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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on President Trump’s recent comments that appear to show a desire to back away from his war in Iran. David argues that Trump is comfortable as a “wartime” president as long as the enemy is American Democrats, and compares the president’s rhetoric about Iran with his rhetoric about his fellow Americans.
Then, David is joined by the historian and journalist Andrew Roberts to discuss why right-wing podcasters seem so fixated on insisting that Winston Churchill was the villain of the Second World War. Frum and Roberts discuss the origins of pseudo-historians and why they appeal so much to the American right.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the novel Burr, by Gore Vidal, and the relationship between art and morality.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Lord Andrew Roberts, the great British historian, a man of letters, and we’ll be talking about many subjects, but above all about the great duel between [Winston] Churchill and [Adolf] Hitler, and why, in our day, so many people in positions of public prominence seem to have difficulty figuring out who was on the right side of the Hitler-Churchill duel and of the Second World War.
My book this week will be a novel, Burr by Gore Vidal, which raises some questions about the relationship between art and morality.
But before my discussion of the novel Burr, and before my dialogue with Lord Andrew Roberts, some thoughts on recent dramatic developments.
On the morning of Monday, March 23, the world woke up to this startling announcement by President Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social:
I am pleased to report that the United States of America, and the country of Iran, have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East. Based on the tenor and tone of these in depth, detailed, and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President Donald J. Trump.
This statement at 7:23 a.m. was promptly contradicted by the Iranians a half an hour later, who said there were no negotiations and no dialogue. Now, neither the Iranians nor President Trump are reliable narrators, so who knows what is true. But it does seem to be genuinely true that President Trump wants to back away from his confrontation with Iran. Interviewed on live television a few minutes after this Truth Social post, he said he was thinking about some kind of joint-owned management of the Strait of Hormuz between the United States and the ayatollah of Iran. So we’ve gone from calling for regime change, for calling [for] unconditional surrender, to a kind of shared management of the waterway between the United States and Iran.
Trump obviously wants out. And he wants out in a way that is going to leave almost all the important questions of the war he initiated unresolved: the Iranian nuclear program, the Iranian uranium stockpiles, Iran’s missile program, Iran’s threat to world oil supplies by its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. All of these seem to be unresolved as Trump seems to be heading out.
This story will have many twists and turns. And Trump, of course, is not—despite his pretenses otherwise—the sole decider here. The Iranians get a vote. As Tom Nichols said in one of our discussions a couple of weeks ago, wars end when the loser decides they’re over. In tactical military terms, the Iranians are the loser of this conflict; they’ve taken much more damage. But there isn’t peace until the Iranians say, We’re ready to stop fighting. And they seem to have concluded—whoever they is, because the leadership keeps being changed by Israeli air strikes against the leadership—but whoever the leadership is, they seem to have decided they’ve taken the measure of Donald Trump and they can outlast him. And if they remain standing and continuing to be firing missiles at the Gulf states, at Israel, and at shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, they sort of determine the shape of the outcome much more than the United States, the tactical winner.
Why is Trump backing away in this way? I think there’s a clue in something he said the day before, on March 22. Now, everyone who’s traveled this weekend or read about travel knows what chaos the airports are in. The airports are in chaos because of the cutoff of funding to the Department of Homeland Security, which is the envelope in which TSA and other airport security agencies are located. There have been negotiations between Republicans and Democrats in Congress over the DHS funding. Some kind of deal seemed to have been within reach that would’ve severed ICE, the immigration agency, and said, Okay, we’ll keep talking about ICE and the restrictions on ICE, but the rest of DHS can be funded so the airports get open. And President Trump vetoed that and said, No, I like this issue. I wanna keep fighting over the whole of DHS. I wanna keep the airport snarled because I don’t wanna negotiate about just immigration alone, because the Democrats will ask me things like the end of face-masking, cameras on ICE agents that I, Trump, find unacceptable. And I don’t wanna fight that fight alone, because I’ll probably lose; I wanna fight it in conjunction with a bigger fight over airport funding.
And here’s what he wrote on March 22 at 8:31 p.m. to explain his reasoning. “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass “THE SAVE [AMERICA] ACT.” It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate, and that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems (who are to blame for this mess!)—” And so it goes.
Notice the contrast in tone between “the country of Iran” and “the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats.” Trump is most comfortable as a war president in a war against half of the United States, or somewhat more than half the United States. Ron Brownstein, a colleague of mine at The Atlantic, has observed very well that Donald Trump is a wartime president, yes, but his war is a war of occupation by red America against blue America. Having to be a leader of the whole country in a war against Iran, that’s just not in his nature. And when his polls begin to sag and the price of gasoline goes up, he fears not that something is happening to the American national interest that may or may not be outweighed by the strategic goal of ending the Iranian nuclear program, changing the Iranian regime, whatever his goals are in that conflict. His most important war is the war at home. And if the war abroad asks of him too much, asks him to act like president of all of America, he just doesn’t wanna do that. Where he is at home and where he is comfortable is as a war leader of part of America against the majority of America. He can’t be a national leader. He doesn’t want to be a national leader. He doesn’t know what it looks like, and he’s only comfortable when he’s the leader of a faction of the country against the rest of the country.
