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NIALL FERGUSON SAYS ALLIED WIN `TARNISHED’ IN WORLD WAR II: TV
Bloomberg
June 30 2008
Historian Niall Ferguson compares the 20th century’s unrivaled
bloodletting to the mayhem in H.G. Wells’s "The War of the Worlds,"
with humans playing the part of the marauding Martians.
Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard University, challenges the
entire notion of advanced civilization in "The War of the World,"
a three-part PBS series that begins tonight at 10 p.m. New York time.
Why was the century so bloody?
Ferguson argues that three factors converged to create a "hundred-year
global war": economic volatility, the breakdown of multiethnic
societies in places like Yugoslavia, and the unraveling of old empires,
which unleashed a wave of revolutions and similar power gropes.
Racial animosity also reached new levels of virulence, Ferguson
says. The Russian press denounced the Japanese as "jaundiced monkeys"
in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese War; the Japanese retaliated by
sending most of the Russian’s Baltic fleet to the bottom of the sea
in 1905.
The Japanese held the Chinese in similar regard, starting a war in
1937 that Ferguson says was the real outbreak of World War II. Then
there was Hitler and his henchmen: Ferguson argues that the Holocaust,
while not the first of the century’s genocides, was unique because
it was carried out by one of the most sophisticated, highly educated
societies in history.
Hitler, he adds, considered Americans a "decadent" and "racially
mongrel people." Still, the U.S. was very good at building weapons,
which it gladly lent to Josef Stalin, another ferocious race-baiter.
Gulag Prisoners
Ferguson says many of Stalin’s policies were "racial persecution
disguised as class warfare." The Soviet dictator was "deeply
suspicious" of all non-Russians and didn’t hesitate to eliminate them.
In one disturbing segment, Ferguson peruses the archives of the Soviet
Gulag — row upon row of brown-covered books containing victims’
pictures and records of their fate. He reads the dossier of a woman
sentenced to 10 years for simply criticizing the government and finds
it "rather haunting to look at these faces."
Ferguson’s views on the Allied victory in World War II, featured in
Part 2 on July 7, will undoubtedly cause controversy. He argues that
the victory was "tarnished" because the Allies killed hundreds of
thousands of civilians during bombings of German and Japanese cities,
including the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While Ferguson makes a distinction between gassing innocent civilians
and attacking cities in an effort to shorten the war, he says the
effects were frightfully similar.
`Age of Genocide’
Although the two world wars featured massive killing grounds — the
pivotal 1943 battle of Kursk between Germany and the Soviets took
place in an area the size of Wales — many deaths occurred in more
remote places and circumstances. He says the "age of genocide" began in
1915 with the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, many of whom were driven
into the desert to perish. (Turkey denies that it was genocide.) Under
Stalin, millions in Russia died from execution or starvation.
The series concludes July 14 with a look at the last half of the 20th
century, which wasn’t so great an improvement over the first. Some
20 million people died in Cold War conflicts, evidence that the Age
of Aquarius was mostly a theatrical phenomenon.
Today, China’s rise as a global power is frightening many of its Asian
neighbors and tensions in the Middle East could, in Ferguson’s words,
produce a war as staggering as "anything we saw in the 20th century."
Maybe those backyard bomb shelters weren’t a bad idea, after all.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
