This is rather illuminating read your and Darryl takes on these hard issues. From outside looking, You are just partisans different side of this Israeli-Palestine conflict aisle. I would like listen debates between you two. Personally I would no call Darry any way antisemate or event going towards it. He just very passionate about this conflict. In this Israeli-Palestine conflict antisemate accusations is thrown too easily towards people who don't support Israel. I would reserve this accusations only for hard-line Jew hater or people who really think Jew really control everything or similar ilk of peoples.
Agreed I don’t believe Darryl is an anti-Semite, to reiterate. I think he just has blindspots, as do I (and as you rightly pointed out). I have wanted to talk to him for a while about various stuff, mostly related to our different interpretations of Hajj Amin al-Husseini; which might not be fair; I’ve focused on Hajj Amin for years and Darryl took a much broader view, and his information wasn’t as up to date as mine simply because he was working on his series years before most great books that covered Hajj Amin came out. I’ve also wanted to do a deep dive conversation on what we think antisemitism actually is at this point because I think we agree on how it becomes a problem (when it becomes an identity). Things just haven’t worked out due to scheduling and him not getting back to me a couple times, but I haven’t reached out about doing something like that in a while, so maybe it’s overdue.
This is a really excellent take and very much resonates with some of my own thoughts. I would just like to add that, while the answer to the question "is Darryl Cooper an antisemite?" still - probably not, I suspect that the more precise answer is "not yet". Setting aside the debate on the limits of free speech, when one uncritically echoes, references, and platforms voices of antisemites, what does that make him? And how long does it take for someone who flirts with and entertains antisemitics views to eventually adopt them? To be fair, much of the criticism against Cooper's interview with Tucker Carlson was by people who never listened to his podcast. But I have. And what I have seen unfolding - from the early parts of the "fear and loathing" series and all the way to this point, is a peculiar but harmless and somewhat empathic fixation on Jews (like some of the anecdotes on people who happen to be Jewish and were part of the Jim Jones cult) turning into an increasingly weird and obsessive preoccupation with "the Jews" (like his highly problematic and historically superficial take portraying Jews as somehow being just like any other "middleman" minority group). In other words, I think the Martyrmade podcast reflects, gives us a glimps into, the process in which a person becomes antisemitic. What, then, is the rationale driving this? Perhaps the most revealing part of Darryl's work in this regard was his episode on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. His lengthy and passionate discussion of the two's horse-beating related experience/writing captures his idea of how the world, or at least large scale violence, works: as a kind of endless perpetual motion, where the innocent body subject to violence inevitably inflicts violence upon another innocent body and so forth. In retrospect, I realized this is the grand narrative that Cooper uses to "cookie cut" the stories he tells. And this in turn helps explains some of the problematic and outlandish statements Cooper made in his "fear and loathing" series ("sometimes you are the monster" - referring to Israel's defensive war in 1948, in which the new state lost around 1% of its population, and effectively comparing Israeli troops, many of which were Holocaust survivors, to the Nazis who tormented them up to only three years prior), for example. So yes, Cooper does seem like a genuinely nice, smart, generous, and extremely empathic and even gentle guy. But he is also an influential podcaster who speaks way too confidently about complicated subjects that experts spend decades learning about and promotes a perception of how the world operates that is at best naive and at worst sinister. Think I'm exaggerating? Just take a brief look at the comment section of the Martyrmade substack. See what kind of audience he is now attracting, and monitizng.
The martyr made Substack comments section is definitely evolving a bit. There’s more of an anti-globalist MAGA crowd than before although there are still a few of us telling him to GTF off Twitter X and stick to long form. I was somewhat surprised in a more recent post about the number of people complaining about Bari’s Free Press as if it’s some sort of validation of how the Jews control the media. The irony being that those commenters fail to realize that Free Press is actually a counter voice to MSM.
IIRC, that was in response to him just shooting from the hip to claim that the FP was designed solely to get neoliberal/right of center people in line about Israel? Ironic too because they just had a piece to which I’m sure he and many of his readers would be sympathetic that covers Daniel Penny in a non-negative light.
