The Scotsman, UK
June 4 2006
The bullets and the babies
PAUL STOKES
Niall Ferguson
The War of the World
Penguin: Allen Lane, £25
IN OCTOBER 1941, Walter Mattner wrote down the following account of
his activities as a policeman on behalf of the Third Reich. “When the
first truckload arrived, my hand was slightly trembling when
shooting,” he wrote. “But one gets used to this. When the 10th load
arrived, I was already aiming more calmly and shot securely at the
many women, children and infants.”
So steady was Mattner’s aim by then that he could take aim at babies
as they were tossed into the air by his comrades. “We shot them down
still in flight, before they fell into the pit and the water,” he
wrote.
It is a horrific account, but there is one more element that makes it
all the more shocking. Mattner’s narrative is not taken from a
statement in a criminal investigation, or even from a page of
confidings to his personal diary. It is taken from a letter home, to
his wife in Vienna. It is not a confession but a triumphant
description of a good day at the office.
Mattner’s letter appears about two-thirds through The War of the
World, the latest, typically ambitious, work from the prolific
historian Niall Ferguson. It is one of a number of occasions in the
book when the grand theme of global conflict just seems to vanish.
The fog of war lifts and you find yourself staring down the barrel of
a gun, on occasions being forced to confront whether you too might
have pulled the trigger. For the really shocking message of this book
is not how unusual a man like Mattner is, but how commonplace.
Ferguson’s account is not limited to horrors perpetrated during the
Third Reich and the Second World War, although that provides the bulk
of the book. On a gruesome global tour of mayhem, we take in the
trenches of the First World War, the Turkish massacres in Armenia –
the first true genocide when as many as one million, a half of the
total Armenian population were slaughtered – the civil wars, purges
and gulags of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, and the
cruelties of the Japanese empire in the East, in particular the Rape
of Nanking. War of the World sets out to explain not just why so much
conflict occurred, but why it was so bloody.
It concentrates, for obvious reasons, on the two global wars. At its
heart, War of the World is a long history of the origins and course
of the Second World War, although, for some reason Ferguson seems
quite keen to disguise that with an introduction and epilogue which
touch very briefly on the century’s many other conflicts, and which
feel slightly tacked on. Perhaps he thought that yet another book on
the Second World War would fail to spark interest. If that is the
case, then he was wrong, for as an exploration of that war in its
widest sense, it is a gripping read.
IF ALL THIS sounds unremittingly gruesome, that’s because it is. Yet,
in the hands of a skilled phrasemaker like Ferguson, it is far from a
grim read. Discussing the failure of the French to resist the German
invasion in 1940, and the British failures against the Japanese in
the Far East, Ferguson points out that both can be attributed to a
failure of nerve, saying: “If Frenchmen were not ready to ‘die for
Danzig’, their British counterparts were just as reluctant to perish
for Penang.”
There is even the odd moment of light relief, as when Ferguson points
out that the Battle of Britain fighter pilots joked that Churchill
was referring to their unpaid mess bills when he said that never in
the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
At the outset Ferguson dismisses the notion of any correlation
between rising casualty lists and increasing firepower. If that were
the case, he argues, then the end of the century would have been more
bloody than the beginning. The most recent and horrific genocide, the
slaughter in Rwanda, was committed using the most basic of killing
machinery. It is not weaponry that is the problem, it is the people
who wield it.
More controversially he also discounts the contribution of the
extreme ideologies of communism and fascism, claiming that such
extreme worldviews have existed before without resulting in such
extreme outcomes.
There is a brief examination of the lessons of evolutionary biology
and the possible insights it might have into the twin urges to kill
and rape which manifest themselves in war, and some distinctly
unsettling psycho-sexual musings on what Ferguson calls the love-hate
relationship between the Nazis and the Jews. But in the end Ferguson
attributes the peculiar bloodiness of the first half of the last
century to the coming together of three factors, ethnic hatred,
economic volatility, and the fall and rise of empires.
The scene is set by the fall of the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian,
and the Kaiser Reich, and the emergence in their place of a number of
nation states comprised of peoples of different ethnic backgrounds.
Under the loose confederation of empire such differences could be
tolerated. Inside the nation state, with its stress on uniformity,
they soon became a source of conflict.
Economics plays its part by exacerbating ethnic tension. Ferguson
stresses volatility as the important factor, suggesting that economic
growth can be as destabilising as contraction, as the benefits it
brings are never evenly spread. Time after time the ethnic groups
singled out for special treatment are prosperous minorities.
It is empire again which provides the trigger for conflict, this time
the imperial ambitions of both Japan and Hitler’s Germany, which
together set off a global war. However, it is the peculiar nature of
both these empires, their belief in their own racial superiority and
the sub-human status of the peoples they conquered, which returns us
again to the idea of ethnic difference.
The big question here is how did the extreme ideologies of the few
translate into the actions of the many? How do you transform an
ordinary policeman from Vienna into a genocidal killer? The gradual
nature of that process, as oppressed minorities are progressively
stripped of their rights, their individuality and their humanity
until they can be slaughtered with impunity, gives the lie to
assertions that it could never happen here.
For all his ability as a writer, there are times when you feel as if
Ferguson is being carried away by the neatness of his own grand
theorising when explaining the messiness of war. Citing economics,
imperial ambition and ethnicity as the cause of bloodshed is a bit
like saying everything is caused by everything else.
At the heart of the darkness of the 20th century is one man, Adolf
Hitler. Was he really inspired to fight a massive murderous war, as
Ferguson asserts, by the volatility of the German economy? It is not
a grand theory but a simple truth that Hitler was motivated by the
human emotion of hatred. That remains very difficult to explain, and
very hard to deal with.
This article:
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
