The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
May 27, 2006 Saturday
Books:
Our staggering appetite for death
REVIEWS
A sobering, provocative and highly readable history argues that
ethnicity was the central, explosive factor in 20th-century conflicts
by DOMINIC SANDBROOK
In 1931, Albert Einstein wrote to the elderly Sigmund Freud inviting
him to join an intellectual association dedicated to enlisting
“religious groups in the fight against war”. This might seem a
laudable enterprise, but Freud was having none of it. Man, he said,
had an urge “to destroy and kill”, an “impulse to destruction” that
stemmed from the “death instinct” of every living being. “There is
no likelihood,” he explained, “of our being able to suppress
humanity’s aggressive tendencies… Why do we, you and I and many
others, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting
it as another of life’s odious importunities? For it seems a natural
enough thing, biologically sound and practically unavoidable.”
Three-quarters of a century later, Freud’s words ring truer than
ever. For as Niall Ferguson’s sobering new book shows, if there were
ever any doubts about mankind’s capacity for sheer bestial savagery,
the 20th century put them to rest. Mere statistics – the millions
stigmatised as sub-human, driven from their homes, deprived of their
liberty, slaughtered by their neighbours – barely convey the horror
of the past 100 years. From the bloodshed of the Western Front to the
massacres of the Armenians, from Stalin’s camps to the rape of
Nanking, from the butchery of Bosnia to the charnel house of the
Congo, men of all creeds and colours exhibited a staggering appetite
for death and destruction.
Ferguson’s book, which concentrates on the half-century from 1904 to
1953, started life as a history of the Second World War and evolved
into a broader exploration of what he calls “history’s age of
hatred”. Instead of simply retelling the familiar tales of
international diplomacy and totalitarian wickedness, he tries to
explain precisely why the mask of civilisation slipped so frequently,
and with such murderous consequences, during the early 20th century.
In the hands of a less accomplished writer, this might be an
unbearably depressing read. But Ferguson more than justifies his
lofty reputation in a book that fizzes with revisionist insights and
invites the reader to think again about the clichés of the world
wars.
Put simply, Ferguson believes that the bloodshed of the 20th century
was attributable to a lethal combination of economic uncertainity,
imperial breakdown and ethnic tension. Instead of looking to class,
like so many historians trailing in Marx’s wake, he concentrates on
ethnicity as the central, explosive factor in 20th-century conflicts
from the Balkans to East Asia. This doesn’t mean that he downplays
economics: the book is stuffed full of tables and statistics of all
kinds. But time after time, he argues, unsettling economic changes –
which include growth and urbanisation as well as recession or
depression – have acted as “the trigger for the politicisation of
ethnic difference”.
Ferguson develops these themes through 50 years of pogroms,
conferences, invasions and tank battles, his narrative sweeping from
the killing fields of the Third Reich to the utter anarchy of
war-torn China. Much of this is well-known territory, but Ferguson’s
great skill as a historian is his ability to make the familiar seem
fresh. Iconoclastic judgments come thick and fast. The Great War was
a bolt from the blue rather than the product of long-nourished
rivalries; the laws of the Treaty of Versailles were to do with maps,
not economics; Japan was more the Asian equivalent of Britain than an
oriental version of Germany. The Second World War, he suggests, began
in China in 1937, not Poland in 1939. Britain should have attacked
Germany in 1938, in a “war of pre-emption”, rather than waiting an
extra year. The Axis powers were stronger in 1942 than we usually
think; the Nazis’ racist empire was a paradoxically multi-ethnic
entity; and by allying with Stalin, the Allies jumped into bed with
“the ultimate Nazi collaborator”.
Whether the reader agrees with this or not – and there are surely few
who will agree with everything the book says – it is wonderfully
bracing, provocative stuff. Ferguson’s reputation is partly based on
his keenness to push a point, often a little too far for squeamish
academic tastes. But he knows his stuff, as an enormous bibliography
makes clear, and even if his acknowledgements thank a disturbingly
large team of research assistants, the sheer verve of the writing
suggests that this is the real McCoy. Although this is a long and
intricately argued book, it is nevertheless highly readable, flowing
nicely from bond markets to battlefields, and it brims with wit and
personality.
But whatever its qualities, it is hard to put this book down with
anything other than an abiding sense of gloom. In a thoughtful
epilogue, Ferguson points out that men slaughtered one another with
just as much relish after 1945; the only difference is that they
generally did it in the Third World, far from the breakfast tables of
Europe and America. In Korea, Guatemala, Chile, Cambodia, Bosnia and
Sudan, women were raped, infants eviscerated, men butchered with
pitiless relish. In his final pages, Ferguson even hints that our new
century could be the bloodiest yet, thanks to the rise of China, the
sensational demographic growth of the developing world and the
persistence of ethnic rivalries. We may fantasise about the “end of
history”, about a new age of globalisation and democracy, but there
will always be another war.