I unfortunately have not been into the Substack comments in a while, but many of his Twitter/X followers are a different breed of retard, to put it crudely. I understand the desire not to alienate your audience, and I even understand the desire not to demonize people who are demonized by society, but that's pretty damn selective and not really that principled. Plus, it goes against the kind of ethics I have, which is I don't really have patience for "the world shapes people and no one has agency" kind of thinking, which DC does seem to traffic in, just from a right wing perspective. It's definitely interesting and provides insight, but socioenvironmental determinism is something I've found tiresome on the left for so long that it just becomes even more infuriating when right wingers do it. I actually have a whole set of thoughts on agency that I already somewhat discussed in my main episode/article on this subject (the one on Merion West), and I'm pretty sure it's come up on previous episodes/essays but I think I should probably write something more in-depth on the subject (i.e. of agency). That's just a bias some people have that I find it hard to believe evidence can overcome. I have the advantage of a psychology background where they beat the nature/nurture dichotomy out of you, so I think I'm okay, though even I have times where I recognize my own bias peaking through. It's really hard to let go, especially if you have a particular love or hate of your historical subject.
Anyway, thanks for the insight, man. Really appreciate it.
Thank you for your follow up to your History Impossible podcast. As the son of a German POW camp survivor with friends who are children of Holocaust survivors, I am obviously somewhat predjust on this subject...
It did strike me reading what you had to say that it may have been counterproductive for the Western governments to suppress the Nazi propaganda after the war. Triumph of the Will was censored for close to 40 years after the war, but watching it for the first time, I was bored after the first 20 minutes or so except for my fascination at how reconstructed Germany looked so much like pre-war architecture. Along the same lines, would it have been better to let depictions of the Nazis as in "The Blues Brothers" be shown in post war Germany to illuminate the ludicrous nature of their world view to the post war generation?
I think I was lucky, since I got exposed to Triumph of the Will clips in a high school class, and we actually got to watch the whole thing in a film class when I was in college. Things really have changed.
That all said, I'm with Hitchens and even Lipstadt, thinking that censoring or especially arresting Irving was wrong. I also think that that's for Austrian courts to decide; the standards the old Reich territories have are different and probably should be, at least for the time being. But in the United States, I think he should be (and thankfully is) perfectly free to put out his selective BS motivated by irrational Jew hatred. We should never make exceptions here. I'd like it if other places followed suit, but I also enjoy America being special in that respect.
This is rather illuminating read your and Darryl takes on these hard issues. From outside looking, You are just partisans different side of this Israeli-Palestine conflict aisle. I would like listen debates between you two. Personally I would no call Darry any way antisemate or event going towards it. He just very passionate about this conflict. In this Israeli-Palestine conflict antisemate accusations is thrown too easily towards people who don't support Israel. I would reserve this accusations only for hard-line Jew hater or people who really think Jew really control everything or similar ilk of peoples.
Agreed I don’t believe Darryl is an anti-Semite, to reiterate. I think he just has blindspots, as do I (and as you rightly pointed out). I have wanted to talk to him for a while about various stuff, mostly related to our different interpretations of Hajj Amin al-Husseini; which might not be fair; I’ve focused on Hajj Amin for years and Darryl took a much broader view, and his information wasn’t as up to date as mine simply because he was working on his series years before most great books that covered Hajj Amin came out. I’ve also wanted to do a deep dive conversation on what we think antisemitism actually is at this point because I think we agree on how it becomes a problem (when it becomes an identity). Things just haven’t worked out due to scheduling and him not getting back to me a couple times, but I haven’t reached out about doing something like that in a while, so maybe it’s overdue.
