The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

Having read several thousand books in my lifetime, I find this book to be an important book. At first I thought this book it would be tedious to read through it. This is not the most enjoyable topic, except to the sadistic and masochistic among us.What the author does, and does superbly is take us through man's inhumanity to man during the course of the 100 years of the 20th century. Ferguson does it in a way that's not entertaining, how could a topic like this be entertaining - but it is FASCINATING.Just as importantly, the author NAILS THE TOPIC. You can always tell when an author or a speaker truly knows his stuff. Paul Johnson the historian is one such writer. David Kaye, the UN weapons inspector is another such speaker. These are people that when they impart information to you, you are compelled to listen because you are in the presence of something rare.This is why you must read this book. Most likely, you are living in America. We live in a country on a comparative level with such abundance, such freedom, that we owe it to the 100 million people who died in the 20th century to understand why they died, and what can be done in the future to avoid such needless death.We owe it to history to understand that there were animals disguised as human beings like Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung, who were Hitler's equal for winning the award for man's inhumanity to man. There are almost 15 million Jews in the world, and they have been very successful at keeping the memory of the Holocaust front and center in people's minds, as they should. Tragedies like the Holocaust should be remembered forever.There are no other groups that are keeping the memories of other Holocausts alive. Stalin killed far more people than Hitler, yet not a word, nor has any movie been made by Hollywood about this topic. Mao in China killed tens of millions of people, nobody saying much about that one either. We have just lived through a century of the greatest volunatary violence in 12,000 years of civilization according to the author, and the silence in the media on this topic is deafening.You will remember the Harvard philosopher George Santayana when he said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Here we are in the beginning of the 21st century stuck in a quagmire in Iraq with a group of people that place less value on human life than we do on recycling newspapers.After reading this compelling book, I have a feeling that this new century is not shaping up to be a walk in the park. We have Arabs striving to create nuclear weapons, whose living practices are just short of cannibalism. In this country we have politicians on both sides of the aisle that are clearly not up to the task that is required, and that is the most frightening thing of all.Before he died, I had a relationship with Herman Kahn, one of the great minds of the 20th century. He was the successor to a man named John Von Neumann, a preeminent 20th century mathematician, and arguably the father of artificial intelligence. Kahn and Von Neumann, were both men that the government called in at the highest levels to help figure out nuclear strategies for war with the Soviet Union. Their IQ's probably dwarfed Einstein.I asked Kahn one day why our government didn't seem to be up to snuff compared to the gents that founded the Republic in the 1700's. His eyes lit up, and he said, "You know, we could never duplicate that group of guys. They were unique in history. Extremely well read, brilliant thinkers, courageous, those people just don't exist in government today, and they were very young, most of them in their 30's."Yes, we are in for some ride in the 21st century. It's all in the book. You will understand what took place in China in the 1920's and 30's in their power struggle against Japan. You will see what happened in World War I that led to the destruction of the 1930's and 40's. Ferguson is at his best in describing things that you just won't read about in other books.An example is the way prisoners of war were treated by all sides during the Second World War. I had no idea that Americans were executing prisoners of war as Germans surrendered. If you were an officer captured by the British, you were four times more likely to survive the war than if you were captured by the Americans.We all know there is an argument raging among historians about whether or not the United States should have employed the atomic bomb against Japan at the end of World War II. The book lays it out. The Japanese had created a plan called "Operation Decision". This involved deploying 2.35 million troops along the Japanese coast. The troops would be reinforced by 4 million civilian employees of the armed forces. There was also a civilian militia of 28 million men ready and armed to fight.The atomic bombings killed over time 140,000 in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki. Just a few months earlier, beginning in March of 1945, the Tokyo fire bombings killed something approaching a 100,000 people. It becomes obvious, the atomic bomb probably saved a million American casualties and you know we would have killed two or three Japanese for every American casualty. Those bombs saved a couple of million lives, but historians like to build castles in the sky, and then we have to read about them.You'll want to read the author's version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. You'll also want to think about the things Ferguson doesn't talk about but hints at. Why did John Kennedy go public on the Russian buildup of missiles in Cuba? Why didn't he negotiate with Khrushchev in private? By going public he put the Russian Premier in a corner, leaving him very little leeway to work his way out.You'll also understand a great myth that economists have pushed on us to this day. They argue that trade is good; because countries don't go to war against countries they trade with. Ferguson points out that war after war is being fought by trading partners. In the 1930's, over a 30% of Japan's imported goods came from the United States. Germany was a major trading partner of the United States up until the beginning of World War II. Economic trading partners have gone to war against each other for the last 500 years. France and England have constantly fought for the last five or six centuries, and are each other's biggest trading partners during that period.Read this book, tell your friends about it. We can not afford to replicate the 20th century with the 21st century. The stakes are higher, our knowledge is greater, our wisdom, who knows? We owe it to the unnecessary tens of millions who died in the last century, and the billions of those poor souls in this century who are basically living in slave like conditions, to live the best of all possible lives. Only knowledge can help us do that. This book has that knowledge.Richard Stoyeck

