexity (I am not sponsored by them, I just like their service). Turning on the “Pro” option, I put in a carefully-worded query and waited for the results.

Joseph Goebbels was the originator of the claim that Churchill, thanks to his poor spending habits, was in the pocket of Zionists, i.e. Jews.

As it turned out, the true origin of the claim that Churchill was being funded by Zionists thanks to his horrible spending habits and bad investments came from none other than Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Propaganda Ministry. This raises an eyebrow—why take a propagandist, much less the Third Reich’s, at their word? Well, as it turned out, one of Goebbels’ biographers—in fact, his most infamous—had indeed done just that: David Irving. This became clear in his recent conversation with the awesome Noam Dworman, owner of the legendary Comedy Cellar in New York City and host of Live from the Table on YouTube (a show I highly recommend, by the way). Near the end of the conversation, Darryl addressed much of what was being discussed after his infamous interview with Tucker Carlson, mostly in the context of Noam’s concerns about Darryl’s seeming flirtations with antisemitism over the last couple of years (mostly on Twitter/X). He split the interview into two parts which can and should be viewed here. The entire conversation is very enlightening and would only warrant a simple re-share from me, but for one thing that comes up toward the end of the second part of the conversation, since it directly related to something I recently stated. At that point, Noam and Darryl were discussing the financiers claim and Darryl said the following:

“And that wry smile [Tucker mentioned], by the way, was taken as a knowing smile when it was a smile of like, “What are you trying to do me here?” You know? And though, by the time I got to the David Irving argument, which is where that comes from, you know, the stuff about Churchill being bailed out by financiers in ’38 and ’40, which did happen. [Tucker] had already asked me, like twice, “Well why would Churchill do this, if it didn’t make any sense for the British Empire?” And I kind of walked around and gave a meandering answer, and he said “Well, why else?” And I did it again, off the top of my head, said I wasn’t planning on talking about this. And he’s like “Well, why else?” And I’m like, “Well, you know, people have written about this…” [Emphasis added].

And there it was. As it had turned out, my initial instincts had failed me on this one, and there is now more to say about credulity created by motivated reasoning. Namely, it is apparent that Darryl seemed to reveal another blind spot in his own (as-of-September-2nd-2024) scholarship. To be fair to him, he was not particularly wedded to the “financiers, the media complex” claim thanks to his phrasing in the interview, but that phrasing also made it at least sound like he endorsed it. There is no need to relitigate the fact that an off-the-cuff interview for him is not the same as a long-considered 30-plus-hour series, but the fact remains, by admitting he was repeating a claim by Irving and without ever having openly citing him, he has, in a sense, placed himself right back in the proverbial hot seat.

An uncharitable read would be that he knew what would happen if he openly mentioned Irving, especially on Tucker Carlson’s show. A more charitable read is that he was simply following Tucker’s lead of trying to make things more controversial, as he more or less stated in the Noam Dworman interview about Tucker’s style. Now, none of us have no way of knowing, but thanks to my bias, I am inclined to believe him when he told Noam that his “wry smile” was more in amused exasperation with Carlson’s line of questioning rather than anything sinister. It is certainly possible that Darryl is trying to run circles around everyone questioning him and playing dumb, but at a certain point, I am only so inclined to try and read a man’s mind, especially if I somewhat know and legitimately like him personally.

However, unfortunately, the charitable read is not much better than the uncharitable read, at least in the sense that it reveals further problems with the approach to scholarship, at least before the controversy surrounding this whole fracas hit, and Darryl started to make it clear that he had other sources in his holster. I have already made it clear that I think his own motivated reasoning—that is, a desire to thumb his nose at mainstream historical mythmaking—has colored his credulity with questionable sources (namely Nicholson Baker and Pat Buchanan). However, even if he is not particularly wedded to the obviously loaded claims of Britain’s most famous antisemitic historian, he revealed a vulnerability in using them to begin with. Where I likely part company with many of Darryl’s critics is that I do not believe this is indicative of a deep-seated antisemitism per se, but a deep-seated disdain for a perceived elitist establishment, dismissive of alternative explanations. That, in turn, will lead you to make common cause with (or at least launder the credibility of) compromised scholars and writers, as well as those who are not qualified to make the claims they do (like Baker and Buchanan).

Deborah Lipstadt after her victory in the libel case brought against her by David Irving.

