The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Secondly, there is reason to believe that two or three Asian tyrants perpetrated mass murder on a scale comparable with that inflicted by their twentieth-century counterparts. The exemplary violence meted out by the thirteenth-century Mongol leader Chingis (Genghis) Khan is said to have resulted in a decline in the populations of Central Asia and China of more than 37 million – a figure which, if correct, is equivalent to nearly 10 per cent of the world’s population at that time.* Timur (Tamburlaine)’s late fourteenth-century conquests in Central Asia and Northern India were also notably bloody, with a death toll said to be in excess of 10 million. The Manchu conquest of China in the seventeenth century may have cost the lives of as many as 25 million people. It is important to emphasize, however, that the majority of victims of these conquerors almost certainly died from famines and epidemics arising from their disruptive incursions. The populations of the regions affected lived perilously close to subsistence, so that vandalism of irrigation systems or destruction of harvests could have devastating effects, particularly for urban centres. Nevertheless, these figures help to set the death toll inflicted by the Japanese during their conquest of north-eastern China (which is said to have exceeded 11 million) in some kind of long-term perspective. It seems likely that the hundred years after 1900 were the bloodiest century in European history, in relative as well as absolute terms. It is less certain that the same can be said for Asia, especially if wilfully causing a famine is counted as a form of bloodshed.

  Thirdly, moreover, several pre-1900 Chinese rebellions and their suppression caused human suffering on a scale that may have matched or exceeded that inflicted on the people of China by twentieth-century civil wars. The eighth-century An Lushan Revolt is believed to have cost the lives of more than 30 million people. The mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) – a peasant revolt led by the self-proclaimed younger brother of Christ against the Qing dynasty, which the rebels accused of capitulation to Western commercial penetration – was estimated by Western contemporaries to have claimed between 20 and 40 million lives. Also devastating to the provinces affected were the roughly contemporaneous Nien and Miao Rebellions and the Muslim rebellions in Yunnan and north-western China. Here, once again, death tolls have to be inferred from provincial and local censuses taken before and after the rebellions. In some cases the declines seem to imply mortality rates ranging from 40 to 90 per cent. At least some part of these declines in population must surely have been due to emigration from, and reduced fertility in, ravaged areas. Still, there clearly was very large-scale organized violence, not least in the way the rebels were systematically exterminated by Qing commanders. Famine was a direct consequence of the scorched earth policy used against the Taiping rebels’ ‘Celestial Kingdom of Great Peace’ centred in Nanking. One hypothesis in The War of the World is that the worst time for an empire – in terms of the loss of human life – is when it begins to decline. This is the period when rebellions are most likely, but also when the authorities are most likely to resort to exemplary brutality. The evidence suggests that this was already painfully obvious in China a century before it became apparent in the rest of the world. Another way of thinking about the twentieth century, then, may be to see it as a Western version of Qing China’s nineteenth-century death throes.

  Finally, there is reason to think that the mortality rates arising from some episodes of West European conquest and colonization of the Americas and Africa were as high as those of the twentieth century. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of victims of the European conquest of the Americas succumbed to disease, not to violence, so those who speak of ‘genocide’ debase the coinage of historical terminology just as much as those who call nineteenth-century famines in India ‘Victorian holocausts’. However, the forcible enslavement of the Congolese people by the Belgian crown after 1886 and the suppression of the Herero Uprising by the German colonial authorities in 1904 do bear comparison with other twentieth-century acts of organized violence. The proportion of the population estimated to have been killed in the Congo under Belgian rule may have been as high as a fifth. The estimated mortality rate in the Herero War was higher still – more than one in three, making it by that measure the most bloody conflict of the entire twentieth century. (The absolute number of dead was, however, 76,000, compared with an estimated 7 million in the Congo between 1886 and 1908.) Historians have not been slow to find lines of continuity leading from this act of ‘annihilation’ to the Holocaust, though a more direct line of continuity might be to the earlier wars waged by the British against other southern African tribes such as the Matabele.

  Perhaps, then, the twentieth century was not so uniquely bloody, when allowance is made for the century’s demographic explosion and for the regional and chronological concentration of the lethal organized violence it witnessed. Yet it was undeniably unique in two respects. The first was that it witnessed a transformation in the kind of war waged by developed Western societies against one another. Throughout European history there had been social and institutional as well as technological limitations on war, which had limited the mortality rates inflicted by organized conflict. Occasional massacres occurred, it is true, but massacre did not become a routinized military method. Even the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, though they struck contemporaries as markedly increasing, respectively, the brutality and the scale of war, did not give rise to death rates like those of the mid twentieth century. What happened after 1914 was especially remarkable because of the ‘long peace’ Europe had enjoyed in the century that had followed Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo. Like the misnamed ‘long peace’ of the Cold War, this was not a time without war, but a time when most war took place outside Europe. The wars that were fought within Europe were generally waged in a quite limited way, most obviously in the case of the short, sharp wars fought by Prussia to create the German Reich.

