Niall Ferguson is Still Looking for a Secret Fascist Boyfriend, and Donald Trump Might Just Be The One

Into the Times (of London) Herr Doctor-Professor Niall Campbell Elizabeth Ferguson has just slithered, bearing an essay on Salman Abedi, perpetrator of the May 22 Manchester bombing, and Donald J. Trump, failed casino developer and President, for the time being, of These United States. Abedi, by Ferg’s account, was a rather loutish young man radicalized by jihadist propaganda and a visit to Syria, where he learned to make bombs like the one he used to dispatch 22 people. A familiar story, surely, but one that must alarm all right-thinking people. Abedi, Our Niall tells us, was merely one explosive node in a network of religious evil, a web of conspiracy and terror extending from Manchester to Germany to Libya to, presumably, one of the deeper Demonweb Pits ™. Scary!

Moreover, Abedi and his cohorts didn’t merely poison themselves with a toxic political ideology. What drives the jihadis, says the Still-Sexy-Scotsman, what motivates the bombers of Boston and Manchester and Paris, is actually an “evil” religion, Islam. Oh, Mssr. Niall doesn’t say this in so many words, but one can easily deduce it from the rest of the essay. He praises DJT for denouncing “Islamic terrorism,” rather than joining the “liberal media” and the “politically correct” in calling it “Islamist terrorism.” The -ist suffix, you see, indicates that one refers to a political ideology; the -ic, a religious faith. By insisting on the latter suffix, Ferg implies that there is something specifically wrong with Islam and the Quran. Indeed, he asserts that Christians have done nothing comparable to the Islamic jihadis “since the seventeenth century.” I suspect Professor Niall has heard of Northern Ireland and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, but his prejudices and his newfound affection for Donald Trump have obviously erased his memories of these recent and quite bloody sectarian conflicts within Christendom.

The same emotionalism causes our overwrought essayist to miss a rather important point about the Manchester bombing: Abedi’s Muslim neighbors knew he was becoming violent, and his family actually warned security officers to keep an eye on him. British officials apparently ignored the tip-off, and Ferg ignores its implications: the vast majority of Muslims, like the vast majority of humans everywhere, are peaceful and ordinary, and don’t care for the tiny minority of violent zealots their communities periodically throw up. Treat that majority with respect and consideration and you have not only a more productive and well-integrated immigrant population, you also have a powerful potential ally against terrorists.

Of course Our Boy Niall doesn’t care. What he wants is a strongman to expel the Bad People from Europe, and Hair Furor looks like the right kind of guy. Ferguson quotes approvingly from one of DJT’s speeches: “Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive them out of your Holy Land. And drive them out of this earth.” Something tells me the Trumpster doesn’t mean “Deport them to Mars.” Something tells me that neither he nor Ferguson would much mind if an extended urban hunter-killer campaign against jihadists also killed a large number of their family members and neighbors. (After all, the United States has killed thousands of innocent people during just the last few years of its War on Terror.) Something also tells me that His Scottishness would like to see such a campaign conducted in Europe. Actually, Niall explicitly says so: “This seems like advice that European leaders could also use.”

Having experienced a frisson of excitement from Trump’s fascist rhetoric, Ferg decides he must add some intellectual respectability to his new crush. He observes that everyone in the “liberal media,” everyone but Niall Himself, missed the point of Trump’s famous photo op in Riyadh, in which we saw him touching a mysterious glowing orb within a cavernous Strangelove-esque building. Well, actually, N.C.E. Ferguson informs us, the building in question was the new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, and the Orb its ceremonial “go button.” The message behind Trump’s Orb, which Trump’s Secret Kissinger is just the man to decipher, is that Saudi Arabia has decided - no doubt under DJT’s powerful intellectual influence - to stop exporting extremist ideology and start fighting it instead. The Donald will help persuade the Saudi government to redirect its energies away from proselytism, and toward partnership with Israel and the United States against Iran. Niall has been preaching a Crusade against Iran and its nuclear program for at least six years, and now its hour has come round at last!

And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. I don’t presume to speak for the Saudi government, but I find it hard to believe that its Global Center will provide much more than lip service to the “anti-extremist” cause. Saudi Arabia has invested beaucoup bucks in the mosques, madrasas, and other institutions that help spread the Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam, not because its government wants to breed terrorists but because it considers Wahhabism a conservative faith and a prop for conservative (and pro-Saudi) Islamic states. An “anti-extremist” center, in the Saudis’ eyes, would simply advance the same policies their government thinks it’s been pursuing for decades.