That may be the fundamental reason—even more than the lack of strategy, the lack of stated goals, the lack of explanation, the lack of congressional authorization—why this war in the Middle East has gone so weirdly and strangely and inconclusively, despite all the tactical successes of the American and Israeli bombing of Iranian war-making capacity. Because he can’t lead the nation, and doesn’t want to and doesn’t know how and doesn’t like it, he can’t speak to the nation about anything to do with a national interest. The only interest he knows is his own personal interest and that of similarly aggrieved people in a struggle against the majority of the country that just wants to get through the airline in an expeditious and efficient way. And so, given the choice between winning the war against Iran and waging the war against “the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats,” it’s that second war, the war against “the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats,” that Trump gives priority to.
Now, those are the people whose votes he needs in order to fund the war he wants less to fight. And so it looks like he’s going to give up the war in Iran to save the war against “the Crazy Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats” and the majority of Americans who oppose him and want a president who can speak for an America in the way that this president never has, never will, never could, doesn’t want to.
And now my dialogue with Lord Andrew Roberts.
[Music]
Frum: Lord Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, is one of Britain’s foremost historians and men of letters. He is known internationally for his 2009 book, The Storm of War, which received the British Army Military Book of the Year award for 2010. Also among his roughly two dozen books are Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare [From 1945 to Ukraine], co-authored with General David Petraeus, and The Aachen Memorandum, a political thriller. Roberts chaired the 7 October Parliamentary Commission, whose report draws on forensic evidence, survivor testimonies, and open-source footage to document the crimes committed by Hamas and its allies during the sneak attack on Israel of October 7, 2023. In November ’22, Roberts was elevated to the House of Lords. My own personal favorite among his many books is his biography of the great high Victorian statesman Lord Salisbury, underrated among Britain’s wittiest prime ministers. Attributed to him is the remark—when a supporter suggested that maybe he considered changing a few things in Britain, Salisbury is supposed to have replied, “Change? Change? Aren’t things bad enough already?”
But we are here today because of Andrew’s work on Churchill, of whom he wrote an outstanding one-volume life in 2018. At a time of online attempted rehabilitation of the Third Reich Nazism and Adolph Hitler, Lord Roberts is the man we need most urgently to hear from. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today.
Andrew Roberts: Thank you very much indeed for having me on, David. And thanks very much also for those very kind words.
Frum: Let’s start with something you have both observed and participated in, which is this crazed online rehabilitation in the American and English social-media world of the—or the attempt to do an online rehabilitation—of the legacy of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. What is going on with these crazy talkers and podcasters?
Roberts: Well, they’re attempting to attack Winston Churchill because he was epicentral in defeating Adolf Hitler, of course. Anti-Semitism plays an absolutely central role to this as well. And they essentially argue—and it’s not a new thing; Second World War revisionism goes back to the 1960s, earlier—that, really, the world was on the wrong side when it tried to stop Hitler from destroying communism after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, and Churchill made a strategic error in not supporting Hitler and opposing [Joseph] Stalin. That’s, I think, where it stems from, but of course, it’s got massive modern connotations with regard to the United States and where the United States is in the world today.
Frum: How is it that somebody decides, You know what? I’m trying to differentiate myself from a sea of online voices. I could talk about a lot of things. I could have a lot of opinions. I could go into sports podcasting, for goodness’ sakes, but no, my distinctive, value-added proposition is going to be the defense of Hitler, anti-Semitism, and the Third Reich. And by the way, it seems to work—when you look at America’s top podcasters, in the political sphere at least, it is amazing how many of them find the rehabilitation of Nazi ideology their ticket to success.
Roberts: I think it’s the very shock value, isn’t it? We always used to call radio “shock jocks” because they try to say the most outrageous thing possible, therefore drawing attention to oneself. And that is the nature of the internet, is that the more shocking you are, the more likely you are to appeal to the lowest form of human nature, I suppose. So it’s built into the algorithm of the internet, in a sense. But also, I think that, as well as wanting to shock and be perverse and so on, there’s also a very—even darker side to all of this, which, as I say, is anti-Semitism, and I think it has contributed enormously to the present rise of anti-Semitism in the world.
Frum: Which do you think is cause, and which is effect? Do you start as an anti-Semite and then wanna rehabilitate the Third Reich, or do you start by wanting to rehabilitate the Third Reich because you look at a lot of old picture postcards and imaginary scenes and Leni Riefenstahl movies and think, Well, that’s an accurate depiction of reality. They must have had a point about the Jews? Which goes first, this cultish attraction to the Third Reich or the anti-Semitism driving the cultish attraction to the Third Reich?
