The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (119 page)

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The Mexican Revolutionary War (1910–20), the Russian civil war (1917–21), the civil war in China (1926–37), the Korean War (1950–53), the intermittent civil wars in Rwanda and Burundi (1963–95), the post-colonial wars in Indo-China (1960–75), the Ethiopian civil war (1962–92), the Nigerian civil war (1966–70), the Bangladeshi war of independence (1971), the civil war in Mozambique (1975–93), the war in Afghanistan (1979–2001), the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) and the on-going civil wars in Sudan (since 1983) and Congo (since 1998). Before 1900 only the rebellions of nineteenth-century China, in particular the Taiping Rebellion, caused comparable amounts of lethal violence: see Appendix.

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The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 is a widely misunderstood document. Its second Article sets out a clear definition of the word which Raphael Lemkin had coined four years before in his book
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
. It covers ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a) Killing members of the group;

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’

It is not only genocide that is declared a punishable offence by the Convention, but also conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, the attempt to commit genocide and complicity in genocide.

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All the human mitochondrial DNA sequences that exist today are descended from that of one African woman, just as all the Y chromosomes can be traced back to that of one man. Indeed, it has been estimated that all the human DNA in existence today originated with as few as 86,000 individuals.

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The term ‘diaspora’ was originally used to refer to all the Jews living dispersed among the Gentiles after the Captivity. It is also a useful term for other emigrant communities that have nevertheless retained their original ethnicity.

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The term ‘Pale’, in the sense of a territory with clearly determined boundaries and/or subject to a distinct jurisdiction, was also used to refer to the area of eastern Ireland under English jurisdiction between the late 12th and the 16th centuries and to territory in northern France under English jurisdiction between the mid-14th and mid-16th centuries. The Russian
cherta osedlosti
(literally ‘boundary of settlement’), to which the Jews of the Tsarist empire were confined after 1791, had a somewhat different character. As in the case of the term ‘diaspora’, the word has a more general applicability to any territory associated with settlement by a particular ethnic group.

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In the eastern regions of the German Reich, for example, there were more than 3 million Poles, more than 100,000 Czechs, around the same number of Lithuanians and around 90,000 Sorbs, to say nothing of significant Danish populations in the north and French-speaking Alsatians in the west. One in every four inhabitants of Bulgaria was not an ethnic Bulgarian. Minorities accounted for 18 per cent of the population of Romania, 16 per cent of the population of Serbia and 10 per cent of the population of Greece. At the same time, just over 13 million Germans lived outside the Reich; 4 million Romanians lived outside Romania (compared with a total population of Romania of 5.5 million); just under 2 million Serbs lived outside Serbia (compared with a total population of Serbia of 2.3 million); and 2 million Greeks lived outside Greece (compared with a total Greek population of 2.2 million).

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To the chagrin of Scotsmen and Welshmen afflicted with inferiority complexes. When this author was an undergraduate at Oxford, all modern history fell into two categories: ‘English History’ and ‘General History’. In a concession to Celtic sentiment, the former category was later renamed ‘British History’ and then ‘The History of the British Isles’.

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Forty years after its first publication, at a time when the devastating power of aerial bombardment was being demonstrated in China and Spain, the story reached a mass audience in the United States as a result of Orson Welles’s radio dramatization, the verisimilitude of which alarmed many American listeners. In 1953 a film version, starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, became an Oscar-winning metaphor for the Cold War, ‘fought with the terrible weapons of super-science’. Twenty-five years later, it was the turn of Jeff Wayne to produce a musical version of the Martian invasion for the strife-torn seventies. In their most recent incarnation, under the direction of Steven Spielberg, the Martians devastate the North-Eastern United States in ways that Islamist terrorists must yearn to replicate.

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The King of Italy had been murdered the year before, the Empress of Austria-Hungary two years before that. In 1903 it would be the turn of the King of Serbia.

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The Council had seven members: two from France, one each from Germany, Austria, Italy and the Ottoman Empire itself, and one from Britain and Holland together. Until the debt was liquidated, the Decree of Muharrem ceded to the Council all the revenues from the salt and tobacco monopolies, the stamp and spirits tax, the fish tax and the silk tithe in certain districts, as well as some potential increases from customs duties and the tax on shops. Revenues from certain Ottoman possessions – Bulgaria, Cyprus and Eastern Rumelia – also flowed to it.

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From the
Westminster Review
, October 1858: ‘To lower the intellectual vigour of the nation… to exhibit to the world how the waywardness of mind will yield beneath the compression of a stern resolution – these are the tasks set itself by Imperialism.’

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A fine example of the genre is W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Pool’, in which a hapless Aberdonian businessman tries in vain to Westernize his half-Samoan bride. In British India, apparently European ladies were scrutinized for traces of the ‘tar brush’, such as a distinctive tinge of colour beneath their fingernails.

