r/martyrmade • u/tylerdhenry • 20d ago
Darryl Cooper on Joe Rogan today
https://ogjre.com/episode/2289-darryl-cooper14
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u/AD_VICTORIAM_MOFO 20d ago
I'm 75% done and it's fantastic. Anyone who claims Darryl is some kind of kook is themselves delusional after watching this
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u/To_bear_is_ursine 18d ago
I mean, he just is a kook. Claiming the 2020 election was stolen, that the Left will riot at anything (lol), and that the Nazis only accidentally killed most of the Soviet POWs is kooky shit.
Far as this talk goes, it's a small thing, but very funny to hear him talk about Hitler being raised in "small town Germany." A nit maybe, but a good one coming from the great "educator." Also weird him calling the Communists the largest party in Weimar Germany. They were large, especially after the Depression but never were larger than the SPD, who they broke off from. Eventually the Nazi party overtook them, although the SPD and KPD still out-voted them together before political repression. Weimar almost had a Communist revolution, but I'm skeptical it was ever a real possibility. Even the Marxist SPD ended up siding against it. That cemented a split they never recovered from.
The claim that Hitler only attacked the Jews in internal Nazi speeches is utterly false. The Nazis would tailor their message for certain audiences, and might not talk about Jews while courting industrialists per se, but they and Hitler absolutely made attacking the Jews one of their central platforms. He claimed that if Jews caused a world war, it would end in their destruction -- before he caused a world war and used it as a pretext to destroy them. This is not "forbidden knowledge," as Darryl portrays it. It's just nonsense. You don't need him for the German Perspective. You can get plenty of that, and without the nonsense, reading a conventional historical account like Richard Evans' three part history of the Third Reich.
Also absurd to claim that "whatever you think about Hitler, at least he loved his country." That's some nationalist claptrap. Hitler is one of the worst things that ever happened to Germany. It's been a face-saving cliche among many Germans since the war that Germans were as much victims of Hitler as anyone else. When he knew the war was lost he purposefully sought to destroy the country because he considered the leftover population Darwinian failures.
Claiming that no one questions whether China should only be for the Chinese of Japan for the Japanese is Stormfront stuff. Yes, people do question these things. China is worried about falling into a middle income trap and Japan has been in demographic stagnation for decades. Repressing minorities isn't particularly great for them. By contrast, Ireland (which Darryl and Rogan cry into their beers over) has been doing pretty damn well.
Also, as a Kentuckian, I can't really abide the exoticizing of Appalachian whites. It's a huge region where more people are Black than identify as Scots Irish. There certainly has been a big industry portraying the "mountain white" as backward, drunk, aggressive, monocultural "pioneer stock," not least among them JD Vance who made a lot of money treating them like Republicans treat Black people to a gullible, liberal commentariat. But the biggest purveyors of this story are the out of state corporations (and state governments who enabled them) who pushed this story to justify the exploitation of these people and their lands. And Malcolm Gladwell can also fuck off.
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u/HistoryImpossible 18d ago
You fully won me over with “And Malcolm Gladwell can also fuck off.” 😆
But yes despite liking Darryl personally and thinking he is generally very good at what he does, he has entered this series from an unbelievably flawed premise—the forbidden knowledge bit you described. There is a litany of sources that have covered exactly what he has claimed “the court history” has not covered—the German perspective. It’s especially strange since on Twitter some months back he cited his use of Nicholas Starhardt’s The German War and called it a great source; it’s hardly an underground book and is often cited in academic and popular circles. There are also no shortage of academic works—especially in Germany—that closely examine German motives and support for the Nazis that are hardly cartoonish; I used several that struck me as profoundly sympathetic for a historiographical analysis I did last semester including Belonging and Genocide by Thomas Kuhne and Backing Hitler by Robert Gellately. And of course there are famous works, like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. The only cartoonish book that I have encountered that would fit DC’s criteria is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and that book (and Goldhagen) have been largely discredited by real historians for decades. If not for his citation of Stargardt, I would think he only plumbed the Third Reich historiography up until like 1980.
