Operation Edgelord

By Alan Jacobs

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

Those who deny the Myth of the Good War—the belief, described in my previous essay in this series, that World War II is a distinctively, perhaps uniquely, good war—fall, I think, into four broad categories.  

 

One: A Plague on Both Your Houses. The serious writers who say explicitly that there is no moral difference between the Allies and the Axis are few and far between. The more common view may be illustrated by A. C. Grayling’s 2006 book Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. Grayling argues that such bombing was a grievous moral crime, but he also, right from the outset, says:

 

It is unquestionably true that if Allied bombing in the Second World War was in whole or part morally wrong, it is nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible: a total of some twenty-five million dead, according to responsible estimates. Allied bombing in which German and Japanese civilian populations were deliberately targeted claimed the lives of about 800,000 civilian women, children and men. The bombing of the aggressor Axis states was aimed at weakening their ability and will to make war; the murder of six million Jews was an act of racist genocide. There are very big differences here.

 

Similarly, in his recent Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (2025), Paul Thomas Chamberlin argues that the war brought about the functional demise of colonialism but was effectively a comprehensive victory for imperialism—imperialism with two distinct and mutually hostile wings, the American and the Soviet, but imperialism all the same. Nevertheless, Chamberlin says in his introduction, “Nazi Germany stands as perhaps the most abominable regime in human history. The Axis powers committed many of the vilest atrocities the world has ever seen. And no serious scholar laments the defeat of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan.”

 

Explicit claims of moral equivalence are rare; but it’s not hard to find moral equivalence strongly implied, though with room built in for plausible deniability. See, for instance, Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which takes the form of a series of historical snapshots, such as this one:

 

Winston Churchill published an article in the Evening Standard called “How to Stop War.” It was June 12, 1936.

 

Fine speeches were useless, Churchill said, and platitudes were a crime. There was only one way to stop war, and that was through military might. “Safety will only come,” he wrote, “through a combination of pacific nations armed with overwhelming power, and capable of the same infinity of sacrifice, and indeed of the ruthlessness, which hitherto have been the attributes of the warrior mind.”

 

And:

 

The German Consul of Cleveland went to Henry Ford’s birthday party in Detroit. Ford was turning seventy-five, and the German consul had a gift for him from Adolf Hitler. It was a big gold-and-white medal with four gold eagles and four little swastikas on it, and with it came a wide red silk neck sash that stood out dramatically against Henry Ford’s white suit. It was July 30, 1938.

 

The snapshots are presented without commentary; readers are free to draw their own conclusions. But the book’s subtitle is telling, is it not? And in an Afterword Baker writes, “Was it a ‘good war’? Did waging it help anyone who needed help? Those were the basic questions that I hoped to answer when I began writing.” The last words of that Afterword, and therefore of the book, are:

 

I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They’ve never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.

 

Readers are free to draw their own conclusions, but Baker’s own conclusions seem straightforward: the leaders of the nations that fought the Second World War brought about “the end of civilization,” and the only people not responsible for that are the pacifists. To his pair of key questions, the answers are that it was not a good war and it did not help anyone who needed help. Of course, Baker might well reply, “I didn’t say that!” He’s got wiggle room.

 

Two: Say What You Want about the Tenets of National Socialism, Dude, At Least It’s an Ethos. (Come on, you know the source.) Here we get to the people I really don’t want to talk about, but must. The obvious example is Darryl Cooper, a podcaster and self-proclaimed historian whose Substack page is, as I write, the bestselling one in the site’s History category—he’s about 15,000 subscribers ahead of Adam Tooze—and whose podcast has occasionally been the top one on iTunes, ahead of Joe Rogan. The dude is making bank.

 

Cooper essentially flips the Story of the Good War—the one I said in my previous post is widely endorsed, not the extreme version Elizabeth Samet believes in—on its head. As far as I know—I can’t see what’s going on behind his paywall—he doesn’t say Hitler was a hero or that the Axis powers were paragons of virtue. He just says that they were a lot better than the alternative, i.e. the postwar liberal order that the defeat of the Axis made possible.

 

Overviews of the controversies surrounding Cooper may be found here and here, but the best summation of Cooper’s position may be a tweet that he later deleted, in which he juxtaposed an image of the drag queen show at the Paris Olympics that looked a whole lot like the Last Supper with a photo of Hitler’s procession through a conquered Paris and said that the latter was “infinitely preferable in every way.” If I may risk a second comedy quote, this reminds me of Larry David: “One thing about Hitler that I admire is that he wouldn’t take any sh-t from magicians.”

