Ep. 96: What Would You Do? Daryl Cooper, Israel, and Rethinking World War 2

Jacob Winograd [00:00:00]:
What would you do? You wake up

Jacob Winograd [00:00:03]:
to the sound of bombs. The walls are shaking. Your children are screaming. You live in Gaza, the most densely populated strip of land on Earth. There’s no escape. There’s no way out. There’s no end in sight. You hear the warnings to leave your homes, to go to the refugee zones.

Jacob Winograd [00:00:23]:
But how, you ask? The roads are rubble. People have been shot for trying to move when they weren’t allowed. And you’ve got little kids,

Jacob Winograd [00:00:32]:
a pregnant wife, an elderly parent. How do you carry them through a war zone? And even if you could, you’ve

Jacob Winograd [00:00:40]:
heard the stories. The safe zones aren’t safe. Families are packed into tents, no clean water, no food, no medicine, and the bombs fall there too. So you stay because what choice do you have? As you sit there in the rubble of what used to be your home, holding your kids close, you remember the stories, stories from your parents about how they were forced from their homes,

Jacob Winograd [00:01:08]:
about the massacres, about what they lost. And you’ve never seen

Jacob Winograd [00:01:12]:
the places they came from. You’re not allowed to. You’re trapped here, and still somehow you’re the threat. You, a father, a mother, a child. And they say that your dream of freedom, that your just your very existence is that of terrorism, of hate. You don’t wanna leave, but you don’t wanna live like this either. Every time you try to just live your life, you’re reminded you’re not allowed to. Your life is not your own.

Jacob Winograd [00:01:40]:
Your farmland is taken. The sea is blocked. Your home is a target. Your family, your neighbors,

Jacob Winograd [00:01:48]:
collateral damage. And you’ve tried everything.

Jacob Winograd [00:01:52]:
Protests, you get shot at. Diplomacy, ignored. Elections, you don’t even remember the last time there was an election. Even when you raise your hands in surrender, the bombs fall. And you didn’t choose Hamas. You didn’t ask for their rule, but they’re there, funded by foreign powers, enabled by the very ones who bomb you. And the world sees you as them, but their power isn’t yours. But that doesn’t matter.

Jacob Winograd [00:02:21]:
You still pay the price. Your children ask, why do they hate us? You don’t know what to say. You don’t hate them. You’ve never even met them. You hate what’s being done to you, what’s being done to your family, but hate? No. You just wanna live. And, yeah, you you know people who do hate, people who say there’s no other choice. We either die fighting or we just die.

Jacob Winograd [00:02:47]:
You don’t agree. Not really, but but you understand them. Because what do you say to someone who’s watched their child starve to death or their father be buried beneath rubble? What do you say to someone who’s been told that they’re a terrorist just because of where they live? What would you do if your whole life was surrounded by walls and drones? And if surrender meant a slow death and resistance meant a quicker one? What would you do when the story of your suffering got edited out of the textbooks? And the ones who dropped the bombs wrote that history and wrote it in a way that justified them? Maybe you’d stay silent or maybe you’d go mad. Maybe, just maybe, you would do something unreasonable. And it’s not because you’re evil, and not even because you’re irrational, but because as the world kept repeating its sins, you finally said no more.

Knowledgeable Narrator [00:03:50]:
If Christ is king, how should the Christian consider the kingdoms of this world? What does the Bible teach us about human authority and what it means to love our neighbors and our enemies? Before we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, let’s know what it means to render unto God what is God’s. This is the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, the modern prophetic voice against war and empire.

Jacob Winograd [00:04:21]:
Hello, Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Biblical Anarchy Podcast project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I’m your host, Jacob Winograd. If you caught last week’s episode, you know, we cracked open some heavy stuff, narrative control, revisionist history, the debate between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray, but I wanna go deeper in this episode. And, this isn’t about defending any one side, not the Palestinians, the Israelis, not Churchill, not Hitler. It’s about asking harder questions, more fundamental questions. Like, what makes people snap? What drives a man to do something unthinkable, not because he’s irrational or crazy, but because every door has been shut except one? Whether it’s a Palestinian father under occupation, a disillusioned German after World War I, the question is the same. What do you do when you’ve exhausted every peaceful option? And that’s what we’re diving into today.

Jacob Winograd [00:05:27]:
Because from Gaza to Nazi Germany, to a man in Colorado who modified a bulldozer into a homemade tank, and you have them connecting those dots today. And from Daryl Cooper’s Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem to the myth making of Churchill and empire, we’re gonna ask the kind of questions that get you called names on the internet. Not that that’s hard. And we’ve said some of this before, I know, but we’re gonna talk about if we’re gonna talk about blowback and trauma and how power shapes memory and history, we can’t just dip our toes in. We need to wade into the uncomfortable because explaining evil isn’t the same as excusing it, as I discussed last week. And as Christians, we understand that we won’t stop all evil, not until Christ returns and his kingdom is fully consummated. But that doesn’t mean that we are silent or do nothing in the meantime. We are still called to resist evil, to expose it, to speak truth, and to seek justice, even knowing that it won’t always work out cleanly or perfectly on this side of eternity.