Roberts: I think they go absolutely hand in hand. I think they’re in lockstep, both of them. And of course, they then do lead you on to a whole load of other views about the world that are essentially antidemocratic, anti-Western, anticivilization, anti-Christianity, anti-culture, as well as this primary motivating force of anti-Semitism—and a desire to shock.
Frum: So you’re led from Third Reichism to pro-Assadism to apologies for Hezbollah and Hamas to defense of Iran—one crazy thing after another.
Roberts: And [Vladimir] Putin, of course, as well because you admire Putin enormously because he invades countries and is a strongman, and I’m afraid there could be overlaps. We’ve seen that there are overlaps in all this manosphere, incel thing as well, that you think it’s macho to invade countries and blow up buildings and send tanks over borders and so on. So that also is something that Hitler did and Putin is doing, and you want to try and make an apology for that too.
Frum: All right, so let me draw on your historian’s hat, or your historian’s expertise, for a moment because there may be some basic facts about this that people don’t know. So let’s start with this: Who won and who lost the Second World War?
Roberts: The Germans, Italians, and Japanese most definitely lost. The Russians, Americans, British, and British Commonwealth won. (Laughs.)
Frum: So if you have an impression that the Nazis had the most formidable war machine in the history of the world and the most effective society organized for war, you do bump into this problem: They did lose.
Roberts: And they were also defeated by the other people that you think of as slavish “Untermensch.” The Russians are people who you despise. You don’t despise the British, because they’re Aryans and so on. So it bumps into your racial theories at every stage—not least, of course, because ultimately, the Japanese are not Aryan peoples, but they’re your allies against various countries, like, I don’t know, Denmark, who are Aryan people. So it just doesn’t make any kind of sense, even according to its own really weird and screwed-up ideology.
Frum: One of the reasons that Hitler and Nazism are so discredited is because the Germans have led the way in saying, You know what? This was not good for us, either. If we had stayed on the path of democracy and peace, all the prosperity we had in the 1950s, we could have had in the 1940s.
Roberts: Well, that’s right, and also, of course, the führer did declare war on Germany at the end, in the very last days in 1945. He wanted to destroy the reservoirs and the railways and basically make Germany completely ungovernable, regardless of how many Germans starved in the process. So, as well as declaring war in all of those Untermensch countries—and Britain, as you say, as a result of Britain having continued to fight—he also finally declared war on his own country.
Frum: Right. Just as he left orders to blow up Paris and destroy that, orders that were mercifully ignored by the German commander in chief in the Paris vicinity, he left [orders to] blow up every waterworks, blow up every power plant, make sure that if Germany does lose the war, the German people then die of starvation. And that was Hitler’s idea, not something that the United States and Britain did to them; the Americans and British fed the Germans after the war.
Roberts: That’s right, yes. [Dietrich] von Choltitz is who you’re talking about, who didn’t let Paris burn. And of course, it was also the junior commanders that refused to carry out the führer’s final wishes with regard to basically turning Germany back into an agrarian, starting economy.
Frum: Right. Let’s talk a little bit about the attempt to overturn the reputation of Winston Churchill. As you and I speak, Winston Churchill is still on the British £5 note, but there’s a project of the British government to take him off—some kind of bird, I think, they wanna replace him with.
Roberts: Yeah, it’s not just Churchill. They’re taking off all of the famous people, all of the writers and the people we’re proud of, and they’re going to be swapped for various fauna, birds and dogs and things like that. I think there’s gonna be a public consultation. The British people, typically, are taking it as a huge joke, and they’re putting forward completely absurd animals that are going to do—if it’s done on a vote, then all hell’s gonna break loose, frankly. (Laughs.)
Frum: But this is symbolic of a larger trend, which is, even within Britain and certainly outside Britain, an attempt to make Churchill a villain of world history rather than the great hero of the 20th century.
Roberts: That’s right. As I like to always point out, this has been going on a long time. David Irving tried it back in the ’70s and ’80s, in a sense. Obviously, [Joseph] Goebbels himself demonized Churchill. There have been lots of books attacking Churchill. Quite recently, we’ve had three or four in a row. So—
Frum: Lemme put a pause there because not everyone will recognize the name David Irving, who’s a huge hero to many of the other people on the internet far right. So tell us about the career of David Irving and why he’s so central in fabricating these myths of Third Reich rehabilitation and Winston Churchill defamation.
Roberts: Well, David Irving is a neo-Nazi historian. He, because of his extreme right-wing views, was able to contact a lot of the widows of leading Nazis back in the ’70s and ’80s, and therefore was able to get quite a lot of information, including new information. So he posed as an historian, but unfortunately, he was somebody who didn’t believe in the Holocaust, for example. And there was a huge libel action against him that was taken out by a very brave writer called Deborah Lipstadt, who won against him.
David Frum: There are so many things to say here, and just for the record, because neo-Nazis will often say he was sued for his views, it was David Irving who initiated the libel action against Deborah Lipstadt, not the other way around.
