🚀 go-pugleaf

There is a very illuminating 3-part series on ABC1 (Australia) at the
moment called "The War of the World" written and presented by Niall
Ferguson. Episodes 1 and 2 have already aired, Episode 3 will be on at
2pm Friday afternoon (8-Mar-2009).

Here is a history of modern times which incorporates a lot of stuff most
of us know about the 20th century, but which is typically omitted from
conventional narratives regarding the causes, duration and effects of
WW1, WW2 and the Cold War. In particular, those perennial
preoccupations, the Holacaust and ethnic cleansing, are seen as part of
a continuum afflicting the whole century, rather than something which
emerged fully-formed the heart of Adolf Hitler in Nazi occupied Europe
during the 1940s.

Germany has so far been reduced to a bit player in the whole saga,
lacking even originality when it comes to things of that nature.

From the Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia to the Tutsis of Rwanda,
ethnic cleansing appears to be (in retrospect) an almost predictable
result of the formation of nation states out of decaying, multi-racial
empires, according to Ferguson. Right down to multi-national contingents
of the world powers looking on and doing nothing.

For his archetype of European colonisation Ferguson chooses the unlikely
candidate of imperial Russia. Of course we always knew it was out there
somewhere, otherwise why did the Brits devote so much effort guarding
the Kyber pass and keeping Afghanistan a no-man's land. Ferguson wheels
Russia into full view and we can see that Britain did indeed have a
serious rival and counterpart in Tsarist Russia. So much so, Ferguson
attributes WW1 in large part to Russia's "reckless" foreign policy of
re-targeting the Middle East and Balkans for expansion following its
checkmate in the East by Japan in 1905.

He also pulls back the curtains on many other things we may have
observed ourselves, but never seen acknowledged in a causative history
of the world. Like the West's obsession with political ideologies
(Communism vs Fascism for example) which blinded it to the fundamental
similarities of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR. The "gulags" were
about slave labour long before Germany resorted to similar methods in
the closing stages of World War 2. Not only that, but Ferguson claims
that "class warfare" was mostly a cloak for decoying Western
intellectuals' attention away from ethnic deportations, importations and
related forms of slavery, such having become standard practice in the
USSR by the early 1930s.

Also, the policy of "Appeasement" was an attempt at limiting war, not
preserving peace, for Ferguson asserts that World War II started when
China declared war on Japan in 1937. 1939 may be the date Britain
reluctantly got involved on one of the peripheries trying to put a brake
of German ambition, but from a global perspective and taken in the
context of the whole 20th Century, Britain's declaration was more a
technicality than a major event in a world already erupting in
spontaneous outbreaks of armed violence throughout the Eurasian
landmass.

Also, the idea that World War I ended with the German armistice of 1918
turns out to be a monument to Western vanity, as fighting soon resumed
in earnest on a huge scale in Russia, more civilians and soldiers dying
there in the few years following 1918 than before. These include
soldiers of the British, French and American armies -- the same
combatants who had supposedly ended the war in 1918.

Episode 2 ended with Stalin and Hitler dividing Poland between them. It
will be interesting to see what Ferguson makes of events which followed
on from there.