Historian Rips the Left’s ‘Fascism’ Claims in Talk at Stanford University
“It’s frustrating to me because I’ve spent much of my career trying to convey to students the nature of authoritarian regimes”
Is anyone else as sick of hearing about fascism from these know-nothings? This message needs to be heard by more people.
The College Fix reports:
Historian rips notion that America is descending into fascism
Historian and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson told an audience at Stanford University on Monday that the concerns of “No Kings” marchers are an “exaggerated and misleading ‘category error.’”
Alongside Ferguson at the Continuing Studies panel “Is this the End of the Post-WWII New World Order” were fellow historian and Hoover Fellow David Kennedy and George W. Bush’s education secretary Margaret Spellings, The Stanford Daily reports.
After the course’s teaching assistant asked whether the current American “political landscape” is fascist, Ferguson replied “I’ll take you back to year five of Hitler, how about that? There was no rule of law whatsoever, anybody who is a political target – if they [can] walk out of the courts – will be picked up by the SD [the Nazi Germany intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst].”
The veteran Harvard history professor continued: “To call a populist, democratically elected government fascist is a category error. It’s frustrating to me because I’ve spent much of my career trying to convey to students the nature of authoritarian regimes… and I must have failed, because people don’t seem to understand this fundamental difference.”
Instead of focusing on Trump, Ferguson said people should look at the “inability of the American establishment to offer a response to the rise of China,” and the “corruption” of America’s top universities.
“The elite universities were guilty of a whole range of sins,” Ferguson said. “They had ceased to be meritocratic institutions… There’s been every other kind of diversity except intellectual, ideological diversity.”
Kennedy disagreed on that point, claiming that media coverage of higher education’s “abuses” have been “greatly exaggerated.” He backed this statement up by (oddly) noting there’s “very little political correctness or wokeness in organic chemistry labs and bio-physics labs and so on.”
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Comments
higher education’s “abuses” have been “greatly exaggerated.” … ???
Denial. My sister, who has a master’s, also categorically refuses to accept reality, such as the 25% of professors at some institutions openly identifying as Marxist, a number which is not going down anytime soon. A few disciplines are more resistant to woke by their nature, sure, but they are under assault by the leftist mob anyway. Your experiences from forty years ago do not apply.
When was the last time Mr. Kennedy set foot in an organic chemistry or bio-physics lab?
Fascist.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Many people do not have a clear definition of “fascism” in mind when they use the word. My starting point in attempting to zero-in on a good definition is to look at the origin of the word. “Fascism” comes from the symbol, first used in Ancient Rome to symbolize the political state. The symbol shows numerous, vertically arranged rods that are tied together at each end of the bunch. Such a bound bunch of rods is called a “fasces”and represents people (the rods) being bound together to create something stronger, the state. It was used in the 20th century to signify a preference for government authority over individual, personal rights.