Andrew Roberts: Sorry, you’re quite right—for calling him a Holocaust denier, wasn’t it?
Frum: He sued her—it was he who tried to suppress her speech, not she who tried to suppress his speech. I think that’s a very important thing to ram home. And in Britain, where it is so easy to win a libel action, he lost.
Roberts: And yes, I attended the court, actually. I watched it. It was better than any West End show; it was absolutely fascinating. Historian after historian getting up and talking about the evidence that proved that there was a Holocaust, and also, of course, that David Irving had denied it.
But therefore, this does make him into a hero of the extreme right.
Frum: Well, I wanna say one more thing about him: He’s also crucial in elaborating the myth of the Dresden bombing.
Dresden is a very beautiful city in eastern Germany, now, thankfully, substantially rebuilt. It was also an important railway node. It was the last unbombed city in the Reich, and it was hit by the Western Allies in the last days of World War II, and 20,000 people were killed. And this is obviously a major disaster, but not as big as the Hamburg bombing or the terrible bombings of Tokyo.
For reasons that are kind of obscure to me, the Nazis in their last days decided to make a propaganda issue of this, and Irving became the person who took the 20,000 to 30,000 authentic casualties and created a much bigger magnification of the number through falsification of archives and other things.
Roberts: Yes, he claimed that 200,000 people, or more than 200,000 people, had died, which, actually, was next to impossible demographically. There were perfectly good reasons to bomb Dresden, good strategic reasons. Plus, we were asked to by the Soviets. But it was the fact that the gauleiter there had basically pocketed the money he was given to build massive air-raid shelters that led to larger-than-expected deaths. But Irving was the man behind the modern creation of the myth; Goebbels started the myth originally, but Irving backed it up. It’s therefore sort of understandable why he should become the godfather of the modern revisionists. He’s their hero. The modern revisionists, on the other hand, they’ve gone far further than even David Irving—primarily, of course, because of the internet; Irving was working before the internet. Whereas when Tucker Carlson interviewed Darryl Cooper, for example, who said that Winston Churchill was the greatest villain of the Second World War, 33 million people downloaded that show. The modern revisionists are able to reach a far wider audience than ever David Irving was.
Frum: Tell us who Darryl Cooper is.
Roberts: Well, I tried to find out, when I heard about these moronic remarks of his. (Laughs.) And the answer is that he’s somebody who Tucker Carlson calls the most consequential American historian writing today, but he’s never written a history book, this fellow. He goes on podcasts a lot and makes sort of long-form podcasts, which don’t have any intellectual respectability whatsoever, which no academic of any serious note has taken seriously. I can offhand tell you a few dozen American historians who’ve got a genuine right to be considered more seriously than Mr. Cooper.
Frum: One of the things that makes you a historian rather than just a journalist, like me, is the historian gets the quotes from the place they came from. So if the quote comes from a state paper, they consult the state paper. If it comes from a memoir, they consult the memoir. They go to the original thing. The journalist says, If this thing from the state paper is reproduced in the work of Andrew Roberts, I trust Andrew Roberts, and so I get my quote from the Andrew Roberts book. But there’s always the possibility, even with an Andrew Roberts book, of a mistake.
Roberts: Oh, yes.
Frum: And so the difference between an historian [and a journalist] is the historian goes to the source; the journalist goes to the secondary source. And my impression from listening to Cooper is he—partly because he doesn’t have the languages, which historians are supposed to do—he goes to the secondary source, and it’s often a neo-Nazi secondary source. And there are various kinds of verbal clues that this Churchill quote, he discovered not from reading the Churchill speech, not from reading Hansard, but via some much more sinister secondary detour.
Roberts: And actually, the laziness of it is also pretty reprehensible because, nowadays, if you go onto the International Churchill Society website or if you consult the Churchill documents at Churchill Archives Center, a lot of which are online, it doesn’t actually take that much; it’s not that difficult to get the correct quote. I’ve got upstairs the 20 volumes of Churchill’s documents. Now, not everybody’s gonna have those, but they are available online. So it’s not that hard to do, but you-re right—he doesn’t bother to do that.
Frum: But there’s also something about internet culture that makes us vulnerable to this. So when David Irving—his primary means of communicating with the world was through books, and because he wanted to be taken seriously as an historian, he complied with the formal architecture of an historical work, which is footnotes and quotes. You make your argument that Hitler was completely innocent of the Holocaust, that he didn’t know about it. You cite a bunch of sources. The people who are encountering your work, they read it, they have the book open, they see the footnote, and they can then wander down the hall, if they’re in a library, to the shelf and pull the thing you cite off the shelf and see, Did you quote it correctly?, and, as John Lukacs did in The Hitler of History, point out, Oh, you introduced a series of very malicious mistakes into your reading.
