THE WAR OF THE WORLD: History’s Age of Hatred
by Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane ₤25, 816 pages
Why, asks Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard, was the 20th century so uniquely ghastly for so many people? “It was not a war between worlds that the twentieth century witnessed,” he argues, “but rather a war of the world.” On top of the two horrific world wars themselves, he lists 12 other conflicts between the Mexican Revolutionary War of 1910-20 and the post-1998 civil war in the Congo that each cost the lives of more than a million people. Ferguson asks an important question, and this well researched, highly readable and occasionally deeply revisionist book advances four main answers.
Although Ferguson concentrates on the period between Japan’s victory over Russia in 1904 and the close of the Korean War in 1953, his setting of the imperial scene in 1900 and his long epilogue covering the cold war and the war on terror effectively encompasses the entire century. He leaves us in no doubt that the 20th century was “far more violent in relative and absolute terms than any earlier century”, giving us any amount of proof of that depressing fact.
One of Ferguson’s trademarks as a historian is to invent words - such as “Anglobalisation” in his recent book Empire. This work is no exception. He creates “politicidal” for the ideologically motivated murderous regimes such as the Bolsheviks, Nazis, Khmer Rouge and North Korean communists that have so bespattered the century with innocent blood. His explanations for their ubiquity leave us with no optimism that they will not reappear in our own century, indeed almost with the certainty that they will.
Another Ferguson trademark is his employment of the surprising (and often deeply politically incorrect) rhetorical ploy. Thus he quotes from a national leader speaking to a “feverish” and “expectant” nation in March 1933 making “a damning indictment of what had gone before and a stirring call for national revival”. This leader “blamed the Depression on corrupt financiers”, “boldly proposed state intervention as a cure for unemployment”, “brazenly threatened to rule by decree if the legislature did not back him”, and “cynically used the words People and Nation to stoke up the patriotic sentiments of his audience”. Of course one is led to expect that Ferguson is referring to Germany’s new Fuhrer. In fact, the speech was President Roosevelt’s inaugural address, although “The resemblances between Adolf Hitler’s speech to the newly elected Reichstag in March 1933 and Roosevelt’s speech are a great deal more striking than the differences.”
Equally striking is the overwhelming evidence that American troops in the Far East used to execute captured Japanese prisoners almost out of hand towards the end of the second world war. “Roughly two-fifths of American army chaplains surveyed after the war said that they regarded orders to kill prisoners as legitimate,” records Ferguson. It took the promise of free ice cream and three days’ leave to induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese. Nor was a refusal to accept prisoners confined to the Far East. As General George Patton told the 45th Infantry Division before the invasion of Sicily: “If you company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you and, when you get within 200 yards of him and he wishes to surrender, oh no! That bastard will die!”
Ferguson’s writing is full of epigrams, witticisms and thought-provoking paradoxes and ironies. For example, Stalin, “one of the most paranoid, untrusting individuals in modern history”, completely fell for Hitler’s promises of peaceful intent, right up to the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941. “The Soviet dictator only trusted one man,” he writes. “Unfortunately, that man was the most unscrupulous liar in history.” By 1942 the Germans had captured more than half of Russia’s economic capacity, but as Ferguson points out, three-quarters of world oil production came from the US by 1944 - compared with just 7 per cent from the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf - so Hitler’s declaration of war against America in December 1941 had been a suicidal error.
Ferguson is also fascinating about the relative weakness of Nazi Germany at the time of the Munich agreement in 1938, and about how few German peasants wanted to take up Hitler’s offer of Lebensraum (”living space”) by 1945; only 400,000 took advantage of the chance to move to free farmland in the east. His chapter jauntily entitled “Himmlertown”, after the name given to the Polish town of Zamosc by the SS leader, leaves one lamenting what could have been achieved for civilisation by six million members of the most creative race on earth if the Holocaust had not taken place.
The four factors that turned the last century into a charnel-house - “History’s Age of Hatred” - were, according to Ferguson, economic dislocation and volatility; the power vacuum caused by the decline of empires; ethnic confluence, and racial disharmony. He does not add the technological advances that allowed mankind to fire machine guns at 600 rounds per minute and to kill 80,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima at the push of a button.
Few will agree with every one of Ferguson’s daring analyses - this reviewer doesn’t accept his outrageous whitewashing of the Kaiser in 1914, for example, or his assumption that Iraq now faces civil war rather than eventual peace and prosperity - but phrases such as “Castro was Pinocchio, a puppet with no strings” makes him supremely readable and thought-provoking.
As for the present, Ferguson accepts that the bombings in Madrid and London have shown that “there is a new enemy within”. That enemy was enormously radicalised and emboldened by the horrors of the Balkan conflicts unleashed on Muslims by Serbia in the 1990s, which in turn could have been halted by the British and European governments long before Nato finally acted in 1999. At the end of the long list of disastrous decisions taken by John Major’s government, therefore, the refusal to allow Bosnia the sovereign right of self-defence may turn out to be the worst and most far-reaching.
Very often history books that accompany television series are of lower calibre than they ought to be; in this (all too rare) case, a high-quality television series is accompanying an even higher-quality book.
Andrew Roberts’ “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900” is published in September.
