
Last December, historian and Hoover Institute Fellow, Niall Ferguson penned a piece in The Free Press about what he sees as the rise of dangerous anti-Semitism on campus and elsewhere. He pointed to disturbing parallels between the role played by German intellectuals in National Socialism and that of our professoriate in today’s anti-Semitism on campus. The anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Germany was actively promoted by the great German universities and many of the intellectuals they employed. Some of their finest minds abandoned rigorous thinking and basic morality.
German academicians’ mistake was combining Wissenschaft (knowledge or science) with Politik (the political realm) in university curricula. That of course is exactly what’s happening across the U.S. where universities are displacing the academy’s more traditional and important role – impartial inquiry – in favor of political activism, the latest iteration of that being the virulent anti-Semitism we see today. Ferguson’s purpose is to warn us of where “the finest minds” can lead a nation.
And yet, while finding no fault with what he says, I can’t agree with what he suggests – that “it” could happen here; we could author our own Holocaust.
As perceptive as Ferguson is, he’s hugely overreacting.
First, he nowhere notes that the current anti-Semitism in the U.S. only cropped up so conspicuously since last October 7th. Certainly, there’ve been harrowing incidents of overt anti-Semitism in the U.S. in recent times, like the synagogue shootings in Pittsburg (2018) and San Diego (2019) that claimed 15 lives. Anti-Semitism exists in the U.S. but, until October 7th, it was marginal, playing a small part in American life or the everyday news. Once the IDF concludes its wholesale destruction of Gaza and the war fades from the front pages, expect to see the campus protests quickly wind down. The proximate cause of those protests isn’t a generalized anti-Semitism, but the horror and anger that inevitably come when we read about and see the slaughter of Gazans, many of them innocents, by the tens of thousands.
Shortly after the October 7th atrocities, I cautioned that Israel should be moderate in its response because, to do otherwise would ramp up anti-Israel sentiment. And so it has.
Second, the protesters are cowards. Many college students in the U.S. today have been coddled all their lives, “safety-ism” ruling their homes and schooling. They’ve learned to believe that everyone gets a prize and words are violence. They take on faith that their feelings trump other people’s rights and freedoms and that the slightest offense constitutes a permanent wound that the offender must redeem by his/her own suffering, humiliation and casting out. Heaven forbid that a student or professor should assert that “all lives matter.”
They’re the most sheltered, protected young adults in history; they have little idea of real suffering or actually fighting for a cause. They’re happy to don their keffiyehs and shout support for Palestine 6,000 miles from the fighting, but the type of street violence that brought the Nazis to power they assiduously avoid. Hitler’s Brown Shirts they’re not.
But the main disagreement I have with Ferguson stems from the entire absence of the type of historical predicate that, in Germany, did so much to produce Nazi-ism and encourage perfectly intelligent Germans to accept its genocide of the Jews. If today’s U.S. is going to take anything like the path of Nazi Germany, it’ll need something resembling a recent past that makes doing so possible. Needless to say, nothing of the kind exists.
World War I killed some two million of Germany’s young men with twice that number being injured or maimed; it dealt a massive blow to the country’s psyche, its self-concept as a leader of Europe, a power to be emulated, a culture to be envied; it left its economy in tatters and the Treaty of Versailles heaped humiliation on top of all the other traumas. In 1918, a revolution forever cast aside the old guard of ruling elites, including the monarchy. Then came the economic disaster of the Weimar Republic that saw hyperinflation reach 21% per day, a monthly rate of almost 30,000%.
The chaos that attended such traumas paved the way for a dictator who made welcome promises – the return to glory of the true Germany. Otherwise highly intelligent, cultured and accomplished German people fell into line and put their shoulders to the wheel of the Nazi cause.
We in the U.S. have nothing remotely comparable. As many problems as we have – and we seem bent on adding more every day – they’re essentially all of our own making, not imposed on us by others. Our economy is the strongest on earth and we’re geographically all but immune from military invasion. Indeed, many of what we call problems are largely figments of the imaginations of Leftists desperate to find something – anything – about which excoriate the U.S. and claim victimhood. (“All white people are racists!” “Defund the police!”) When people have to make up injuries in order to pose as victims, we know for certain that there’s little true victimization.
So it was telling that, when Peter Robinson asked Ferguson how the U.S. can be following in Germany’s footsteps when we entirely lack the historical predicate that produced the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Ferguson spoke many words, but never gave an answer, never explained what hole in the national soul could be filled by hating Jews.
What we have are a few academics shouting an anti-Semitism that’s shared by a vanishingly small number of Americans and even fewer in the halls of power. Comparing the Germany of a century ago to the U.S. of today is instructive in ways, but to suggest that we’re in the same boat, drifting down the same stream toward the same destination fails the test of basic credibility.
Thank goodness.