But the preferred form of modern neo-Nazism is verbal, or verbal and visual. That is, there’s no text; they speak. And their favorite form is not to say, Let’s not have a historical controversy in writing, but let’s debate in form so if I tell a lie and the person I’m talking to is not as nimble or not as well informed, the lie sails past, in a way that it can’t do in true historical debate, which is done in writing, with footnotes.
Roberts: Precisely right. And it’s all part of their modus operandi. And they have to do it that way because, of course, if they did it the other way, we’d be able to catch them out all the time. So it’s much, much easier to lie verbally than on the page—if you want that lie to survive longer than the amount of time it takes for somebody to check you.
Frum: Can you take us through what you think are one or two of the most common lies about Churchill and Churchill in relationship to the Second World War?
Roberts: Oh golly. (Laughs.) Well, there are dozens of them. I dunno. I wonder whether it’s best to do it chronologically or just—he’s supposed to have been involved in secret peace negotiations with [Benito] Mussolini, and apparently, the proof of that is wrapped up in a box at the bottom of Lake Como. (Laughs.) He is, of course, supposed to have deliberately made the Bengal famine worse than it actually was already, for which there’s no proof whatsoever. He’s supposed to have let Coventry be destroyed, even though he knew that Coventry was going to be attacked in order to preserve the secrecy of the Ultra decrypts. Oh gosh. There are so many—aall the way through his life, by the way. He’s supposed to have sunk the Lusitania as well, is another one. (Laughs.)
Frum: Isn’t the central lie that he was supposed to be in the thrall of Jewish bankers? That’s the big thing: that the Jews invented Churchill in order to make war on white Western civilization. And Churchill, because he was, for a man of his time, strikingly not anti-Semitic—although not purely so, but strikingly non-anti-Semitic for a man of his time and class—that therefore he’s some kind of tool of the Jews in their war on the white West.
Roberts: Yes. This, again, has been around for a very long time. Oscar Wilde’s lover “Bosie,” Lord [Alfred] Douglas, was a believer in this theory, and Churchill actually sued him [because] he said that Churchill had underplayed the Battle of Jutland for some financial reason that the Jews were behind.
The Jews are blamed for, as you say, creating Churchill—or if not creating him, then at least buying him in the 1930s. Now, he did have rich Jewish friends who occasionally did bail him out. So that’s the way that they tie in this sort of [The] Protocols of the Elders of Zion kind of conspiracy theory. But there’s no example—
Frum: He also had rich non-Jewish friends who bailed him out, because one of the requirements of being a Churchill friend … (Laughs.)
Roberts: Yeah. No, Churchill was broke his entire life, basically. No, he didn’t get into the black until he was in his 70s, once he—
Frum: You introduced me to a wonderful book about Churchill’s finances. What was it called—No More Champagne: [Churchill and His Money]?
Roberts: That’s right, yeah. David Lough. Very good book. Yeah.
Frum: He would periodically write letters to his wife instructing her on domestic economy: And the first thing is: We’re going to eliminate champagne at lunch. That’s how we’re really going to … (Laughs.)
Roberts: That’s right. And actually, I asked Mary, Winston and Clementine Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames, and she said that that lasted about three days. (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.) The expensive Cuban cigars were only to be served at the discretion of Churchill; the box wasn’t to be open for guests to help themselves. (Laughs.)
Roberts: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. I don’t suppose that lasted terribly long, either.
Frum: (Laughs.)
Roberts: But the thing was that he was always broke, but quite rightly, I think, his attitude was not really to try and save spending money, ’cause that never worked, but to just work harder and to—and that’s the reason that we have 800 articles and 37 books, comprising 51 volumes, and he wrote more than [William] Shakespeare and [Charles] Dickens combined. It’s because he had to because he was broke.
And as you say, non-Jewish friends bailed him out as well. But there’s no example of any Jew ever asking him for anything at all as a result of bailing him out. And some people, like Sir Abe Bailey and I think Sir Henry Strakosch gave him money in their wills. So there’s clearly nothing that they were after as a result, ’cause the money didn’t actually get given to Churchill until they died.
Frum: Well, because the impression one has of him is he was not just a deeply admirable man, but also a highly personally lovable man. And so people who were his friends and who were good with money and knew that he was horrible at it would say, This is something I can do in testimony to not only my admiration for him, but my love for him.
Roberts: That’s right. And Bernie Baruch being another great example of that—the New York banker who basically allowed, if Churchill’s stocks and shares went up, then Churchill kept the money, and if they went down, then Bernie Baruch would cover the difference. But again, there was no quid pro quo for this apart from friendship, admiration, and love for the man.
And so, of course, the anti-Semites immediately pounce on this aspect of Churchill’s character to try to insinuate that he was in the pocket of the Jews and so on. And therefore, according to this theory, he took the British empire into war in order to destroy the man who was attempting to destroy the Jews, i.e., Adolf Hitler.
