(This is an abridged version of an essay that originally appeared in the American Thinker newsletter that subscribers receive every Friday night. If you would like more unique content like this, subscribe here.) 

Conservatism, particularly the new and vibrant populist MAGA variant, is in danger of becoming ahistorical; that is, lacking knowledge of the historical record to a point where we no longer know what happened in the past and cannot act on the lessons embodied by that experience.

This has already happened to the American Left, which stumbles from one crusade to the next without any clear understanding of how any of it fits into a broader historical context, whether it involves their own history, that of the U.S., or that of the world as a whole. This is awfully strange, considering that the forces of history, as embodied in the “historical dialectic,” play such a key role in Marxism itself.

This ignorance makes the left ineffective, but we conservatives must not lurch through the twilight with no idea of where we’re going because we don’t know where we’ve been. However, as Tucker Carlson’s historical ramblings show, we are at risk.

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Carlson has worked up a theory about the origins and course of WW II in which the criminal monster Winston Churchill is “the chief villain of the Second World War,” as opposed to the mild, misunderstood Adolf Hitler, who merely wanted to carve off a chunk of Poland. He bases this on the polemics of Darryl Cooper, a self-styled historian and YouTube influencer. Since influencers know everything, there was no need for Carlson to familiarize himself with any of the massive body of WW II scholarship, and he appears not to have done so. He has been widely criticized by a number of historians, among them Victor Davis Hanson.

Cooper is the latest expression of a school of WW II revisionism that began in the 1980s in Germany, naturally enough, with the Historikerstreit (Historian’s Conflict), a public debate as to how WW II, Adolf Hitler, and the Holocaust should be integrated into an understanding of modern German history. While it’s unknown how familiar Cooper is with the Historikerstreit, there’s no argument that much of what he proposes—Hitler’s minor role, Churchill’s expanded responsibility, the disparagement of the Allied war effort, the diminishing of the Holocaust—emerged from that movement.

One example of these errors will suffice: the claim that Hitler had little to do with triggering WW II. It was Churchill’s fault, helped all by an unknown cabal of international bankers.

What needs to be understood about the European theater in WW II is that it was a war of revenge, with Germany out to get its own back from France, Great Britain, the U.S., and everybody else who had defeated it in WW I.

The key element here is the “stab in the back” theory, in which Germany, on the very verge of victory, had been betrayed by shadowy figures—leftists, international bankers, or Jews, according to Hitler—and forced to accept a demeaning armistice followed by the humiliating Versailles Treaty. At the time, until the Western Front collapsed, many Germans reasonably thought they were winning.

Following the failed Nivelle offensive in 1917, the French army teetered on the edge of collapse, with open mutinies among the frontline troops. In early 1918, General Erich Ludendorff planned a mammoth offensive to sweep aside the weakened French, take Paris, and declare victory (the British Expeditionary Force, as the Germans well knew, would not have been able to hold out under these circumstances.)

Fortunately, the Germans managed to bungle a sure thing. American troops arrived quickly enough to turn things around, and the British offensive at Amiens in August 1918 led to the breakthrough that culminated in the November armistice. It was America that ended the inevitable German victory, but Germany clung to the fantasy that it could have held out against the world’s economic superpower, without recognizing that any rematch would have the same result, a delusion that eventually coalesced with the vision of a man whose psyche was intertwined with vengeance as its very ground of being. The result was utter catastrophe.

Adolf Hitler viewed revenge as a matter of destiny. He had a beef with the entire world and would resolve it on his terms. The Jewish people were the focus of this, of course, but it wasn’t the Jews alone.

Adolf Hitler needed to make the world bleed. His entire career, from volunteering for the German Army to his end in the bunker, expressed this. Recall Hitler’s “Nero order” telling Albert Speer to destroy every bit of infrastructure in Germany to punish the German people for betraying him.

That’s what led to war: the Germans’ thirst for revenge dovetailing with a highly intelligent, extremely capable, and fanatically driven psychopath. All other explanations, whether political, economic, or social, must take a back seat. Without Adolf Hitler, you don’t get WW II.

As for Winston Churchill, he had his flaws. He drank and had lengthy depressions (his “black dog”) coupled with his fits of exuberance and enthusiasm, suggesting a mild bipolar disorder.

But minor personality failings don’t start wars. In 1919,  Churchill authored the “Ten-year Rule,” which held that defense spending by the British government would be predicated on the assumption that there would be no major war for ten years. Britain held out on spending for 13 years, only seven years before the war began.

Finally, there’s the undeniable fact that Churchill had little to do with the outbreak of war. He’d spent most of the 1930s, while the crisis was building up. He wasn’t in the government until he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, two days after when Hitler invaded Poland. It was Neville Chamberlain, in 1939, who declared war when, a little over a year earlier, he had been groveling before Hitler in search of “peace in our time.”

Carlson and Cooper are not alone. In the 1990s, conservatives embraced a book titled Day of Deceit, which claimed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had deliberately allowed the Imperial Japanese Navy to attack Pearl Harbor to propel the U.S. into war.

The problem was that there were two Japanese Navy codes, JN-25 and JN-26, which the author believed U.S. Navy codebreakers read simultaneously. In truth, the Japanese smartly dropped JN-25 and replaced it with JN-26 just before setting the Pearl Harbor operation into motion. Navy cryptographers only broke JN-26 the following April, when they learned, among other things, of the upcoming attack on Midway. Like everybody else, FDR had no idea that the attack was coming.

Another writer overlooked the Alps’ existence. He argued that Allied forces could have “easily” advanced from northern Italy into Central Europe, preventing Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps even Poland from being occupied by the Soviets. In fact, Nazi commander Albert Kesselring stalled the Allied advance led by the incompetent Mark Clark (the only general known to have been sued by his own troops) for a year and a half, relying on—you guessed it—the mountainous Italian terrain. What Kesselring would have done without the Alps to play in is not worth thinking about.

It's dangerous when these erroneous beliefs become embedded as received wisdom. Consider the geological strata of myths that have accrued around the JFK assassination, most of them contradictory, and none of them making any sense. Too much of this – and it wouldn’t take a lot – could well bring our efforts to nothing.

A major virtue of the movement conservatives is that they did do the reading. Their problem was that they couldn’t be moved to do much of anything else. Encountering any kind of challenge, they’d write a lengthy piece on what Alfred Jay Nock would have thought about it, and then kick back, pour a glass of sherry, and take in a performance of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” on PBS.

MAGA populists tend to be more energetic, but energy misdirected is energy wasted. Working from mistaken premises and misunderstood history is a virtual guarantee of misdirection.

If we could combine old-line knowledge and education with MAGA vitality, we’d have something close to perfection, but that’s probably asking too much. So we’ll have to crack the books ourselves. To quote another authority on the value of history, Marcus Tullius Cicero: “Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.” And, my playmates, children don’t win ideological battles.