Comments on: Silly Boy

by: cyrus

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:37:23 +0000

It’s been a few years since I last read Pity of War, but I recall that Ferguson made much the same point that you do: namely that the Germans got a German-dominated customs union anyway in the form of the EU, so what was the fighting over? I can’t remember if he made an explicit linkage between the war and Britain’s eventual loss of empire, but I’d be surprised if he had not. In any event, he’ll get no argument from me that WWI was anything other than a catastrophe, and that a quick German victory, sans British involvement, would have been far better than what actually happened.

by: Daniel Larison

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 01:43:46 +0000

That is doubtful. Even though we apparently will get Friday afternoons off, I just finished around 2.5 hours of homework writing the first sixteen or seventeen letters of the alphabet with their short and long vowels three times apiece. That’s a lot of writing. If homework is like that every night, I will not be blogging for a while. When they call it intensive, they aren’t kidding.

by: John42

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 22:13:19 +0000

Daniel, you know if you’re posting in your comments section on Monday, you’ll be putting up new blog posts by Friday. At least I hope so.
Until then I’ll be very depressed. Sunt lacrimae rerum.

by: Daniel Larison

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:51:00 +0000

It is a strange transition he has made or at least appeared to make, but in a sense it is fairly consistent. As I understand it, Ferguson objected to British intervention in WWI at least partly because it was bad for the Empire, and it badly weakened Britain’s ability to maintain the Empire. You can almost see him saying, “If it weren’t for WWI, we would still be running the show instead of the stupid Yanks!” He has a point (indeed, had Britain not been involved, we would likely have never gotten involved, so we would have remained the great neutral and Britain the great power), but perhaps he is missing out on the bigger lesson of the frequent futility of warfare as such.

One might also reflect on the utter futility of WWI in another way: 79 years after the war ended, Germany dominates a Europe that is united in a common market, which is close to what probably would have happened had the Central Powers won, and Belgium, for whose sake the British part of the war was supposedly fought, is on the verge of surrendering as much of its sovereignty as it can, provided that it does not implode first.

by: cyrus

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:03:32 +0000

I liked Ferguson a great deal better when he was the contrarian historian, rather than Niall Ferguson, dashing celebrity historian and imperialist shill. Before my eyes, he’s gone from persuasively arguing that British intervention in WWI was a mistake and a tragedy to arguing here and elsewhere that said catastrophe proves the need for more intervention in places compared to which the Eastern Europe of 1914 or 1939 seems a shining city on a hill.

by: Daniel Larison

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:38:54 +0000

What a bizarre spelling error–I don’t know why I keep doing that.

by: A.K.B. Cusack

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 04:39:12 +0000

You keep on writing “Luttawak” but it’s “Luttwak”!

I remember first reading his seminal work on coups d’etats in fifth grade. My teachers gave me funny looks. Luckily my fellow students generally didn’t care enough to frown upon it. In fact, after I explained what a coup d’etat was, some seemed to think it was pretty cool.