Why was the 20th Century so Deadly?

by Read Listen Learn

Although there were many wars in the nineteenth century, they usually took place in the colonies that the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians occupied against the wishes of their populations or because powerful European governments forced other countries to co-operate with them for economic reasons. This was known as 'gunboat diplomacy'. These colonialist wars tended to be quite one-sided, owing to Western powers having the advantage of technologically advanced weapons used against people defending their lands with swords, spears and the occasional pistol.

After Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and his dream of a French Empire on the continent of Europe was silenced forever, the only time when large numbers of white people died was the American Civil War of 1861 to '65, which caused the deaths of three quarters of a million soldiers and an unknown number of civilians.

As industrialisation had made Europe and America wealthy and science was steaming ahead with innovation after innovation, Europeans and their American cousins had every reason to believe that their world was one of progress – scientific, technological, political and moral. In 1914, nearly a century after Napoleon's exile, democracy – at least in white nations which had the power to govern themselves – was the emerging world order almost everywhere.

By contrast, at the end of the millennium, Europe had been home to two world wars which spread all across the world, killing fifty-eight million people, most of them Europeans. China's Mao Tse Tung had overseen the deaths of forty million of his own population through famine and persecution. Stalin had caused or ordered the death of a similar number of people in Soviet Russia. Pol Pot in 1970s Cambodia wiped out nearly half the eight-million strong population of his own country in only three years. Each of these dictators thought the deaths necessary for the achievement of their ideological goals.

Next door to Cambodia, the disastrous American involvement in Vietnam led to the deaths of two million (mainly Vietnamese) in the country's infamous civil war, only a few years after three million Koreans had lost their lives in their own battle between capitalism and communism. Of course, not all twentieth century conflict can be explained by ideology.

Hitler's infamy will last as long as the human race studies its history for the systematic extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Modern Turkey still argues about whether the deaths of more than a million Armenians in a few months in 1915 can be termed 'genocide'. When British India was divided along religious lines into two states in 1948, with most Muslims travelling to Pakistan and Hindus to India, more than a million civilians were burnt, hacked and starved to death by people who, months before, had been their neighbours. Less than a quarter of a century later, the Pakistani Army massacred more than three million Bangladeshis in nine months for daring to ask for independence.

Back in the heart of Europe, Yugoslavia split into warring factions in the late 1980s, with Serbs executing Croats and Bosnians (and vice versa) and taught us in the West the chilling term 'ethnic cleansing'. In Africa, Rwandan government radio in 1994 encouraged the oppressed Hutus to kill their neighbours who belonged to the minority but centuries-old ruling Tutsi tribe, accounting for, some say, more than a million deaths in a hundred days. US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arab revolutions, which show no signs of abating today, have already led to tens of thousands of tragic deaths and millions of people displaced from their homes. We have started to talk of bio-warfare. As if all that were not enough, the last century introduced us to the term 'serial killer' and 'school shooting'.

In short, the twentieth century was the bloodiest the world has ever seen. So, how could European optimism – or complacency? – in the early years of this notorious century turn so quickly to disaster? How could civilised America, which has taken over from Europe in guiding the rest of the world, become so morally bankrupt that it has area bombed civilian populations and developed new forms of torture?

Perhaps a good place to start asking questions is with individual responsibility for the mass murder of innocent women and children. That leads us, inescapably, to Nazi Germany, the charismatic personality of Adolf Hitler and the enormous popular support he enjoyed. Historians have argued ever since Hitler shot himself in the bunker in Berlin about whether the killing of Jews, above all, but also mentally ill people, the Romany, socialists and communists, gays, the educationally challenged, Slavs and intellectuals could ever have happened if he had been assassinated in one of the many attempts on his life.

Michael Burleigh, a prominent historian with a special interest in Hitler, has written that Nazism was like a religion and that its leader held out promise to his people in much the same way as a saviour does in monotheistic faiths. Ian Kershaw, a biographer of the Nazi leader, has said that it is impossible to imagine Nazism without him.

He gives solid evidence to the effect that it was Hitler's decision alone to declare war on the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and to invade the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in 1941, although in both cases his generals strongly advised against it. But Kershaw also points out that Hitler rarely put his thoughts on paper on the question of the Jewish genocide.

Niall Fergusson, another historian of the twentieth century, argues that Hitler's views on the issue were clear, but that the state apparatus allowed for his ideology to be carried out without him being consulted on each and every detail. In other words, that Hitler's role was vital to Nazi ideology but that the way the state was set up allowed his ideas to be implemented. He says that it is the nature of a totalitarian state to control every element of life so that even one's dreams might be about the Great Leader.

