Our common enemy is intolerance
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.). 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 opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith,” he wrote.
To be sure, Ferguson makes the obligatory bow to tolerance. “It is doubtless true to say 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.
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 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.
I would have to be willfully ignorant to overlook that much terrorism — including, of course, the murders of Sept. 11, 2001 — has been carried out by Muslims, usually Arabs. And I am not one to deny that cultural differences matter and can matter greatly. But the Europe that Ferguson fears will go the way of Rome has shown in the recent — and not so recent — past that its Christians can act plenty bestially on their own.
In the name of one true Christianity or another, Catholics slaughtered Protestants and Protestants slaughtered Catholics. Jews were always a tempting target. A pious Czarist Russia countenanced 660 pogroms in 1905 alone — a statistic gleaned from Ferguson’s own book, “The War of the World.”
Nazi Germany’s Catholic and Protestant clergy were largely mute as the nation’s Protestant and Catholic soldiers murdered with abandon. “Protestants welcomed the Nazis’ ‘national revolution’ with an enthusiasm and hope for spiritual revival comparable only to the fervor with which they had endorsed war in 1914,” Nicholas Stargadt wrote in “The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945.”
Last month, Hindus in India murdered a Muslim man for allegedly killing a sacred cow. The placid Japanese of today were yesterday’s rapists and murderers of Nanking and performed hideous medical experiments on prisoners of war. Stalin killed millions; Mao did the same. Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jews — you name it — have at times been barbarians.
There is danger in naivete. A threat exists. Paris has been grievously wounded; Beirut and Ankara, too. The Islamic State claimed the downing of a Russian passenger jet and, in the Middle East itself, a state has arisen that has made beheading, sexual slavery and religious hatred a matter of policy. It is Muslim, it’s true, but Nazi Germany wasn’t.
Among the values Ferguson surely wants to protect is tolerance — religious, of course, but ideological, sexual, racial and anything else you can think of. It is at the core of Western culture and why his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fled Somalia for the West — first Europe and now the United States. We all have the same enemy. It is not Islam. It is intolerance.