This completely ignores the fact, of course, that he was out of office throughout the 1930s. One of the things that Darryl Cooper accuses Churchill of having done was to have made the Second World War worse after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but he wasn’t actually in the government until Hitler had invaded Poland; he didn’t get into the government until after the invasion. And then he doesn’t become prime minister, of course, until the Nazis had already invaded Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg. So, just on chronological grounds, none of these accusations really add up logically, just in terms solely of rational argument.
Frum: There are many differences between real history and this kind of internet history, but real historians are always very attuned to which event happened first. And one of the basic rules of history is: An event that happened after an earlier event cannot have caused the earlier event, because it came second in time and time flows only one way.
Roberts: Yes, exactly. And you get this, of course, with everything to do with Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. It comes a year and a bit after Hitler’s invasion of France, and one leads on to the other. And to try to therefore accuse Churchill of trying to save communism in 1941 as a result of anything that happens—it’s very, very clear that the reason that he made an alliance with Soviet Russia, even though he hated communism, was because the Russians were fighting Hitler and he recognized that Hitler had to be defeated.
Frum: That’s a very important point just to stress here. The most famous of Churchill speeches—Though we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall never surrender—at the time those were given, Britain’s allies were Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Greece. That’s about it. And the Soviet Union was Hitler’s most important ally. And at the time of the fall of France, Hitler drove into France with Soviet-provided fuel. And then the German tanks were made out of materials, many of which came from the Soviet Union. And so this is both a Soviet lie and now a Russian lie and a neo-Nazi lie to forget this key fact: When Churchill came to power and fought the Battle of France and lost, Hitler and the Soviet Union were allies, not enemies.
Roberts: Yeah, and the Communist Party in Britain opposed the war until the 22nd of June, 1941. So you have Communist trade unionists in British factories causing trouble even during the Battle of Britain.
Frum: Yeah. Communists in the United States too.
Let me take you into the present day because you are a rare historian who is not only active in contemporary discussions, but was called upon by your own Parliament to write the definitive report on the Hamas atrocities after October 7.
I won’t take you into that field right now, because of respect for time, but drawing on the expertise you acquired through there, I want you to help us understand a debate that is going on, which is: Many of the people who advocate these crackpot theories of history were, until a minute ago, big supporters of President Trump. Not to accuse Donald Trump, who seems pretty hazy on most of history—I don’t know that he would have a side on any of these disputes; maybe New York nightclubs in the 1970s, he’s kind of an expert on that. But there seems to be this split in the MAGA world between the voting bloc and the members of Congress, who are mostly aligned with President Trump in supporting his actions against Iran, and then the MAGA influencers online, who are increasingly radically opposed to it. Can you explain to us how this conflict is working and what it means?
Roberts: I suppose in a sense, of course, the MAGA opponents of Iran do have the point that they were sold a pup by Trump, who did promise no “forever wars,” no interventions, and so on, especially not in the Middle East after what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. So one can understand how some of them feel lied to and let down.
But the isolationist wing, who are the people who feel that, again, have a very long history. The phrase “America First” was first used by Charles Lindbergh and the anti-interventionists who wanted America not to go to war against Nazi Germany. So here, again, you have very strong historical echoes, and so people who consider themselves to be on the sort of ultra-right of the MAGA movement in a sense do sort of feel betrayed and let down.
Frum: Well, I don’t know that we wanna call them “isolationists” because the ultra-right wing of the MAGA movement was very keen for a war against Denmark to seize Greenland. They were interested in fighting Panama to take back the Panama Canal. And they raised no objections to Donald Trump’s repeated talk of annexing Canada as some kind of 51st state, although he never intended to give Canada any senator, so it wouldn’t be a state; it would be kind of an occupied territory. So the MAGA [movement] was very comfortable with violent action in the Western Hemisphere, of a highly imperialist kind, against people who are traditional American friends, like Denmark. Americans have been present—and you’ll know better than me—but there’s been an American military presence in Greenland, with the consent of the Danish government, since before the United States entered the Second World War, all during the Second World War, and all during the Cold War. And the Danes would’ve gladly welcomed a larger American presence today if the Americans would’ve been willing to send it, so there was no objection. And MAGA had not a problem with that imperialist agenda. It is conflict with anti-Western forces, whether it’s Putin or the Iranians; that’s what makes them upset.
Roberts: Yes, that’s right. In a sense also, historically, of course, with regard to Southern America—to Venezuela and Panama, etc.—that does tie in with the Monroe Doctrine that goes back to 1823. So that isn’t a radical change from what, oh, I don’t know, Teddy Roosevelt would’ve been comfortable with.
However, as you say, the time that the ultra-MAGA people get very upset is when the West goes to war against people who scream “Death to America” and tries to get the nuclear bomb. It is an interesting aspect. We have the same thing here in England, of course.
Frum: Let’s wrap this up here with going back to the historical matter. Would you give us a refresher of what the world would’ve looked like if, in those crucial days when the British had to make the decision whether to follow Churchill’s lead—whether to refuse the peace that Hitler offered after the fall of France—if we had taken the advice of the Pat Buchanans and the Tucker Carlsons, and Britain had surrendered in the summer of 1940, what would the world look like today?