Apparently, though, Niall’s infatuation with His Trumpishness has become strong enough that he will believe nearly anything. I say this because the Dimestore Kissinger believes not only that Trump has intellectual depths only he can fathom, but that DJT might be willing to listen to his own expert advice: “He needs,” writes Ferg, “to rethink his policy on Muslim immigration” if he wants to win Muslim hearts and minds. Anyone still in possession of his or her faculties could see the preposterousness of Niall’s notion. President 45 cannot “rethink” his policies toward Muslim refugees, Hispanic immigrants, and African-Americans because no real thought went into producing them. Instead these policies grow from hatreds that DJT acquired early in his life, that became foundational to his ego, and that played a huge role, I am ashamed to say, in getting him elected. Ferg’s assumption that a smart conservative (yes, I know that’s now an oxymoron) like himself could persuade our fascist president to change doesn’t just demonstrate infatuation; it displays the kind of blind king-worship that went out of fashion in most Western countries in the nineteenth century.

Ferguson, however, long ago ditched his professional training and devotion to reason in favor of sucking up to the powerful. In the 2000s he courted rich businessmen, in the 2010s he became BFFs with fellow sycophant Henry Kissinger, and now he apparently wants to squirm into the good graces of an out-and-out tyrant. This is not, alas, a unique fate for intellectuals. Or pseudo-intellectuals.

(Above photo of Donald Trump, King Salman, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the Global Centre for Combating Extremist Ideology courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Photo of Niall Campbell (Douglas) Elizabeth Ferguson by Nik Gowing, 2010. He's much more rugged now.)

Tourists and Indigenes: What I Learned in Taiwan

And now some more pleasant travel memories.

Qianlong-era polychrome vase, ca. 1760-80

Last December, my partner Susan and I took a long-planned trip to Taiwan, partly to visit our friend Anne and partly because we’d heard the country had much to offer visitors. We heard correctly. During our week- and-a-half stay we admired northern Taiwan’s lush green hills and precipitate coastal cliffs, walked around the picturesque old coal-mining town of Jioufen, and toured the National Palace Museum, beloved of tourists from mainland China. (I assume they want to see all the treasures the Kuomintang absconded with in the 1940s.) I discovered an unexpected fondness for the beautiful, delicate polychrome porcelain of the Qianlong era (1735-95); perhaps I took to heart John Adams’ remark that he studied war and politics so that his descendants could study porcelain. Anne and her parents treated us to two outstanding meals, including such delicacies as chicken feet, black eggs, tree fungus (better than it sounds), soup dumplings, and kumquat tea.

On our own, Susi and I visited Longshan Temple, a three-century-old wooden compound packed with tourists and worshipers.* The devotees filled the central temple with incense and piled long tables with flowers, fruit, biscuits, and other offerings. And why not? Prayers are well and good, but seem more sincere when accompanied by cookies. In the realm of the secular, we visited Taipei 101, one of the world’s tallest buildings, and admired the city from 91 stories up. The view impressed us but was blurred by pollution, which Anne’s father told us had blown in from the mainland. If we had stayed in Taiwan a day longer we could have enjoyed watching the skyscraper lit up in rainbow colors, a gesture of support from its proprietors to the supporters of marriage equality. The Taiwanese parliament was then debating a same-sex marriage bill, a momentous issue given the country’s cultural conservatism. Between that debate and some saber-rattling by the People’s Republic, there was no room in the country’s newspapers, at least not in its English-language press, for Donald Trump. This pleased us.

Taipei 101, late December 2016

Like most cities, Taipei primarily exists for the sake of commerce, and I did my fair share. Anne and Susan and I went to the famous Shilin Night Market and several other open-air emporia, and to several old factories that investors had converted into art and craft markets. We stocked up on souvenirs and gifts, indulged a new-found obsession with miniature wooden toy sets, and overindulged (in Susan’s case) in crane games and vending-machine baubles. I didn’t spend much time on the latter, until I discovered that some Taipei vending machines dispense off-brand Lego-like figures of SS officers. Including a faithful Nazi dog. These I found in such bad taste I had to buy some.

Yes, this is a real thing.

They will make good fodder for my off-brand Lego-type Xenomorph figures.

My favorite find was Taipei’s Museum of Formosan Aborigines, whose exhibits and artifacts celebrated the lives of the indigenous Taiwanese. I knew that Taiwan had an indigenous population before the Han Chinese and Japanese colonized the island - the 2016 NAISA conference had a panel or two devoted to their culture - but I did not realize that the island’s sixteen nations belonged to the same ethnic family that colonized Indonesia, Hawaii, Easter Island, and Madagascar. Indeed, given the longevity of Formosa’s aboriginal peoples, their homeland was probably the “culture hearth” from which all of the far-flung Austronesian peoples originated. We admired the displays of stone and (early-modern) metal tools, fishing gear, and bright clothing, and the photos and early films of Taiwanese lifeways. I was surprised to learn that several of the island’s First Nations, such as the Saisiyat, have their own versions of the jingle-dress dance, something I thought confined to the Ojibwas of North America.

