Posts Tagged ‘Niall Ferguson’

An excerpt from a Free Press conversation between historian Niall Ferguson and Bari Weiss, newly named editor-in-chief at CBS News. Listen to the whole thing here . Meanwhile, an excerpt below:

It’s been two years since the October 7 massacre. Over at The Free Press, the event was remembered with with an hour-long conversation about anti-semitism, terrorism, between A different kind of loss. You can listen to the full podcast here. Niall Ferguson on October 7 and Our Changed World

Historian Niall Ferguson in conversation with Bari Weiss of at The Free Press. Towards the end, the conversation turned to a topic dear to my heart: the importance of reading.

I’ve written about that a lot on Werner Herzog: “Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading.”

An excerpt from the conversation:

Ferguson: Conspiracy theories have been in the ascendant for some time. I think that they’ve benefited from the internet, but what makes you susceptible to a conspiracy theory is that you are actually post-literate or pre-literate. You haven’t really read the books that would make you skeptical about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or skeptical about some of the claims that are now being made by [Tucker] Carson and other people on what Jim Lindsey calls the “woke right”… The problem is that people are highly susceptible to old conspiracy theories, and of course conspiracy theories have for centuries made Jews the villains if they have not read any real history. And I think that is part of what concerns me about the way history is taught in our schools, in our universities.

It is no longer being taught in the way that might make people able to defend their minds against this kind of poison.

You asked, ‘What can we do?’ Well, it sounds banal, but I think reading books is not a bad start. After all, what made me able to recognize the intentions of the perpetrators on October 7, 2023, was that I’ve read a lot of accounts of the violence against Jews that occurred in the early stages of the Holocaust, before the Holocaust was industrialized in Auschwitz, when the Holocaust was a series of wild pogroms directed against the Jews of Eastern Europe.

You know, if you’ve read accounts of those hideous events, then you know what a pogrom is like. You don’t need to have experienced one. You’ve read about it. I think reading firsthand accounts of historical events is still the most powerful way to prepare yourself for what the present and future may throw at you.

And I don’t think that people read enough. I don’t think they read nearly enough of the kind of books I read when I was researching “War of the World,” the kind of books I assigned when I was teaching the Third Reich special subject at Oxford.

I’ll just give you one example, the one thing that I would urge people to read. The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, who was Jewish, although converted to Christianity, but defined as a Jewish professor in Dresden in the 1930s and 1940s, are a wonderful account of what it is to be a Jew in a society where your rights are whittled away. You start thinking you’re a German with full civil rights. The diaries begin pre-Hitler. And then with every passing week after 1933, your rights are whittled away until you have none at all and are made to wear a yellow star and are waiting for deportation to the death camps.

I think those are some of the most important books that have ever been published about the experience of life in a totalitarian regime. People who get confused, who think somehow we’re on a path to totalitarianism, should read those volumes. It’s a good reality check. And we should read those volumes wherever we live and ask ourselves the question: “Is some similar process at work? Is that the feeling that Jews in Britain have started to feel?” I begin to think that it is, even if the source of the threat is a very different one from National Socialism. If the source of the thread is Islamism and its useful idiots on the left, that’s a very different source.

But what if the end result is the same? If you haven’t read any history, if you haven’t read Klemperer, you don’t really know what to look for. So that’s my banal advice. I guess the historian has nothing left in the end to offer but books.

Bari Weiss: You have so many to read of yours that if people have not read, for example, The Tower and the Square, and so many others of your incredible works, I recommend that they go and do that immediately.

Go here to listen to the podcast.

Not only is Why the West Rules — for Now the bedside reading of Niall Ferguson, but The Economist has just named Ian Morris‘s weighty tome  as one of the top books of 2010:  “An entertaining and plausible book by a British historian at Stanford University that shows how debates about the rise of China or the fall of the West are ultimately a sideshow, as nature will bite back savagely at human society.”  (We wrote about it here and here.)

The Economist reviewed the book last October:  “Ian Morris, a polymathic Stanford University professor of classics and history, has written a remarkable book that may come to be as widely read as Paul Kennedy’s 1987 work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”

Also receiving The Economist‘s best-of-the-year praise — in fact, right above the Why the West Rules, is Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands: “How Stalin and Hitler enabled each other’s crimes and killed 14m people between the Baltic and the Black Sea. A lifetime’s work by a Yale University historian who deserves to be read and reread.”  (Bloodlands was discussed on The Book Haven a few weeks ago, with Norman Naimark‘s Stalin’s Genocides, and again here.)

In the spirit of Morris’s book, if you’d like to watch ten centuries roll by in five minutes — click “play” below.  We think it’s kind of fun.

Foreign Policy has published its Second Annual Top 100 Global Thinkers List — “a unique portrait of 2010’s global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them” — and there are inevitably some surprises.

The one that pleased us most is that nestled in Niall Ferguson‘s recommended reading list of three books (Ferguson comes in at #80) —  Ian Morris‘s Why the West Rules — For Now.  We’ve written about Morris, the man who knows everything, here and here.

Other names mentioned in these pages appear on the list — Christopher Hitchens, Liu Xiaobo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Clay Shirky, David Grossman.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali made the cut, and so, ironically, did the man who has derided her — Ian Buruma finishes the list at #100.  (Tariq Ramadan follows immediately after at #62).  But what’s curious about her blurb is this bizarre understatement:

“The first time you heard about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it was likely the story of a brave Muslim woman fleeing her forced marriage in Somalia to become an outspoken critic of Islam. But her flight didn’t stop there; after more than a decade living in the Netherlands, she left Europe and its painful debates over assimilation for more comfortable ground: conservative America.”

Well, no.  Not quite.  They neglect to mention that she fled Holland because a fatwa called for her death, her colleague Theo van Gogh was murdered, and the Netherlands not only failed to protect her, but turned on her, questioning her immigration status. Big difference.

Why did no one at Foreign Policy flag this boo boo?  I guess all the copy editors have been laid off.