By Kindler

“They just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead there.” – Tucker Carlson guest Darryl Cooper.

Yes, I know we all have outrage fatigue and are sick of having to even think about all the awful, crazy sh*t Republicans say and do every day. But isn’t Holocaust denial a bridge too far?

This post is about an interview Tucker Carlson recently did with a Hitler apologist –  but let me make one thing clear before I even get started. Tucker is not out on the fringes of the Republican party, as some will try to gull you into thinking.  Mother Tucker is a close adviser to the Republican nominees for president and vice-president – in fact, he was reported to have been one of the three people who ultimately convinced Trump to choose J.D. Vance as his running mate, along with Steve Bannon and Don Jr.

Carlson was granted a prime time speaking slot at the RNC Convention.  Trump and Vance grant him plenty of interviews and J.D. is currently refusing to cancel an upcoming event at which they will be appearing jointly.  Carlson clearly has the ear of both men, as well as that of Trump-booster Elon Musk, who welcomed Tucker to “X” after Fox dumped the guy as a costly legal liability. Musk initially promoted the pro-Nazi interview as “Very interesting. Worth watching.”

So there is little doubt that Tucker would be a top advisor in a Trump-Vance Reich, whether formally in the mold of a Stephen Miller or in the informal capacity of a Roger Stone.  And so, when he spends two hours of his time fawning over the work of someone devoted to rewriting the history of WWII to favor the German side, don’t just dismiss discussion of this incident as more ginned-up faux Internet outrage. Rather, we have here a legitimate question of what a top advisor to an already fascist-friendly would-be president is whispering in his ear.

Clearly, a major motivation for Carlson featuring the man he described as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today” was to further his high priority project of promoting a pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine foreign policy. So he was clearly on board with his guest J.D. Cooper’s assertion that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.” Because yeah, a militarily stronger nation invading a weaker one is just the way of the world, how is that America’s business? Carlson made his intentions clear in commenting on the story for CNN:

“The fact that these lunatics have used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history disgusts me, and should terrify every American. They’re warmonger freaks. They don’t get the moral high ground.”

The even more monstrous Big Lie that Carlson and Cooper are peddling is that the whole Holocaust was just a big mistake due to poor planning. Cooper dishonestly claimed that the Nazis “were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners…did not have enough food” and so, instead of letting them starve, decided to “finish them off quickly now”.

This account is a vicious assault on the memories of millions of people who were murdered or tortured by the Nazis, the millions more bearing the scars of their family members having to suffer such treatment – as well as on the integrity of historical truth. What Cooper calls “local political prisoners” were actually members of groups systematically targeted by the Nazis for extermination, including Jews, LGBT people, the disabled and others. Their property was stolen, their families divided and destroyed, not as “local political prisoners” but as innocent individuals identified for genocide based on purely demographic characteristics.

Any so-called “popular historian” could easily find the truth of what happened, which was meticulously recorded by the Germans at the time in documents, photos and videos. The U.S. Holocaust Museum, like other such institutions, has floors and warehouses full of the evidence of what happened and WHY it happened.

The only question here is the agenda of people trying to cover up this historical atrocity and distract from these vast repositories of evidence. Besides the pro-Putin apologia, my darkest fears make me wonder if this is some sort of attempt to prepare the Republican base to accept the inevitable humanitarian disaster if we execute the Trump policy of “mass deportation” of rounding up and attempting to deport 15 million alleged illegal immigrants from the U.S.  I say “attempting to deport” because as journalist Radley Balko detailed in a well-researched piece on the subject, it’s likely that such a plan would result in many of the targets of such raids being stuck in internment camps, as many of the countries to which Trump may try to deport them would refuse to accept them.

Yeah, you know…concentration camps.

But even the obscenity of Holocaust denial, perhaps the ultimate low to which a political party could stoop short of outright, organized violence, simply merits a shrug as we are asked to move on to the next issue. J.D. Vance’s spokesman’s response was that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson.” So we have to accept Hitler fan boys at the pinnacle of political power in America because it would be wrong to “cancel” them.

Of course, the right wingers alleged to have been “canceled” never suffer any real consequences – instead, they just move on to more and more lucrative ventures, whether funded by Russia or tax-fearing billionaires.  Actual “cancelling” means being forced out of your home as your property is stolen and your family separated from you, being forced to wear a little yellow or pink badge to indicate you are to be shunned, being sent to a camp where you are starved and literally worked to death, subjected to gruesome medical experiments, sterilized against your will, and – if you manage to survive all that – being sent to be gassed and burnt to ashes. Not because you were a political prisoner caught up in some sort of unfortunate accident, but because you were  a member of a group targeted by a fanatical leader who made his plans quite clear years before in his memoirs.

Have you ever suffered that sort of “cancellation”, Tucker, Elon, Donald, J.D., any of you? No, you haven’t and you are in no damn place to deny the lived experience of the millions of those who did.

I cannot express how important the current election is and what the consequences will be if we lose to these lunatics.  But if we do and all the horrors we anticipate come to pass, I hope that no one in the future chooses to marginalize our suffering and pretend it didn’t happen in order to keep this sadistic merry-go-round going on and on through the rest of human history.

No. Never, ever forget.

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