What's wrong with Niall Ferguson

I have had a low opinion of Niall Ferguson ever since 2003, when he was academic hitman for the pro-Iraqi invasion interests. Following his most recent creepy outburst, Juan Cole has explained just what's wrong with the man better than I could:

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson apologized Saturday for having said that economist John Maynard Keyes did not care about future generations because he was gay and had no children.
The question I want to raise here is the over-all logic of Ferguson’s underlying reasoning. What makes him continually make embarrassing and simple errors of fact, as with his attack on Obama last summer, which Newsweek did not bother to fact-check before publication.
I would argue that the reason that conservatives like Ferguson hate Keynes is that Keynes demonstrated conclusively that when the economy goes into a deep recession or depression, the only way to get back out of it is for the government to increase spending. ... Paul Krugman once wondered, after the 2008 meltdown, why so many academic and professional economists are so anti-Keynesian, given the impressive record of correct prediction attendant on the Keynsian enterprise. I am more cynical. I don’t have to guess. I think some, or many, are corrupted by the big money that flows from upholding the independent role of capital and from belittling government efforts.
Ferguson’s outrageous polemic is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. Instead of demonstrating that Keynes’s theory is faulty (which no one has yet done), Ferguson attempted to smear Keynes and deprive him of standing in intellectual debate by calling him a deviant...
Why does conservatism even have the implicit category of the deviant lurking in the back of its collective mind?
Contemporary Conservatism erects a social hierarchy, with wealthy heterosexual Westerners (and their compradors) at the top, and other groups queuing behind them from below. The wealthy Western heterosexuals are autonomous wealth-creators, constantly dragged down by the foolish impulse to regulate inherent in the government, which in any case represents the unwashed hoi polloi.
Ferguson’s remarks come on top of another conservative Harvard scandal, as a 2010 paper by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff , which argued that deficit spending by governments hurt growth. ...
Ferguson is so tied to the demonstrably false Reinhart-Rogoff paper that he continues to defend it even after its own authors are backpedaling furiously, and continues to attack Paul Krugman, whose papers won him a Nobel prize; they noticeably lack glaring excel spreadsheet errors. (Excel? Seriously?)
The hierarchies are not only economic or rooted in style of life. Ferguson’s Western triumphalism is well-known. I was at a conference where his comments about the (perfectly nice) Oxford Islamic Center was brought up, and he shouted, “They’re in Oxford!” Ferguson thinks it was a good thing for Oxford graduates to run, and loot, Muslim countries at gunpoint during the past two centuries, but is appalled that Muslim intellectuals might turn up for peaceful academic discussions in the old college town. [emphasis SM] He was all for the Iraq War and only carped that it couldn’t be successful unless the US committed to run Iraq for decades. Presumably this is because Iraqis (Muslims after all) are juveniles that need the firm adult Western hand. The Conservative fascination with reviving a long dead and impracticable Empire is just one more manifestation of a desire for social hierarchy. The imperial masters are on top.
The creation of social hierarchies, with people with ‘good’ attributes on top and others seen as somehow incomplete or deformed, is central to contemporary conservative social thought. Christians (or, in some versions, Christians and/or secularists)? Good. Heterosexuals? Good. Muslims and gays? distinctly inferior. Moreover, the government is the mechanism whereby the second-class citizens can engineer changes in regulations that rein in the alleged money-makers, and so it is intrinsically problematic and should be crippled as much as possible.

Ferguson is a smart guy and may have done some good work along the line. But he can't be trusted.

Juan Cole translates Omar Khayyam

Now that the rose of your 
good fortune is blooming,
why are you standing there
with no glass in your hand?
Have some wine–
fate is a treacherous enemy,
And a day like this 
is hard to come by.

Translated by Juan Cole
from [pdf] Whinfield 71
http://www.juancole.com/2012/03/omar-khayyam-71.html

The Global Americana Institute brings you Thomas Jefferson in Arabic

Juan Cole announces:

I am excited to announce that the Global Americana Institute has, in partnership with Dar al-Saqi of Beirut brought out a volume of selected writings of Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. It was elegantly translated by Professors Mounira Soliman and Walid Hamamsy of Cairo University and is entitled in Arabic the equivalent of Revolutionary Democracy: How America became the Republic of Liberty.