In both relative and absolute terms, the bodycount of the last century was the highest in recorded history. There were 16 conflicts that left more than a million dead, another 6 that claimed from a half million to a million lives, and 14 more that claimed from a quarter to a half million lives; all told, about 167 to 188 million people lost their lives as a result of armed conflict. Harvard historian Niall Fergusson has written a monumental tour-de-force attempting to answer the question: why?Being Niall Ferguson, author of "Empire" and "Colossus," the reasons are not the conventional ones. Large-scale killing has taken place in previous centuries, and the 20th century, blessed with material progress, should have been a peaceful one, yet the bloodshed was unprecedented.Ferguson disagrees with the traditional explanation that the scale of killing was a result of more sophisticated military hardware. The killing fields of Rwanda and Cambodia showed that large-scale massacres could be carried out by primitive weapons.Stalinism, Fascism, and Anti-Semitism have been cited as the sources of the centuries largests mass murders. Ferguson argues that although the nation-states that formed after the disintegration of empires embraced extreme ideologies, these nation-states were not inherently evil; in fact they carried out many positive and peaceful goals.Ferguson, instead, identifies three elements - the three E's - that were responsible for much of the 20th century's armed conflicts: "ethnic disintegration, economic volitility, and empires in decline." One of the primary examples he uses to illustrate his thesis is the case of Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to World War I, four empires were on the brink of dissolution - the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the Hapsburgs of Austro-Hungary, the Romanovs of Russia, and the Ottomans in Turkey. The co-existence of these multi-ethnic populations was always tenuous at best, the transformation from empire to nation-state was anything but smooth. The nation-states that emerged after the war - Turkey, Germany, and Russia had their own agendas to cope with the worldwide economic depression that followed the war. The other countries that were located in between from the Baltic to the Balkans experienced some of the bloodiest ethnic cleanings in history. And this was only a foreboding of what was to come.What makes this "fatal formula" so pertinent today is that all of these elements exist in the Middle East today. According the Ferguson, as he elegantly argued in "Colossus," America is an empire, a liberal empire, but it is also an empire in denial. With economic instablity, which already existed before the invasion of Iraq; ethnic strife between Sunni and Shia; and America's wavering support for the young nation: everything seems to be heading toward full-scale civil war. Making matters worse, the conflict will inevitably spill over into Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom have ethnic and religious interests in the outcome.Ferguson's analysis seems to be convincing. The brutality that we are witnessing today in Iraq where Sunni and Shia treat each other as "inferior or malignant species" is remarkably reminiscent of some of the 20th century's worst nightmares. We can only hope that the bloodletting can be stopped and that a political solution can be found. Unfortunately, the ranks of the optimists are dwindling.

Book OK. There was some annotation early in the book. I have not marked down the review for that.

Good book immaculate condition.