It is important for us to remember that credulous use of David Irving as a source when researching World War II is absolutely something that can discredit a historian (or even a historical podcaster), but it does not necessarily, depending specifically on what is being cited and how it is being cited. I plan to do a proper episode of History Impossible one day on the David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt affair and how our knowledge of Holocaust denial itself broke into the mainstream, but Irving’s status as a historian, even when he began questioning the facts of the Holocaust, was once considered quite solid. Before his Holocaust-denying preoccupations began to be made clear (which arguably began in the 1970s when he was beginning his crusade that there was no documentation demonstrating that Adolf Hitler directly ordered the extermination of Europe’s Jews; more on that later), he was even respected by many historians, despite his tendency to downplay Nazi evil. This was thanks to his extensive knowledge of German military archives, which were less combed-over than they have become five decades later.

And indeed, Deborah Lipstadt, Irving’s ultimate nemesis, would cite several instances of historians praising Irving in her 2005 memoir, History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. This included the celebrated British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (a Holocaust intentionalist, for what it is worth), who, despite being critical of Irving’s methodology, once said that “no praise can be too high for his indefatigable, scholarly industry,” as well as History Today’s “fourth most important historian of the past 60 years” (as of 2011), A.J. P. Taylor, who said Irving possessed “unrivaled industry” and “good scholarship.” In addition, Lipstadt also pointed to noteworthy British diplomatic historian Paul Addison, who wrote that Irving was “a colossus of research,” despite his poor, “schoolboy” judgment. However, all of these scholars shared the same general criticism of Irving, which would come to be prophetic: that his interpretations had a tendency to be formed by a selective reading of evidence that almost always resulted in him minimizing Adolf Hitler’s responsibility for the violence of the Second World War. However, Irving’s skills and services were continually praised, especially during the Hitler Diaries hoax of the early 1980s, when he was able to help prove the diaries—created by a German conman and illustrator Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983—were indeed fake.

Irving during his trial in Austria over some of the claims he had made that ran afoul of their laws.

Nevertheless, Irving’s credibility continued to take bruise after bruise, especially as his writing began to take on increasingly negationist tinge, especially regarding Germany’s war crimes. This could be seen as early as his work on the German V-weapons program in his book called The Mare’s Nest published in 1964, in which he minimized the slave labor Germany used at Nordhausen concentration camp and the Mittelwerk factory in order to construct the experimental rocketry. It became even more obvious after he published Hitler’s War in 1977, in which his insistence on Hitler’s innocence regarding the Holocaust began in earnest. In the book, he set out, in his own words, to clear off the “years of grime and discoloration from the façade of a silent and forbidding monument,” and “view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk.” Honorable enough intention, if that is what the intention was. Given the multitudes of inaccuracies, selective omission of information (including the murder of over 360,000 Jews by the Einsatzgruppen), and obviously motivated interpretations of the information, the book was largely panned by critics and especially other historians, and the scrutiny against Irving began to mount. This, in turn, seemed to lead to Irving to make increasingly outlandish claims, including in 1983 when he claimed, according to celebrated Third Reich historian Richard Evans, that “probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich, certainly when the war broke out, was Adolf Hitler. He was the one who was doing everything he could to prevent things nasty happening to them.”

Perhaps inevitably (especially given the scrutiny that continued to mount), as time went on and his bitterness at being incriminated outweighed his good sense, the now-obvious mask Irving was wearing and his respectability fully slipped. This resulted in his full metamorphosis into an outright denier of the Holocaust’s most infamous crimes involving the Nazis’ use of gas chambers. In 1990, while in Germany no less, he proclaimed the following:

There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, there were only dummies which were built by the Poles in the postwar years, just as the Americans build the dummies in Dachau [...] these things in Auschwitz, and probably also in Majdanek, Treblinka, and in other so-called extermination camps in the East are all just dummies. […] I and, increasingly, other historians are saying, the Holocaust, the gas chamber establishments in Auschwitz did not exist.

With hindsight, we know that many of his claims about there being no gas chambers were incorrect and even intensely problematic and motivated by a deeply-felt hatred of the Jews. But in the moment, it can be more difficult to intuit the connection, especially if the man’s work is considered to be of a good quality. Plenty of highly-skilled writers, actors, musicians, comedians, and artists and creatives of all types have their demons—as Noam and Darryl discussed during their conversation, Dostoyevsky was no different. My personal favorite example is H.L. Mencken who in public, was the most delightfully irascible cultural critic, and in private, was a raging Jew-hater. The difference is—and Darryl and other contrarians and revisionist-minded people would do well to remember this, if they ever bother to read this—Mencken’ and Dostoyevsky’s greatness and skills were not predicated upon their feelings about Jews. David Irving, a historian of World War II and the Third Reich (and by definition, the Holocaust itself), and his feelings about Jews are, fairly or not, inextricably linked.

