Niall Ferguson, the Harvard history prof whose piece on 20th century wars I watched, is in the news again. Last time I recall was when he left his wife and children to marry Ayan Hirsi Ali. This time he's issued an abject apology for suggesting in a lecture that Keynes' economics lacks a future perspective because he was childless and gay.
It truly is astonishing to me to remember life before Stonewall, and I do, where homosexuality was so shameful as to be pretty literally unspeakable except as a slur, to now, where opinions that are less than adulatory are treated as thought crimes. I think one is as insane as the other.
One virtue of Ferguson's DVD was the time he spent on Stalin and his horrors. For our age, Hitler's evil is as self-evident as the Devil's was in the Middle Ages. The fundamental reason, I suspect, is not World War II but the Holocaust. That has become the sacred and unquestionable underpinning of the narrative. Wrong opinions about it get you jailed in Europe. Hitler's crime was not war, but something far worse: racism, the deepest obsession of the post-War West. This leaves Stalin's oceans of blood and death off to the side. People get far more exercised about Joe McCarthy than Uncle Joe. It allows fellow Marxists like Che to be on the T-shirts of Episcopalian pastors[1] and Marx's name to escape the complete opprobrium which follows anything remotely fascist. Despite the craven excuses of fellow travellers, Stalin is the natural result of Marxism, not an aberration. So were Mao and Pol Pot and Ceaucescu, etc. But while we have Inglourious Basterds, no such Hollywood film about scalping Communists exists. The Gulag, if spoken about at all anymore, is regrettable; the Holocaust is absolutely sacrosanct.
[1] I can't find the pic anymore, but when Paul Fromberg was made pastor at St Gregory Nyssen in SF, part of his bio had him in such a shirt.
PS. Parmenidian doxa. Well, sometimes I try to put all my education to good use.
No comments:
Post a Comment