The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (102 page)

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 from 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.