From "the war was more Churchill's fault" to "Hitler was right," such opinions are no longer just the domain of groups of neo-Nazis hiding in the woods, but an increasingly common part of the narrative of far-right columnists and celebrities who reach millions of viewers. The U.S. alt-right promotes historical revisionism favorable to Nazism, and has already found imitators in Poland.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
It might seem that there is no greater obviousness than the claims that Nazi Germany was an unprecedentedly criminal state, and that World War II was won by the better side. In just a few years, the Nazis slaughtered millions of people in a genocide of industrial scale, killed even more in other ways, and it was still just the seeds of their project to subjugate Europe to the "master race," which they fortunately failed to fully realize. The fascist allies of the Third Reich did not go that far, but they also had much on their conscience.
Everything mentioned above is (or should be) elementary school level knowledge. Nevertheless, recently there has been an increase in people more or less openly standing up for the Nazis or their allies. Some relativize Nazi crimes, others deny their extent, and finally, in the most extreme cases, some openly support Nazism.
This is best seen in English-language social media, led by the X website, where the milder content of the genre is sometimes applauded even by its owner.
Churchill worse than Hitler?
In the circles of the American radical right, joined by Elon Musk, there are increasing attempts to rewrite history. A good example is Tucker Carlson's recent interview with Darryl Cooper, proclaimed by the journalist to be the "best and most honest" historian in the US, despite his lack of a degree. Musk promoted the interview with a note that it was interesting and worth watching.
What does Cooper proclaim so groundbreaking? Among other things, he places Churchill as the main villain of World War II. His fault? Pushing for war when Hitler allegedly proposed peace and jointly working out an "acceptable solution to the Jewish problem" (sic!). Only when the Allies rejected this generous offer did the war escalate into a world conflict, while forcing the Germans to deal with the "Jewish problem" in a different way.
Cooper cited letters from German soldiers and SS men allegedly concerned about the fact that they did not have enough supplies to feed the Jews (and more) residing in the camps. They even quoted a suggestion that it was more humane to kill them quickly than to let them slowly starve to death. So we get a vision in which the Nazis, in heartache, were forced to carry out genocide because Churchill wouldn't go along with the annexation of Poland and the expulsion of the Jews to Madagascar.
This has all been debunked long ago and repeatedly by serious historians. Hitler may not have sought war acutely with England, but domination of continental Europe and its racial "cleansing" was his goal, so escalation was unavoidable. On top of that, cited as a tragic twist of fate, food shortages were one of the tools of genocide - even if the only partially implemented "starvation plan," devised by Herbert Backe and approved by Hitler, involved starving tens of millions of people in eastern Europe. That doesn't seem to bother the American far right, which has found a bigger villain in the form of the British prime minister.
For the record, I should add that I by no means consider Churchill a flawless hero - the Bengalis would certainly have a different opinion of him - but putting him in a row with Hitler only serves to relativize and belittle the crimes of the latter.
Carlson is not the only American alt-right figure engaged in such historical revisionism, modeled, incidentally, on similar sentiments of decades ago. Candace Owens called information about the Holocaust and Dr. Mengele's experiments "exaggerated propaganda," and Stew Peters praised the book burning of the Third Reich and called for a similar treatment of the "woke movement." Now such views are on the upswing.
Fish spoils from the head
This is largely "due" to the new management of X (formerly Twitter), looking through its fingers at the activity of users spreading conspiracy theories and fascist ideologies. Elon Musk himself, as holder of the largest number of followers on X, regularly promotes far-right accounts such as End Wokeness and Rothmus. Many of them publish openly racist content, and some don't even hide their sympathies for neo-Nazis - the iamyesyouareno account, with which Musk often interacts, covered a video of a Norwegian man shouting and hooting in the direction of migrant women with the caption "the Vikings are waking up."
These, however, are still relatively mild cases. On the X portal, we also find accounts such as Conscious Philosopher, which has more than a hundred thousand followers and posts on a daily basis about "Hitler was right" or "Nazism is a good ideology," and considers Jews to be parasites running the world. In turn, Garbage Human (nomen omen), who is followed by more than a quarter of a million users, uploaded a photo of a hajling toddler wearing swastika clothing, captioning it "kids will grow up to be decent people." And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In one week in March, several of the most popular pro-Nazi posts on X collectively garnered 4.5 million impressions, tens of thousands of likes and further shares. Many accounts publishing such content have subscribed to X Premium or other packages to increase visibility and reach. The portal's management does not have a problem with such subscribers despite the fact that through their presence ad revenue is declining - fewer and fewer advertisers are interested in promoting themselves alongside posts proving the superiority of the white race. Acceptance of the platform makes it easier for neo-Nazis to gain an ever-increasing following, much like the whitewashing or relativization of Hitler practiced by the aforementioned alt-right leaders, who, by asking "uncomfortable questions," pave the way for false and harmful answers.
Nazi Volunteers Over Dabrowski
Although I write about English-language accounts and primarily American discourse, similar problems are by no means foreign to the Polish public space. A few weeks ago, the host of the popular "World War II in Color" website came to Channel Zero as an expert to make an anniversary comment on the September campaign. There would have been nothing surprising about it, if it were not for the views of the guest invited by Jaroslaw Wolski. Through his Facebook accounts, he repeatedly emphasized the lack of a division between "good guys" and "bad guys" in World War II, while denying some of the crimes of regimes allied with Hitler, from fascist Italy to imperial Japan.
What's more, volunteer formations participating alongside the Third Reich in the "anti-Bolshevik crusade," carrying civilization to the East, were often glorified (slogans, of course, taken straight out of Nazi propaganda). The author of the blog once claimed that the Spanish Blue Division and foreign SS troops were better than the Dabrowskiites - who, despite strenuous efforts, have still not been proven to have committed any crimes. Simply standing on the same side as the USSR was supposed to make the Polish volunteers (but also the Western Allies) complicit in the Gulag system or Stalin's purges. Strangely enough, on "World War II in Color" one rarely finds similarly harsh assessments against Nazi collaborators.
The main source of this attitude is fanatical anti-communism, which doesn't stop at justifiable (and obvious) criticism of Stalin, but goes on to heroize anyone who fought against him. And there were no greater anti-communists than Nazis and fascists of all sorts. Apologia for Nazi Germany in Poland will not pass, of course, but writing a new history of World War II indirectly in their favor is already taking place, and not only home-grown historians, but also state institutions are participating.
As part of "decommunization," the right-wing is trying to remove almost every manifestation of anti-fascism from the public space, including remembrances of Polish soldiers fighting the Nazis, while glorifying Nazi collaborators from the NSZ. The German-armed and trained Swietokrzyska Brigade is being erected monuments because it also "fought communism."
This is not even equating the Third Reich and the USSR anymore - wrong in fact, because for the world and especially Poland the former was incomparably worse - but putting communism as an enemy much more dangerous than Nazism and fascism. If one compares such theses with the discourse that is increasingly common in the circles of, for example, the American alt-right, we have yet to see historical revisionism of similar proportions in our country. It is certainly more difficult to whitewash the Nazis in a country so brutally experienced by World War II.
The Polish right, however, loves to copy all the worst trends from the U.S., from fighting against "woke ideology" to extending racist manipulations (popular especially in Confederation and Solidarity Poland circles), so whitewashing Nazis is also a potential threat. Among fanatical anti-communists we will find many willing to rewrite history - it is worth reacting, until it is not too late.
