20th Century Pox: War, Race Hatred, Mass Slaughter By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – Historian Niall Ferguson compares the 20th Century’s unrivalled bloodletting to the mayhem depicted in H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” with one difference: Humans played the part of marauding Martian invaders. Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard, counts the bodies, and suggests causes, in “The War of the World,” which airs on PBS starting June 30 at 10 p.m. New York time. The three-part series, which opens with footage of a flamethrower doing its signature work, deeply challenges the notion that we’re an advanced species, save at the art of extermination. Why was the century so bloody? Ferguson argues that three factors converged to create a “hundred-year global war”: economic volatility, the breakdown of formerly harmonious multi-ethnic societies in places like Yugoslavia and Poland, 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. Hate recognized no borders. The Russian press denounced the Japanese as “jaundiced monkeys” in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese war; the Japanese repaid the compliment by sending most of the 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 company: 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 and highly educated societies in history. Hitler, he adds, considered Americans a “decadent” and “racially mongrel people.” Whatever our racial credentials, we were very good at building weapons, which we gladly lent to Joseph Stalin, another ferocious race-baiter. Viewers who believe Stalin has too long walked in Hitler’s murderous shadow will find a kindred spirit in Ferguson, who closely examines Stalin’s bloody policies, many of which, he argues, were “racial persecution disguised as class warfare.” Stalin, he says, was “deeply suspicious” of all non-Russians, and Stalin’s suspicion was often a death sentence. In an arresting segment, Ferguson peruses the archives of the Soviet Gulag – row upon row of brown-covered books containing the names and pictures of victims. He finds it “rather haunting to look at these faces” and reads the entry of a woman who got ten years in the camps for simply criticizing the government. Ferguson’s views on the Allies’ victory in World War 11, featured in the second installment (July 7), will likely be the most controversial. Ferguson argues that 1943-45 was the “cataclysmic crux” of the “war of the world,” during which the Allies adopted some of the same strategies as the Axis powers. American troops often killed Japanese soldiers attempting to surrender, he says, partially explaining why some fought to the death. Allied bombers also targeted civilian populations, killing 35,000-50,000 in Hamburg, at least 35,000 in Dresden, followed by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Ferguson makes a distinction between gassing innocent civilians and attacking cities in nations that unleashed war, he says the effects were frightfully similar, and calls the Allied effort a “tarnished victory.” While the world wars featured massive killing grounds – Ferguson says the pivotal battle of Kursk (1943) between Germany and the Soviets took place on a battlefield “the size of Wales”— many deaths occurred in more remote places and circumstances. The “age of genocide” kicked off, he says, with the 1915 Turkish slaughter of up to 1.5 Armenians, many of whom were driven into the desert to perish. Within Russia, millions died from either execution or starvation policies. All told, the dogs of war have been insatiable and Ferguson warns they’re hardly sleeping. 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. With some 20 million deaths in conflicts including proxy wars between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it’s safe to say the Age of Aquarius was mostly a theatrical phenomenon. Meantime, a new Eastern power is rising – China – whose expansive designs may cause as much mayhem as Japan’s imperial excesses, Ferguson warns. The Middle East, he adds, could unleash a conflict as staggering as “anything we saw in the 20th Century.” One comes away thinking a backyard bomb shelter may be a wise investment after all.
