If Sid Vicious and the other punks hadn’t been so incensed by all the peace, love and LSD, not to mention the bloated music it produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they would never have reached for the most offensive polar opposite – the swastika – to show their disdain. Wearing it on their sleeves (or carving it into their arms with a knife) outraged not only the hated hippies but their parents and the whole post-war consensus united around one thing – righteous victory in the second world war.

Pretty good offence-for-effort ratio there, for one little fashion addition.

Of course, they didn’t actually believe in the Nazi cause. Of their modern imitators – certain sections of the young online right – I’m not so sure. Like 1970s punks they attempt to outrage and reject the liberal order, but unlike them it’s not about playing dress-ups. Many are actually defending the goose-stepping genocide-enthusiasts.

Conservative commentator Candice Owens (coming soon to these shores – if the government allows it) has taken a recent detour into such dodgy territory, questioning whether Joseph Mengele ever carried out his infamous (and well-documented) concentration camp experiments. Last week, Tucker Carlson interviewed a gentleman by the name of Darryl Cooper who claimed Churchill, not Hitler, was ‘the true villain of WW2’.

Owens, I write off as a not-very-bright controversy-monger – she has similar ‘questions’ about the moon landing. Cooper is a different proposition. Tucker introduced him as an ‘historian’ and yet he holds no credentials and has no publishing history. He does, as he said on the show, read a lot of history books. Well, I’ve read a lot of Penthouse magazines but it doesn’t make me a gynaecologist. Even so, he is obviously thoughtful, intelligent and knowledgeable. So what gives? The perverse delights of contrarianism? Or something darker?

Cooper openly admits he is targeting the ‘state religion’ of beliefs about the second world war. His mission, now that we are ‘far enough away’ from the events of the war, is to uncover the ‘truth’. Which among other things is that (according to Cooper) Churchill was a ‘psychopath’.

Plenty of eminent historians (you know, with degrees and published books and stuff) have rebutted Cooper since (including Victor Davis Hanson and Niall Fergusson, both in the Free Press) but let me, a fellow amateur, give it a shot.

Cooper’s thesis relies on giving Hitler all the benefit of the doubt and none of it to Churchill and the Allies. It is the defence of the wife-beater: she made me do it. If Churchill hadn’t been so bellicose in stubbornly refusing to agree to Hitler’s peace terms (offered after he’d conquered half of Europe) the war wouldn’t have (Cooper’s words again) ‘become what it did’. This neglects a few pertinent facts:

1. By the time Churchill became prime minister, war had been declared. Denmark and Norway had already been invaded and within a month of the start of his premiership the Nazis had taken the Netherlands, Belgium and France. After this orgy of conquest, yes, Churchill rejected Hitler’s ‘peace’ offer.
2. Hitler had continually broken previous agreements including the Munich Agreement (regarding the invasion of Czechoslovakia) and the non-aggression pact with Poland. He went on to shaft the Soviets by breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invading the USSR. Hitler’s word on any peace treaty wasn’t worth a single hair on his pathetic excuse for a moustache.
3. Cooper’s claims of Churchill’s psychopathy rely largely on the Allies’ bombing of Germany (which he characterises as ‘terrorist’). It was brutal, yes, but came only after the Nazis had bombed civilians in Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry, along with the ‘practice’ horror show of the incineration of Guernica in the Spanish civil war.

I will absolve Cooper of outright Holocaust denial. It is unclear when he excuses the death of ‘political prisoners’ because the Nazis hadn’t ‘planned’ for such large numbers of prisoners, whether he is talking about Jews. That Carlson didn’t question him on this is perhaps suggestive of weird priorities. (I’m being generous.)

I’ll be less so regarding Cooper’s blatherings on X (under his handle ‘Martyr Made’). Anyone who uses the phrase ‘the Jewish problem’ in anything other than the ironic quotes I just used, sets off my creepometer.

‘Martyr made’ also, apparently, compared on X a photo of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower with an image from the controversial ‘Last Supper’ drag queen tableau during the Paris Olympics, commenting: ‘This may be  putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left (of Hitler) was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right (the tableau).’

I understand the bearded ladies of Paris offended many. They unintentionally amused even more. More soberly, the trans cult has certainly caused a lot of suffering to confused young people and poses a different but no less serious danger to women. I also understand that Cooper is using the sad display at the Olympics as emblematic of all the identity politics madness of modernity. Like the punks before him he is reacting against the excesses of liberalism – in this case, woke gender nonsense.

But still the comparison is obscene.

Cooper hears the word ‘trans’ and reaches for his swastika without really thinking through what this means. There is no conservative (or anti-progressive, if you wish) concern that wouldn’t be worse under the Nazis. Free speech? Not so much for Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose hanged in 1943 when they published pamphlets insulting the Führer. Christianity? Only of a particularly Lutheran strain denuded of any ‘Jewish elements’ and co-existing with the kind of pagan occultism favoured by Himmler. The rule of law? Free enterprise? Respect for the nation state and its borders? Need I continue?

I may have to, given the acclaim Cooper has received from many of the online right as a fearless truth-teller – which he is not. His revisionism has an ideological element (his smirking insinuations around Churchill’s Zionism are a hint) that makes his work the opposite of a ‘just the facts’ approach.

Part of the problem is the nature of the online world. For Generation Z and younger, Substack ramblings and endless podcast pontifications are replacing the written word. They are a poor substitute. The measured imbibing of the essential narratives of our culture takes time – and not the ADHD friendly bursts the internet offers. School history teaching is the rest of the problem, social messaging being preferred over old-fashioned notions of grand narratives and facts. A woeful ignorance, not to mention confusion has resulted, readily exploitable by chancers like Cooper.

To crib from the old ‘psychopath’ himself:

Never before in the field of human knowledge have so many been ignorant of so much that truly matters.