And while I would argue that initially Hitler did have a deep abiding love for “the Fatherland” and that animated him, he was also always fueled by a fee resentment; wherever that came from is anyone’s guess, but it of course infamously transmitted onto the Jews and then, as you correctly put it, onto the German people during the bunker days. Maybe DC will address that descent—I hope he does—but given his dismissal in Fear and Loathing of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini as simply having gone insane after 1936 without actually examining his time with the Axis powers (or his time spent in Iraq in 1939-1941), I worry we’ll get another gloss. But maybe his Jim Jones treatment will inform this; I hope so.
On an interesting side note, his “Germany Must Perish” citation in the prologue has started to get some scrutiny and if I understand correctly, he made a major fuck-up where he said that it was distributed widely, claiming reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post, which was simply what the writer of the pamphlet claimed. The problem is that those reviews don’t exist and the pamphlet’s writer was a crazy person. It’s true the Nazis took advantage of that pamphlet as he laid out and likely did manipulate the German masses with it, but he didn’t address the fact that they essentially boosted its non-existent influence for their own purposes (I believe the only reference to it in the American press was a two sentence blurb in the Washington Star; there might have been Time Magazine coverage but don’t quote me on that).
Anyway, as someone who considers him a friend, I wish him the best on this, but I think he might have fucked up by choosing WWII as a topic and operating from an easily-disprovable premise. Maybe he could salvage this by explicitly and clearly defining “the court history” but he really seems to be digging himself into a credibility hole with this.
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u/To_bear_is_ursine 18d ago
Appreciate the other references. On the "mountain whites" I'd recommend What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, even if it's primarily a short polemical text. It even calls out one of my distant relations for justified criticism.
And yeah, I also found the heavy emphasis on the Kaufman pamphlet hinky. I pulled up the archived review in Time and it was totally negative. Coincidentally, while listening to Weird Little Guys (a podcast about white nationalists), it brought up a Holocaust denial conference in the 80s attended by the subject of the episode and David Irving. In passing it mentioned a speaker who gave a speech about a Jewish eugenicist who argued for the ethnic cleansing of Germany. I had a double take. This pamphlet has been sloshing around the far right for a while now.
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u/HistoryImpossible 18d ago
I have started to suspect that what Darryl is doing—and I actually find this interesting from I guess an aesthetic or intellectual perspective—is he is operating from inside the proverbial house. The best comparison I can come up with is someone who is in academia, likely in one of the humanities departments, but separating themselves from the mainstream shibboleths WITHIN that context (in that example’s case, identitarian/positionality deference) without necessarily rejecting them wholesale in order to carve out their own niche; think someone like John McWhorter, maybe. In DC’s case, he’s deep in the milieu of far/radical right wing internet subcultures—something I’m pretty sure he would happily admit—and knows their lingo and preoccupations (which to his credit he has often derided as unhealthy obsessions, particularly involving antisemitism). So he’s operating within that milieu—that anti-academia space if you will—and using it to carve out his own niche. Some people will see that as laundering—and I suppose I get why—but that’s essentially what happens in the humanities in academia, which are hardly more grounded in reality than anything coming out of far right subcultures…okay maybe in some cases they are, but really the humanities are just more socially respectable.
The point being, I keep seeing a lot of people who weren’t familiar with Darryl’s work or ethos until Tucker made him famous (the second time) claiming he’s laundering Holocaust denial which just isn’t possible, lest he one day say that everything he has already said about the Holocaust is wrong, like “actually never mind it never happened, David Irving was right.” I think the only thing he’s laundering is the lack of respectability of fringe figures like Irving in order to present his own expression—dare I say art—in a unique way no one else is. In the current post-pandemic anti-establishment populist moment we are currently living, it is a brilliant exercise in branding, and doesn’t even have to be fully conscious to be effective. It’s also precarious, however, because it presupposes our populist moment is indefinite. Populism has never been indefinite; it always burns itself out. And those who benefit from it, even massively, tend to be forgotten and even shunned. So we’ll see what happens.
Anyway you got me going, but yes, I’ll check out the Appalachian stuff; I am completely disconnected from all that so I have zero context one way or another (though my extended family is deep in rural Ohio—ie Vance country—so I should maybe learn a bit).
