Like several of the historians who recently signed an open letter against AV, Niall Ferguson is not resident in the United Kingdom for tax purposes. But Ferguson's work on the First World War was actually rather good, the sort of thing around which, up to a very considerable point, the paleocons of Left and Right could unite. Yet he seems to have been going downhill ever since.
Tonight, he managed to inform his Channel Four viewers, without any qualification (look out for the return of "Break Dancing Jesus" to answer that with a list of Ferguson's postnominals and publications), that Israel was "undoubtedly a Western outpost", thereby confirming once and for all that he does not define the West as anything to do with Christendom, and indeed, as his view on Turkey also illustrated, sees membership of it as perfectly open to a state founded precisely on the bloody mass expulsion of Christians.
Oddly for a man who is now more or less an American, it apparently never occurred to Ferguson that every scientific and technological advance in Israel is really attributable to the United States, which paid for it and which might at least as easily have paid for it at home rather than abroad.
The drivel about an Iranian nuclear weapons programme was of course slipped in. Astonishingly, we were informed that Islam contained "a taboo against educating women", the exact opposite of what the Qur'an says, and "requires" the wearing of headscarves, which it does not, although, unlike face-coverings, they are perfectly acceptable in principle in the West properly defined. Ferguson is a knowing mouthpiece for the self-justifying lies of his latest squeeze, who is in fact an economic migrant, but who has learned that that status is even less acceptable when taking the neoconservative's dollar than it was when taking the liberal Left's guilder or euro.
Look out for next week on democracy, with no mention of the reserved Christian representation in Iran or Lebanon, no contrast between that and Israel or Turkey, no mention of how third parties and Independents have it a lot easier under the electoral law in Iran than under that in many of the Unites States of America (or under the media regime in the United Kingdom), no reference to the greater number of women than men at university in Iran, and so on. I can hardly wait.
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I also noticed how many of those historians lived abroad. But you are right that Ferguson's initial book on WWI was useful and important. Can we say the same about certain other expat signatories, such as Andrew Roberts?
ReplyDeleteThe howlers in Roberts's work are what most people pick up on. But, while there are many things that can and should be said against the partition of India, the hatchet job on Mountbatten in 'Eminent Churchillians' is altogether more serious than Roberts's references to the Red Army marching east across Europe and what have you.
ReplyDeleteAs it took shape, Labour adapted itself both to Radical Liberalism and to populist Toryism, depending on the pre-existing culture at least of its target electorate. Labour was never the party of anything like the whole of the working classes, nor did those classes ever provide anything like all of its support. Britain has neither a proletariat nor a bourgeoisie in the Marxist or Continental sense, but several working classes and several middle classes.
There was never any incongruity about the presence of middle or upper-class people in the Labour Party, and not least among Labour MPs. Nor about their having come from, and far from cast off, either Liberal or Tory backgrounds. Especially in Labour's early years, those backgrounds routinely included activism, and indeed parliamentary service, on behalf of either of those parties.
Mountbatten stood broadly within that tradition, if slightly to the side of it. He was Attlee's choice for last Viceroy of India, and Wilson's first choice for the new position of Secretary of State for Defence, which he felt obliged to decline only because of his closeness to the Royal Family. So much for Peter Wright's fantasy about a plot to overthrow Wilson and replace him with Mountbatten; if Wilson was a KGB agent, then the best that can be said is that the KGB ought to have demanded its money back.
And no wonder that neoconservatism's court historian has done most to traduce Mountbatten's, in any case far from justly blameless, reputation.