About book The War Of The World: Twentieth-Century Conflict And The Descent Of The West (2006)
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's...that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied...With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter." -- H.G. Wells, The War of the WorldsNiall Ferguson, the young Oxford fellow who gratingly insists upon himself, takes Wells as his cue in The War of the World (singular, not plural). Like Wells, Ferguson starts his book at the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Specifically, he starts with September 11, 1901, in an obvious allusion to the more famous September 11, 2001. The connection is never explained; but then again, there are a lot of connections that are not made in this book. Ferguson begins The War of the World by showing how a modestly educated white man born on this date would actually have a pretty good life. Technology was changing the world, making it easier for those of lesser-means to live easier lives. What had once been a far-flung globe was being stitched together by safer, faster travel, and by the web of finance. Soon there would be flying contraptions, electric gizmos, and a big ocean liner named Titanic. Things were off to a smashing start!Within thirteen years, much of the world would be entangled in a disastrous war that started with an assassination in the Balkans, of all places. This touched off what Ferguson calls "the bloodiest century in history" (in both relative and absolute figures). The big promise of The War of the World is that Ferguson is going to stand conventional wisdom on its head; make up down and down up; and irreparably alter the way we think of the twentieth century. To which I reply, in my best arcane contract law parlance: Ferguson's claim tis "mere puffery."Ferguson's non-ground-breaking thesis is that the bloodshed of the twentieth century resulted from the trifecta of economic boom-and-bust, decaying empires, and race. That's like me saying that a baseball game is won by good pitching, good defense, and scoring more runs than the other team. Furthermore, Ferguson doesn't cover the whole of the twentieth century; instead, he focuses on the years 1914-1945. That's right. In other words, this is a book about World War One and World War Two (except that it's written by the brash, dashing, insufferable, Indiana Jones-wannabe Nial Ferguson, so it's in your face!). After an agonizingly prolonged introduction, chock-full of needless charts and graphs, you get to the book's first section, which deals with World War One. Here, the focus is on decaying empires. In Ferguson's telling, World War One came about as Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans struggled to hold onto their fast-fracturing empires. Well, duh. This isn't really novel or unique. It seems pretty obvious that the entangling alliances that set off the war like a series of dominoes were entered into in the hopes of protecting imperial assets. (The Germans were allied with Austria Hungary; Austria Hungary was allied with Serbia; then the Germans and the Austrians allied with Italy against Russia; in response Russia allied with France and France allied with Great Britain and Great Britain promised to uphold Belgium's neutrality. See? Simple.)This is not to say that I totally disliked this section. I did not. It just promised too much. Ferguson is easy to read, inserts telling anecdotes, and doesn't neglect sources such as plays, poems, and novels, that tell a great deal about a time period but are often ignored. Moreover, as he did with The Pity of War, Ferguson places a lot of the blame of the war on England. This is actually provocative, and frankly, has a lot of truth to it. Much of the history of World War One is told through the prism of World War Two. Thus, the Germans are always the baby-eating villains, and the British are always the stalwart heroes (and the Americans are always the ones to come in and save England's ass, which then gives us the right to be rude to Europeans while claiming - despite being born in the 70s or 80s - that "we saved your ass in World War Two!) I call this view of World War One Retroactive Hitler Syndrome. The subtler reality is that Germany was doing what every other European power was doing: protecting itself. To a large extent, it was England's decision to enter the war that took it from a continental conflict (of which Europe has had hundreds) to a global war. In the mid-war years (1919-1937), Ferguson discusses economic volatility and race. Again, his economic arguments feel rehashed. I mean, is there anyone anywhere who doesn't understand that the crushing debt of Versailles and the Great Depression created a fertile environment for Adolf Hitler? The race discussion is a little more interesting. In Ferguson's view, the war didn't cause racial genocide; rather, race caused the war. There is a fascinating bit about how the victorious Allies planted the seeds for war by dismembering the German Empire, thereby removing ethnic Germans from their homeland. The focal point of the race discussion, though, is on the Jews. A lot of time is spent on pogroms, anti-Semitic tracts, race laws, marriage rights, property rights, and finally, the Holocaust. This is in contrast to a much shorter, though more enlightening discussion of race in Asia, where the Japanese were subjugating the Chinese and Koreans. Simply put, I've read about the Holocaust before. From where I'm sitting at my desktop computer, I can look to one of my bookcases and see any number of titles covering this topic: Nazi Germany and the Jews by Saul Friedlander; Auschwitz: A New History, by Laurence Rees; The Holocaust, by Martin Gilbert; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer; Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Goldhagen; and Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes (I call this my "frowny face" shelf). The point I'm trying to make, not succinctly, I might add, is that this "groundbreaking" work is actually taking up space in a well-furrowed field (to uncomfortably use a farming metaphor). To extend this thought a bit further, it's tough to know how much original digging Ferguson did, as opposed to slightly re-framing the work of others. It doesn't help that Ferguson doesn't use endnotes (he explains in a note at the end of the book that the 2,000 endnotes would not possibly fit in the book, and are available online. I tried to find them