Thursday, December 27, 2007

The historical fallacy of Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is a good historian. Some may say a brilliant historian. Of late, he is playing with a computer programme which replicate historical battles and wars, and one which has proven his theory that had the UK, France, and the Soviet Union opposed Hitler's take over of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938, fascist Germany would have been stopped and horror we know of world war 2 in Europe would have had a different outcome. Well he concludes after putting his theory to the computer game, it wouldn't have, and more likely than not, the Nazi troops would have landed on the shores of England's East Anglia and occupied parts of Great Britain!
Not only that, the Czech army would have collapsed like that of Poland's a year later when Germany's pre emptive attack of Poland ushered in the second world war in Europe, and France and the Soviet Union wouldn't have come to fight alongside the UK.
Well historian Ferguson is blindsided by his celebration of his home country as a defender of liberty. Had he scratched the surface of events, he would have discovered that France tried encircling Nazi Germany through an alliance consisting of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. It failed for many reasons, one of them being the reluctance of Ferguson's UK from soiling its hands on affairs on the contient. Britain's elite tilted towards supporting Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevikism, lest we forget, and the members of the royal family, the nobility, the moneybags and coupon clippers clinked flutes of champagne with Herr Hitler.
Such is Ferguson's fallacy and fancy which like water in the desert sands disappears without a by your leave

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