It has a powerful, brief introduction by prominent Arab intellectual Hazem Saghieh, an editor of al-Hayat newspaper, which expresses admiration for Jefferson’s political thought while not attempting to paper over his personal foibles. Saghieh notes that post-World War II Arab thought has been strangely unengaged with liberal democratic ideas, especially in their American incarnation, but that that is a shame since figures such as Jefferson have much to offer. Of course, elite Arab families know English and travel to the United States, and don’t need this translation. But below that five percent at the top of society with regard to wealth and education, there is now a vast literate Arab middle class numbering in the hundreds of millions, who could not deal with Jefferson’s antique English but could read this translation. At least some of them will be interested in doing so.
Al-Demouqratiya-al-Thawria

Al-Demouqratiya-al-Thawria

I am hopeful that the book will find an eager reception in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries yearning for democracy in the Arab world, and in a way, it could not have come out at a better time. Jefferson could be good for them to think with, a colleague from across the centuries and the Atlantic.

We are enormously grateful to kind donors who made this project possible, including Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Center itself, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, as well as SNL Financial LC with offices around the globe including Islamabad, Pakistan and Ahmedabad, India, as well as many individual donors who gave through Paypal or credit card.

...

I was inspired to pursue this project by the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, moments of a ‘clash of civilizations,’ or at least a clash of some narrow forces within each civilization. I thought we needed some bridges. It pained me to read the gross mischaracterizations of the United States and its values that were common in the Arabic press and blogosphere. I had long been aware, and annoyed by, the relative paucity of Americana in Arabic bookstores. I carried out exhaustive bibliographical searches and while there are lots of obscure journal and newspaper articles of previous decades, what you can get your hands on in an actual bookstore or at a book fair today is quite limited. The US State Department has a translation program in Amman, Jordan and in Cairo, Egypt, which does excellent work, but there is room for more such endeavors and the list of what is translated is so short that there isn’t much danger of overlap.

Postscript:

Journalists sometimes ask me if there isn’t something Orientalist or imperialist about translating Americana into Arabic. It is a fair question, but it seems to me not a very useful one. First of all, I started studying Arabic when I was 19, and I have spent my life with the great Arabophone authors, from al-Ghazali to Naguib Mahfouz, from Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi to Nawal Saadawi. I myself translated three books from Arabic into English by Lebanese poet and novelist Kahlil Gibran. I am grateful for what they have given me and how they have enriched me, and I don’t consider myself colonized by them. Intellectual interchange is not a zero-sum game, as medieval Muslim intellectuals delighted in pointing out. The Qur’an itself says, 49:13 (al-Hujurat), “We created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you might know one another.” And the Prophet Muhammad is said to have commanded, “Seek knowledge, even unto China.” In the glory days of classical Islam, there was a translation movement seeking to put Greek philosophy and Sanskrit astronomy into Arabic, not a sullen fundamentalist fear of intellectual interchange.

Second, translation of the great works of Western literature has been central to the Arab renaissance and modern Arab culture. I wrote my MA thesis on Rifa`ah al-Tahtawi, who translated loads from 19th-century French. Early Egyptian nationalist Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid translated John Stuart Mill. Pioneering Egyptian novelist Taha Hussein translated Shakespeare. Arabophone literature interacted mainly with the colonial metropoles of France and Britain, and the distant United States was seldom an object of interest for them. With the rise of Arab nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism from the 1950s forward, Washington was often seen as being on the wrong side of history by Arab authors, and that sentiment discouraged translation, especially of political thought.

But the United States has been a major force in the world for many decades, and it is frankly bizarre that it is so little represented in Arabic translation. I don’t fool myself that such books will be best-sellers, but I do hope that interested Arabophone intellectuals will benefit from them and interact with them, and gain a fuller appreciation of the depth and texture of the United States, beyond just political maneuvering and Hollywood.

Two introductions to the current situation in Egypt

There is a very clear and straightforward analysis of the Egyptian situation by Juan Cole over at his blog Informed Comment.  Note this excerpt:

Why has the Egyptian state lost its legitimacy? Max Weber distinguished between power and authority. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the Egyptian state still has plenty of those. But Weber defines authority as the likelihood that a command will be obeyed. Leaders who have authority do not have to shoot people. The Mubarak regime has had to shoot over 100 people in the past few days, and wound more. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have ignored Mubarak’s command that they observe night time curfews. He has lost his authority.