This was what Christopher Hitchens ultimately realized when, after defending Irving’s right to say the things he said (and rightly so, in my opinion), he met with the infamous historian. In his 2001 essay for the Los Angeles Times titled “The Strange Case of David Irving,” he described reading Irving’s self-published biography of Joseph Goebbels (likely the source Darryl was originally using) back in 1996 when it was put out, writing “I’m a big boy and can bear the thought of being offended.” The book enlightened him to some things he had not previously known, and he ultimately wrote a piece criticizing Irving’s original publisher for dropping publication of the massive book (it is over 700 pages long). He “described Irving himself as not just a fascist historian but a great historian of fascism,” and pointed out several things that Holocaust deniers would actually despise about the book, including descriptions of the Nazis’ mass shootings and “the use of an ‘experimental’ gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmno.” If this was Holocaust denial, it was certainly a funny way of going about it, Hitchens reasoned. And after all, the real problem here was a question of whether or not we, in the liberal West, are allowed to read controversial material. “Allowed?” Hitchens angrily wrote. “One should be able to do so without permission from anybody.”

Christopher Hitchens at his best.

Indeed. And sure enough, this full-throated and well-reasoned defense of freedom of speech—which are always at their best when they defend the worst kind—landed Hitchens a meeting with Irving the next time he was visiting Washington D.C. Hitchens remembered inviting Irving over for a cocktail and, in proper Hitchens fashion, was more taken aback by the historian “refusing any alcohol or tobacco” than he was by the presentation of a “gift”: two giant stickers meant to be placed over traffic signs, reading the phrase “Rudolf Hess Platz,” which Hitchens described as “a practical-joke accessory for German extremists with that especial sense of humor.” Trying to “look as unshocked as I could,” (given the shock-value intended by the gift), Hitchens recalled the rest of their meeting that day:

Irving then revealed, rather fascinatingly, that some new documents from the Eichmann family might force him to reconsider his view that there had been no direct order for the annihilation of the Jews. It was a rather vertiginous atmosphere all around. When it came time for him to leave, my wife and daughter went down in the elevator with him on their own way out. Later, my wife rather gravely asked me if I would mind never inviting him again. This was highly unlike her; we have all sorts at our place. However, it transpired that, while in the elevator, Irving had looked with approval at my fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter, then 5 years old, and declaimed the following doggerel about his own little girl, Jessica, who was the same age:

I am a Baby Aryan

Not Jewish or Sectarian;

I have no plans to marry an

Ape or Rastafarian.

The thought of Carol and Antonia in a small space with this large beetle-browed man as he spouted that was, well, distinctly creepy. (He has since posted the lines on his Web site, and they came back to haunt him at the trial.)

Hitchens did “give [Irving] one last chance,” after his (Irving’s) “utter humiliation in court” in 2000 (that is, his fight with Deborah Lipstadt’s publisher for supposedly slandering him), and despite Irving trying to claim things occurred in a way different than had been reported in the court room (namely, that he had called the judge “Mein Fuhrer”), Hitchens found out from his friend, Ian Buruma who was covering the trial for The New Yorker, that Irving himself had admitted it directly to him. Everything being stated about Irving was as true as reported, and despite Hitchens remaining correctly unshaken in his conviction that free speech was paramount and that a courtroom was not the best place to discern historical truth, he realized that Irving served as the antithesis of “[transparency] as regards motive and [scrupulousness] as regards evidence.”

Hitchens was not the only person to feel this way. Deborah Lipstadt, Irving’s nemesis, wrote in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (the book which started the entire battle between the two) that the court of law was never the place where historical debate must be held. This would turn out to be ironic, given where she and her publisher would end up thanks to Irving’s thin skin at being called out for exactly what he was, but her point was sound. As she wrote:

An even greater difficulty arises when the court is asked to render a decision not on point of law […] but on a point of history […], in which the judge [takes] historical stance on the Holocaust. It transforms the legal arena into a historical forum, something the courtroom was never designed to be. When historical disputes become lawsuits, the outcome is unpredictable.

