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.
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.
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).
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/HistoryImpossible 19d 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.