The Danger of The Simple Story: What Martyr Made’s Critics Are Getting Wrong

There is good in the bad, and there is bad in the good. Ignore this truth at your peril.

It’s often those who seek to protect a culture who end up eroding it. In the wake of a surprisingly immense controversy over the legacy of a long-dead British Prime Minister, I worry I’m watching those who fervently wish to protect Western classical liberalism unknowingly contribute to its downfall.

Human civilization is constructed around stories. The stories we share unite a society by orienting us toward the same values and goals, in the process increasing trust, cooperation, and harmony. As many before me have noted, this is the fundamental utility of religion. The divine ties between pharaohs and the gods inspired the building of the Pyramids, one of the greatest engineering and construction challenges in history. The story of Jesus enabled Christendom to cooperate in building a European civilization more technologically advanced than anywhere else on earth. Due to the story of Mohammed, civilization could even expand from the harsh conditions of the Arabian desert.

But this phenomenon is not uniquely “religious” (as in requiring supernatural beliefs), nor should it be mistaken as uniquely orienting groups towards values and goals that are good. The Nazi story of the biological superiority of the Germanic people united an army into committing genocide. The Marxist story of the bourgeoisie stealing “surplus value” united a revolutionary movement into creating a murderous dictatorship of the proletariat.

Such false stories can enable group cooperation toward shared values and goals just as much as a true one, often to our world’s detriment, but only for so long as the story is believed. A problem for such society-binding stories—religious or secular—arises if and when they’re shown to be untrue. As I’ve written about previously, this is what has led to the decline of traditional religions in the wake of the scientific revolution.

The decline of a uniting story is not a casual matter. A society no longer bound in shared purpose is one that can collapse into internal distrust, hostility, chaos, and even civil war. This is what conservatives are trying to sound the alarm about when they warn of multiculturalism leading to the decline of the West. Yet, what has been done in the name of keeping a failing story alive can often be even worse. It looks like book burnings, police states, and the murder of heretics and apostates.

There is another route that can rescue what is valuable from a failing story: revision. This is the Church reinterpreting the Bible to mesh with the reality of evolution and the age of the earth. It’s the United States’ purpose shifting to include protecting rights for residents beyond landowning white males. It’s China recognizing that markets can be a part of their “people’s republic.” These revisions, in my view, have not gone nearly far enough, yet they’ve staved off the total collapse that would have otherwise come to the societies built upon these stories.

However, for fundamentalists, revision is no answer—to them, it’s either identical to collapse or a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to it. Fundamentalism isn’t always entirely wrong. There have been no shortage of times in history when the baby has been thrown out and the bathwater remains. This is French Monarchists who feared a collapse of order seeing The Reign of Terror occur. It’s left-leaning religious organizations entirely collapsing to the woke faith. But the instinct toward fundamentalism must be subject to rationality, and narrow in its focus of preservation, or else it looks more like the stereotypes commonly associated with the term: the Westboro Baptist Church, the Khmer Rouge, ISIS.

Fundamentalists cannot coexist with revisionists; they must defeat both revisionists and non-believers, or they will be defeated themselves.

This context is important for understanding the landmine that history podcaster Darryl Cooper (aka Martyr Made) stepped on by challenging the consensus view of Winston Churchill as a hero of WWII. The controversy took Twitter/X by storm, leading Elon Must to delete a tweet endorsing Cooper and issue a new one doing the precise opposite, and sparking four separate rebuttals published by The Free Press alone. Cooper has been called “Hitler-Loving,” an odd accusation against someone who recounted an extraordinarily moving and powerfully anti-Nazi history of the Holocaust (or perhaps not so odd, given Cooper’s popular and well-balanced but mildly pro-Palestinian podcast on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how many leading Israel-supporters attack those not 100% aligned with their views). To bolster these ungenerous accusations, old deleted tweets from Cooper have widely circulated, tweets he’s long since explained and apologized for. Thankfully, this cancellation attempt has not worked, as Cooper’s audience has grown exponentially in a matter of days.

The story of WWII that we grow up with—one of the unambiguously good Allies defeating the unambiguously evil Axis—has been extraordinarily powerful in its simplicity. At a level that even a child can understand, it has united Westerners in the belief that our civilization defends positive values on the world stage and aligns us in acting upon those values both domestically and internationally.

Let me be clear: I agree that this is a vitally important story and that the Axis powers were evil. This is personal to me. I grew up in a Jewish community where many of my friends were the descendants of Holocaust survivors. I visited a number of the camps (including Auschwitz) with these friends and heard the stories of their grandparent’s and great-grandparent’s endurance, and I’ve spoken with a handful of Holocaust survivors themselves (most recently, here). I also don’t hold any particularly strong sentiments about Churchill; my knowledge of him barely exceeds the standard narrative we all learned in high school.

But what I do know is that some stories are too simple for their own good, and fundamentalists endanger our society when they dig in against any revision that threatens that simplicity.

I’m not nearly qualified to speak to the truth of any alleged sins of the Allies, but I’m certain that a reflexive, fundamentalist inability to entertain the possible reality of these sins endangers the Western classically liberal order I believe in far more than the original critique.

The nature of evil is not as it’s often depicted in myth. While psychopaths are real, the worst evil generally comes from those who believe themselves to be doing good. Evil people rarely cackle and advise you to embrace your hatred like Emperor Palpatine. Like impressionism in art, in myth, such simplicity is useful for its ability to direct its audience toward deeper meaning. Lucas’s fictional Palpatine was well suited for depicting the danger of the pursuit of power over all else, but one shouldn’t confuse fiction with the real world. When reality becomes mythologized, as in the case of WWII (or when myth is believed to be real, as in the case of religion), this simplicity becomes a double-edged sword: it can teach its lesson as well or better than any fictional myth only up until the point it is no longer believed to be true.

I’ve long been concerned that the dedication to painting Hitler and the Axis as cartoonish, Palpatine-esque villains would backfire. This isn’t because they’re not evil, but because it has left our society confused as to what real evil looks like, and made it more difficult for people to recognize actually existing villains. And perhaps now more than ever, in a time of deep distrust toward traditional sources of information, people noticing perceived cracks in the standard narrative of WWII are pendulum-swinging away from the classical liberal perspective into neo-Nazism. Leveraging this reaction is the explicit goal of white nationalists like Andrew Torba, who have relished the discourse around Cooper’s statements.

But that pendulum swing will not happen and cannot be leveraged by today’s villains if revisionists can overcome fundamentalist opposition and protect what matters about the WWII story while allowing for the complexity that’s inherent to reality. True or false, it shouldn’t matter to the endurance of the overall narrative if the Allies potentially did bad things during WWII, or even if Western involvement in the war unintentionally ended up making things worse for the groups that the Axis persecuted. None of this ought to take away from the fact that the Axis committed enormous atrocities, which they did because they held an ideology that promoted hatred and division, and it’s Western classical liberalism that provides the alternative to such evil—even if we’ve erred in living by it or practicing it effectively, including while fighting the Axis.

The icon of the Yin-Yang is meant to remind us of an important truth about the complexity of the world. There is good in the bad, and there is bad in the good. If you see the world simplistically and refuse to reckon with this truth, then you risk losing everything you seek to protect.