MercatorNet, Australia
Oct 6 2006
The War of the World
By Francis Phillips
Why was the 20th Century the bloodiest of all? Historian Niall
Ferguson ventures an answer.
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of
the West
by Niall Ferguson
880pp | Penguin | ISBN 1594201005 | US$35
Niall Ferguson, along with Andrew Roberts and Michael Burleigh, is
one of the "Young Turks" among contemporary historians. A professor
at Harvard, a research fellow at Oxford and a senior fellow at
Stanford, he has successfully bridged the gap between academia and
the media. This book has itself been the subject of a recent
television series; indeed, it has a dramatic and forceful fluency
that lends itself to a visual presentation. At over 700 pages, with a
wealth of maps, graphs and photos to support the text, it is in every
sense a large book. The author describes it as the "Everest" of his
career; with its enormous span, encompassing both the whole world and
almost the whole of the 20th century, one can understand what he
means.
Taking as his imaginative starting point H.G. Wells’s famous work of
science fiction written in 1898, The War of the Worlds, Ferguson
moves from this eerily prescient scenario, in which an alien species
invades planet Earth in order to destroy it with terrifying,
scientific efficiency, to what he calls "History’s Age of Hatred".
Why, he asks, given the hundred years of comparative peace and
prosperity in Europe from 1814-1914, did this same continent trigger
an unprecedented orgy of violence in the century that followed?
In four parts, comprising the First World War, the growth of the
"empire states" that followed it, the Second World War and the
post-war period, the author identifies three major reasons for the
20th century’s endless aggression: ethnic conflict, economic
volatility and old empires in decline. These, he argues with a
formidable arsenal of facts and figures, were the "fatal formula".
While accepting the obvious point made by all commentators of the
period, that technological advance made mass slaughter much easier so
that, for instance, millions of men were able to be transported by
the new railroads to the battle fields of WWI and armoured tanks,
poison gas, bombs and submarines hugely increased the capacity to
kill, Ferguson’s analysis is more penetrating. He selects the
territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea as the
unhappy triangle, the fault line (he uses the graphic image of
shifting tectonic plates that cause earthquakes) of Europe. This,
despite the seeming tranquillity and progress that preceded the Great
War, was where the old empires, with their multi-ethnic populations,
their shifting demographic balance and their political instability,
were clustered together in an uneasy co-existence.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is not difficult to realise that the
Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the Hapsburgs of Austro-Hungary, the
Romanovs of Russia and the Ottomans were bound, sooner or later, to
clash. New nation-states were emerging in Turkey, Russia, Japan and
Germany with their own sinister nationalist and imperial agendas.
Commenting on the Armenian Massacres of 1915-17, which he calls "the
first true genocide", the author writes that they were "a horrific
illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic
polity trying to mutate from empire into nation-state". Alongside
this, the British Empire, over-extended and under-manned, was in slow
decline; the "Pax Britannica" concealed its own ferment, unrest and
potential for violent conflict, later in the century to break out in
Iraq, India, Palestine and Northern Ireland.
These political changes were accompanied, Ferguson argues, with rapid
economic shifts: inflation, deflation, boom, bust and depression –
the volatility that, combined with other factors, will make conflict
likely, indeed inevitable. This conflict, he demonstrates, was not
simply of the conventional kind, directed against external enemies,
"the formalised encounter between uniformed armies" as in the past.
What was new about the 20th century was the scale and savagery of the
ideological "war" conducted internally by governments against their
own peoples: against the Jews, socialists, gypsies and others in
Germany, the kulaks and the intelligentsia in Stalin’s Russia, the
millions of Chairman Mao’s fellow Chinese. The empire established by
Lenin, for instance, was "the first to be established on terror
itself since the short-lived tyranny of the Jacobins in revolutionary
France."