This is a really excellent take and very much resonates with some of my own thoughts. I would just like to add that, while the answer to the question "is Darryl Cooper an antisemite?" still - probably not, I suspect that the more precise answer is "not yet". Setting aside the debate on the limits of free speech, when one uncritically echoes, references, and platforms voices of antisemites, what does that make him? And how long does it take for someone who flirts with and entertains antisemitics views to eventually adopt them? To be fair, much of the criticism against Cooper's interview with Tucker Carlson was by people who never listened to his podcast. But I have. And what I have seen unfolding - from the early parts of the "fear and loathing" series and all the way to this point, is a peculiar but harmless and somewhat empathic fixation on Jews (like some of the anecdotes on people who happen to be Jewish and were part of the Jim Jones cult) turning into an increasingly weird and obsessive preoccupation with "the Jews" (like his highly problematic and historically superficial take portraying Jews as somehow being just like any other "middleman" minority group). In other words, I think the Martyrmade podcast reflects, gives us a glimps into, the process in which a person becomes antisemitic. What, then, is the rationale driving this? Perhaps the most revealing part of Darryl's work in this regard was his episode on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. His lengthy and passionate discussion of the two's horse-beating related experience/writing captures his idea of how the world, or at least large scale violence, works: as a kind of endless perpetual motion, where the innocent body subject to violence inevitably inflicts violence upon another innocent body and so forth. In retrospect, I realized this is the grand narrative that Cooper uses to "cookie cut" the stories he tells. And this in turn helps explains some of the problematic and outlandish statements Cooper made in his "fear and loathing" series ("sometimes you are the monster" - referring to Israel's defensive war in 1948, in which the new state lost around 1% of its population, and effectively comparing Israeli troops, many of which were Holocaust survivors, to the Nazis who tormented them up to only three years prior), for example. So yes, Cooper does seem like a genuinely nice, smart, generous, and extremely empathic and even gentle guy. But he is also an influential podcaster who speaks way too confidently about complicated subjects that experts spend decades learning about and promotes a perception of how the world operates that is at best naive and at worst sinister. Think I'm exaggerating? Just take a brief look at the comment section of the Martyrmade substack. See what kind of audience he is now attracting, and monitizng.
The martyr made Substack comments section is definitely evolving a bit. There’s more of an anti-globalist MAGA crowd than before although there are still a few of us telling him to GTF off Twitter X and stick to long form. I was somewhat surprised in a more recent post about the number of people complaining about Bari’s Free Press as if it’s some sort of validation of how the Jews control the media. The irony being that those commenters fail to realize that Free Press is actually a counter voice to MSM.
IIRC, that was in response to him just shooting from the hip to claim that the FP was designed solely to get neoliberal/right of center people in line about Israel? Ironic too because they just had a piece to which I’m sure he and many of his readers would be sympathetic that covers Daniel Penny in a non-negative light.
I unfortunately have not been into the Substack comments in a while, but many of his Twitter/X followers are a different breed of retard, to put it crudely. I understand the desire not to alienate your audience, and I even understand the desire not to demonize people who are demonized by society, but that's pretty damn selective and not really that principled. Plus, it goes against the kind of ethics I have, which is I don't really have patience for "the world shapes people and no one has agency" kind of thinking, which DC does seem to traffic in, just from a right wing perspective. It's definitely interesting and provides insight, but socioenvironmental determinism is something I've found tiresome on the left for so long that it just becomes even more infuriating when right wingers do it. I actually have a whole set of thoughts on agency that I already somewhat discussed in my main episode/article on this subject (the one on Merion West), and I'm pretty sure it's come up on previous episodes/essays but I think I should probably write something more in-depth on the subject (i.e. of agency). That's just a bias some people have that I find it hard to believe evidence can overcome. I have the advantage of a psychology background where they beat the nature/nurture dichotomy out of you, so I think I'm okay, though even I have times where I recognize my own bias peaking through. It's really hard to let go, especially if you have a particular love or hate of your historical subject.
Anyway, thanks for the insight, man. Really appreciate it.
Thank you for your follow up to your History Impossible podcast. As the son of a German POW camp survivor with friends who are children of Holocaust survivors, I am obviously somewhat predjust on this subject...
It did strike me reading what you had to say that it may have been counterproductive for the Western governments to suppress the Nazi propaganda after the war. Triumph of the Will was censored for close to 40 years after the war, but watching it for the first time, I was bored after the first 20 minutes or so except for my fascination at how reconstructed Germany looked so much like pre-war architecture. Along the same lines, would it have been better to let depictions of the Nazis as in "The Blues Brothers" be shown in post war Germany to illuminate the ludicrous nature of their world view to the post war generation?
Keep it going!
Wendell Grogan
I think I was lucky, since I got exposed to Triumph of the Will clips in a high school class, and we actually got to watch the whole thing in a film class when I was in college. Things really have changed.
That all said, I'm with Hitchens and even Lipstadt, thinking that censoring or especially arresting Irving was wrong. I also think that that's for Austrian courts to decide; the standards the old Reich territories have are different and probably should be, at least for the time being. But in the United States, I think he should be (and thankfully is) perfectly free to put out his selective BS motivated by irrational Jew hatred. We should never make exceptions here. I'd like it if other places followed suit, but I also enjoy America being special in that respect.