Jacob Winograd [00:06:36]:
But if we ever hope to combat it, we need to understand what gives birth to it. So I wanna talk about Daryl Cooper. Daryl’s a navy veteran. He’s an independent historian and the host of the Martyr Maid podcast, which has become one of the most compelling long form storytelling projects on the Internet today. His series, fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem, traces the deep and complex history of Zionism, antisemitism, trauma, and identity in both Jewish and Western consciousness. And it’s really a it’s a masterpiece beyond just of history of nuance and empathy. And it’s actually the inspiration for how I opened this episode. I wrote so I I had made an ex post with everything I read sometime in the last six to eight months, and I I modeled it after the what Daryl Cooper did in the Martyr Maid podcast, how he opened this series.

Jacob Winograd [00:07:38]:
Now somewhat recently, Cooper found himself at the center of a media firestorm. This was after appearing on the the, on Tucker Carlson’s show, and that moment is so infamous that now it’s, like, routinely brought up as a reference point, including during the recent debate between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. What sparked the outrage was that he he dared to poke at one of the West’s most sacred cows, which is the mythology of World War two. He went on Tucker Carlson and he said something that shouldn’t have been that controversial, not if, like, everyone was adults and mature and approaching these things with open minds. You know, if we actually cared about history instead of, you know, national bedtime stories or fairy tales, I don’t think that it would have been that controversial. But what he did was he he questioned the sort of, you know, untouchable, like, view of not just the West and the allies, but of Churchill. And this isn’t because he’s pro Hitler. It’s not because he’s a holocaust denier.

Jacob Winograd [00:08:53]:
You know, these are the things that get thrown around. But this is because he wanted to ask whether the war in all of its horror could have been avoided or at least mitigated, whether the actions of the so called good guys were always morally justified, and whether the stories we tell ourselves about World War two are actually helping us see clearly or, just like I talked about last week, just part of the narrative control and helping to make us complicit and and happy to go along with, you know, things going on today. He called World War two a load bearing myth, and I I think he’s right. And he explains it this way, and I think it’s accurate, that myth doesn’t even mean that it’s a lie. Right? Myth just means that it’s a sacred narrative. It’s a symbolic story reinforced from childhood through movies, textbooks, museums, and the media. And it’s a story we’re not allowed to question without being accused of heresy, essentially. Because if you challenge the idea that World War two was purely this epic of good versus evil and that Churchill was part of that and was a heroic bulldog who saved civilization and that the allies were only ever acting in righteous defense, then you’re accused of justifying Hitler or dim or minimizing the holocaust.

Jacob Winograd [00:10:22]:
Never mind things like the Bengal famine, which killed millions under Churchill’s orders while he cracked jokes about Gandhi. Never mind the firebombing of Dresden and and Tokyo where tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated. Never mind that Churchill refused peace overtures, sometimes even escalating bombing raids in response to German calls for negotiation. Never mind that Hitler, as evil as he was, offered to relocate Jews rather than exterminate them in the early years and that The US and Britain turned them away or that mainstream historians like Herbert hoo, Herbert Hoover, begged Churchill to allow food relief into occupied Europe to prevent mass starvation, and he refused. And yet when Daryl Cooper says these things, and again, quoting from mainstream historians, and all these things being very well historically documented facts, and we can debate over the interpretation of those facts, but these are facts, many of them repeated in books published by Oxford or Yale or or the Hoover Institution itself. He was denounced by the White House, the media, and party leaders as if he’d gone full neo Nazi. Because once you question the myth, even with receipts, then you’re the enemy. But as Christians, we don’t build our lives on these myths, right? We don’t build our lives or our our cons our conceptions of truth and morality or our allegiances in the mythos of America or the wars it’s fought or anything like that.

Jacob Winograd [00:12:13]:
We build it on Christ, on his kingdom, and the truth. And that means we can’t afford to just accept lies or at least just accept narratives, as I talked about last week, that are just given to us and not be willing to critically examine them. And that can sometimes mean that, you know, we might be putting ourselves into the territory of being called names or, being smeared. And that’s the price sometimes of being countercultural. And I I think I would rather be smeared than be complicit in just accepting narratives and propaganda that lead to war, that justify bombs and starvation and empire. So let’s slow down. I just threw a lot out there. Before we even run through the list of the claims and controversies, I wanna dig deeper here and ask this very foundational question of why revisit this at all? Like, why this specific era? Because even if you agree with me that, you know, as Christians, we should be critical of of of narratives that are pushed, why is this one getting so much attention? Why why should we take the time to go back and and dig through old archives and dust off Churchill quotes and, you know, relitigate stuff that happened eighty years ago? Because this is more important than just a conversation about history.

Jacob Winograd [00:13:49]:
It’s a conversation about discernment. It’s about learning whether or not it was possible to avoid what ended up being the second worst possible outcome in modern human history. The worst would have been if everything happened and Hitler won, and luckily, hill Hitler did not win. But we essentially got the second worst outcome, which is that Hitler didn’t win, but we still had tens of millions of of people killed, the world burning, genocides happening anyway. And the victors walk away from these ashes and tell the story that that they were the good guys doing everything they could to stop, you know, these these evil nations. And I I care about relitigating that history because I think that there’s holes there, but this is also about, like, the lessons that people try to draw from that era then get repeated in modern time. Everyone like, every intervention in my lifetime has been, oh, you know, Saddam Hussein is is Hitler. Right? Vladimir Putin is Hitler.