  In the twentieth century, it might be said, the sins of nineteenth-century imperialism were visited on Europeans, though retribution was sometimes sent to the wrong address (the Poles could scarcely be held accountable for the miseries of subjugated Africans). Many of the key actors of the First World War had learned the art of annihilation in colonial conflicts; the example of Lord Kitchener – the butcher of Omdurman, appointed Secretary of State for War in 1914 – springs to mind. At the same time, the twentieth century saw Central and Eastern Europe go through what China had experienced in the previous century: a crisis of imperial order spawning cataclysmic civil wars. Perhaps there was also fulfilment of those early twentieth-century fears of a new Mongol horde, except that this time the hordes were European. Hitler and Stalin proved to be worthy heirs to Chingis and Timur.

  The second feature that makes the twentieth century beyond question unique – and which remains the paradox at its heart – is the way that the leaders of apparently civilized societies were able to unleash the most primitive murderous instincts of their fellow citizens. The Germans were not Amazonian Indians. And yet, under a democratically elected leader and armed with industrial weaponry, they waged war in Eastern Europe as if actuated by authentically prehistoric motives. It was this development that Wells dimly but intuitively foresaw in The War of the Worlds. For what makes Wells’s Martians so abhorrent, so terrifying and yet so fascinating is precisely their combination of murderousness and technological sophistication – like the selfish gene with a death ray. These were the very characteristics evinced by twentieth-century men when they waged their own internecine war of the world.

  1900–1928

  1. The limits of self-determination: this ‘Racial Map of Europe’(1923) (strictly speaking, an ethno-linguistic map) shows why it was so hard to construct homogeneous nation states in that zone of heterogeneity stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans and the Black Sea.

  2.‘The Yellow Peril’: drawing of 1895 by Hermann Knackfuss based on a sketch by the German Emperor William II and sent to Nicholas II and other European sovereigns to alert them to the threat f
rom the East.

  3. Europeans in Asian bondage: European soldiers captured at the Battle of Yang-Cun are brought before the Boxer generals Song, Dong and Li.

  4.‘Bon appetit!’: the Japanese David gives the Russian Goliath a bloody nose and bids for the Manchurian cake, from a German cartoon of March 1904.

  5. Pogrom victims and survivors, Odessa 1905.

  6. West meets East on the Habsburg frontier: the Archduke Francis Ferdinand meets Bosnian dignitaries in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, just hours before his murder.

  7. Gavrilo Princip (front row, third prisoner from the left) and the other members of‘Young Bosnia’accused of conspiring to murder the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, in court in Sarajevo.

  8. The world comes to make war in Europe: two soldiers from France’s West African colonies during the First World War.

  9. Scottish prisoners of war are pleasantly surprised to be fed by their German captors.

  10. Little‘Red’Riding Hood confronts the imperial German wolf: Russian cartoon of the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, 1917–18

  11. The Bolshevik Revolution in White eyes: Jewish leadership and Asiatic methods. An anti-Semitic caricature of Trotsky from the Civil War era. Note the Chinese executioners. The caption reads‘Peace and Freedom in the Sovdepiya’, short for‘Soviet-Deputatov’, i.e, the Soviet state.

  12. The waterfront at Danzig (Gdánsk): view over the Mottlau showing the tower of the town hall on the left, St Mary’s Church in the centre and the Crane Gate to the right.

  13. The bodies of Armenian children, Turkey 1915.

  14. Rudolf Schlichter,‘Armenian Horrors’, watercolour on paper c. 1920. Sexual violence was to be a recurrent feature of genocide throughout the twentieth century, though like the‘lust murders’Schlichter also depicted, the Armenian genocide was something he read about in the newspapers rather than witnessed.

  15. Ethnic cleansing in action: Greek refugees throng the docks at Smyrna, fleeing from Turkish troops, September 1922.

  1929–1942

  16. Berlin bei Nacht: few works of art better capture the bright lights and deep shadows of Weimar Germany than Georg Grosz’s Grossstadt (1917).

  17. The American nightmare: poverty in the Depression.

  18.‘Look, you boob… !’: after a brief junket in the Worker’s Paradise, George Bernard Shaw points out the superiority of Soviet Communism to an incredulous Yankee capitalist.

  19. Stalin, God of Soviet Industrialization:‘The Victory of Socialism in Our Country has been Secured. The Foundation of Socialist Economics is Complete. The Reality of Our Industrial Plan – millions of Labouring Comrades, Creating a new life.’

  20. The myth of collectivization: the slogan reads,‘Collectivization Will Shock Harvesting Productivity’. Especially for Ukrainians, the reality was mass starvation.

  21. The myth of self-determination: fortunately for Georgians, Stalin did not view his own people with that intense mistrust he felt towards so many of the other minority peoples of the Soviet Union.

  22. Gulag prisoners build socialism – and redeem themselves – with pre-industrial tools. Thousands perished as canals of questionable economic value were hacked out of the frozen Russian ground by ill-equipped slave labourers.