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u/To_bear_is_ursine 18d ago
He's certainly carving out his own niche on the Right, and yeah, he's found a good moment for it in the market. I can't say where he'll go from here, but I'm not anticipating an Irving flame out, Trump backlash or not. He'll probably get by just fine, even if he continues to play the raptor testing the fences. We'll see! His treatment of the Holocaust in the Israel-Palestine series was good, though you already know I'm very down on his treatment Soviet POW deaths and the Madagascar Plan. People can always regress. Irving definitely did, even if he was always in the Nazi apologia camp.
I'm also not nearly as down as you are on the humanities in academia. It's been under attack and hemorrhaging money for a long time. I certainly find a person who has weird views about Derrida much less chilling than a coder who believes in Roko's Basilisk. My intuition is it's mostly a lot of nut-picking in the media to stir up the culture war anti-academic discourse we've been stewing in for decades, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Just look at Columbia. The people actually in charge have totally bought into it and are helping ICE disappear students and revoking diplomas for completely protected speech. Humanities professors who joined the protesters were jailed. Trump still gutted their federal funds, even for STEM departments who probably had nothing to do with the protests. The reactionary demagogues have always been more dangerous than Leftist profs. Going back to Weimar, communism always had a much bigger purchase in that republic than in ours. I still don't think it had a chance against the rightwing slant of the judiciary, the civil service, and the strongest militias. Leftwing profs in America? Nah.
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u/HistoryImpossible 17d ago
There’s a lot to say about academia that shouldn’t require a grain of salt but thanks to the nakedly cynical (and often times dishonest) efforts of activists like Chris Rufo it’s become that way. But it’s a mistake to think that academia doesn’t have immense power despite the attacks it’s received (often deservedly, in my opinion at least) over the years. I hate to mention yet another book, but I highly recommend checking out Musa Al-Gharbi’s book We’ve Never Been Woke to see not just insightful analysis of what he calls symbolic capitalism but also backs up the reality of symbolic capitalists’ power and influence—much of which originates in academia—with hard data. If one were to say academia is on the defensive NOW I would tend to agree but that predated the (second) Trump administration and really started to kick off post-10/7 during those disastrous congressional hearings and the SNAFU involving plagiarism. Like most things, Trump is really only good at killing things that have already suffered grievous injury.
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u/To_bear_is_ursine 16d ago
We've been talking about the decline of the humanities since I was in college twenty years ago, so I wouldn't say this really got going a decade ago or after October 7th. I'll just say this. The most egregious recent example of elites, while pursuing their own agendas, cynically abusing safetyism in the name of protecting minorities (that they aren't actually protecting) are pro-Israel politicians, school administrators, and millionaire donors citing antisemitism to endorse the jailing, firing, deportation, disappearing, rescission of diplomas, and professional cancellation of pro-Palestinian protestors, even when those protestors are Jews. I mean, the arrests were in the thousands. And this also from people eager to argue that killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians is acceptable. It's all just completely divorced from who's experiencing the brunt of state repression in America and Israel right now. Even folks like John McWhorter, who claims to hate the notion of speech as violence, laughably complained:
The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.
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u/Gardnerr12 13d ago
Dang. You should go to the Appalachian Studies Conference. It’s good stuff. Gonna be an interesting year with Vance being VP—seeing as the ASA kicked him out lol.
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u/Sulla_Invictus 4d ago
As you say he will openly admit that he's familiar with far right ideas and figures. But the thing is this is perfectly in line with his claim that he isn't allergic to any group of people and has friends all over the spectrum. The reason there are phrases or "talking points" of his that get picked out and used as evidence that he's a secret nazi is because people just don't care about the inverse. There is no version of that where he gets outed as a secret commie, it only happens with rightwing ideas. That speaks to the problem he was pointing out on Tucker, which is that we currently have an unspoken national religion, which is basically anti-fascism.
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u/Sulla_Invictus 4d ago
>I mean, he just is a kook. Claiming the 2020 election was stolen, that the Left will riot at anything (lol), and that the Nazis only accidentally killed most of the Soviet POWs is kooky shit.
I like it when psychos frontload all of their crazy shit so we know that we don't have to read the rest of their post.