 

But of course if you’re going to say that—by which I mean not (a) Hitler took no sh-t from magicians but rather (b) Hitler’s conquering France is “infinitely preferable” to a blasphemous drag queen show—you will require a very different interpretation of the events leading up to World War II than Americans have tended to endorse. Thus Cooper’s repeated insistence that Hitler was a man of peace whose hand was forced by the warmonger Winston Churchill, and that while the Holocaust did indeed happen, it was essentially a great big accident, never planned but resulting from a chaotic Nazi response to Churchill’s aggression. (Whoops!)

 

I am not here to refute, but merely to describe—however: the Myth of the Good War may be selective in its use of evidence, but virtually every claim Cooper makes can be not only questioned but straightforwardly disproven: See detailed and quotation-laden critiques by Niall Ferguson and Andreas Koureas.

 

Three: Just Asking Questions. This group arises in response to the previous group. It’s a diverse body of folks: For instance, Tucker Carlson, after interviewing Cooper, said, “I think you are the most important popular historian working in the United States today,” and added, “People can certainly take issue with any factual claims you’re making. I assume they’re all right.” This is Carlson agreeing with Cooper but also, shrewdly enough, leaving himself an escape hatch: he “assumes” that Cooper is correct—but of course assumptions can be overturned and in any case the issues are worth exploring—so many think, not just Carlson.

 

Often the people exploring are more circumspect than Carlson was: Elon Musk listened to the Carlson interview with Cooper, linked to it, and commented (in a since-deleted post): “Very interesting. Worth watching.” This stance has become widely known as Just Asking Questions, though Joe Rogan, who also interviewed Cooper, calls it “Just talking to people.” But in both cases it might better be called: Just Listening to People At Great Length. Cooper got many hours from Carlson and Rogan alike to make his case against the Myth of the Good War, with virtually no pushback. And maybe that’s how it should be. Who am I to judge? Hey, I’m just asking questions.

 

Four: Are You Offended Yet? In this category come the trolls, for instance Nick Fuentes, who cheerfully admits that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis—“cookies in an oven,” he calls them—but also, when asked by Piers Morgan whether he regretted saying that “Hitler is really f—ing cool,” asked, “Regret saying a fact? No, no, that’s absolutely true.” He went on:

 

And I’m tired of pretending it’s not, to be honest … . It’s just cool — the uniforms, the parades, it’s cool. As a guy, you look at World War II, and it’s fascinating, and it’s interesting, and it’s compelling, and it’s cool.

 

And throughout this section of the interview Fuentes sees himself as a representative figure: “The thing is, my generation, we’re just done with the pearl-clutching.” When reminded that there are people still alive whose parents were killed by the Nazis, Fuentes says simply, “I dont care.” Fuentes here presents World War II as an aesthetic (cool vs. uncool) rather than a moral (good vs. evil) phenomenon, and if people are outraged by that, it’s a sign that they Just. Don’t. Get. It.

 

So these are the four primary ways to reject the Myth of the Good War, the story that has made World War II so central to the American imagination: by seeing the combatants in the war as morally equivalent—or at least not greatly distinct; by seeing the Axis powers as more admirable than the allies; by disavowing commitment to any particular narrative in favor of “just asking questions”; and by redescribing the war as an aesthetic event, with no interest in the morality of any side.

 

If you’re an American who thinks of the war as the comprehensive defeat of totalitarian regimes and the emergence of your own country as the world’s regnant superpower, or a Brit who sees the war as a nearly miraculous triumph of the plucky underdog, or even a German or Japanese person who sees the end of the war as Stunde Null (Zero Hour), an opportunity to start over and build your country anew, then World War II might seem to you an event of unique meaning—an event upon which to build a society-governing story.

 

But perhaps you see the war as a scene, in Matthew Arnold’s famous lines, “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” Perhaps for you the war meant the collapse of Western society into militarism or rudderless liberalism or whatever your most-hated -ism is. Perhaps it’s something you observe only in order to deem it cool or uncool. And perhaps you just don’t know what you think about any of it. Those are very different situations, but what they all have in common is a decentering of World War II: It is no longer an event you interpret in order to anchor your sense of social meaning and purpose. Instead, it’s just something that happened, like the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act or the War of 1812.

 

Is that where we are now?