Meet a Really Scary Intellectual
Meet Niall Ferguson, celebrated intellectual Scottish historian, promoter of US world emperialism, and the perfect example of a really smart guy so wrongheaded that he gets a lot of people killed needlessly.

Washington Monthly's Benjamin Wallace-Wells admirably deconstructs this -- I'm having a real difficulty choosing marginally neutral words here -- scholar and his ideas of global US paternalistic emperialism.

Wallace-Wells points out that "Perhaps more than anyone else, Ferguson was responsible for inserting the notion of a formal American empire into the public debate. Professors of imperial history around America started turning to his texts. Washington hawks from Richard Perle to Dinesh D'Souza to Bill Kristol drew on Ferguson's ideas and arguments to help make the case not only for the war in Iraq but also for a revolutionary, if vaguely articulated, new role for America in the world."

Now he's about to take up a position at Harvard, as a professor of history. If there's a thought more unnerving than his notion of imperialism, it's got to be one of all those Harvard students succumbing to his brilliant stupidity. But maybe I'm being needlessly pessimistic; maybe the students are better than that. Damn, I hope so.

Hmmm... I wonder who the intellectual in Hitler's vanguard was.... I'll have to do some research there.

More on Ferguson.
- posted by Delta Foxtrot @ 7/13/2004 02:56:00 PM