In this sprawling book Ferguson is himself arguing on all fronts,
raising as many questions as he answers: were Stalin’s crimes
necessary to modernise an antiquated country? Was there any real
difference between Stalin’s "socialism in one country" and Hitler’s
National Socialism? What is the difference between Auschwitz and
Hiroshima? What was the better option: to cut and run as the British
did in India, or to stay on and fight, as they did in Kenya? He
delights in the odd coincidences of history, analysing the
differences between Roosevelt and Hitler, who both came to power in
1933 to countries in the grip of economic depression, or those
between Margaret Thatcher and Ayatollah Khomeini, who both assumed
power in 1979.
His book draws on a multitude of sources, literary and historical,
such as Erich Maria Remarque’s classic of the Great War, All Quiet on
the Western Front, Spengler’s Decline of the West (which, like the
philosopher of conservatism, Roger Scruton, he recognises as
important as it is cranky) and the Diaries of Victor Klemperer, which
Ferguson describes as "the most penetrating and insightful account
that was ever written of life and death under the swastika."
Given the unadulterated gloom of his subject, the author’s prose
fizzes with energy and a kind of mordant wisecracking; after 1945
"Stalag gave way to Gulag"; in Communist Russia "breakneck
industrialization was always intended to break necks"; Goebbels sold
Hitler to the German people "as if he were the miraculous offspring
of the Messiah and Marlene Dietrich".
It is his capacity to compress disparate events into an arresting
image as well as his command of so many different killing zones that
makes this work a brilliant tour de force. The sheer span of the
subject matter covered make it a mine suited to inexhaustible
quarrying. It also makes the book spiritually fatiguing to read for
it is, one might say, a prolonged and persuasive exercise in despair.
It is certainly not possible to read about this Age of Hatred for
long without fearing that large sections of the human race are
forever vulnerable to dictatorship by psychopaths. Ferguson cites
Richard Dawkins’ theory of a "race meme", whereby we identify some
people as "alien" and thus to be destroyed. This is not H.G. Wells’
fictitious Martians; it is men attacking their own species – "the
selfish gene with a death ray." He is also influenced by Freud’s
theory of the "death instinct"; rape and murder are merely suppressed
in civilised society, always ready to be unleashed when the
appropriate conditions lead to a breakdown. "We should not lose sight
of the basic instincts buried within the most civilised men".
Somewhere in the book Ferguson refers to "man’s inhumanity to man".
This poetical and much quoted phrase somehow doesn’t fit the bill
presented here; it is more accurately man’s sickening ferocity
towards his fellow man that we are witnessing time and time again. In
an appendix the author attempts to put the 20th century carnage into
historical perspective, with a brief glance at Ghengis Khan and
Tamburlaine and the trail of slaughter they left in their wake.
However, he is not convinced by the comparison, largely because he
assumes that modern man ought to be more civilised than his medieval
counterparts – only to demonstrate with depressing regularity that
this is a fallacy, when leaders of apparently civilised societies can
arouse "the most primitive murderous instincts of their fellow
citizens."
Ferguson concludes, "We shall avoid another century of conflict only
if we understand the forces that caused the last one – the dark
forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of
economic crisis." But surely there is more to be said on the topic
than this. To understand is the easy part. Popular historian Paul
Johnson has commented that the repudiation of Judaeo-Christian values
has cast its own menacing shadow over the last century. It cannot be
a coincidence (though Ferguson does not reflect on it) that the most
callous regimes of the 20th century were either Marxist-Communist, as
with China and Russia (and Cambodia briefly, under Pol Pot), or
neo-pagan, as with Nazi "Aryan" Germany. Trotsky once announced, "We
must put an end to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of
human life" and Ferguson admits that the capacity to treat other
human beings as "members of an inferior or malignant species" was one
of the crucial reasons why the 20th century was so violent.
His diagnosis of the geographic, ethnic and political elements
comprising the "fault-lines" are entirely persuasive; but he needs to
bring his roving, pugnacious intelligence to bear on a deeper, more
metaphysical fault-line: the fissure within the soul of man himself,
as he struggles either to give expression to the good impulses within
him – or succumbs to the evil of which he is demonstrably capable.
Francis Phillips writes from Bucks, in the UK.