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They were in fact from Franconia, not Saxony.

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The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly.

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Zionism was, in essence, the Jewish form of nationalism. As the Irish revived Gaelic in the nineteenth century, so Jewish scholars resuscitated Hebrew. Its political expression was made difficult by the lack of an obvious geographical focus; turning the Pale of Settlement (see p. 59) into a Jewish state was never a realistic option. From the 1860s, therefore, organizations like
Hoveve Zion
(Friends of Zion) began to establish colonies in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, a movement that won support from, among others, Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The Budapest-born journalist Herzl’s book
Der Judenstaat
was published in 1896, having originally been drafted as a proposal to the Rothschilds to become the royal family of a new Jewish kingdom.

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The US Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. Among its proponents was the labour leader Samuel Gompers, himself of Jewish origin.

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Japan’s expansion had in fact begun in the 1870s, when she annexed the Bonin and Kuril Islands (1875) and the Ryūkū Islands, including Okinawa (1879). The original Japanese demands in 1895 had included the Liaodong peninsula. Having reluctantly surrendered it, the Japanese were dismayed when it was leased and occupied by the Russians in 1898.

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The Bolsheviks, despite their name, were not in fact the majority, but a relatively small splinter group.

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Bordeaux prices.

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Politically conscious peasants tended to identify themselves with the Socialist Revolutionaries. It was peasant support that made the SRs the clear victors of the elections to the Constituent Assembly. But the party was divided between Left and Right, with the former initially willing to join forces with the Bolsheviks, and lacked leaders who could match the ruthlessness of Lenin and Trotsky.

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Despite all the pre-war talk of monarchical solidarity, George V decided against offering his Russian cousins asylum in Britain. They were shunted pathetically from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg as the Bolsheviks tried to work out what to do with them.

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His successor, Stalin, was more self-consciously Tsarist. ‘The Russian people are Tsarist,’ he once observed. ‘The people need a Tsar, whom they can worship.’ He explained his position in the 1930s in a letter to his mother: ‘Mama, do you remember our tsar? Well, I’m something like the tsar.’

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Having travelled some moral distance from his Welsh Methodist roots, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George sneered that Wilson came to Paris ‘like a missionary to rescue the heathen Europeans, with his “little sermonettes” ’. His French counterpart Clemenceau reacted similarly to Wilson’s sanctimony. Of Wilson’s Fourteen Points he remarked acidly that God had been content with ten commandments.

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It cannot be without significance that a very high proportion of Ottoman casualties were incurred in the first year of the war, which accounted for 64 per cent of those killed in action, 41 per cent of those missing in action, 33 per cent of those who died as a result of wounds and 58 per cent of those who were permanently incapacitated by wounds. Total wartime losses were in relative terms the highest of the war.

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It was in 1892 that an Ottoman official told the French ambassador at Constantinople: ‘The Armenian Question does not exist, but we shall create it.’

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The evidence that Talaat expressly ordered massacres in telegrams to provincial officials is controversial. It has been claimed that the telegrams were forgeries, but the originals were cited in the post-war trial of Talaat’s assassin and the court did not question their authenticity. Incriminating exchanges between Talaat and other Turkish officials were also intercepted by the British.

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The anonymous German author of
Horrors of Aleppo
was deeply worried that his country would be blamed for the fate of the Armenians. ‘
Ta’alim el aleman
[the teaching of the Germans]’, he reported, was ‘the simple Turk’s explanation to everyone who asks him about the originators of these measures [against the Armenians]’. He also noted the ‘ominous silence’ on the part of German officers when the subject of the Armenians was raised. This tallies with the case of aGerman officer who reprimanded a subordinate for putting his signature on a document relating to the Armenian deportations. The American consul in Aleppo certainly regarded the Germans as having ‘condoned… the extermination of the Armenian race’. Indeed, the Austrian consul in Trebizond believed that the Germans had given the ‘first encouragement’ for the ‘neutralization’ (
Unschädlichmachung
) of the Armenians, but added that they had envisaged less drastic means (presumably forced conversion). His counterpart in Adrianople reported that German officers had been present during deportations of Armenians ‘and had not lifted a finger to prevent them’. For his part, Morgenthau was shocked by the hostility of the German ambassador and the German naval attaché towards the Armenians when he raised the issue with them. The latter told him: ‘Both Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country. One of these races has got to go.’

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See, for example, ‘When… we speak of the defeat of the enemy, we mean that, by the annihilation of a portion of his fighting power, we make him despair altogether of any subsequent favourable turn in the hostilities.’ (Goltz,
Conduct of War
, p. 8)