History is no stranger to surges of antisemitism. The world’s oldest hatred has resurfaced in every generation since antiquity—including our own.
But this time is different: In the past, the best, and indeed the only, response to antisemitism was the truth. Myths of Jewish malevolence were confronted and debunked by those who knew better. But today’s technology—in particular the algorithm and artificial intelligence—has changed that. Today, truth is being sacrificed on the altar of spectacle.
What that means, says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, is that historians like him have utterly lost the battle. In today’s Big Read, he joins AI researcher John-Clark Levin to examine how this technological frontier has enabled antisemitism to spread and fester—and, in their words, to offer “a remedy, if there is one.” —The Editors
As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat. When the two of us met at Harvard 15 years ago, one was a professor teaching modern history, and the other was an undergraduate interested in the future of artificial intelligence. The elder of us had published a succession of books concerned with one of the most important and intractable questions of the 19th and 20th centuries: Why did the successful economic and social integration of the Jews after their emancipation or westward emigration produce such a vitriolic backlash?
I (Ferguson) had written a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty and a biography of Siegmund Warburg. I had studied the German hyperinflation of 1923 and its corrosive impact on the Weimar Republic. I had written books about the two world wars, one of which—The War of the World—offered a novel interpretation of the Holocaust as one (the worst) of a series of episodes of mass murder. I not only lectured on these issues at Harvard and other universities, but I also sought to reach the widest possible audience by engaging in journalism and broadcasting, producing more than 30 hours of documentary television for PBS, and Channel 4 or the BBC in Britain.
My animating goal was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history—including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state. Yet today I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized. Popular and influential conservatives such as Tucker Carlson and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) crowd now tolerate traffickers in Nazi revisionism. And the poison being peddled to young conservatives by radicalizers such as Nick Fuentes is even worse than traditional Holocaust denial. They don’t so much deny the Holocaust as mock it and celebrate it.
