Monday Smackdown: Does Niall Ferguson Really Think the Sack of Rome in 410 Was Like the Paris Terror Attack?
: What the Paris Attacks and the Fall of Rome Have in Common: Nothing: "Ferguson begins... describing the sack of Rome in 410 by the Goths...
...then asks: ‘Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night?’ The answer is: No, it does not....
There are very few similarities.... At about 9:30 PM on Friday a handful of Islamic militants unleashed a blast of murderous violence in northeast Paris. For a few nightmarish hours they controlled the Bataclan Theater and methodically murdered innocent civilians in cold blood. At about midnight French security forces raided the theatre. All the terrorists were killed. Order was restored. It was a shocking and awful crisis that lasted just over three hours, leaving 129 dead and hundreds wounded.... [But] the people of Paris still stand. The Louvre still stands. The shops of the Champs-Élysées did not lose a single piece of inventory....
The analogy does not hold on wider level either.... On the eve of the sack of Rome, the Romans and the Goths dealt with each other as near equals... vastly different from the power dynamic the West faces today. The truth is that the situation is so asymmetrical that Islamic State and their ilk are forced to attack civilians and ‘soft targets,’ a tool always used by a very weak opponent to attack a very strong one.... The Goths did not send a few guys into Italy to set fire to Rome and murder whomever they happened to come across before inevitably succumbing to superior imperial might. They marched an entire army into Rome and looted the city at will....
When you look at the EU today--and the West generally--the Western Empire in 410 makes a lousy historical analogy. Francois Hollande hasn’t moved the French capital to a châteaux in the Alps because it is too dangerous to remain in Paris. No autonomous, well-armed Muslim army controls Provence. A completely different foreign army has not annexed Brittany. Lyon hasn’t revolted and declared independence from Paris. It is one thing to be concerned about Western complacency, but to argue that a small and efficiently crushed attack is just like when Rome fell is dangerous...