Jacob Winograd [00:15:05]:
Everyone’s Hitler. Even Trump’s been Hitler. Right? And when it comes to how you deal with terrorists, how you deal with, different entities when, you know, like state entities, national, entities, that that are are being aggressive or that don’t line up with the, you know, certain values or beliefs or agendas, then it’s, you know, to say, well, if if you’re not gonna be tough on them, like, if you’re not tough on Putin, well, what are you? Are you, are you Chamberlain or are you Churchill? Right? Are you gonna appease or are you gonna be tough? And so this is about history, but it’s also about discernment, and it’s about what are our priorities as Christians. Like, what are we trying to get out of these conflicts? Are we trying to score points and win and be tough guys, or are we concerned about truth, and are we concerned about avoiding these outcomes that are absolutely devastating? And that’s what Cooper is trying to get at too. That’s why he asks these hard questions. He’s not trying to defend the wicked, but really to expose the possibility, the the tragedy, that it didn’t have to get to that point, that the war might have been avoidable, that lives might have been saved, and that the West had really sought peace, really exhausted every option to avert war and genocide, maybe we’d be living in a much different world right now telling much different stories. So if you if you wanted I’m not gonna be able to completely cover everything, but there’s a really good if you wanna dive deeper into this, I highly recommend checking out Daryl Cooper’s appearance on the Scott Horton show. And the the specific one that I’m referencing, I’ll have linked in the the show notes.

Jacob Winograd [00:17:00]:
It’s one of the most important interviews for understanding what Daryl is actually saying and more importantly, why he’s saying it saying it. Again, not to excuse evil, not to glorify bad actors, but to understand how real people facing real suffering and real humiliation come to commit atrocities. And that’s what Daryl does in all of his work. He did this in fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem. He explores not just what the Zionists did or what the Arabs did, but why they did it. And he’s done the same thing, Yeah. With other topics, like, he has one on Jonestown. I think he’s done one on Waco, and he’s gonna be doing one coming up on World War two.

Jacob Winograd [00:17:43]:
And he’s gonna do it from the perspective of the Germans to be like, well, how did the, German people view World War two and the lead up and aftermath as they were going through it? And why again, why do you do that? Because it’s not realistic to say that the German people were normal, just like average Europeans in 1920, and then, like, turned into demons by 1935 to 1945, but then magically became normal decent human beings again after 1945. Like, that that’s just not how human nature works. And if we pretend it is, we’ll never recognize, the warning signs when they appear again in our own time of evil regimes cropping up or mistakes similar mistakes being made. So let’s walk through some of the actual claims Cooper made, which I’ve alluded to. And this isn’t even to say that he’s necessarily right about everything because I’ve I’ve done my best to fact check a lot of his claims. And a lot of it comes down to,

Jacob Winograd [00:18:51]:
as far as I can tell, that

Jacob Winograd [00:18:54]:
none of the things that are reported are false, but there’s disputes over the extent to which they matter or the interpretation of them. So you you kinda see what I get into. But even if, you know, his interpretations aren’t are are contestable or even if he has a couple minor things wrong, that that’s not even the I’m not doing this podcast to defend Daryl Cooper as, like, the final authority on these things. Right? But, again, just to understand why he even wants to ask these questions, why I wanna ask these questions. And and so,

Jacob Winograd [00:19:33]:
you know, let let’s start out with this question. Did Hitler want war with Britain and France?

Jacob Winograd [00:19:40]:
So that that’s complicated. He he certainly didn’t want it at the beginning. He didn’t start out by wanting it. He talked about loving the British Empire, saw them as natural allies against Bolshevism, against communism, and he he did make efforts to negotiate, especially in you know, before and after invading Poland. Now you’ll hear, like, okay. Well, Hitler, like, you know, he him offering peace, him saying he doesn’t wanna invade. Can you trust that? Well, we have to be careful not to read back into history things that we know now that they didn’t know back then. Right? And, we I I don’t think it’s fair to say that back in, you know, the lead up to, you know, both both before Poland’s invaded or even after, that we 100% can say that they they knew that Hitler was so untrustworthy that no deal was worth possibly trying to make because he would have just reneged on all of them.

Jacob Winograd [00:20:43]:
You know? So we we we can’t say that peace wasn’t possible, and we also cannot say that it wasn’t worth at least trying. Right? Like, they didn’t even entertain it.

Jacob Winograd [00:20:57]:
So I think this means that, you

Jacob Winograd [00:20:59]:
know, this is, I guess, like, the first if it’s a death by a thousand cuts, this is the first example of how we don’t have a cut and dry battle of good versus evil. Really, that’s the question I’m I’m trying to keep us pointed on. Like, again, was the war and the extent to which it happened completely inevitable? Did did Churchill have to escalate when he you know, could he have deescalated at points? And there’s evidence he escalated when he could have deescalated. Again, many many peace offers and overtures were dismissed out of hand, And, you know, there were bombing campaigns that were launched in 1940 even before the blitz began. And, in that conversation I told you about between Daryl and Scott, you know, the idea of they talk about how the idea of mass starvation as a weapon of war, you know, that wasn’t beneath Churchill. And, you know, that’s the the the Bengal famine, which you can can look into, which Churchill mocked. So, I mean, and millions died there. Right? So, I mean, I’m not saying intent doesn’t matter and that there’s not something especially evil about the pernicious hatred of Jews that Hitler had that led to the deaths of of millions of Jews, but then to, like, hold Churchill up as just, like, this unquestionable good guy when he has millions of deaths on his, hand on his on his watch for his policies.