Authority is rooted in legitimacy. Leaders are acknowledged because the people agree that there is some legitimate basis for their authority and power. In democratic countries, that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. In Egypt, it derived 1952-1970 from the leading role of the Egyptian military and security forces in freeing Egypt from Western hegemony. That struggle included grappling with Britain to gain control over the Suez Canal (originally built by the Egyptian government and opened in 1869, but bought for a song by the British in 1875 when sharp Western banking practices brought the indebted Egyptian government to the brink of bankruptcy). It also involved fending off aggressive Israeli attempts to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and to assert Israeli interests in the Suez Canal. Revolutionary Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) conducted extensive land reform, breaking up the huge Central America-style haciendas and creating a rural middle class....

The failure of the regime to connect with the rapidly growing new urban working and middle classes, and its inability to provide jobs to the masses of college graduates it was creating, set the stage for last week’s events. Educated, white collar people need a rule of law as the framework for their economic activities, and Mubarak’s arbitrary rule is seen as a drag here. While the economy has been growing 5 and 6 percent in the past decade, what government impetus there was to this development remained relatively hidden– unlike its role in the land reform of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the income gained from increased trade largely went to a small class of investors. For instance, from 1991 the government sold 150 of 314 state factories it put on the block, but the benefit of the sales went to a narrow sliver of people.

The world economy’s [pdf] setback in 2008-2009 had a direct and horrible effect on Egyptians living on the edge. Many of the poor got hungrier. Then the downturn in petroleum prices and revenues caused many Egyptian guest workers to [pdf] lose their economic cushion. They either could no longer send their accustomed remittances, or they had to come back in humiliation.

The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK– and as a state for the few– the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president– and perhaps less.

 There is another analysis with a slightly different slant at American Footprints by Noor Khan:

Egypt has NEVER experienced a real democracy. Despite being technically independent since 1922, it was under British colonial control until the Free Officers “Revolution” in 1952. Since Nasser and the Free Officers were pretty popular, the time is often looked back on nostalgically, especially by the lower classes, but it was a military government. Since Nasser’s death in 1970, Egypt was ruled by Anwar Sadat until he was assassinated in 1981 and M. Hosni Mubarak since then. Upon coming to power, Mubarak instated an Emergency Law which suspends many constitutional protections and basically gives the state complete jurisdiction for anything falling under the category “security.” There is no guaranteed right to privacy, free speech, assembly, press, or even a trial. Although there are a number of members of the judiciary who have tried to maintain its independence from the state, they are regularly thwarted and often removed or worse.

Image: Egyptian fighter planes of the sort used to try -- unsuccessfully -- to frighten demonstrators. Desperation?

Napoleon's Egypt -- a significant quote

For students in history 3805, wrestling with the paper on Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt, And how to relate Egyptian attitudes to French ones, here's a quotation from pages 174-5:

The French employed public celebrations and spectacle both to commemorate Republican values and to instill a sense of unity with regard to revolutionary victories. Such "festivals reminded participants that they were the heroes of their own revolutionary epic." The universal wearing of the cockade, the flying of the tricolor, the intricate symbology of columns and banners, the impressive military parades and cannonades, all were intended to invoke fervor for the Revolution and the remaking of society as republic. That some of the French appear seriously to have expected the conquered Egyptians to join them in the festivities demonstrates how little they could conceive of their own enterprise on the Nile as a colonial venture. The greatest use of Republican ideology appears to have been precisely to hide that fact from themselves.

Depending on the exact point of view you are taking in your paper, this insight might be very useful. There are lots of examples in the book to back it up.

Update:  Page 204:

[During a revolt one French leader heard Bonaparte say,] "Shall we be the plaything of some hordes of vagabonds, of these Arabs whom one barely counts among the civilized peoples, and of the populace of Cairo, the most brutish and savage rogues who exist in the world?"

Juan Cole on the prospects of American success in Afghanistan

Lessons of Petraeus’ Iraq for Petraeus’ Afghanistan is a detailed and sensible discussion. It is particularly useful for its summary of the Iraq war and the current situation there.

Image: Iraqis protesting the lack of electricity in the sweltering summer.