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September 19, 2014

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Violence of the 20th century should be lesson in avoidance

ONE of the most noble and necessary tasks of the historian is to hold up for the rest of us an honest mirror of our past, one that neither distorts the truth nor hides what we would rather not know. After all, the 20th century contains so many things we would prefer to forget.

In “The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict And the Descent of the West,” Niall Ferguson allows us no such easy way out as he peers beneath the familiar narrative in order to reveal the darker stirrings beneath.

In doing so, he raises many troubling questions for which we lack comforting answers.

He believes that it was the social instability created by economic hardships, actual or perceived declines in status, and weakened authority structures that were collectively responsible for the repeated waves of incredible, often genocidal, violence of the 20th century.

Darker passions

We cannot, and should not, hide from the fact that the cancers that led to the racial and ethnic hatreds responsible for so much suffering and death were not just the irrational fears and hatreds of a relative few but were, rather, the cumulative result of centuries of prejudice and darker passions of the human heart that festered within “regular folk.”

The two world wars, of course, form an inescapable, central part of any review of the 20th century, as the staggering number of human beings killed in those wars is almost beyond comprehension: 17 to 20 million in WWI (7 to 10 million of whom were non-combatants); 60 to 80 million in WWII (of which 38 to 55 million were civilians who perished from a combination of warfare, genocide, disease, and famine); and upwards of 20 million in China’s war against the Japanese invaders (1937-45), the great majority of whom (16-17 million) were not soldiers.

But why did these wars break out? And what explains the fury and hatred behind the multiple genocides of that century?

1. The widespread fear and hatred of other races and ethnic groups triggered violence.

In the decades following the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution, many came to interpret its essential revelation to be that evolution occurred through “the survival of the fittest.” This not only conveniently explained why homo sapiens triumphed over “inferior” species, such as the Neanderthals, but also accounted for why even some races of contemporary human beings were more capable and advanced than others.

In the latter 19th and into the 20th century, this morphed into the despicable “science” of eugenics that argued it was possible to “improve” humankind through controlled breeding.

Accordingly, any intermixing of races threatened to dilute the “pure” white race. Relatively recent DNA testing has revealed the elementary falsehood of this nonsense. All humans, in fact, are virtually identical genetically, sharing 99.9 percent of their DNA. This distortion of science, in addition to latent prejudices already in existence, fed the dramatic explosions of hatred of the past century:

Hitler’s organized genocide against the Jews resulted in 6 million human beings perishing. But his murder apparatus destroyed many millions of others as well, people stigmatized for being mentally ill, homosexuals, or of the “wrong” ethnic type.

The Soviets, too, had their own view of who was more deserving of life; in this case, it was the greater Slavic peoples of eastern and southern Europe. Also, as a further development of the concept of superior-inferior peoples, Stalin applied this to types or classes of people.

One of the most heinous examples of genocide was committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian people, which began in 1915 and continued for several years thereafter.

The Japanese, too, fueled by their view of the superiority of their own race, committed inexplicable acts of savagery in their invasion of China, most notably in the horrific “Rape of Nanking” in 1937.

2. In the struggle to defeat Hitler and the Axis powers, the Allied nations employed intentional mass destruction of civilian populations.

The West also employed means that were brutal, revealing how little that is “civilized” or “honorable” can survive the crucible of warfare. As a means of weakening enemy resolve, British and American warplanes intentionally carpet- and fire-bombed cities, resulting in massive civilian deaths.

3. War is always the consequence of other options not taken; if we want there to be “no more war” we must redouble our efforts to implement alternative options early.

No unqualified “good” can come from war, only various shades of chaos and destruction. It was the economic, political and social chaos brought on by the First World War that set the stage for most of what was to follow for the remainder of the century.

And that war began through a series of misjudgments and dodged responsibilities from the very beginning.

Had Germany moved to restrain Austria from its vengeful reaction to the Austro-Hungarian archduke’s assassination in 1914, there would have been time to find an alternative to widespread conflict.

By avoiding war, Germany would likely also have escaped the domestic economic hardships of the 1920s that so weakened the Weimar Republic and provided fertile soil for Hitler to plow.

Can we understand?

Dr. Ferguson concludes with a somber warning.

“On the eve of the twentieth century, H.G. Wells had imagined a “War of the Worlds” — a Martian invasion that devastated the Earth. In the hundred years that followed, men proved that it was quite possible to wreak comparable havoc without the need for alien intervention. All they had to do was to identify this or that group of their fellow men as the aliens, and then kill them...

“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, and in doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still.”

Do we have the will to understand and heed?

 

The author has been a college teacher of American history and political science and director of the US National Catholic Rural Life Conference; he served as a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives and retired from public service in the Iowa executive branch in 2004. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.




 

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