Niall Fergusson's War of the World is a chronicle of the martial horrors of the 20th Century. The detail is stunning and the style as accessible as, say, Simon Schama or James McPherson in the same historical narrative genre. Professor Fergusson's central thesis seems to be that the root of all of the last century's major conflicts, and particularly WWII, lay not in economic privation or political ambition but racial hatred. The book's title is derived from HG Wells's science fiction novel War of the Worlds: the perpetrators of 20th Century warfare are analogous to Wells's alien hordes, bent on destruction of another race, in pursuit of their own "lebensraum".Fergusson marshals his evidence impressively into a blitzkrieg of evidence, detailing the development of the Nazi ideology, for example, from the minor sexual dalliances with Jewish women of those who were to become Nazism's principal leaders, through to the gas chambers and the Final Solution.At times, it must be said, the litany of "evidence" of racial inferiority presented by the proponents of Nazism and related creeds comes so thick and fast that you have to remind yourself whose side the professor is on. Indeed, there are some commentators who believe he crosses the line. And though such accusations rather overstate the case it is understandable that a superficial reading of the text could easily lead one to that kind of impression.One important thing that the author does is readjust some preconceptions. He points out, for example, that the conventional view of WWII beginning in 1939 is pegged to a UK audience. For the inhabitants of Manchuria, the Sudetenland and Abyssinia the war was well under way by then. He also gently, but firmly, "corrects" some past accounts of the same events, such as AJP Taylor's analysis of the origins of that war, whilst simultaneously acknowledging that historiography, like physics and astronomy, has moved forward since Taylor's day. He thus sidesteps any charges of damning with faint praise. (He is less generous, though, when dealing with historian EH Carr.)As excellent as this book is, however, I'm not overwhelmingly convinced by the central thesis. Hanging the blame for World War II mostly on the back of anti-Semitism or Japanese contempt for their fellow Asians trivialises the big political-economic picture. Sure, the Axis powers in WWII were able successfully to exploit the prejudices they had amplified through their propaganda, and the atrocities inflicted on millions of Jews, Chinese and other specifically targeted groups had an undeniably premeditated racial driver, but without the hyperinflation of the twenties it has to be doubtful that there would have been a successful mobilisation in Germany.The comparison is with all those semi-informed cleverdicks (not a term I would use on Fergusson, I hasten to add) who blame every war on religion. Sure there may be a case to be made in some instances (the Crusades, maybe?). But Ulster Protestants killing Catholics are like Southern trash lynching blacks: fighting for the right to be slightly less oppressed than the neighbours; for a slightly larger slice of a pitifully small pie. The solution is not found in the total extermination of either side, but in economic prosperity. Once they have a nice house, a big fridge and HDTV the majority are less concerned with bludgeoning other folks to death because of the colour of their skin or their mode of superstition. It is more difficult to, in Nietzsche's expression, "collect zeroes" in order to achieve your ambition if the supply of zeroes - a broad mass of dispossessed and disenchanted numbskulls - is limited. For although there were plenty of intellectuals at German universities who knew and accepted the principles of eugenics, it is doubtful that the average German thought beyond privation and finding scapegoats for it.It is, of course, more complicated than that, and I doubt I would last five academic rounds with Niall Fergusson on the subject. And the fact that I don't agree with his thesis doesn't detract from an appreciation that War of the Worlds at least has a case to make and does so in masterly fashion.The other point I would take issue with is his contention that the West did not win the War of the World. It's not that I disagree with what is said about the power accrued to the Soviet Union and then Russia since 1945, nor can I possibly deny the inexorable rise of China nor that Japan, for all its recent problems, remains an economic powerhouse to be reckoned with. It is more the framing of the war as a zero-sum game in which there have to be winners and losers. Yes there was untold suffering by millions at the end of the war, on both sides; yes, they were most definitely losers. But ultimately the transformation of Eastern Europe symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall opened up fantastic opportunities for East and West, even though it cannot be denied that Russia has some way to go before it clears up its act. Similarly, so does the rise of the tiger economies, and none more so than the rise of China. Like President Bush, I too would like to see far more political freedom bestowed on the peoples of Asia than is currently the case. But for the time being I, like billions of Chinese, possibly, think that economic progress is better than nothing, where Bush apparently would prefer they have "freedom". What's the value of having the freedom to starve? One thing the left had right during the seventies was that truly progressive movements grow best in conditions of prosperity.Other parts of the thesis, though, do work, as in the case Fergusson makes for a preemptive strike at Germany in 1938, when the country was in a relatively weaker condition militarily and economically. There was already, at that time, sufficient evidence that the developing Nazi state was a malign presence. However, one only has to look at the furore caused by the Iraq war to see why Chamberlain and company hesitated in the face of Hitler's procrastinations - just as the anti-war mob now would have liked Blair to have done in the face of Saddam's ploys. Those who do not learn from history are obliged to repeat it, and just because Saddam had no WMD at the point of invasion, who is to say that would have remained the case? Hitler in Mein Kampf recognised that he literally got away with murder for a while because nobody was willing to crush his movement.Fergusson also makes a good case in favour of "Bomber" Harris's campaigns on German cities, whilst not denying that they were by nature no less savage than say the bombing of Guernica.Although an account of war in the 20th Century, it is WWII that dominates, and quite rightly. WWII saw conflict on a monumental scale: the battlefield at the Kursk salient, in July 1943, Fergusson tells us, was the size of Wales. It also yields accounts of savagery and degradation of industrial proportions, such as the escalating tendency by both sides to take no prisoners, which in turn fuelled a reluctance by soldiers of both sides to surrender, leading to some ferocious battles to the death. (Historian Antony Beevor, in a Financial Times interview, talks of the role of Fear, as opposed to Hatred, as the key driver in these circumstances. I would contend that Fear is similarly at the root of the "War of the World", and that this was exploited and whipped up into Hatred by the likes of Hitler.)Plenty to ponder, then. Professor Fergusson fuels the fires of discourse. I doubt the book would have been half so valuable had the result been everybody nodding in unison at platitudes. Full marks.

