Along southern English coastlines, and plonked across fields inland, are “pillboxes,” the nickname for aging little concrete bunkers with machine-gun slits. Today, you’re likely to find curious children or, in less salubrious areas, drunken vagrants poking about these largely forgotten structures. But more than eight decades ago, they were the last line of defense against the dreaded fate of “speaking German.” Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.
There was no Nazi invasion of mainland Britain, the Germans largely deterred by the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy in the vital summer and fall of 1940. Those pillboxes stayed empty and silent. Someone who has become empty, though certainly not silent, is Tucker Carlson.
In an episode of his show released October 2, the conservative commentator-turned-provocateur put an astonishing question to Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg: How is Britain better off for having fought, and helped defeat, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis? So it would be nice to have, like, at least a European language spoken in your country.” Coming from an American, that shrug turns a familiar taunt on its head—and it makes sense only if you forget what “speaking German” really meant. Carlson’s point, such as it was: “If a war is fought with the children of your citizens, which it is, then that war should benefit those citizens.” The core of Carlson’s argument is that both the loss of the empire and Britain’s grim modern decline are consequences of fighting the war against Hitler, and that the war therefore wasn’t worth it.
There are many holes into which this argument falls and dies. As Rees-Mogg put it, the war was “classic good versus evil.” Hitler posed an existential threat to Britain itself, and to most nations across the European continent. Moreover, Britain, problems aplenty, is not in quite as bad a state as many Americans tend to believe.
Nor is it an Islamic emirate, or a caliphate, or some other variation of this strange belief—one JD Vance, now vice president, aired in 2024 when he joked that Labour-run Britain might be the first “truly Islamist” country to get a nuclear weapon. And contrary to Carlson’s claim, fewer than 2 percent of residents of England and Wales told the 2021 census they couldn’t speak English well or at all. But let’s return to Carlson’s indifference to the notion that Britain would be “speaking German” if it hadn’t defeated Hitler alongside the Allies.
Because it inverts the usual pattern. Traditionally, Americans have deployed the “speaking German” line as an insult to ungrateful Europeans. Were it not for the belated entry of the U.S. into the war, the Nazis would still rule Europe, goes the thinking.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