Roberts: Hitler wasn’t asking for all-out surrender of Britain; he was asking for Britain to stay neutral in the future of the war. So we wouldn’t have had the Blitz, of course. We’d have probably been able to have hung on to the bits of the empire that he wasn’t interested in. And he would’ve been able to have attacked Russia with all of his armed forces, including 100 percent of the Luftwaffe, rather than just 70 percent of it, because he needed to keep 30 percent of it back to protect German cities against British bombing—and also to protect France, of course, from an invasion.
So there would’ve been a very different attitude, I think, in the United States; I can’t see the United States getting involved and also terribly difficult for them to have worked out how they could have engaged with the Germans anyway—North Africa perhaps, but that’s hardly any sort of quick route through to Berlin.
It was touch and go in Russia. Of course, in the October of 1941, Stalin had his own personal train made ready to take him back beyond the Urals. The Battle of Stalingrad could have gone either way as well. And of course, the Germans did subject Leningrad to a grueling thousand-day siege.
So had the Germans won in Russia and pushed the Soviets back beyond the Urals, Hitler would’ve been master of Europe from the Urals all the way through to Brest. And it would have been a catastrophe—of course, as it was, 50 percent of Europe’s Jews died in the Holocaust; 100 percent undoubtedly would’ve died under those circumstances, while Hitler was also working to try and create a bomb, which it would’ve been very difficult, I think, for the United States to have made entirely on its own and funded if they weren’t even involved in the war at all, because nothing would’ve brought them in to fight against Germany, especially if they’d been attacked at Pearl Harbor and Britain wasn’t in the war. So there’s a world in which Hitler could have certainly survived the mid-1940s, maybe created a nuclear bomb, and totally dominated the whole of Europe, which would’ve left America, ultimately, very isolated. So I think—
Frum: Yeah. And remember, the Germans were ahead in rocket technology, so the Americans might have gotten the nuclear weapon first, but the delivery system, the Germans would probably have got first.
Roberts: Certainly, yes, absolutely. You didn’t have an American version of Wernher von Braun in the first part of the 1940s.
So, yeah, Churchill’s decision to fight on in 1940 is absolutely central to the survival of Western civilization, which is why he’s so unpopular with the revisionists, because they would much prefer to see a world in which Hitler was dominating the world, did have the bomb, did wipe out the Jews, and had his own form of sort of Weltmacht, which is very, very different from the kind of Western civilization that we see today.
Frum: The person who saw this all most clearly at the time was President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, who gave speeches about it, which we don’t read anymore, because they seemed so irrelevant until recently—or seemed so much a part of history. But Roosevelt warned in the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, that if we go down this path—if the Tucker Carlsons of this world had got their retrospective wish, and the British government had made a kind of peace with Hitler and let him invade the Soviet Union and annihilate all the Jews of Europe—that the United States would never have been a free country again. It would’ve lived on half a planet. It would’ve sheltered in the smaller of the two hemispheres. And it would’ve had to live forever on a war footing, not a Cold War footing, but on a full war footing, against this technologically advanced nuclear power with rockets on the Eurasian continent. That’s what this was all about in 1940.
And the development and peace that the world enjoyed after 1945 was a product of American power and British endurance, and had the British made the choice that is being recommended to them by all these fool, loudmouth bloggers, their own childhoods would’ve been overhung by terror and fascism and tragedy. And they would not have enjoyed the security that we have so taken for granted that we can entertain of all these foolish, nonsensical, childish, ignorant opinions on the internet that was created because of the peace and security and wealth that the Western world enjoyed because of Churchill’s endurance and courage in that summer.
Roberts: I think you’ve put the full level of irony right up there. (Laughs.) Yes, that’s exactly right, David.
Frum: Andrew, can I ask you one last personal question? I understand you’ve just finished working on something. Can you share a little bit about what it is?
Roberts: Yes, Napoleon and His Marshals. It’s a book about the relationship between the emperor and his 26 marshals. It’s gonna be coming out in America in November.
Frum: And you have written the great rehabilitation of Napoleon in another biography. The Hitler-Napoleon comparison breaks down because Napoleon was—although he was a warlord, he did do a lot of good things too.
Roberts: Yeah, there’s no comparison. One of them is the Enlightenment on horseback, and the other is the absolute opposition to the Enlightenment. No, that’s going well, and then after that, I’m going to write a biography of Benjamin Disraeli. So I’ve got until the year 2030 nicely cut out for me. (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.) You are a marvel. Andrew, thank you so much for talking to me today.
Roberts: Thank you, David. I’ve much enjoyed it.
Frum: Bye-bye.
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Frum: Thanks so much to Andrew Roberts for joining me today on The David Frum Show. My book this week is Burr, a novel by Gore Vidal, published in 1973. I first read this book as a teenager. I returned to it this past week because of some thoughts left behind by my discussion last week of the novel The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann.
