I spoke to the editor Mary-Kay Wilmers and said: 'Don't force my hand by forcing me to put it in the hands of lawyers.'"Hold on... he wants her not to force him to put his hand in the hands of lawyers? Is this just holding hands with them, or is there some kind of messed-up Lavinia-from-Titus-Andronicus shit going down?
Hardly anyone is a racist in the Stoddardian sense today, even if they raise the alarm against Muslim ‘colonisers’ of a ‘senescent’ Europe, or fret about feckless white Americans being outpaced by hard-working Asian-Americans. Ferguson is no racist, in part because he lacks the steady convictions of racialist ideologues like Stoddard.it's both craven and disingenuous, because it undermines the clear intent of Mishra's essay, which was to associate Ferguson with all manner of notorious historical and literary racists.
Ferguson is no racist, in part because he lacks the steady convictions of racialist ideologues like Stoddard. Rather, his writings, heralding an American imperium in 2003, Chimerica in 2006, and the ‘Chinese Century’ in 2011, manifest a wider pathology among intellectuals once identified by Orwell: ‘the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible’.So in other words, Ferguson is overly deferential to authority. Meh.
But where will the new immigrants come from? It seems very likely that a high proportion will come from neighboring countries, and Europe's fastest-growing neighbors today are predominantly if not wholly Muslim. A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe.Ferguson's basic argument in favor of imperialism is that a strong Western empire, bolstered by a vital Christendom at its core, is all that can protect liberal freedoms, and that any other empire lends itself necessarily to restrictions and intolerance by virtue of not being Western or Christian. The current world, therefore, created as it was by the dominance of polities adhering to general Enlightenment principles of science and economic freedom, is the best of all possible worlds and simultaneously incredibly fragile and in danger of collapsing at the merest touch of foreign ideology.
This prospect is all the more significant when considered alongside the decline of European Christianity. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark today, fewer than 1 in 10 people now attend church once a month or more. Some 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes say that God did not matter to them at all. While the social and sexual freedoms that matter to such societies are antithetical to Muslim fundamentalism, their religious tolerance leaves these societies weak in the face of fanaticism.
At the time, however, The Pity of War seemed boyishly and engagingly revisionist, and it established Ferguson’s reputation: he was opinionated, ‘provocative’ and amusing, all things that seem to be more cherished in Britain’s intellectual culture than in any other.Mishra is saying, I think, that Ferguson is a bad historian, coddled first by the British love of Clarksonian establishment iconoclasm and then by American Neoconservatives. That's a pretty ballsy claim to make.
By the 1830s the Comanche and their allies on the southern plains were killing about 280,000 bison a year, which was near the limit of sustainability for that region. Firearms and horses, along with a growing export market for buffalo robes and bison meat had resulted in larger and larger numbers of bison killed each year by the white and mixed Native market hunters. A long and intense drought hit the southern plains in 1845, lasting into the 1860s, which caused a widespread collapse of the bison herdsposted by yoink at 6:05 PM on December 5, 2011 [1 favorite]
Ferguson’s next book, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004), a selective history of American imperial interventions, showed him to be increasingly concerned with the capability rather than the legitimacy of the American empire. He was convinced that domestic social welfare programmes like Medicare and Medicaid had to be cut drastically in order to build more foreign outposts for jodhpur-clad Americans. But Americans, it turned out, were not rushing to Abercrombie & Fitch to equip themselves for life in the tropics.Heh.
‘Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’ ‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ Daisy whispers with a wink at Nick. But there’s no stopping Buchanan. ‘And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’No, he never implies that Ferguson a racist in his "scholarly" essay. He just likes The Great Gatsby.
Ever since then, Mishra has very shrewdly—I use that adverb with admiration—deployed his identity as a Brown ex-colonial to maintain his position as a licensed explainer of global subjects to the liberal West.I can totally feel the admiration there.
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posted by escabeche at 11:17 AM on December 5, 2011 [11 favorites]