Niall (Neil) Ferguson
speaker
315 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Niall (Neil) Ferguson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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All my efforts to help people understand why the Holocaust happened so that we wouldn't make the mistakes again of the 1930s and 1940s as a species appear to have come to nothing.
To me, there's no longer a polarization problem.
We have a horseshoe problem now, which is that the far right and the far left are converging on the political spectrum, which is bending.
into a horseshoe, they're converging on a number of key issues of which antisemitism turns out to be the most, as it were, viral.
The thing that gets the most engagement on social media is anti-Israel, anti-Zionism, anti-Jews, and that seems to be working both for the far left and the far right.
Well, John Clark and I met 15 years ago at Harvard when I was a professor there, and he was an undergraduate.
I think he was one of the first people to say to me, you need to think about artificial intelligence because something big is coming.
And we've remained in touch ever since, mostly as he's tried to help me understand the artificial intelligence revolution.
But we've also corresponded about the issue of antisemitism, and we've co-authored before.
He was the one who suggested we revisit the issue of antisemitism on the basis that something was changing structurally in the public sphere that was quite new.
And the more I thought about what he was discovering online, because he did much of the heavy lifting of watching some very toxic content that is out there, the more I realized something very shocking, and particularly for me, depressing.
I realized I'd failed.
I realized my entire life's work had been a failure.
Because I have spent just my entire life, since my mid-20s, trying to answer some fundamental questions about modern history.
And the hardest question, which is at the center, not just of modern European history, but of modern world history, is why did the Holocaust happen?
How did it come about?
Why was anti-Semitism, which had been an ideological phenomenon for a long time before the 1930s,
Why did that ideology become the basis for an industrialized genocide?
I've written a great deal about this.
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