“The idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie,” Tucker Carlson told Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg in a recent TV debate, “and everyone believes it because they know nothing of the actual facts. But the truth is that Germany had big parts carved out of it, including parts of Prussia.” As for the Treaty of Versailles, which did indeed assign the previously German provinces of Posen and Western Prussia to Poland, Carlson states, “The UK had nothing to do with it at all.”
Perhaps Mr Carlson needs to be reminded of his history. In fact, the United Kingdom was a senior convener and signatory of the Versailles Treaty, which was negotiated by her prime minister, David Lloyd George. The ethnolinguistic demarcation line between Poland and Russia was called the Curzon Line, after the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon who delineated it. And when it came to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain was intimately involved after her guarantee of Poland’s integrity on 31 March 1939.
This isn’t the first time Carlson has indulged Hitler apologism. Last September, he interviewed Darryl Cooper, who told him that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. A few weeks later, Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, the livestreamer who has described Hitler as “awesome”, “right” and “fucking cool”.
These commentators are not unhinged outliers; they are part of a larger movement of ultra-MAGA propagandists who want to rewrite the history of the Second World War, only with Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt as the villains, and with Hitler as a visionary but misunderstood leader who was merely trying to do the best for his people. They are helped by the sad fact that so much of the generation who remembered the war, and thus can give first-hand testimony to what ludicrous rot this all is, are naturally slowly succumbing to the inevitable passing of time. In Britain there are wannabe MAGA types, including “groypers”, “incels” and “chuds”, as well as devotees of the manosphere, who also circle around weird antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi-adjacent worldviews.
But when one examines “the actual facts”, one soon recognizes that it is Carlson himself who is indulging in “lies”. And Rees-Mogg who deserves high praise in batting back Carlson’s by turn faux naif, ignorant and fascist-adjacent statements and questions.
After all, if Hitler had merely been interested in overturning the Versailles Treaty, as he himself claimed and Carlson seems to believe, he would have stopped at Posen and the (previously German) Danzig Corridor, rather than occupying the entirety of Western Poland in September 1939. A month later, Hitler allowed the Russians to occupy the whole of eastern Poland, under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had negotiated with the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov in August.
As was clear to everyone at the time — and should be even clearer to Carlson today — Hitler’s plans ever since he wrote Mein Kampf in the early Twenties were to seize Lebensraum (“living space”) for his Aryan empire in eastern Europe. In March 1939 he had proven that overturning Versailles was not the limit of his territorial ambitions, when he invaded Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia, which had not been taken from Germany at Versailles.
If overturning Versailles had been Hitler’s aim, why, then, did he invade Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and then the following month attack neutral Holland and Luxembourg, which had not gained territory from Germany under the Versailles terms? The obvious answer, that the Fuhrer craved hegemony over Europe, seems to have been lost on Carlson. Whether out of contrarianism, naivety, or misplaced curiosity about alternatives to perceive Western weakness, Carlson and his fellow travelers are all too willing to explain away the terrible misdeeds of tyrants.
Just as Carlson denies that Hitler was unjustified in overturning an international treaty, he makes excuses for Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. “I never cared, for the record,” Carlson told Rees-Mogg about Putin’s 2014 seizure of the Crimea, because Ukraine “is the most corrupt country in the world”. He also denounced Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator”, claimed that the USA “was not in a state of Total War” against Japan in 1945, and even asserted that “Russia has a much larger economy than Britain”. Flattering, but untrue. The UK has a GDP of $4.66 trillion according to the 2036 IMF predictions, against Russia’s $2.66 trillion, and Britain’s GDP per capita, at $61,000, is more than thrice that of Russia at $18,525. So sympathetic is Carlson to Putin that even the Russian president himself, reflecting on Carlson’s interview with him in 2024, remarked that it was softball.
That same instinct has caused Carlson to ignore some of the darkest acts in Western history. Carlson’s belief that Britain and America were no “better than the people you were fighting” in the Second World War ignores the fact that, by and large, the Allies observed the Geneva Convention, whereas the Nazis and Japanese routinely ignored its provisions. Germany allowed prisoners of war to starve to death while the Japanese brutalized captives.
“Far from Britons having ‘lost your self respect’ as a result of the Second World War, in fact it is a primary reason why we are rightly proud of our country.”
Far from Britons having “lost your self respect” as a result of the Second World War, in fact it is a primary reason why we are rightly proud of our country. We were, along with the British Commonwealth, the only countries to fight the Axis throughout the war from start to finish, and therefore won untarnishable glory in standing against the most evil regime in history.
Carlson’s attempts to smear that record are unfounded and destructive. When Rees-Mogg correctly pointed out that if Hitler had won the war, Britons would today be speaking German, Carlson replied, “Who cares? There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” According to the Office for National Statistics, some 0.3% of residents of England and Wales cannot speak English at all, so once again Mr Carlson falls into the category of those who, in his own words, “know nothing of the actual facts”.
Nor is it true that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally wrong because, in Carlson’s words, Japan “was already a defeated nation”. When the nuclear bombs were dropped in August 1945, Japan still had 1.5 million men occupying the major urban, industrial, and coastal regions of eastern and northern China, as well as in Inner Mongolia and in Japan’s puppet state of Manchuria. Japanese submarines were still operating widely in the Pacific.
In early August 1945, Japan occupied Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) and the whole Korean peninsula, and had forces in Burma, Thailand, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea. It was furthermore preparing for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, and considered itself far from being defeated. Indeed, its War Cabinet considered surrendering after the initial bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and formally decided not to. It took the attack on Nagasaki for Emperor Hirohito to declare that the war “had not necessarily gone to Japan’s advantage”.
We can be disgusted at the revisionist way that Mr Carlson twists history — he even considers Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, to be one of Britain’s “great war heroes” — but we should not be shocked. He has long had form for doing exactly that, and Rees-Mogg was correct in accusing Carlson of “verging on defending Hitler”, which is precisely what the remarks about the Versailles Treaty were intended to do.
We should be concerned, though, that Vice President JD Vance has not yet distanced himself from Carlson. Vance has a serious chance of becoming president of America, yet remains friends with a man who does not consider the Second World War to be a just war, one worth fighting.
Fortunately, the present ultra-MAGA movement centered around Carlson bases its entire argument regarding the Second World War on historical falsehoods that are relatively easily refuted. And their motivation is similarly easy to follow: in attempting to relativize the aggression and crimes of Adolf Hitler, while using antisemitic tropes to relativize the actions of the Nazis, they are trying to cast doubt on criticisms of Vladimir Putin. It is vital that these revisionists do not win the battle for the historical narrative, otherwise Hitler will posthumously win the peace in a way that he and his vile creed could thankfully not win the war.
It is all so transparent, and the best way to refute it is to do what Jacob Rees-Mogg did so admirably: stay calm, and recount the historical truth by way of factual evidence. As Sir Winston Churchill — who Carlson considers a “villain” — put it, “Study history, study history. For therein lie all the secrets of statecraft.”