The Scotsman, UK
June 17 2006

Intolerable cruelty
COLIN DONALD

The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred
by Niall Ferguson
Penguin, 816pp, £25

IN WOODY ALLEN’S 1986 MOVIE Hannah and her Sisters Frederick, the
comically grim Euro-intellectual played by Max Von Sydow, rails
against a TV discussion of Auschwitz: "The reason why they could
never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that
it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is ‘Why
doesn’t it happen more often?’ "

Niall Ferguson’s tumultuous catalogue of 20th-century nightmares is a
reply of sorts to the pessimist’s rant. Focused though it is on the
"turning point" years 1939-1945, it sets out to destroy the sense of
exceptionality surrounding the Nazis’ acts, merging them with the
less-efficient barbarities staining every decade of the "global 100
years’ war".

A non-comprehensive list of these lowlights would include: the
Armenian massacres in the First World War, the Russian civil war, the
Stalinist Terror, the Japanese war on China, the Second World War,
the Korean War, the Cultural Revolution, the frenzies of the Khmer
Rouge, the Balkan wars, and the Rwandan massacres. Like Macbeth, we
humans have "supp’d full with horrors" and it is only in the last
decade or so that historians have been able to digest the
implications of this chaos.

Professor Ferguson’s big beast of a book, accompanied by a TV series,
sucks up and synthesises a vast range of state-of-the-art research
(the bibliography is 48 pages long), filters it through his own
economic history specialism, and adds a dash of Dawkins-esque
evolutionary theory. The result is a provocative and urgently
readable study that avoids scholarly pussyfooting to ask the biggest
questions of modernity. Some may object that Ferguson’s snappy,
paradox-happy prose style is exactly the meretricious sort sent up in
Alan Bennett’s Tony-winning hit play The History Boys. No doubt his
love of clever inversions ("Appeasement did not lead to war. It was
war that led to appeasement" etc) will irritate some, especially
coming from a telegenic 41-year-old Scot with one of the juiciest
posts in academia (a Harvard chair in history).

But even those who sniff at his readability must admire the scale of
the work involved in shaping so much material and expressing it with
such panache. The questions he asks are these. Given that human
nature did not change at the end of the 19th century, why did the
globalised and technocratic world of 1900 dissolve into a Hieronymus
Bosch vision of hell? Why so often, and on such a scale?

Ferguson’s thesis is that the death camp innovation – inter-ethnic
savagery, dressed up as "hygienic" new-fangled nationalism – lay
behind a self-perpetuating cycle of violence, either between states
or between communities within states. Terror as state policy was not
new, but Ferguson blames Lenin and his heirs for modernising the
concept and putting technological and bureaucratic muscle behind it.

He also shows how their task was made easier by western journalists
and intellectuals – including LSE founders Beatrice and Sidney Webb,
and the writer George Bernard Shaw and more dimly remembered figures
such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times.

Shaw wrote with disgusting flippancy about the Moscow show trials,
while praising Stalin as a modern messiah. And it was Duranty, not
Hitler, who coined the phrase "you can’t make an omelette without
breaking eggs" – in relation to Stalin’s Ukrainian famine – which
sums up the intellectuals’ contribution to halting the 20th-century
moral meltdown.

The force of this book has two main sources. The first is its ability
to illustrate in Technicolor the often unbearable consequences of
political and military decisions. The second is to suggest a more
persuasive framework for this appalling narrative than any one-volume
history to date. In Ferguson’s version, the bones of the story are
these: Ethnic hatreds stirred as rickety multi-ethnic empires are
reformed into aggressive "empire states". The traumatic effects of
ultra-rapid economic change – upwards or downwards – helped people to
brand each other as vermin. These tides would cause humans to behave
in ways inconceivable at the dawn of the 20th century, when nothing
but improvement seemed likely.

To pick some random unnoticed ironies that Ferguson has thought
through: That the decline of the hereditary principle in office and
ownership coincided with the rise in the political significance of
inherited race. That vicious ethnic conflict (from Germany to Rwanda)
follows periods of intense intermarriage and integration. That what
was necessary to stop the war in 1939 was a pre-emptive war in 1938.
That the 20th-century story, usually seen as the triumph of the West,
is really its descent, from the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905, to
the rise of China in the 1980s and ’90s.

So here we are, on the brink of an ominous new age, whose Franz
Ferdinand-in-Sarajevo moment came in New York five years ago this
September. As Ferguson constantly hints by drawing parallels between
suicide bombers, ethnic cleansers and useless international
peacekeepers then and now, the worth of his book stands or falls by
what it tells us about the 21st century and what traps we must avoid.
Ultimately, it is not Ferguson’s knack of turning received opinions
on their head that distinguishes the book. Its value is in spotting
material that needs a wider readership and letting it speak for
itself. Thus, the appropriate response to this book is not
philosophising or hand-wringing but astonishment at how much folk
memory has been able to shrug off, and to forget.

Take the account of a 15-year-old Korean girl, Kim Buson, removed by
the Japanese to the Philippines, where "she received 30 to 40
soldiers every day". This is cited as an example of "the imperialism
of sexual domination", a major theme of the century. Or that of
Rudolf Reder, one of the few from the gas chamber clearing detail to
survive Belzec, haunted by the cries: "Mummy, but I’ve been good!
It’s dark! It’s dark!"

In his 1898 sci-fi novel, HG Wells imagined Martian invaders
indiscriminately blowing up ant-like civilians – a feat of
prescience, says Ferguson, that anticipates "Brest-Litovsk, Belgrade
and Berlin, Smyrna, Shanghai and Seoul".

These survivors’ stories, which no-one was ever meant to hear,
suggest that the 20th century’s legacy – and its warning to the 21st
– is knowledge of a cruelty of a more intimate kind, far beyond the
capabilities of aliens.

~U Niall Ferguson’s television series, The War of the World, starts on
Channel 4, Monday at 8pm.

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