Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: The interview Tucker Carlson had with Jacob Rees-Mogg, who’s a member of Parliament. I don’t know if he’s still a member of Parliament, but exceptionally smart man, articulate, and of course, Tucker got into World War II. Hitler, Hitler really didn’t want to go to war with England. He said it many times.
Rees-Mogg came back with, “Well, he signed that piece of paper and gave it to Neville Chamberlain, so what Hitler said most of the time was lie.” But I think most people that watched these clips would’ve been embarrassed for Tucker Carlson and his continued desire to push this rewriting of World War II history and other historical incidents in the 20th century.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I watched a lot of it. It was painful to watch because I used to know Tucker and I liked him. I still like him, but obviously something’s happened to him. I don’t know if they meant it to be that way, but what it was really saying, Jack, was here is the American aristocrat, wealthy, privileged kid who grew up in conservatism and represents the right side of the right.
And here is the British aristocrat, very wealthy, who represents the right side. I don’t mean right as correct, but a strong Brexit guy, you know, an ultra-conservative. I’m sorry about the imprecise terminology. So he’s an ultra-conservative, and so is Tucker. Uh, Rees-Mogg is the heir, I think his father was the editor of The Times, and he inherited an estate, and his wife is very wealthy.
So, he’s probably worth $150 million in dollars. Tucker is the heir to the Miller Lux 19th-century land. At one time, it owned almost a million acres in the 19th century. Everywhere I go around here, you can see old Miller Lux ranches. On one side, and then, of course, I think it was his stepmother, but I may be imprecise, was the heir to the Swanson food fortune.
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And he went to prep school in Europe, I think, for a while. So, they’re very similar in background. But when they actually talked, Jacob Rees-Mogg was very careful. He cited evidence. He didn’t try to interrupt. He didn’t chuckle and look at the camera. It was very professional, very kind of cold and sober, factual, never lost his temper, and Tucker was highly emotional, spewing out all sorts of misinformation that, what, 1,200 people at Eaton were killed in the war, and it was 200.
Just factually incorrect, and he had to be corrected by Rees-Mogg. As far as the main issues of the debate, once again, Tucker is completely wrong. He says that that Britain did not have to fight World War II, A, that if Hitler had been allowed to win and keep all of his ill-gotten gains from the Russian border all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, Britain would have been better off because after the fall of France in late June of 1940, Hitler made a deal.
And then Tucker said that it could have taken it rather than demonizing Oswald Mosley and the other fascists. He knows nothing about contemporary reports of that deal. What Hitler was saying was, you white Tories, you aristocrats in Britain are a lot like us. That’s not true. They weren’t. And then he’s saying, you can have your empire take a deep breath for a while, but you’re never going to intervene in the continent.
Now, they were already going into Poland and rounding up Jews and killing them. They already were doing, quote unquote, assisted suicide with their own multiple sclerosis, mentally retarded. They were already lining up dissidents and shooting them en masse.
There was only one country in the world that stood between that entire, every single major EU country today was either by June, July of 1940, either aligned with Hitler, maybe we could stretch it to August, September with Greece falling in Yugoslavia, but aligned with Hitler as an ally, neutral but pro-Hitler or occupied by Hitler.
The whole EU, all of the NATO countries, there was only one little country, little Britain and its crumbling empire that it couldn’t quite reach, which was under attack by Japan already before Pearl Harbor in the Dutch East Indies and soon to be in Singapore and soon in India and in Burma. And what did Britain do?
It said, we don’t trust you. We’ve tried to make a deal with you, Hitler, at Munich. You lied. You said that was the last territorial ambition you had, and you annexed, you destroyed Czechoslovakia. And no sooner did we sign that than within a year you invaded Poland. And Poland who lost, who disappeared for years, who had its borders chewed up by Soviet Russia in 1939 with you.
And then what Tucker didn’t say is, because he’s a big fan of Vladimir Putin apparently, is that Britain was attacked, bombed by the help of the Soviet Union from August 23rd of 1939 until June 22nd of 1941. There was no allies. The United States was not in the war. The Soviet Union was on the side of Germany de facto in a non-aggression [pact], supplying 20%, 30% of their food and fuel while they bombed, firebombed Coventry and began firebombing London, etc.
It was only Britain, and Britain was the only country … He makes fun of it because he said, “Well, you went to war when you weren’t invaded.” It’s worse than that, Tucker. Britain was the only country of the six major belligerents, Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, who went to war for the principle of upholding its word to Poland that it would protect it if Hitler started a war against it.
And it did. And it was the only country to fight on the first day of the war and the only country to fight on the last. It fought magnificently, given its resources.
Now, he made finally a couple of other crazy … He said that Oswald Mosley was the opposition. Oswald Mosley never had any elected office. He was a fascist and he was pro-Hitler and they dressed up as a black shirt or brown shirt, whatever you want to call him.