  23. Jacob Abter, one of the members of the Leningrad Society for the Deaf and Dumb, executed during the Great Terror for his alleged complicity in a non-existent plot to assassinate Stalin and other Politburo members.

  24. Lebensraum imagined: an ethnic German family takes a break from harvest toil for the benefit of magazine readers‘home in the Reich’.

  25. Illustration from a children’s book published by the Stürmer Verlag in 1935:‘The German is a handsome man / Who knows how to work and knows how to fight / Because he has guts and looks so grand / The Jew detests him with all his might.’ ‘This is the Jew, you see at once / The biggest rogue in all the land / He thinks himself a very prince / But is in truth an ugly man.’

  26. Victor Klemperer, survivor and philologist of the language of the Third Reich, as well as that of the Fourth (Soviet) Reich that succeeded it in Dresden.

  27. Isaiah Berlin’s diplomatic pass, issued on September 15, 1945. It was in Moscow that Berlin had his celebrated encounter with the poet Anna Akhmatova.

  28. Hershel Elenberg and his wife Rivka: just two of the victims of Jedwabne pogrom, murdered by their own Polish neighbours in July 1941.

  29. Henryka Lappo (left) with a friend, before the former’s deportation from eastern Poland to the Soviet Union.

  30. A Nazi wartime poster blaming atrocities on‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. As at Katyn, these bodies exhumed by the Germans at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine were indeed victims of the NKVD. But the SS lost no time in filling new mass graves with the bodies of the town’s Jews.

  31. Having been forced to undress, these five Jewish women and girls are about to be shot. They were among 2,700 Jews murdered outside Liebau (Liepaja), in Latvia, by German police and Latvian auxiliaries in December 1941.

  32. Victims of the Rape of Nanking, sexually assaulted and brutally murdered by Japanese troops at some point between December 1937 and February 1938.

  33. Indiscriminate war: a man tends children wounded in a Japanese raid on Shanghai railway station, 1937.

  1943–1953

  34 & 35. Marja and Czeslawa Krajewski from Zamosc, murdered in medical experiments at Auschwitz in 1943.

  36. The Axis powers as aliens: American wartime poster.

  37. Tatars in the Red Army, which was not a Russian but a genuinely multinational Soviet force.

  38. A shattered German soldier sits on the remains of a wrecked artillery piece in the wake of the Battle of Kursk in July 1943. The failure of the German Operation Citadel dealt a death blow to German hopes of stemming the Soviet tide on the Eastern Front.

  39. The Allies as aliens: Nazi poster for Dutch consumption, depicting the United States as a monstrous synthesis of beauty contests, jazz music, black boxers, gangsters, the Ku-Klux-Klan and, of course, Jewish plutocracy.

  40. Counting the dead after the destruction of Dresden in February 1945. Many victims were reduced to mere ash.

  41. The enemy as subhuman, I: Japanese megalomania personified in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s caricature‘Mr Moto’.

  42. The enemy as subhuman, II: Phoenix war-worker Natalie Nickerson writes to thank her Navy boyfriend for the Japanese soldier’s skull he sent her as a souvenir from New Guinea. According to Life magazine, she named it‘Tojo’.

  43.‘Monstrous beings of metal moving about in the distance’(Wells): two American tanks advance under Japanese fire during the Battle for Okinawa, June 1945.

  44. The face of surrender: a Japanese naval lieutenant is persuaded to lay down his arms on Okinawa. Japanese aversion to dishonour and mistrust of Allied intentions meant that a majority of the island’s defenders preferred to fight to the death.

  45. A Soviet soldier tries to steal a Berlin woman’s bike. This was the least of the crimes committed by the Red Army as they advanced through Germany.

  46. The Third World’s War: soldiers training in Guatemala to fight the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Although notionally a war between capitalists and Communists, on close inspection the Guatemalan civil war was as much an ethnic conflict between Ladinos and Mayans.

  47. The new face of totalitarianism: Chinese children read from Chairman Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, a manifesto for civil war between the generations.

  48. My enemy’s enemy: the butcher of Cambodia, Pol Pot (left), greets the modernizer of China, Deng Xiaoping (right), in Phnom Penh in 1978. The common enemy in question was Vietnam. Deng was not above butchery himself, as he proved eleven years later when pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square threatened the Communist monopoly on power in China.

  49. Self-esteem through genocide: Milan Luki c, who stands accused of murdering Bosnian Muslims in his home town of Vis?egrad in 1992.

  Sources and Bibliography

  In
manuscript form, this book had somewhere in the region of 2,000 endnotes. To have published these would have made the book unacceptably bulky, so it was decided with regret to omit them. In due course a full list of references will be published on my website (www.niallferguson.org).

  ARCHIVES

  Archivio Segreto Vaticano

  Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin

  Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven

  Bibliothèque de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris

  Landeshauptarchiv, Koblenz

  The Library of Congress, Washington DC

  Memorial Research Centre, Moscow

  National Archives, Washington DC

  National Archives, Kew, London

  National Archives at College Park, Maryland

  Research and Documentation Centre, Sarajevo

  Rothschild Archive, London