Jacob Winograd [00:22:36]:
You know, again, this it’s just things that that are, again, death by

Jacob Winograd [00:22:42]:
a thousand cuts here. Lots of pretty deep gash into the idea that, you know, Churchill equals good guy. Right? And that that was the whole thing that Darrell got in trouble for was for saying that he that although he he the way Darrell put it was that Churchill didn’t commit the most atrocities and, you know, perhaps wasn’t the most evil, but then in some ways, Churchill was a villain in World War two insofar as he contributed towards getting that second worst outcome. As an and and if it hadn’t been for certain stances and policies of his, like, the war might have still happened and people might have still died, but it didn’t have to get to the degree that it got to. You know, let’s talk about, you know, speaking of, like, the holocaust, was that the original plan from the outset? Right? Again, something that puts up red flags in people’s brains, but, you know, the, Daryl’s claim is and I I think this is historically supported as far as I can tell, is that the final solution is just that. Like, it’s the final solution, not necessarily the first solution. It it developed over time. And this isn’t to say Hitler didn’t have at least a desire to do ethnic cleansing, if not genocide of the Jews and did not you know, he definitely hated the Jews.

Jacob Winograd [00:24:09]:
Right? There’s no Daryl says that, you know, and his all of the every podcast of his I’ve ever listened to, he’s like, yeah. No. Hitler definitely hated the Jews. He even has one episode where he goes into, like, hey. This is kinda like the history of things that Hitler and other Germans experienced that wrongly, but just like, here’s how it happened, led to them looking to the Jews and hating them and using them as a scapegoat for a lot of things. But there were

Jacob Winograd [00:24:36]:
you know, as I I said

Jacob Winograd [00:24:37]:
I think I said this in the intro, Hitler at many points was saying, well, let’s just get the Jews out of here, whether that’s sending them to Madagascar or, you know, even saying that he

Jacob Winograd [00:24:46]:
was gonna pay the way for Britain and The US to take the the the Jews. So, and we have

Jacob Winograd [00:24:56]:
to also, when we’re talking about the holocaust, realize that it it wasn’t until the war turned and the ghettos became unsustainable that the machinery of extermination was really fully unleashed. And then you have things like the British blockade, contributing to mass starvation even among the Jews. And, yeah, there was a Nazi policy, driving a lot of things in the Holocaust, including some of the starvation. It certainly doesn’t help when you have a British blockade that’s designed to strangle supplies to the continent, and so know, historians debate over how much that contributed directly to the the death toll. But Churchill was warned and told by either by the that the Jews in the camps were starving, and he still chose not to lift the blockade. And and this really then leads to, I think, the most damning thing of all. And and there’s this juxtaposition here that I really wanna highlight that I

Jacob Winograd [00:26:02]:
think is is just I think it’s hard to it’s

Jacob Winograd [00:26:06]:
hard for me to to say it, but I think if I if I say it well enough and you might have to go back and, like, listen to me say it again and really think about it. But I think, like, once you see it, it’s hard to unsee, and I think it’s pretty damning. The allies said they couldn’t negotiate with Hitler. He was evil, not trustworthy, and yet they refused the Jewish refugees. And they said, we can’t make peace with Hitler. He’s evil. You know, he can’t be reasoned with. It’s like, okay.

Jacob Winograd [00:26:37]:
So then what did you do? If he was so evil that negotiation was impossible, why did you do almost nothing to save the people he was hunting? The US turned away Jewish refugees, even ships like the MS Saint Louis or, yeah, Saint Louis that carried nearly a thousand desperate Jewish souls, most of whom were later killed in the holocaust. And Britain locked its doors and blocked Jewish immigration, to to Britain and also to Palestine. And and the West had this whole conference in 1938, the Evian conference, to address the refugee crisis. And do

Jacob Winograd [00:27:20]:
you know what came of it? Nothing.

Jacob Winograd [00:27:22]:
Country after country stood up and basically said, sorry. We’re full. Even once the killing camps were operational, once they knew what was happening, they didn’t do anything. Like, they didn’t even bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz. And let’s be clear, they did know. By 1942, the western allies had credible intelligence that the Jews were being systematically murdered in Nazi occupied Europe. Reports came in from the Polish underground, from Jewish escapees, from eyewitnesses like Jan, Karski. By the summer of nineteen forty four, there was, the the Vrbo Wechsler report that provided a detailed account of the Auschwitz operations, including the layout of the camp, the gas chambers, the, the the the, crematoria, the mass killings.

Jacob Winograd [00:28:13]:
And, you know, the allies received these reports, sometime in 1944. And the American spy planes were flying over Southern Poland and were even accidentally photographing Auschwitz while on bombing runs against industrial targets nearby. And, you know, that you can see it in the pictures, the the gas chambers and the long lines of prisoners. It’s all there in black and white and yet nothing. You know? The allies didn’t bomb and try to, you know, didn’t bomb the the camps and try to rescue them. They didn’t bomb the rail lines.