at his website, www.niallferguson.org, but after an admittedly half-assed attempt, gave up). Most of the sources in his bibliography are secondary, previously published works. And in certain parts of the book, I could tell. For instance, during the section on the "rape of Nanking," Ferguson uses a newspaper story about Japanese soldiers in a beheading contest. This same story was used by Iris Chang in Rape of Nanking. The second half of the book is dominated by World War Two, which Ferguson rightly describes as starting in 1937, with the Japanese invasion of China. What can I say about this section? The words diffuse, scattered, and random come to mind. There is no narrative; there is no arc; there is no thesis. There's just a lot of dots, without any connecting. Ferguson seems to be jumping around willy-nilly, to use a phrase I would otherwise never utter. One moment he is excerpting a graphic description of Jews being executed; the next moment he is arguing that the Axis powers never had a chance to win. Again, this is not to say I wasn't entertained. To an extent, I was. Ferguson is like a really smart guy who gets really, really drunk at one of my parties, and then starts talking about history. Like a drunk, he'll get going on a topic and continue down that road for awhile before suddenly veering to another topic. However, if Ferguson's point was to show that World War One and Two were actually one long war, I don't see how these random factoids fit in. The diffuseness was at times exasperating, but it tilted into irritation at times due to Ferguson's blunt style. He is given - as a brash, young historian - to making bald pronouncements on controversial subjects, as though anyone who felt otherwise was a nitwit (that is, was not Niall Ferguson). For instance, Ferguson dismisses Lindbergh as a "crypto-fascist" and concludes that Japan never would have surrendered without being bombed to smithereens (ignoring, of course, Ultra decrypts to the contrary). In the last fifty pages, Ferguson decides to extend his un-proven thesis forward, into the rest of the century (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) This epilogue was rushed, and like the rest of the book, ungainly. There's definitely a lot of ideas here, and keen insight, but this is a book badly in need of some Ritalin.
The fall of Empires, says Ferguson in this impressively solid masterpiece, is generally more bloody than their rise. Even without his thorough account of a century of conflict and the extinction of the European Empires and recent rise of Asia, the conclusion would be hard to deny, as the industrial age culminated in a series of crimes so vast as to eclipse the public conscience of earlier wars. Not for nothing is the Godwin the ultimate signal that an internet thread has descended into anarchy.Just what made the wars of the 20th Century both so murderous and so universal is a theme which occupies much of the book. The culmination of the trend in the suicidal spasm of violence from 1937 to 1945 is examined in painstaking detail in terms of the economic disparities between the antagonists, their populations and productivity, the distribution of atrocities by both sides and the grievances and greeds which led to these wars. Ferguson also indulges in a myth-shattering analysis of appeasement, today a term of abuse but at the time an understandable and rational attempt to save the situation. Britain went to war a year too late, Ferguson establishes based on hardware production trends, so the policy was mistaken but not irrational.The account of the Shoah is harrowing, but there are some surprises for those not familiar with the detail. The sickening horror of soap production beggars many minds already, but the indifference of Italy and Japan to Nazi German anti-Semitism will be unknown to some, and the record of both countries is shockingly superior to that of some of the Allies and occupied. Japan and Italy even played some small part in extricating Jews from occupied Europe, and a small number of survivors resulted from their ambivalence. Staggeringly, in 1946 a spontaneous pogrom broke out in Poland against returning concentration camp inmates. Again, I am struck by the feeling that one cannot read this and remain sane.Atrocities and hate existed on all sides, but only one side's murderers systematically faced justice. Is this wrong? Ferguson says no - the crimes of the aggressor are of a different order to the indiscipline of the defenders. I agree, to a point - one way to avert such crimes in the future might be to ensure that our criminals face a court regardless.Stalin receives short shrift. The greatest irony of the century may be that this paranoid and psychopathic individual only ever trusted one man, and that negligence led to perhaps 20 or 40 million Soviet deaths over and above those that led from his own attempts to engineer a society. The Japanese come off better, and were it not for their vile behaviour towards the populations of occupied territories one suspects that Ferguson would come out in sympathy. The stated desire to expel the Europeans and provoke an Asian Renaissance was not dishonourable, and ironically has come to pass. Their confrontation with the USA was all but forced upon them, and also far from certain in outcome. Faced with the seizure of their assets and an oil embargo, the Japanese would have been forced to their knees in 18 months. On the face of it at least, their casus belli seems to stand.It is most striking that once all these foes were defeated, a "cold" war ensued at perhaps an even higher level of violent intensity worldwide. The era of conflict that spanned the century did not merely fizzle out, and arguably yet another pretext has now been found in the War "on" Terror. It strikes me, though, that the determinants today are suddenly no longer tied to industrial productivity. Faced with the British Empire, and later the Soviets, Hitler could not have won after the first reversal of the Battle of Britain and the huge miscalculation of Barbarossa. Production is destiny.Today, by contrast, irregular guerilla forces are facing down empires with some success. The War of the World has seen the eclipse of Europe as an imperial force in its own right. The War on Terror, I'll warrant, will see the eclipse by exhaustion of the US Empire and the historic renaissance of Asia, the culmination of the century-long spasm which Ferguson masterfully documents in this book.