Friezes of some of Taiwan's First Peoples

The Aboriginal Museum aimed to entertain, given that it expected an audience of casual visitors and tourists. Tourists, of course, rarely scratch the surface of a nation’s culture or history. As I subsequently learned, Taiwan’s indigenes possess a distinct but endangered culture, and a history fraught with exploitation and misery. The yuanchuminchu (First Peoples) first colonized Taiwan about 5,000 years ago, sustained themselves through a mixture of hunting (especially deer), fishing, and millet cultivation, and gradually grew their population to about 100,000. In the early-modern era they held their own against Dutch and Han colonists, with whom they traded and intermarried; some even worked as ethnic soldiers for the Qing Dynasty. In the late nineteenth century, however, the Qing and the Japanese began a long military campaign against the Taiyan, Taroko, and Bunun nations, whose homelands produced valuable supplies of camphor. Japanese offensives killed 15-20,000 Tarokos in 1914 and 1930, and the Imperial Army confined other First Peoples within a constricting ring of land mines and electric fences. During the Second World War, the Japanese regime began exploiting indigenous Taiwanese directly, conscripting men into the army and forcing women into sexual slavery.

Japan proved the most vicious of Taiwanese indigenes’ exploiters, but after 1945 Chinese settlers and Kuomintang emigres tried to efface the indigenous Taiwanese people’s culture. The national government relocated First Peoples to the lowlands, and pressured them to adopt the Chinese language and abandon their “superstitions.” Racial discrimination against aboriginal Taiwanese remained widespread. (As Mark Munsterhjelm notes, fewer than half of Chinese parents in a 2000 survey said they would allow their children to marry an aboriginal spouse.) Since the 1990s, the national government has tried to reverse its campaign of cultural imperialism, encouraging First-Peoples language instruction in schools and promoting musical performances, cultural festivals and museums like the one Susi and Anne (and Anne’s father) and I visited. The Taiwanese elite have tried to make indigenous identity “cool,” perhaps less out of a desire to redress past wrongs than because the First Peoples make good symbols of an independent Taiwanese identity. The cultural revival the government promotes tends to emphasize performances and displays that please non-indigenous audiences, rather than preserve and deepen older traditions. 

Bunun woman sifting millet

The mechanics of settler-colonialism - exploiting indigenous peoples’ labor, destroying their settlements, taking their land, and co-opting their identities - seem to follow a universal progression. The actual Saisiyat, Taroko, Bunun, and other First Peoples aren’t going away, however. Their current population of 400-500,000 represents a greater percentage of the national total than does the American Indian population of the United States, and as with other indigenous peoples in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and North America, they appear determined to defend their land rights and make their own history.   

Sources: M. Munsterhjelm, “The First Nations of Taiwan: A Special Report on Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, June 2002, online at https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/first-nations-taiwan-special-report-taiwans-indigenous. See also Andrew Abalahin, “Sino-Pacifica: Conceptualizing Greater Southeast Asia as a Sub-Arena of World History,” Journal of World History 22 (Dec. 2011): 659-91, esp.675-77; Shu-Yuan Yang, “Cultural Performance and the Reconstruction of Tradition among the Bunun of Taiwan,” Oceania 81 (Nov. 2011): 316-330.

(Above image of Taipei 101 via Pinterest.com. Photo of Bunun woman from the Digital Museum of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples. All other photos by the author.)

  

* We visited Longshan on Christmas Day, which in Taipei was attended by clear skies, bright sunshine, and 80-degree temperatures. One should plan to visit Taiwan in the late fall or winter.

The Jackson Ghost Removal Program

Last week my partner Susi and I went to Kentucky to meet my good friend Katherine Osburn (a historian at Arizona State) and her husband Charles. We had agreed to stay at a bed & breakfast, which turned out to have been the home of Governor Thomas Metcalfe (Kentucky's tenth exec) and a frequent stopping point for Metcalfe's friend Andrew Jackson. The owners took quiet pride in this; the guests were politely unimpressed.

The night we arrived, Katherine slipped on the front stairs and busted her face. She wound up in the ER in Paris and needed several stitches. She concluded that the ghost of Andrew Jackson was haunting the inn and stalking Native Americanist historians, and burned some sage to try to drive off his spirit. No luck. The next afternoon I became violently ill and experienced stabbing pain in my upper abdomen. My petite amie took me to Bourbon County Hospital, where the staff diagnosed me with blocked bile ducts and pancreatitis. Old Hickory had struck again. 

That evening, as I slept in a dilaudid haze, Susi again assailed Jackson's ghost, playing Beyonce music in every room of the house. That did it. No-one else got sick. Jackson's ghost returned to whatever spectral waste had spawned it.

Do not mess with Bey.

(The image above is the Cane Ridge Meeting House in Paris, KY, about ten miles from our B and B. Photo by the author.)