Jacob Winograd [00:28:46]:
They didn’t they they, instead,

Jacob Winograd [00:28:50]:
you know, they prioritized military targets and then on on their own targeted German civilians. Right? And then you’d have the blockade and all that. It was basically total war, knowing that they were leaving the most vulnerable to their fates. You know, basically saying that the only way to you know, that that that there was gonna be a lot of deaths and that, you know, this is why they just they had to win the war. That was you know, these people’s deaths were just an unfortunate, cost to what they had to do

Jacob Winograd [00:29:24]:
to win the war. So again, if you I

Jacob Winograd [00:29:27]:
want I I wanna drive this home. If you say you couldn’t make peace with Hitler because he was evil, and, yes, he was evil, then he did nothing to stop his evil. Like, I I guess they they fought Hitler, but they had opportunities to take in Jews, to rescue Jews, to allow them, a place of safe refuge, and they did nothing.

Jacob Winograd [00:29:51]:
And I think that’s kind of hypocritical because you can’t say,

Jacob Winograd [00:29:56]:
well, like, it was it would have been pointless for Churchill and others to try to negotiate with Hitler because of how evil he is. It’s like if you knew how evil he he was, then you should have tried even harder to be like, yeah. You’re offering to pay to get the Jews out. We’ll pay to get the Jews out. Don’t kill the don’t, you know, you know, don’t do it. They they did they did did nothing. It it wasn’t ignorance. It was indifference.

Jacob Winograd [00:30:24]:
And that’s a historical reality we have to confront if we wanna stop history from repeating itself. So the same powers who claimed the moral high ground, who said they had to go to war because Hitler was irredeemable refused to act when it mattered the most. They just let it happen. And that’s the contradiction we’re wrestling with here. And we’re not wrestling with this to condemn everyone, not to rewrite history in favor of the other side, but to confront history with open eyes and open hearts so we don’t repeat those mistakes again. So it’s not that Hitler was good. It’s about saying that Churchill wasn’t. Right? So it’s about admitting that both sides were deeply compromised and that the moral clarity we project onto that war is really just comforting illusion.

Jacob Winograd [00:31:16]:
It is post hoc. It’s one that we use to justify our foreign policy today as I’ve already talked about. Why I like to say it’s not history and these wars are often not good guys versus bad guys. It’s just bad guys versus worse guys. But questioning that story gets you labeled a rev as a revisionist or even worse, but we need to ask these questions. Because if this is how the West handled World War two and the holocaust, if they knew what was happening and and, you know, either refused to act or acted poorly, right, and and show they had a faulty moral compass, showed that, you know, it’s easy for them to post talk, say that it was a a moral war and crusade when really we just see more of the they were concerned about, their power, their territories. You know, it was all it was all to it was all based on that is what is what I would argue. So if we if we see that at play here, even in World War two, which is supposed to be, you know, the most moral war we ever fought against, you know, there’s that

Jacob Winograd [00:32:26]:
in the civil war, What does that tell us about, you know, how they got here in the first place? Right?

Jacob Winograd [00:32:32]:
Like, not just during the war, but before that. Like, how did we get here? So if we zoom out from that, you know, like, what led to the rise of Hitler? Was the Treaty of Versailles, just towards Germany? Were the German people’s grievances all illegitimate, and was their despair entirely irrational? That’ll be fair. You know, it it is more within the acceptable, you know, the the allowable whether the index card of allowable opinion, as Tom Woods says, to talk about the Treaty of Versailles and how that played a huge role in allowing Hitler to rise to power. But even then, I think and we cover this I remember covering this in high school, but I still

Jacob Winograd [00:33:16]:
don’t think we we we give it enough day

Jacob Winograd [00:33:20]:
daylight talking about this.

Jacob Winograd [00:33:24]:
You know, and these are the questions

Jacob Winograd [00:33:26]:
that Daryl Cooper wants us to ask. And it’s what Scott Horton raised in his conversation with him, and And it’s something I even brought up back in episode 58 because the parallels to our time are too obvious to ignore. Think about it. A humiliated population, a nation crushed economically, cultural and moral confusion, institutional distrust, people who feel voiceless and directionless and who are looking for someone to blame and are looking for someone to save them. Does that ring any bells? Does that sound familiar at all? Because that’s what Germany looked like in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and if we’re honest, that is not that much dissimilar from what we’re seeing across much of the West today. So, no, we’re not drawing moral equivalencies. We’re drawing warnings. For all the talk about those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, it seems like people don’t wanna learn their history.

Jacob Winograd [00:34:28]:
Like I agree with that saying, but

Jacob Winograd [00:34:30]:
then when you get people like Daryl Cooper or Scott Horton or Dave Smith who were like, hey, let’s actually dive into the history. And I think we’re telling a story about the history that oversimplifies it in ways that we’re gonna miss things and then repeat those mistakes, like, oh, no. You’re you’re it’s it’s the opposite. Like, these people, you know, my camp, if I’m gonna associate with them in that way, it gets labeled as revisionists and that we’re minimizing the holocaust. I’m gonna flip it around and say, no. You’re the ones that are minimizing and diminishing the holocaust because you’re using the holocaust. You’re using the sentiment of never again to justify modern day holocausts and to put us on the path towards tyrannical regimes like the Nazis or at least something close

Jacob Winograd [00:35:23]:
to that, or similar to that to happen again. Because

Jacob Winograd [00:35:28]:
when people feel abandoned, when they feel disenfranchised, when they feel lied to and betrayed by the media, by their elites, they get desperate, and desperate people don’t always make noble choices. And that’s how evil rises, not from cartoon villains in backrooms, but from real people in pain grabbing onto anything that seems like a solution, that seems to offer clarity amidst the chaos. And that’s the lesson we need to learn. So I don’t know. Does Daryl get a % of everything right? I I don’t know who does. Right? I’m sure if you, you know, listen to he’s got hundreds of hours of of podcasts and writings to go through. And I I’m sure you can nitpick some things. I’ve I’ve seen a couple things people will say that he’s gotten wrong or gotten slightly, you know, like, maybe, like, overemphasizing certain things.