Another great book from Niall Ferguson. This is basically about the 20th century being so bloody and violent. He tells us about the Pogroms against the Jews before World War 1, the great war itself in statistics, the Stalinist purges in the 1920s and 1930s, to the rise of facism in the 1930s. The author explains why World War 2 was so destructive, including the Holocaust, to more modern genocides such as Cambodia in 1979. I really liked this book, but was a bit bemused by the statistics and political stuff hence 4 stars.

I think that this was an absolute mess of a book because Ferguson spends the majority of the book discussing well established historical facts that he does not even bother to connect to his overall thesis.Ferguson, in the introduction of his book, explains that the extreme violence of the twentieth century requires a serious explanation. He then says that since the majority of those killed were non-combatants one cannot rely upon a study of military history to explain this violence, one has to look elsewhere. For Ferguson, “three things seem necessary to explain the extreme violence of the twentieth century, and in particular why so much of it happened at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places ... These may be summarised as ethnic conflict, economic volatility” and the end of empire. When I first read these comments I was struck by the upmost banality of them (seriously, how the heck could anyone think that writing a book advocating for such a position could be developing our understanding of the twentieth century?). In addition, I do not think that it is remotely helpful to attempt to explain the violence of this century through such generalisations about its causes when you are dealing with such a vast and diverse period of history.Finally, we come to the biggest problem of the book: the way Ferguson makes his argument. In sections of this book, I do think that Ferguson does make a good case that his three factors led to violence within the twentieth century. However, that vast majority of the book I don’t think even attempts to support argument and that, at minimum, 75% of this book should be cut. For example, in the epilogue of his book - a section that should focus upon supporting his argument that the rest of the violence post-1953 was caused by these three factors. The only problem is, Ferguson does not even both and he just lists historical facts and he does not even attempt to connect these facts with his thesis. For example, in a section of his epilogue he engages in a discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis and then completely forgets to explain the impact that this crisis has on his thesis.I would say that the biggest lesson I learnt from this book is that, why you may have a decent argument, you need to ensure that you don’t go off on random tangents.