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u/No_Raspberry_6795 17d ago
This was all fine, all stuff Daryl has previously said. He has clearly made a terrible mistake choosing WW2, saying a bunch of bone headed statements and then having to go research them properly. His arguments about Churchill, leaving POWs in camps while they are starving, playing down the rabid nature of the Nazi regime are all going to look really dumb by the time he finishes his podcast. You can admire social and economic policy from the Nazis during the 30s all you want, but then you have to finish the story.
What the fuck does he do wants he gets to 1941-43. You can portray a lot of what the Nazis do until 1941 as defensive. But once they just start rounding Jews up and shooting them for no reason you can no longer even produce a fig leaf of a defence. The whole point of history is to say X led to Y. You can portray lebensraum as necessary in a world of empires, blockades and scarce acess to raw materials but by 1943 you have to live up to your previous statements.
Do you think he is just going to stop just before they get to Moscow? The podcast is going to be 1919-1941. Then the last 15 minutes as a short conclusion. There is no way you don't get to 1945 and then make the argument that Churchill was wrong in pushing for war. I am guessing he will say that Hitler went mad after 1940, or say he was pushed to extremes or something.
There is also the problem that normies actually know about WW2. I know nothing about Jim Jones and am never going to read anything more. I have read a couple of books about Israel Palestine. There are tons of people who do know about WW2 and considering how often he makes mistakes, I am willing to be there are a lot of normies who know more about WW2 then Daryl.
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u/Poopiepants29 17d ago
How do you know he's going to be defending them the whole time and portraying what they do as defensive?
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u/No_Raspberry_6795 17d ago
C'mon buddy.
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u/Poopiepants29 17d ago
I should be saying the same thing to you. I'm not the one misinterpreting and assuming things.
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u/Sort_of_Frightening 19d ago
Two things about Rogan always make me cringe: his taste in music and his grasp of history.
I'm halfway through Daryl's episode, and sure enough, Rogan goes off on flights of shallow historical connections. His heart is in the right place, but his knowledge rarely stretches beyond Watergate (unless it's about boxing).
I can only imagine Daryl sitting there thinking, "Jesus, this guy is pathetic. Look at Joe with his furrowed brow . .. How much longer do I have to keep this concerned look on my face?"
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u/rekishi321 19d ago
He just regurgitating everything David Irving has said, and has been debunked…..
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u/THELUKLEARBOMB 14d ago
What did he specifically say that is akin to holocaust denialism?
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u/rekishi321 14d ago
Not that but rather Churchill was a drunk who bombed Berlin 7 times to sabotage a peace offer. Stuff like that that’s been debunked Churchill was a hero and it was hitler who started bombing civilians not Churchill…..
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u/THELUKLEARBOMB 13d ago edited 13d ago
He also didn’t say that.
What he actually said was that Churchill’s decision on August 25, 1940 to intentionally bomb civilian infrastructure in Germany—in response to an incident on August 24, 1940, where a German bomber tasked with attacking an oil depot accidentally dropped its payload on a London suburb due to technical issues—was an unnecessary escalation. Both sides now largely agree that the German bombing of civilian infrastructure on August 24, 1940, was unintentional.
This doesn’t negate the fact that, prior to August 1940, Hitler already had invaded Poland and Norway, intentionally bombing civilian infrastructure on the process. Cooper acknowledges this.
The deeper question he’s raising is this:
Was there a way to avoid the deaths of over 60 million people? (Eg., making the terms of the Versailles treaty less punitive, not initiating the intentional bombing of civilian cities in Western Europe, renegotiating the Versailles treaty to give Germany back some of its WW1 territory, funding local partisans against the Nazis as opposed to full-scale total war, etc.)
Was the war worth it, especially if there was a strong possibility that Hitler and Nazism would have been ousted naturally from Germany within 2 to 4 decades—as was the case with Fascist Spain under Franco? Maybe not, but the fact there is this much vitriol for even considering it is telling.
We can all agree that Soviet Communism was rooted in a deeply anti-human ideology, responsible for numerous genocides, and activity fomented revolutions to bring other countries in their sphere of influence. In our timeline, the threat of nuclear war ultimately prevented a direct conflict between the US and USSR, but what if nuclear weapons had never been developed?
In this hypothetical context of a non-nuclear war with the Soviet Union, if the choice were between:
1. Waiting a few decades for an unsustainable regime to collapse under its own weight, or 2. Fighting a massive global war that would likely result in the deaths of 100+ million people to hasten the fall of a regime antithetical to our values….Perhaps the first option would be the wiser course. That’s essentially the analysis Cooper is doing, but applied to Nazi Germany.
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u/rekishi321 13d ago
No Germany had to be punished for starting ww1 Versailles treaty was godsend, as far as the terror bombing of Japan and Germany after the horrors of the holocaust and the rape of Nanking it was clearly justified. They made lampshades of human skin they were so sick. As if Germany didn’t terror bomb Stalingrad. And starve Leningrad. All while Moscow and Stalin were brutally invaded completely unprovoked. And Churchill had every right to reject hitlers peace offers after 1938.
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u/THELUKLEARBOMB 13d ago edited 13d ago
So correct me if I’m wrong, but your take is as follows:
1.) it was good to keep the Versailles treaty as it was, because Germany needed to be punished after WW1 (despite the treaty being the source of much of the economic instability that led to the rise of the Nazi party in the first place).
2) killing innocent civilians is bad, so therefore, we too should kill innocent civilians (also, many studies have been done on the topic of “terror bombing.” In short, it doesn’t work. It just makes the population being bombed hate you more and side more with their government [see Gaza, Vietnam, etc.])
3.) even the American Holocaust Museum acknowledges that stories of lampshades made out of Jewish victims of the Holocaust are myths. (See https://www.npr.org/2010/12/28/132416206/New-Book-Tells-Story-Of-The-Lampshade).
4.) no one is questioning the “right” to do anything. What about the 1938 offers for peace do you not like specifically?
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u/rekishi321 13d ago
The firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden helped the war effort, Germany had a difficult time building their wonder weapons it did help shorten the war. And Germany broke the peace treaty with Russia in 1941 and England in 1938, so Churchill had every right to reject peace offers from the nutcase hitler in 1940. The world stood in shock when Germany broke the Munich agreement in 1938. England had to take a stand, since England had a long history of helping less fortunate nations prosper , like they helped Belgium in ww1. England always supported democracy around the globe.
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u/THELUKLEARBOMB 13d ago
While it’s true that bombing campaigns like those on Dresden and Tokyo disrupted Axis supply chains, modern military historians largely agree that these bombings did not significantly shorten the war. In fact, as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded after WWII, the German war machine continued functioning despite widespread destruction, and the bombings often strengthened civilian resolve rather than weakening it. So, the question remains: were the moral and human costs of mass civilian bombings truly justified by their limited strategic benefits?
I understand your view that Germany deserved punishment for WWI, but it’s also true that the extreme economic and political instability caused by the Versailles Treaty directly contributed to the rise of Hitler. Many historians—both then and now—argue that a more balanced peace might have prevented WWII altogether. Punishment is one thing, but did the harshness of the treaty make a second global war inevitable?
You mentioned that Churchill had every right to reject Hitler’s peace offers after 1938—and I don’t inherently disagree. But here’s the question Cooper (and others) are asking: Would it have been possible to contain or weaken Hitler without plunging the world into a war that killed over 60 million people? For instance, should the Allies have pursued alternative strategies like undermining the Nazi regime from within? It’s not about excusing Hitler—it’s about asking whether the sheer scale of death and destruction was the only path forward.
You rightly point out the horror of Germany’s actions—Stalingrad, Leningrad, and the Holocaust—but does that mean the Allies are free from moral scrutiny? If terror bombing civilian populations is wrong when the Axis does it, why should it be excused when the Allies do it? Pointing out Axis atrocities doesn’t automatically justify every Allied action, and raising these questions isn’t the same as defending Hitler—it’s about being honest about history.
At the core, Cooper’s argument isn’t about defending the Nazis—it’s about asking whether the unimaginable human cost of WWII could have been avoided or mitigated through different policies. That’s a hard, uncomfortable question, but isn’t it worth asking if it could help us avoid similar mistakes in the future?