As Benito Mussolini, the leader of Fascist Italy, put it: everyone is within the state; none is outside it; none is against it. There was one party, one leader, one ideology, one people. As German civil society increasingly emphasised the importance of uniformity of belief and expression and the technological means were in place to implement Nazi ideology, going against the norm was hard. Obeying orders in this way was also made easier by the fact that sending millions of Jews to their deaths was no single person's job: someone arranged the trains to Auschwitz, another was in charge of cataloguing the Jews' possessions, a third organised guards, and so on. Individual responsibility was hidden in the mundane nature of the tasks.

Still, someone had to do the actual killing – force screaming women into gas chambers or shoot them as they hid in ghettoes around Europe. This was no mere administrative chore. How can we explain the fact that Germans were so obedient – even enthusiastic – about carrying out these tasks, especially since the Italians, for instance, were not? To understand this, we need to look back to the sense of shame that Germans in general – and, perhaps Hitler in particular – felt about their defeat in the First World War. This was certainly deepened by the humiliating peace treaty, signed at Versailles, which blamed Germany entirely for the war; made the country pay not only the cost of its own arms and rebuilding but every other country's too; refused it an army; and took away large areas of the country and shared these between its enemies.

Hitler blamed, as he saw it, international Jewish bankers for the defeat and, so, for the economic misery of the nation. Next, the Nazis used aggressive propaganda to dehumanise the Jews, portraying them as rats and subhuman thieves and murderers. An example of this was the job the Nazis gave the Jews in Austria, when it was 'annexed' in 1938: they had to clean the streets of Vienna with toothbrushes, thereby losing their dignity and even appearing comical. Then again, they were not taken out of their apartment blocks and sent at once to their deaths, but were housed in special areas of the city, away from their non-Jewish former neighbours. Finally, there was the fact that no single individual made the decision or all the arrangements to send these people to their deaths.

Once the process of dehumanisation has begun, it allows the sadistic behaviour of the many camp guards that behaved dreadfully to the Jewish inmates, seeming to enjoy their suffering. While it is true that many of these officials had very authoritarian childhoods, there were other mechanisms at work than merely selecting guards who had been abused in their youth. Any pity shown towards the prisoners was reported and punished, for instance. In this way, as brutality became routine, so it grew. If we nurture virtue, it develops and so it is with vice.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel Prize winning novelist, argued that all of us have the same potential for evil within us. Yet, the Jewish Italian Holocaust survivor and philosopher, Primo Levi, wrote that he knew instinctively that he was not a murderer and could never have acted as the camp guards did. For him to confuse the murderers with their victims is a sign of the moral disease of our society. And yet, many Holocaust survivors who went to Palestine were massacring and ethnically cleansing Arab villagers even before Auschwitz was liberated.

In answer, therefore to the question of why the twentieth century was the most violent ever, we can give many reasons. First and foremost, in the first fifty years, it was possible for one party, one ideology to control all mass media, so that no contrary opinion could be conveyed to people. With television, mobile phones and, most importantly, the Internet, communication can no longer be so easily controlled by one group with one idea.

Next, Hitler seemed to find ways to explain away the humiliation of defeat in the First World War and a scapegoat – as people wanted to believe it, they did. While his complete lack of morality and his single-minded, almost suicidal achievement of his goals and his psychopathic disregard for others' pain made a lethal combination ideal for the social conditions of Germany at that period though, German civil society – with its stress on uniformity, obedience and comradeship – allowed Hitler's vision to take hold, where in a less militaristic society with more independence of thought, it might not have.

Of course, this dark perspective on human awareness and conscience is not the only one available. Some academics have pointed out that a firm belief in God's goodness motivated many of the most courageous people who resisted Nazism. This is true. And, of course, we now live in a world of mass communication which can promote tolerance of difference and public accountability for crimes against humanity. We see this today in the International Criminal Court, which investigates war crimes and charges of genocide. Yet, it is also notable that most people brought before it are African and always on the losing side. There is, therefore, a long way to go.

And, of course, we can be sure that technological innovation – something we have not considered – must not be underestimated. It made mass murder easier than it ever was for the Conquistadors, the Crusaders or Genghis Khan. But the optimistic idea that we are progressing morally as much as we are scientifically must be very doubtful.