Jacob Winograd [00:36:28]:
But, you know, if

Jacob Winograd [00:36:29]:
we’re picking at nits, like, we’re missing the point.

Jacob Winograd [00:36:33]:
And even when he’s getting something wrong, I mean, he’s, again, super well researched, and he’s always trying to put you in the heads of the people he’s talking about. Even though, like, he’s a critic, as I am, of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and of Zionism, his serious fear and loathing starts out by forcing us to understand Zionism and why the Jewish people were drawn to it. You know, if you really if you really wanna understand how Daryl approaches this and why it matters, I I challenge you. Go listen to the first thirty minutes of part one of fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem. Seriously, just the first half hour. You’ll notice the connection immediately. It appears the opening of this episode, the the slow deliberate immersion, the moral tension, and the question he forces you to confront, not just about Zionism, not just about Germany or the Arabs, but about every atrocity in history, about every group of people in history who have ever gone through something terrible. And it says, what would you do? That’s the question that Daryl never stops asking.

Jacob Winograd [00:37:43]:
Not to excuse, not to glorify, but to understand. Because it’s one thing to just give you the facts of history. It’s another thing to put you in the the place and the minds and the hearts of the people in that history so you can actually see and feel in your head be like, I understand how this happened. It didn’t just like it like, we’re not just living in a world where things are out of control. No. That’s a world

Jacob Winograd [00:38:10]:
of cause and effect.

Jacob Winograd [00:38:10]:
As I said last week, actions have consequences. And the more you put yourself in the minds and the hearts of the people, even people who find themselves falling prey to, evil despotic men who then bring out the worst in them, who who who bring out demonic forces that perpetuate some of the worst evils in history. Like, I get real angry, just a little off script here. Like, I really admire people like Jordan Peterson. But but Jordan’s kind of been on the side lately of of criticizing the anti interventionist, anti war, camp and those who are critical of Israel. But, like, I learned this from Jordan Peterson, what Daryl Cooper’s doing. Because Jordan Peterson has said many times that everyone wants to think that they’re Oskar Schindler in the middle of the Holocaust, but that you would more than likely be rounding up your Jewish neighbors and reporting them to the SS. That’s that’s the truth of the the total deprivation of of sin in our hearts of human nature, that we’re cowards and we lack moral strength and clarity when it comes to the when we find ourselves in those situations.

Jacob Winograd [00:39:30]:
It’s not even just that you’ll do it out of fear. It’s like you’ll be convinced that it’s the right thing to do. How does that happen? That’s what Jordan Peterson has talked about in the past, and I wish he’d be consistent on that. And that’s all Daryl’s doing. That’s what Scott’s doing, and that’s what I’m trying

Jacob Winograd [00:39:49]:
to do. Because in until we can imagine what

Jacob Winograd [00:39:54]:
it would feel like to be desperate, abandoned, and betrayed, we can’t till we feel the gravity of those moments, we’ll never truly comprehend the history and how those evil regimes rose. And, you know, the same principle applies to even more than just history and foreign policy. The this idea, like, what would you do? It’s not just for Gaza or Germany or Zionism. You can even bring it closer to home. I brought up in the beginning, the the Killdozer incident. Right? This, Marvin, Heemeyer. They could tell you pronounce it. Heemeyer.

Jacob Winograd [00:40:31]:
The man behind, the the Killdozer incident. And he’s not a Nazi, not a terror I guess he kinda was a domestic terrorist that you could say. But, he he like, before this, he wasn’t. Right? He wasn’t like a, you know, a a a jihadist or something. But he was a small town welder in Colorado, a normal American citizen, someone who spent years, trying to fight what he believed was corrupt local government behavior through every legal and peaceful means available. And when every door seemed shut and even when every appeal felt rigged against him, you know, he he finally hit this point where he snapped. So he armored a bulldozer, a Komatsu, and went on a a destructive rampage against the town’s institutions that he believed had had ruined his life. And no one died, although I do think he did shoot at a couple of the police officers and people who were trying to stop him.

Jacob Winograd [00:41:33]:
And I wanna be clear. I’m not endorsing what he did. Right? Because even though no one died, like, he still you know, there there was force initiated and threatened against innocent people, and that’s that’s not justified. But but Marvin’s story does serve as a reminder in to what I’m talking about here. And, like, the like, think about this. Even in America, even under relatively peaceful conditions, people can be driven to radical and destructive actions by systemic injustice and corruption and despair. And when they feel trapped, when they believe there’s no other way out, they lash out. And, again, understanding why someone like Marvin Snapped isn’t about excusing it.