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OK today I have the time to follow up on this book. This is a bit off the cuff but for those undergraduates of you who didn't read it until the day before you were assigned to speak in front of the class it will give you some nuggets to work with.Firstly the author Mr. Furguson has a penchant for writing what one might almost call big history that is looking beyond the titles we find convenient when analyzing say the 20s or the 30s or even World Wars One and Two. This author may delve into some of that and use some of the same vernacular but his historiography lies somewhere entirely.Here he reexamines the history of the late nineteenth through about the mid 20th century and offers up some very insightful notions that are at once obvious and also terrible in their ramifications.The title of the book is no coincidence and points directly to H.G. Wells invasion thriller and argues persuasively I think that it has already come to pass. No extraterrestrials mind you. Just one human lower others to sub-human status for war making and political purposes. The author examines the ethnic upheavals taking place particularly in eastern Europe in the first half of the century noting that the tendency towards ethnic cleansing was not unique to one group or another. The phenomena was much more widespread and the reason this was noted earlier is part being too close to the subject and part the enormity of the Holocaust.Throughout time there have been attempts by one group to rub out another group. What changed in the last century was the rise of industrials and mass destruction. Communication became instant and means by which virulent thought could be disseminated to the masses. Add to this long standing European feuds and pograms and you see the rise of the settings needed for a new term to be invented. Genocide.The author makes the case that the real underlying issues in the wars of the last century can more or less be traced to racial and tribal origins and goes about describing what was happening on the ground that causes him to reach this conclusion. This is s topic of much debate to this day particularly in places like Poland where no national reconciliation has ever taken place. The Germans were meticulous record keepers and the fact is they even comment that the Poles where more ferocious anti-semites than them. What we so often think of as a German thing was in fact widespread among other groups as well. The German may have been leader of the kabal, he may have even been it's worst perpetrator, but he was far from the only one killing Jews and other people in cold blood.The author goes to note how the rules of war seemed to change radically somewhat in the First World War and then radically in The Second World War where by the end of the war all sides were essentially trying to destroy the other without reference to civilian bystander or military participant.If one looks at Rwanda... Where did such an awful thing spring forth from? Surely every idea has it's nexus it's source? What about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? What he's getting at is the lines that traditionally have been used to define warfare have fundamentally changed and that Total War, genocide, and mass attrition have in an odd way become the de facto standard today. He argues the period starting around 1900 and running at least until the end of World War Two or Korea represent not a series of separate wars but rather a modern fifty year world war.Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.How many times have we heard these words? We have had generations since the closure of the period author specifies and they have all seen it in the methodology handed down to use from ancient times. In a sense the author has proposed a new overarching schema to help better understand the underlying causes of war and what really causes it. He argues it's not economic in nature though economics can play a role. I think he says it's really boiled down to the not entirely tamed beast within the heart of man and it's expression through nationalism. Nationalism became the new tribalism armed now with the machine gun, tank, bomber, even nuclear bomb. It only needs a machete to show expression as in Rwanda.I recommend the book. You can get your mind around it and then look at how the racial tensions express themselves within the United States in political and social warfare among other things. I was more critical of some earlier works of his but I think he's on to something here.
—Curtis
The explanations that we learn in high school for history's most horrible events tend to remain with us unchanged, unless we really look deep. Ferguson challenges many of the assumptions about the causes of the 20th Century's dreadful violence and is convincing. Living in Jerusalem, I've often seen how conventional wisdom about the persistent violence of the Middle East seems to miss the mark. That only makes me more convinced that Ferguson is right in refusing to accept the reasons advanced by historians 50 years ago for, say, the Nazi's campaign against the Jews. Our ideas ought to be constantly developing and responding to new research, and Ferguson's book is the best way to get a very broad sweep of these new perspectives.
—Matt
Niall Ferguson's breath-taking overview of the violent 20th century is certainly worth the time taken to read it. Even with my familiarity with history, I feel that there was something to learn and contemplate on every page. While his conclusions are complex and difficult to sum up, the endless atrocities of the bloody previous century were a result of man's infinite ability to see other classes, ethnic groups, religions and tribes as enemies, and practice unconstrained mass brutality, whether during wars or not. As usual, Ferguson writes with craft and style, and has the enviable and rare knack for expressing economic realities in an entertaining narrative. I would recommend this fine book to all who take an interest in modern history, especially if you extrapolate the past to better understand where this poor old world is headed.
—Jonathan
