Delusions of Historians (Niall Ferguson)


To the right are passages describing the experiences of soldiers during the First World War. I could reproduce hundreds like these conveying the horrors of battle. 

Niall Ferguson is a brilliant historian, formerly a professor at Harvard University and now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In his well-reviewed, The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I  (2000), Ferguson claims that the war persisted--men fought--simply because "fighting was fun."

The best that can be said about this conclusion--put side-by-side with descriptions like the ones to the right--is that this hypothesis is grotesque. 

Yet within the historical community, Ferguson is "allowed" to make statements such as this without being seriously challenged.

Comfort women were women and girls (Korean, Chinese and Japanese) forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II.

Ferguson's statement that soldiers fought in the First World War because it was "fun" is equivalent to saying that the women of Korea, China and Japan persisted as comfort women because they enjoyed being raped and having sex.

This raises the broader issue of why nation-states during the First World War were allowed to slaughter young men, to the tune of 9 million dead and 21 million wounded.

Young men, it would appear, have been the most victimized, oppressed group of the 20th century. If judged simply by the number of young men sent to be slaughtered in battle, this is obvious.

Most people, however, are unwilling to characterize young men as victims or as an oppressed group--because we prefer to think of soldiers as aggressive warriors, heroes, etc. Young men themselves think of themselves in these terms. They are profound participants in their own oppression.

Please keep this issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter in your hip pocket. Whenever you are tempted to make statements or write about warfare as a form of "masculinity," male aggression, heroism, etc., simply read the passages above and to the right.

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE
BATTLE OF VERDUN

“Men were squashed. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. Blown into showers; bellies turned inside out; skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club.”

“You eat beside the dead; you drink beside the dead, you relieve yourself beside the dead and you sleep beside the dead.”

“I saw a man drinking avidly from a green scum-covered marsh, where lay, his black face downward in the water, a dead man lying on his stomach and swollen as if he had not stopped filling himself with water for days.”

“To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is the fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the

Ferguson's statement that soldiers fought in the First World War because it was "fun" is equivalent to saying that the women of Korea, China and Japan persisted as comfort women because they enjoyed being raped and having sex.