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 […]
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.