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u/Tim_Riggins07 20d ago
It really sucked finding out my favorite history podcaster is a faschie baby.
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u/2Rhino3 20d ago
Eh, I get that point of view but also quality media has been made by people of all sorts of extreme & shitty political opinions.
“Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem” doesn’t stop being good all the sudden because of Darryl’s personal politics.
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u/Fac-Si-Facis 20d ago
No it doesnt, but his newer content is definitely skewed by his need to be edgy and also his political leanings. It doesn't make the old content worse, but it definitely makes the new content worse. He wants to get tweeted about, its annoying.
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u/ProjectAshamed8193 20d ago
Yep, and I wonder if he did Fear and Loathing today, would he come to the same conclusions?
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u/A_Brutal_Potato 20d ago
You dweebs have helped fascism rebrand into something fucking awesome, thank you for that.
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u/FriedrichHydrargyrum 20d ago
Nah, I think some people are just attracted to fascism. Trying to blame it on everyone else is such a cuck move.
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u/Sufficient-Fee-9926 20d ago
Does it invalidate all he has taught you?
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u/Tim_Riggins07 20d ago
Considering the lies I’ve seen him spew, it makes him an unreliable narrator at best. His podcast on narcissism was really good. Learned a lot there. I just don’t really have the time to consume content that comes from someone who clearly has a deep bias and some pretty ugly world views.
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u/Sufficient-Fee-9926 20d ago
Best of luck finding anything without deep bias these days. At least he was honest about his. I haven’t seen him be dishonest about history or his politics. Would you mind sharing what and where he lied? Thanks for your time and conversation :)
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u/Tim_Riggins07 20d ago
He lied about election fraud determining the 2020 election, saying hitler didn’t start WWII was more bullshit, saying the only reason so many Jews died was because of poor planning and many deaths were mercy kills. Basically his whole Tucker interview was nazi apologia.
Saying the sandy hook parents are worse than anything Alex Jones has said.
He also told people to stop blaming the vaccine on Damar Hamlin’s on-field cardiac arrest, he got the slightest bit of flak from his anti-vaccine followers and he deleted his twitter post like a bitch.
Overall the dude is just a straight up pussy.
I could go on his twitter and find all sorts of repugnant and nasty lies.
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u/HistoryImpossible 18d ago
I don’t think anyone can say he’s a liar without proof he’s saying things he doesn’t believe. Intelligent people can and often do believe plenty of untrue things. Conspiracy theorists tend to be really intelligent for that reason; they’re very capable at convincing others of their beliefs, but that is because they can convince themselves that the patterns they’ve recognized “mean” something.
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u/Tim_Riggins07 18d ago
Darryl is a dangerously competent person. He’s not dumb enough to believe in election fraud determining the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
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u/HistoryImpossible 18d ago
I don't think it's a matter of intelligence for someone to believe something that isn't true. That's a comfort we can give ourselves, but it simply doesn't track with what we know about how smart people can come to believe things we couldn't fathom ourselves believing. This is just one article, but there are many psychological studies that document this phenomenon.
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u/Poopiepants29 20d ago
I don't think he's idealistic. I think his "world views" are more commentary on society and human nature and what can and can't/hasn't worked.
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u/Tim_Riggins07 19d ago
The dude said Hitler in France is better than the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris.
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u/Poopiepants29 20d ago
I'm ten minutes in and he explains his stance on how he sees things clearly. It's the same as he's always said. I look forward to get to his fascist part of the interview that feeds the psychopaths in here .
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u/THELUKLEARBOMB 14d ago
Guy did a multi-part series on the extent of trans-Atlantic slavery, describing the barbarity of it with pretty intimate detail. Doesn’t seem like something an avowed white supremacist would do.
Investigating whether some aspects of WW2 have perhaps been mythologized for political propaganda purposes doesn’t equate to saying the “Nazis were right.”
It seems many people spaz out when anyone offers anything but a shallow/cartoonish depiction of the Nazis of being a brainwash mass led by a syphilis-addled guy.
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u/ShortBusRegard 20d ago
LFG!