Caveat Lector
Don't be fooled by propaganda masquerading as history
Substack has a bestsellers list for each subject category. The top bestseller in the history category is Darryl Cooper.
Yes, that Darryl Cooper.
Number three is Curtis Yarvin.
Yes, that Curtis Yarvin.
I’m not knocking Substack. We aren’t going to defeat extremism with locked doors and censorship. I won’t even criticize them for having Cooper and Yarvin in the “history” category. When all the content of the world is lumped into a handful of categories, distortions are inevitable.
But I will urge readers to, please, beware.
As far as I can make out, neither Cooper nor Yarvin has any training in history. Neither is a historian. And little of the work either does — especially Yarvin — deserves to be thought of as history.
What does it mean to be a historian? Or to write history? Following is a passage that answers that question succinctly, I think. It comes from the report of Sir Richard Evans on the work of David Irving.
Evans is the greatest living historian of the Third Reich. (And much more. He’s brilliant.) Irving is a man who has spent his life pretending to be a historian in order to convince others that the Nazis weren’t monstrous criminals.
Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
By that definition, Cooper and Yarvin — especially Yarvin — are similarly disqualified.
So what are they, really, if not historians?
They are political propagandists whose work is mostly intended to — along with garnering attention and making bucketloads of money — promote political views. The views they promote (again, Yarvin is the worse of the two) are objectively extreme and, in my personal opinion, loathsome.
This, from Yarvin, is only the latest appalling illustration.
For the record, I have a masters degree in modern European history with a focus on fascism and the Third Reich. When I did that work, in the mid 1990s, what I studied was truly and entirely history, a subject as safely confined to the past as feudalism and the Roman Empire. It sickens me that my degree is now relevant when I watch the daily news. It sickens me more to know that enormous numbers of people seek out the likes of Cooper and Yarvin in order to learn about the past and understand the present.
Caveat lector. Please, caveat lector.
Couldn’t agree more. Subject classification by algorithm feeds into general dumbing down which then erodes the culture’s epistemic foundation and hence, the everyday niceties of democratic accountability that keep us kinda honest. It’s a helluva harder to rebuild or even to maintain the foundation than it is to tear it apart. We’re all getting a ringside seat to that. The very least we can do is witness and speak out. This librarian appreciates your work, Dan.
At some visceral level, I remain agog at how seriously Yarvin is taken. Maybe it comes from my having heard of him long ago, before he hit the big time. My image of him is thus fixed as being some obscure guy with tedious blog bloviations.
I would naively have suggested it would be nice to have a site explaining basically "He Doesn't Know What He's Talking About". But nowadays I'm cynical so as to believe that it wouldn't do any good, he'd just say it's The Cathedral unable to cope with his truth.