That novel ponders the problem of a great artist, or someone we’re invited to believe is a great artist, tangled in the moral compromises of making art under the conditions of the Third Reich. And we’re asked to consider whether there is anything that can justify that kind of moral compromise, and The Director comes to its own very ironic and understated conclusion about whether or not moral compromise justifies great art in the end, whether great art can be produced under conditions of moral compromise.
I turned to Burr and Gore Vidal because it was a book I enjoyed very much as a teenager, and I enjoyed it because it was a pretty nasty piece of work, actually, written by a pretty nasty man, Gore Vidal. Burr tells the story of the American Revolution’s founding generation through the eyes of Aaron Burr, who even today remains kind of a villain of American history and in 1973, building up to the bicentennial, at a time when America’s heroes were taken much more at face value than they are today, Burr was the great outsider—a man hated both by Thomas Jefferson and by Alexander Hamilton, so he had to be bad.
Gore Vidal took on Burr and used him to write a debunking novel about all the founding generation. The novel is set at the end of Burr’s life in the 1830s, but we are constantly called back to the period of the Revolution and the Constitution. We’re shown, through Burr’s eyes, a George Washington who is stupid, vain, militarily incompetent, sexually dysfunctional, and mercenary in his marriage. By the way, because Vidal can spare no form of mockery, we are introduced to George Washington as a man who walks with an ungainly waddle. Thomas Jefferson, the great hero of the Declaration of Independence, is shown as hypocritical, cowardly, manipulative, a schemer of every kind. And Alexander Hamilton gets slightly better press than the other two, but he is shown as someone who is brilliant, but self-seeking, arrogant, snobbish, contemptuous of others, and profoundly two-faced. Burr himself is a man, certainly, with faults; we see that he, in late life, marries for money and then steals from his wife. But we’re invited to see him as, despite these foibles, amusing and retaining, and his cynicism about everything and his lack of moral scruple is—actually, we’re invited to see this as a kind of higher wisdom.
There is no irony about this. Gore Vidal does not introduce us to Burr as an unreliable narrator. In fact, there’s another narrator of the book, a younger man who sees Burr with some distance, but we’re invited to take Burr’s view as the novelist’s view and therefore as our view.
Now, Gore Vidal, I think his reputation is fading somewhat these days, but I knew him a little bit in his lifetime, He was a thoroughly unpleasant person. You can see it in his interviews. He was spiteful and envious in his own right. I think he’s best remembered now for a saying of his—he later tried to explain this away as a joke, but it reflected the authentic man. He is said to have said, or he takes credit for the line, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” And that’s the man. And it is his own nastiness that fills the novel with its amusingness. The novel is amusing because Burr is nasty, his story is told by a nasty person, and we’re given a point of view that very much appealed to the adolescent smart aleck who wants to see history as it really was and not through some gauze of legend.
So what we have here is, I think, not a great work of art, but a successful work of art that owes its success entirely to the unpleasantness and spitefulness of the novelist’s character. Bad character produced pretty good art. So is our problem solved? I’m not so sure, because as I reread this book now as a much older man, I thought, What would a truly great artist have done with this material? He would’ve allowed us to see through and past Burr in a way that, say, Shakespeare allows us to see through and past Richard III, or the way that John Milton allows us to see through and past his Lucifer, who gets all the best lines in Paradise Lost. And to understand that, while we can enjoy the spiteful cynicism of an Aaron Burr as a narrator, that the great work of art would’ve allowed us to see that Burr was fundamentally wrong, and that the people whom he’s traducing, mocking, maligning, they are, in fact, despite of their undoubted human foibles, which Burr can see and which history has kind of elided, that they were great people in their own way because great people are not perfect people, and the presence of imperfection—an ungainly waddle in the walk of the founder of the country—does not make him any less the founder of the country and does not make his heroic and self-abnegating acts any less heroic and self-abnegating. That the spiteful man sees only as far as the spiteful man can, and that can produce a work of art that is successful, but maybe not ultimately great.
I don’t know that that is a final answer to the question of the relationship between art and morality. I think we can think more hardily, more accurately, and more powerfully about this through the prism of a novel like The Director, which I think is a more successful novel than Burr—a more powerful and maybe more enduring novel than Burr. But Burr [is] entertaining; if you haven’t read it, it’s worth a read. If you wanna have a kind of mean view of the founding generation, it’s a lot of fun. Just understand always that this is a limited work by a limited narrator in the hands of a limited artist. And so maybe the answer is: Actually, the two, art and morality, may have more to do with one another than Gore Vidal ever imagined as he wrestled with his own limits, both as a man and as an artist.
That’s it for The David Frum Show this week. Thank you so much for listening and for watching. As ever, if you’re minded to support the work of this podcast, the best way to do it is by subscribing to The Atlantic and supporting the work of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic. Thanks for watching and listening. See you next week. Bye-bye.
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