While Lipstadt also says a greater side effect of distorting the court room in such a way is that it makes free speech martyrs of deniers like Irving, she would also object to Irving’s imprisonment in Austria in 2005 for “trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust,” according to Austrian law. In an interview published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in 2016, Lipstadt would say that, “I believe it was wrong that he was thrown in jail [b]ecause I believe in free speech. […] I was against it when he was put in jail.” She certainly equivocated a bit and took more umbrage at the disrespect to her own speech he had displayed (and fair enough), but her point was certainly sound, as has been her point that debating Holocaust deniers is simply a way to legitimize their worldview.

Based on his original comments, but also knowing his stated disdain for censorship as I do, I suspect Darryl supports the idea of airing debates between Holocaust revisionists and traditional historians. I think, ultimately, that has always been his core, principled position on this; not that “these revisionists like Irving have a point, there were no gas chambers,” but rather, that we would be better suited as historians and even just regular citizens who care about history and truth if we were to engage with them, instead of dismissing them. However, what I believe he misses here is what he has shown throughout this entire controversy to be what he misses: a far-too-generous amount of good faith in the motives of people who clearly have none, and whose motivated reasoning clearly only comes from one place. Ask yourself: have you ever met or heard from a skeptic of the traditional Holocaust narrative that did not also have very particular feelings about Jews? So what would we really be debating, were we to engage with these people? This is not the Spanish court of Vallodolid in 1550, where Bartolome de las Casas had to argue that the Indigenous people of the New World were, in fact human beings. If one wants to debate the human status of Jews by proxy via a conversation about whether or not Zyklon B was used to kill millions of them, they can be my and anyone else’s guest, but that strikes me as a waste of everyone’s time and, ultimately, enabling mental illness filtered through extreme politics and bigoted tradition.

Darryl has claimed he is not a fascist; at this point, I do not much care one way or another, since it would make little difference one way or another except on how we, as consumers and peers, perceive his work. However, I think what people are picking up on is that he does not particularly hate fascism either. Which is fair enough in a lot of ways; I think that is wrong, and obviously many people do too, but most people who are not already fervently anti-communist (or, in my case, anti-totalitarian), think about communism in the exact same way. They themselves are not communists or even communist sympathizers, but they don’t particularly hate communism either. Similarly, I also do not believe his referencing of David Irving makes Darryl an antisemite, but I do believe it makes him vulnerable to giving antisemites a free pass because he hates their enemies more than he hates them. At least, that seems to be how he sees it, as best I can tell. This is likely a distinction without a difference for a lot of people, and fair enough (especially for Jews).

This continues to dog him and likely will continue to dog him—something he admitted in his conversation with Noam Dworman. He also seemed to admit that he would not have conducted himself in the original Tucker Carlson interview in the same way, if given the chance (while also proving my original suspicion correct that he did not feel like it was his place to push back on Tucker). However, I do have concern that the scrutiny he receives, especially if it does not come from a place of good faith, will help push him further into a defensive position, which can make whatever distinction that does exist—that is, between antisemitism and antisemitism’s enemies—actually irrelevant.

The Lady Mosley.

In 1999, Christopher Hitchens wrote a review of Jan Dalley’s biography of Diana Mosley, the wife of the famous British fascist Oswald Mosley (who long-time followers of mine might recall I spoke about in the episode of the podcast called “Hitler’s Bastards”). The review is full of the usual Hitchensian bon mots but it also contained some insight into the stress faced by the contrarian, by the figure who cuts against the grain, by the person who has little or no desire to be among polite society if that is what it means to be polite. More power to those people, I suppose; far be it from someone like me to begrudge anyone who gets a sour taste in their mouths when they think about the mainstream. However, what is the cost—or rather, what can the cost be at such a rejection? It puts you on the defensive, and no one is equipped to always be in that position, no matter how resilient they are. It is less that the defensiveness itself is exhausting (though it certainly is), but rather, the defensiveness is what ultimately makes it so easy for the soul to become corrupted (or for one to let the devil in, if you will).

As Hitchens wrote, Diana Mosley became “too languid and spiteful to conceal her prejudices even now,” and that “the subject clearly fatigues and irritates her.” She had become, over the years, “secretly gleeful about fascism.” People make their own decisions—something about which I’ll always stress, including about the most oppressed—but there are indeed social forces at work, which is something Darryl Cooper will always stress. Those social forces, if persistent and negative enough, can do wonders in keeping people in a perpetually defensive position, which in turn breeds paranoia, which is not inoculated by intelligence or grace, both of which Darryl absolutely possesses. But he is just as vulnerable to such forces as the rest of us. And given the scrutiny he has brought upon himself, perhaps more so. I wish him the best, regardless.