AN ORGY OF INHUMANITY
by Joanna Bourke
New Statesman
June 19, 2006
On the evening of Sunday 30 October 1938, six million Americans sitting
around their wireless sets heard some terrifying news: humanity
was on the brink of annihilation. According to the CBS broadcast,
the vanguard of an invading army had landed in the farmlands of New
Jersey and was moving steadily across the continent.
More than one million Americans panicked. Friends and relatives were
telephoned and warned of the impending calamity. Bread, blankets
and babies were thrown into cars, which then sped westwards. Other
listeners were too stunned to move. Women and men fainted; children
and dogs howled. As one student admitted shortly afterwards: "I didn’t
have any idea exactly what I was fleeing from, and that made me all
the more afraid." America was not being attacked by the Germans or
the Japanese. The invading hordes came from the planet Mars.
It was a hoax, of course, and the millions of terrified listeners
were furious at being fooled. They accused CBS of causing them
"grievous bodily or mental injury" and demanded compensation for their
pain. Orson Welles, the young broadcaster and actor responsible for
the radio play, was forced to issue an abject apology.
Welles’s play was an adaptation of H G Wells’s 1898 novel War of the
Worlds. He had simply modernised the story by moving the action to
the 1930s. No wonder listeners found it convincing. In that uncertain
decade, many Americans easily believed that aliens could destroy the
world as they knew it. Wasn’t there talk of an approaching world war?
Unemployment was rocketing. Only a few months earlier President
Roosevelt had warned: "Nothing is so much to be feared as fear
itself." Welles’s radio adaptation of War of the Worlds scored a
direct hit on a seam of political alarm underpinning American culture
in the 1930s.
Niall Ferguson’s new book, The War of the World, also seeks to tap
into an underlying sense of apprehension. Why was the 20th century
marked by massacres, genocides and war on an unprecedented scale,
and how could the carnage have been avoided? Today, weapons of mass
destruction seem to be proliferating. Confidence in the ability of
politicians to exercise restraint has waned. Faith in human reason
is fading. What is going to prevent the 21st century descending into
worldwide war?
Ferguson provides a potted account of the way the west was torn apart
by tumultuous storms of hatred. As the west declined, the east was
on the rise, driven by economic robustness. Although Ferguson admits
that it is not difficult to imagine a future in which west and east
clash in war, he remains cautiously optimistic about the chances of
21st-century nation states avoiding full-scale conflict. He argues
that the unrivalled superiority of the US in the 1990s was a force
for good. Uncontested American supremacy enabled violence elsewhere in
the world to be contained. As a result, global warfare is now at its
lowest level since the late 1950s. Ferguson seems to believe in the
ability of strong nations (the US and, in the future, perhaps China)
to control the passions of more volatile ones.
Although Ferguson’s story is daunting in its detail (the book has
to be propped up against a table to be read comfortably), it does
not claim to be a history of the entire century. The focus is on the
years between 1904, when Japan became the first Asian power in modern
times to defeat a European power, and 1953, the year the Korean war
ended. Ferguson is most assured when dealing with the terrible years
between 1914 and 1918. It is important, he tells us, to remember that
the years before 1914 were relatively peaceful. In Europe, at least,
there were only 21 major wars in the hundred years up to this point.
In that context, the inability of many British elites to forecast the
start of hostilities in 1914 is understandable, especially when tied
to their (misplaced) confidence in Britain’s imperial might. Surely,
these elites believed, the world’s largest empire possessed sufficient
power to avert a global crisis.
They were proved wrong. Rather than preventing war, empires fuelled
them. To carry out the dirty task of slaughter, all major powers
were dependent on recruits, conscripts and forced labour drawn from
territories far from their national heartlands. In the end, the war
ground to a halt largely as a result of a dramatic slump in the morale
of German soldiers, who began surrendering in droves. By that stage,
however, a generation had been slaughtered.
Although the Great War casts a long shadow over the 20th century,
Ferguson acknowledges that the war which followed was even more
decisive. The Second World War propelled the notion of "total war"
to horrifying heights. Civi-lians became the victims-of-choice. While
only 5 per cent of deaths in the 1914-18 conflict were civilian,
in the 1939-45 war that figure was 66 per cent. Many more civilians
than military personnel were killed in Belgium, China, France,
Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Soviet Union
and Yugoslavia. Innocence was butchered.
According to Ferguson, peace brought only a "tainted victory".
Western powers had allied themselves with Stalin, a "despot who
was every bit as brutal a tyrant as Hitler". Unrestrained submarine
warfare and the terror-bombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Hiroshima (to
name just a few) had contaminated British and American honour. It is
alleged that when Winston Churchill heard the news about the death
sentences passed on the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, he turned to his
chief of staff and commented: "Nuremberg shows that it’s supremely
important to win. You and I would be in a pretty pickle if we had not."
The two world wars had reduced humanity to rubble; the Holocaust
had stripped even that rubble of meaning. It was followed by the
threat of nuclear annihilation. Humanity had fashioned a world of
suffering which dwarfed anything that went before. How could this
have happened? The subtitle to Ferguson’s book provides his answer:
the 20th century was an "age of hatred". Throughout the world,
people turned on their neighbours with ferocity. De-humanisation
became common: the suddenness with which people could be cast as
"aliens" was alarming. During the Armenian genocide of 1912-13,
the Turks coined a description for the Armenians: "dog food". When
Japanese soldiers entered Nanking in 1938, the 20,000 Chinese women
they raped were considered less than human. As one soldier explained:
"We felt no shame about it. No guilt." Through the classi- fication
of the enemy as inhuman, they all became fair game.
This orgy of inhumanity is thoroughly probed by Ferguson. And when
he sticks to history, it is a credible account, even if it doesn’t
tell us much that is new. The problem is that he seems to have been
seduced by evolutionary psychology. He gives much analytical weight
to the concept of "hatred", yet never really tells us what it is.
Instead, he relies on the vague idea that hatred is one of humanity’s
innate instincts. The "twin urge to rape and murder remains repressed
in a civilised society", he argues, but it wreaks havoc when unleashed
upon the world. Economic volatility is one important trigger.
Ferguson’s thesis is most disturbingly addressed in the context of
sexualised violence. He suggests that the destructive instinct is
intrinsically tied to the sexual impulse. Sexual violence directed
against enemies was inspired by "erotic, albeit sadistic, fantasies
as much as by ‘eliminationist’ racism", he asserts. Bloodlust and rape
went together. This just isn’t good enough. The simple logic and aura
of scientific certitude represented by the appeal to instincts mask
the fact that "instincts" don’t actually explain anything.
At best, all Ferguson is doing is sticking a label on complex
historical processes. To assume an inherent connection between hate and
love does nothing to clarify why some genocides (hate) have involved
rape (which Ferguson bizarrely wants to put in the "eros" category)
while others have not. Neither the "repression" of hatred nor its
"eruption" explains anything in historical terms. It is unclear, for
instance, how the "volatile ambivalence" of "aversion and attraction"
can help us understand the history of violence "which has for so long
characterised relations between white Americans and African Americans".
By emphasising the primordial connection with our primate ancestors,
Ferguson reduces the complexity of human society and fails to account
for individual motivations or cultural trends in violence. It
is an unfortunate lapse. Ferguson should leave psychology to the
psychologists and stick to what he is really good at: writing history.
Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of
London, and the author of "Fear: a cultural history" (Virago, 2006).
She is currently writing a book about rapists.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress