The eminent historian and public intellectual Niall Ferguson looked at what happened in Paris and somehow saw Rome. In his column for the Sunday Times of London, he conjured up Edward Gibbon, who wrote of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon said Rome fell to barbarians who “extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent and the helpless” — pretty much, Ferguson says, what “we witnessed in Paris on Friday night.”
Ferguson is the author of many books on economics and history and is affiliated with all the usual prestigious institutions (Harvard, Stanford, etc.). In addition, he has been anointed by Henry Kissinger as his chosen biographer. We are not talking Donald Trump here.
Yet Ferguson’s language in his column approaches Trump’s. Ferguson castigates Europe for being weak and spineless. “It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums,” he wrote. “At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.” Heinrich Heine, an ex-Jew, once wrote that conversion to Christianity was “the ticket of admission to European culture.” Is it now necessary to get into a mall?
To be sure, Ferguson makes the obligatory bow to tolerance. “It is also true that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent,” he says. But his words give intellectual heft to what is suddenly an explosion of anti-Muslim sentiment in both Europe and the United States. In America, Republicans have exploited the Paris massacres to warn about a wave of Syrian refugees heading our way, their numbers inflated by Trump from an anticipated 10,000 to 250,000. Whatever the number, Jeb Bush would give priority to Syrian Christians.
The governors of several states vow they will accept no more Syrian refugees. Predictably, some GOP candidates have raised the possibility of terrorists slipping into the refugee stream. They inadvertently echo the American politicians of the 1930s and 1940s who wanted to keep refugees from Nazi Germany out of this country, asserting that there were communists among them.