Jacob Winograd [00:42:19]:
It’s about being able to recognize the warning signs before it happens again for individuals and for nations and for society. And, you know, like, with with with Marvin and Killdozer, there’s there’s kind of folklore built around them, memes and slogans, and and a lot of times even admiration in in certain corners. And there’s this expression. It says, sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things. Now whether or not you believe that captures the full truth of Marvin’s actions, it proves the deeper point that Daryl Cooper and I and others are trying to make, that we can all imagine it. We can all imagine being pushed to the edge. We can all understand at least a little bit what drives some people to desperate measures when faced with persistent injustice or tyranny to the point where we’ll we’ll even, you know, idolize or make a folklore out of someone who, you know, even if he I’d say he went too far, but there’s people who who go like, I man, I get it. You know, sometimes you get pushed to the edge and, and people think that the the the m’s justify the means.

Jacob Winograd [00:43:32]:
And for Marvin, it was his livelihood, his years of labor, his dignity squeezed out by a corrupt alliance between politicians and big businesses until he believed he had nothing left to lose. So now let’s go back to the story we started this episode with. The father in Gaza holding his starving child, watching bombs fall, hearing the world call him a terrorist just because he lives in Gaza, put yourself in his shoes. What would you do? Let’s be clear about something. Gaza has been under Hamas’s rule and Israeli, you know, occupation

Jacob Winograd [00:44:12]:
for twenty years. I mean, really, there’s

Jacob Winograd [00:44:15]:
been Israeli occupation for longer than that, but the Hamas rule for twenty. And that’s long enough that most of the population living there today was either born into it or raised or was raised under it. Even in 02/2005 when Hamas first entered the political process, as I said last week, they didn’t win a majority, not even close. They didn’t win a majority in any of the precincts. And so the story we often hear, like, Gaza is is just Hamas. Right? Palestinians are Hamas. It doesn’t hold up. The reality is more complicated.

Jacob Winograd [00:44:49]:
Then we add again, this is just indisputable. Israel intentionally worked to empower Hamas, to divide and conquer and weaken the Palestinians, to keep Gaza isolated from the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority, to avoid having to to to pursue a two state solution or some other solution to give the Palestinians their rights and their liberties. And yet even after years of blockade and humiliation and starvation and occupation, not every Palestinian was turn was radicalized into violence. And while there’s many examples, none is greater to prove my point of this than in 2,018 when the people of Gaza organized the Great March of Return, which wasn’t a terror attack. It wasn’t a military intervention. It was a protest. Thousands of civilians, families, teenagers, kids marched towards the fence separating Gaza from Israel, and they demanded two basic things, end the blockade of Gaza, allow allow Palestinian refugees the right to return to the homes they were driven from in 1948. And how how did Israel respond? With snipers, with live ammunition, with tear gas, and mass shootings.

Jacob Winograd [00:46:10]:
Over 200 Palestinians were killed, many shot in the legs, many left permanently disabled, just thousands more than the hundred that were killed were wounded, and the world barely blinked. So when people say that Palestinians only understand violence, they just, hey, hate Israel. They’re just a it’s a death cult that wants to destroy the Jewish people. No. That is not all the Palestinians, and many of them have tried protests. They’ve tried diplomacy. They’ve tried elections. Every peaceful door has been slammed shut.

Jacob Winograd [00:46:44]:
Every attempt at nonviolent resistance has been met with bullets and bombs and silence from the so called civilized world.

Jacob Winograd [00:46:54]:
So what would you do? That’s not

Jacob Winograd [00:46:56]:
a rhetorical question. It’s the moral heart of this entire episode.

Jacob Winograd [00:47:02]:
And if you have kids and you understand how tragic that is, you just

Jacob Winograd [00:47:06]:
put yourself in put yourself in that position. Imagine yours imagine that you’re a father and you just had a bomb dropped on your house and you are the only one left, and you’re sitting there looking around at the blown up bits of your family, and you tell me you can’t understand how you could get radicalized into violence at that moment. The fact that some didn’t is just a testimony to that even though we are sinful, even though we are totally depraved, that we aren’t always as depraved as we could be. Again, what would you do? It’s not a rhetorical question. If we can’t ask that question, if we can’t entertain the humanity of the people that we’re bombing, that we’re not serving the kingdom of God. We’re serving the kingdoms of this world. And here’s the deeper reality. Both sides of this story, the Jews and the Palestinians

Jacob Winograd [00:48:04]:
have been through hell. We the the intro

Jacob Winograd [00:48:07]:
to fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem is about the antisemitism, and the pogroms that the Jew Jewish people suffered in Eastern And Western Europe before and and after World War I and the late eighteenth, sort of late late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, really, really for a long time before that. The Jewish people have been through so much hell. And the criticism that Daryl and I have for Zionism is essentially that, like, yeah, after a while, the Jewish people got tired of that and decided they’re gonna have a homeland and they’re gonna do it at any cost even if it means displacing Arabs from Palestine. Like, they they said that explicitly. That’s not revisionist history at all. That’s that’s that that is that is fact.

Jacob Winograd [00:49:00]:
Well, listen. This isn’t about picking one victim and one villain, but

Jacob Winograd [00:49:05]:
recognizing that trauma runs deep on both sides, that the fear, the pain, the desperation that drives, people to to terrorism or to resistance, that that that didn’t spring out of nowhere. And Darryl Cooper, not and not Scott Horton and not Dave Smith and

Jacob Winograd [00:49:26]:
not me, we’re not revisionists who are trying to

Jacob Winograd [00:49:30]:
make you hate Churchill and love Hitler. We’re we’re trying to do something much harder, something much more important. We’re trying to see the humanity in every group of people to force us to understand that the forces that drive nations, movements, and individuals towards decisions that from the outside look insane or monstrous to to to understand that, like, that could be us, to understand what those forces are and to be able to to be like, that that could be me. And also because if we believe Jesus’s words to we’re gonna obey them. Right? We’re gonna follow them. That means loving our neighbor and our enemy. That that’s not optional. If we only see good guys and bad guys, we’ll never understand history, and we’ll never be fully capable of loving anyone outside of our own tribe.