He had 5,000. He tried to beat up people in the street. And he said that Hitler, we know now that if he took over, the likely people who would have ruled Britain were him, Mosley, or maybe the Duke, the dethroned king, Edward, or maybe basically pro-Hitler’s David Lloyd George, the prime minister during World War I, was talking about coming back as an interim government.
It was only Winston Churchill who said, “No, do not trust these people. They say that we can have the empire and we can have our navy, but we’ll never have our navy or empire because they’ll have the entire continent, the entire world, and it will be just like Munich again. They will say, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do this.’ And then we will be completely humiliated as a moral country while they slaughter people as they are doing already and we don’t say a word about it.”
And so, why did Hitler invade the Soviet Union? He said he was going to do it in “Mein Kampf,” but one of the reasons he did it was because Britain would not give in.
He tried everything. He couldn’t invade them by sea. He couldn’t bomb them into submission. He couldn’t beat them in North Africa. He did it because he thought he could take the Soviet Union. Think of that thinking. This huge Soviet Union will be easier to beat than little Britain. That’s what he really believed, that in 10 or 11 days, as Gen. [Franz] Halder said, “Well, after 11 days, one could fairly say the war in Russia is over,” and that that was going to then bully Britain into surrender.
And there wouldn’t be a Jew in Europe today or in the United States probably, because a lot of them came over here, had Hitler won. And Tucker knows that.
And then he says, “Well, they wouldn’t have had all these foreigners.” That didn’t come in 1946 or 1947. Look at the population in 1950. Look at when you had the Rivers of Blood speech, that was in the ’60s.
It started in the ’60s, but it was mostly the idea of Tony Blair. He was the one that really opened the floodgates. That was a postmodern … The empire was in big trouble financially after World War I. World War II didn’t destroy it. They were gonna have to give it up anyway. And they knew that. It hastened it.
FDR hastened it, but it was a dead letter anyway. And so almost everything he said in that interview was false. Once again, he has these little quips that are really… And then he starts chuckling and trying to make fun of this guy, Rees-Mogg, but he really knew history. He was actually educated with a seconds in history at Oxford.
And that used to be really hard to do. And so he knew his history, and he didn’t lose his temper, and he quietly corrected him. And I don’t know any fair-minded person that didn’t think that severely damaged Tucker’s reputation. He couldn’t laugh his way or fudge facts out of that. And one of the subtexts is, again, so if you listen to very carefully, a subtext is the Jews, the Jews, the Jews.
Fowler: Oh. You never heard back from him your request that he correct the record.
Hanson: No, I haven’t.
I’m still waiting. He said that Victor Hanson thinks the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was glorious when I actually said it was a horrific act. But if anybody could come up with a better way of stopping a horrific invasion of Japan that would have cost Americans a million casualties, probably 5 to 6 million Japanese casualties and 15,000 dead every day we were fighting the Japanese.
The Japanese were killing in Asia and the Pacific. I’d be happy to hear it. And maybe they thought, “Well, we could have used the firebomb raid.” Yes, we could have. And the big greatest loss of life in a single day was not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It was the March 9th or 10th bombing of Tokyo with napalm. And we would have bombed them.
Believe me. After World War II in Europe was over, we were gonna have bombers transferred. We had new B-29s on order, and Okinawa was going to be a deliverance of fiery death to all of Japan had that war continued.
Fowler: The fact that Japan did not immediately surrender after Tokyo, it was evidence that they were going to fight to the last man.
Hanson: They were very excited, if that’s the right word, because they hadn’t had a really good record when they first introduced in the Philippines campaign kamikazes. But Okinawa was only 900 miles away. And the Zero was a very light aircraft, and it had enormous, almost 2,000 miles of range. And it only had to go one way as a kamikaze.
It was like a cruise missile. So it didn’t have to have the whole tube.
Fowler: So they sunk 30-something ships, didn’t they?
Hanson: I think they hit 36, and they sunk 19. And they killed 5,000 sailors. And they pulled off a lot of the major carrier groups. They had to get out of there because there was nothing they could do with a Zero, with 50 Zeros and other Japanese planes coming at 350 miles an hour, two feet above the water, under the radar.
And then at the same time, Japanese Zeros diving from 30,000 feet right through fighter cover at full speed. And they’re not trying to shoot anybody down. They’re not trying to bomb. They have one goal, to crash. That’s a lot easier to do than drop a bomb and hit the target. And they were brilliant cruise missiles, and you couldn’t stop them.
And they had 7,000 to 8,000 of them waiting on Japan. They could have destroyed most of the Pacific fleet. And I don’t know why he doesn’t see that, or he does see it. But it’s so easy to say, “Well, I’m so moral. I hate all nuclear weapons. And Victor Hanson thinks they’re glorious.” Just prove it. Prove it.
Prove it. Prove it. Prove it. Just give me a quote. Just say, “Here it is, Victor. You’re a liar. Here you said this. This was glorious.” He will never do that. He’ll never apologize for all the facts that he got wrong in the case of Jacob Rees-Mogg. He won’t. But he got corrected a lot. He could have got corrected a lot more, but Mogg was too polite to just end up saying “wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.”
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