Never Go Full Tucker - Konstantin Kisin

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (1:05)

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Konstantin Kisin (1:28)

Never go full Tucker.

For days now, my timeline has been full of clips from the allegedly blockbuster showdown between American podcaster Tucker Carlson and British politician and broadcaster Jacob Rees-Mogg, in which they clashed on the subject of the Second World War. Based on excerpts, I prepared myself for something genuinely dark. One clip in which Carlson claims he has no idea why Britain fought World War II was particularly worrying. This I thought is the moment. Tucker has finally gone all the way. His cross the Rubicon, set up a tent on the other side, and started selling merch with my struggle on it. And so, despite wanting to watch the entire thing less than a remake of Downfall directed by Daryl Cooper, I forced myself to. Sadly, far from being disgusting and outrageous, it's mostly just disappointing. As he correctly says in the discussion, Karlsson isn't a secret Nazi, he's just ideologically captured and not very bright. A typical podcaster, in other words. As regular viewers will know, I've talked extensively about what I call the woke right. This is a term that has caused much consternation because to many people, wokeness is definitionally a pathology of the far left. To be woke is to be extremely left wing. I take a different view. To me, wokeness is a pathology of human beings that is reflected not in the views people hold, but in the behaviour its adherents feel entitled to engage in. Most people have been implicitly taught to think of the political spectrum as aligned with communism on the far left and fascism on the far right. Horseshoe theory, on the other hand, sees these far ends of the spectrum bending towards each other and meeting as they reach for the same methods. We saw this in the 1930s when the hostility to an act of destruction of democracy, suppression of criticism, scapegoating and extermination of out-groups, socialist economics, militarism and so on were prevalent both in the communist world and in the fascist countries of Europe and beyond. The horseshoe theory of wokeness is no different. The ideology which is parodied as gay-raised communism is different from the post-liberal right, but the methodology is similar. Identitarian victimhood, a belief in the fundamental immorality and irredeemability of their political opponents, and the general black and white thinking about everything including war, history, and politics. The work left's approach to history is simple. Imagine a perfect world. Now look at people who lived 200 years ago and notice that they were not living in it. Conclude that they were monsters, tear down the statues. And what about the work right's approach? Imagine a perfect world. Now look at the people who were making impossible decisions before and during World War II and notice that both the process and the outcome were not perfect either. Conclude that they too were monsters and invert the moral order. This is how you get to the Churchill was the greatest villain of World War II rhetoric and what is that if not the metaphorical tearing down of his statue? Killing innocent people is always wrong, Tucker Emotes. And of course, in a utopian vacuum, we'd all agree with him because it's superficially true and important. Proportionality, discrimination, the whole apparatus of just war theory exists precisely because we take it seriously. But as a moral position about the Second World War, it's not profound, it's childish. The Second World War was a mass slaughter of civilians. That was its defining characteristic. The Axis powers murdered civilians on an industrial scale as policy, continuously, until the moment they were physically prevented from continuing. Six million Jews, millions of Slavs. And that's just Hitler's Germany. Japan had been in Manchuria since 1931 and at full scale war with China since 1937 By the time Hitler invaded Poland, millions of Chinese civilians were already dead, with much of the killing done in close quarters and by hand, beheaded with swords, burned or buried alive, or used for bayonet practice. So the actual question, the one any serious person has to answer, is not, is killing innocents wrong? It's this.