Jacob Winograd [00:50:34]:
The apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians two that Christ himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh, the dividing wall of hostility. And in Galatians three, he reminds us that in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Jesus came and

Jacob Winograd [00:50:56]:
he he came to save us. Right?

Jacob Winograd [00:50:59]:
And and I said last week that, I think it was last week, I don’t know, on a recent episode that that that salvation is on the individual basis. Right? That that, when when Jesus died to save you, he died to save you from your sins. And and the gospel should always be at the core of what we’re talking about when it comes to Jesus and his and what he did. But he didn’t just come

Jacob Winograd [00:51:27]:
to save individuals

Jacob Winograd [00:51:29]:
and to restore what was lost. He also came to tear down the walls between tribes and races and nations. His parables, his teachings, his example, they shatter they they shattered then and now the social norms of both his time and our time. He touched the untouchable. He dined with sinners. He healed Samaritans. He refused to play by the rules that said these people were clean and those people were dirty. He calls us to that same radical love because the hard truth is that we were once enemies of God.

Jacob Winograd [00:52:09]:
We hated him. We rebelled against him. And yet while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It is easy to love those who love us, but Jesus calls us to something far harder, to love those we are told to hate, even to love those who hate us, who have done evil to us,

Jacob Winograd [00:52:29]:
who have done evil to other people. And not

Jacob Winograd [00:52:33]:
to deny justice, not to excuse the sin, but by remembering that every human being bears the image of God and that the only thing that separates us from them are the circumstances that we’ve lived through

Jacob Winograd [00:52:48]:
and the grace that God has shown us, the grace and the work of Jesus Christ. Every human being bears the image of God, even our enemies, even the ones we’re told not

Jacob Winograd [00:53:01]:
to see. So here’s the deeper reality. Both sides of this story, the Jews and the Palestinians have

Jacob Winograd [00:53:07]:
been through hell. You don’t have to pick a side.

Jacob Winograd [00:53:11]:
You don’t have to diminish one to love the other or hate one to defend the other. You can love both.

Jacob Winograd [00:53:20]:
And that’s what I that’s what I hope that this episode spurs you to do, to see the humanity and to go out

Jacob Winograd [00:53:28]:
there and, you know, the remember the gospel message is for everyone. And if, as a church, if we’re called to spread the gospel to the nations, to to tell people of the good news, let’s stop dropping bombs on the people that we’re supposed to be evangelizing. Can we do that? Well, listen, I’m I’m anti war. I’m a libertarian. Maybe that’s pie in the sky thinking, right,

Jacob Winograd [00:53:52]:
to think we’re gonna have a free society. I think we could

Jacob Winograd [00:53:57]:
have a free society, but there there’s always gonna be, you know, those who do evil, murder, theft, injustice, assault. But, man, like, could could we just imagine that maybe we avert avoid the worst worst? That we we could just live in a world where we don’t drop bombs on innocent civilians? And as I said last week, what

Jacob Winograd [00:54:21]:
do you do now? That’s a

Jacob Winograd [00:54:24]:
that’s that’s a good question to ask. What do you do now? What do you do with Hamas? What do you

Jacob Winograd [00:54:28]:
do with Israel? I tell you

Jacob Winograd [00:54:30]:
what you don’t do. You do not settle a course that ensures that we’re back here in twenty more years. We have to repent. We have to choose love. We have to choose peace and we have to choose to live counter culturally as ambassadors for Christ’s kingdom and not purveyors of propaganda for the kingdom of this world. Thanks for listening today. If this episode challenged you, good. It’s supposed to.

Jacob Winograd [00:55:00]:
I had a this episode took me

Jacob Winograd [00:55:02]:
a while to write out and, and and to read, and it’s one

Jacob Winograd [00:55:06]:
of those episodes that I I, I don’t know the right way to put a bow

Jacob Winograd [00:55:11]:
in it and end it. But, again, I think the most important point

Jacob Winograd [00:55:15]:
of that if if if Christ died for us while we were his enemies, that that has that has real ramifications and consequences for how we should view our enemies. So if you wanna support the show, as always, please go to biblicalanarchypodcast.com, click the donate link,

Jacob Winograd [00:55:36]:
and, you can sign up to

Jacob Winograd [00:55:38]:
be an LCI insider. If you wanna support the show, you can also like this, subscribe if you haven’t already, share it on social media. And that’s all I have for

Jacob Winograd [00:55:49]:
you guys. Until next time, live at peace, live for Christ. Take care.

Knowledgeable Narrator [00:55:55]:
The Biblical Anarchy Podcast is a part of the Christians for Liberty Network, a project of the Libertarian the of the biblical anarchy podcast, please consider donating to the Libertarian Christian Institute at biblicalanarchypodcast.com, where you can also sign up to receive special announcements and resources related to biblical anarchy. Thanks for tuning in.

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