| My favorite line: > Some of my fellow historians have asked the obvious question why Ferguson fixates on the fifth century, when the seventh century in the East, which saw the rise of Islam, might present more obvious food for thought. Perhaps Ferguson knows even less about that. As the author notes, Niall Ferguson chose his Roman comparison to evoke fear of a fall from greatness, not because it is an insightful comparison. The rise of ISIS and its war with Al-Assad's Syria and Iraq should be seen in the context of an emerging revolutionary state like the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Cambodian, and Iranian revolutions. The refugees are just like those that are typically cast out during the rise of a revolutionary state. We get much more nuanced comparisons of ISIS and the refugee influx in this context. Here is a great set of such comparisons: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/isis-rev... > In his ‘General considerations on the decline of the empire in the west’ that concluded volume 3 of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon made this European dimension explicit by considering how a similar chain of events might impact on the Europe of his own day. The best vaccine against alarmist predictions is looking at the previously incorrect alarmist predictions from the same source. This review is like @pessimistsarc on Twitter, except for angsty pundit-historians. Very gratifying. |