Civilization: A New History of the Western World Part 4

CIVILIZATION

A NEW HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

ROGER OSBORNE

PIMLICO      2007

PART 4

Chapter 17: The End of Civilization. Depression, Extremism and Genocide in Europe, America and Asia

The willing march into the catastrophe of the 1914-18 war defies any rational rules of historical cause and effect. We can map out the alliances, the teetering balance of power, and the growing sense of arrogance and paranoia; but we are left to wonder how a group of nations who believed themselves to be the most civilized in human history, with a generation of citizens enjoying more political and social rights and better living standards than any in the previous century, could have willingly sent millions of their young men to needless death or maiming. But if the First World War shakes our assumptions of social, political and, above all, moral progress, then the events of the following 30 years were, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was to write from a Nazi prison, ‘utterly bewildering to anyone nurtured in our traditional ethical systems’.

• The two world wars have come to be seen as a single conflict, in which the unfinished business of 1918 festered and eventually erupted. This happened against a background of utter disillusionment and anger with the established authorities.
• In the 1920s American capitalists were worried that people would stop buying their goods once they had enough things to live comfortably. Consumerism was born. Rather than selling goods to its customers, the advertising industry sold happiness.
• Union membership declined; inequality grew; federal tax cuts favoured the wealthy; and when farm incomes fell by half the government refused to intervene – the free market was allowed to run its course.
• American industry found itself in an extremely favourable situation. The more goods it could sell, the more workers it employed and the more consumers it created; and the lower the wages the higher the company profits.
• Industry kept on producing until there was a massive overcapacity in the economy. In October 1929 Wall Street crashed taking American free-market capitalism with it.
• While the United States was becoming an individualistic society where politics had virtually disappeared, the politics of Europe became dominated by the struggles of ever-weakening liberal democracies in the face of both communism and fascism.
• It was the Bolsheviks who first showed how the heavily centralized nation state, with its monopoly of force and control of communications, was vulnerable to takeover by a relatively small group.
• In St Petersburg in the first few hours of 25 October 1917 Bolshevik forces took control of the railway stations, post and telegraph offices, telephone and electricity networks and the state bank, leaving the existing government stranded inside the Winter Palace – which was then occupied.
• Russia in the early 20^th century, like France 120 years earlier, was an autocratic society isolated in a world of change.
• Russia, later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, became the living embodiment of Marx’s final phase of history – the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had come to pass.
• Like Plato 2,300 years earlier, the task of the Soviet leaders was to bring about the ideal society that must exist.
• The Soviet Union established itself as a modern industrialized nation at exactly the time the west was imploding into economic depression and right- wing extremism.
• While unemployment and fascism stalked the streets and empty factories of the west, the Soviet Union seemed like a workers’ paradise where goods were distributed on the basis of need and services rendered according to ability.
• As a vehicle for people’s desire to do good to others, socialism became, for many people in the west, the repository of hope for the future.

In the 1920s and early 1930s it seemed to many that Soviet society was delivering much of what Marx had promised. State planning enabled food, education, hospitals and industrial goods to be provided in ever-increasing amounts. Newly trained teachers reported rooms full of peasants patiently writing their first sentence over and over: ‘We are not slaves. We are not Slaves.’ Soviet science was led by a generation including Koltsov, Chetverikov and Vavilov, who dedicated themselves to the new cause and placed the Soviet Union at the forefront of world developments in plant-breeding, population genetics, agricultural science and physics. The emergence of Russian artists, musicians, poets and novelists of world stature – Mayakovsky, Gorky, Sholokhov, Shostakovich, Pasternak, Bulgakov and others – reflected the sense of a new beginning for humanity. Nevertheless, as early as 1918, the German communist leader Rosa Luxemburg saw what the future might hold: ‘In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of the labouring masses. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience  direct and rule.

• The hopes of many Russians and western sympathizers lasted through the civil war of the early 1920s and into the 1930s. But by then power was, as Luxemburg had predicted, shared among a small elite.
• From 1928 Stalin used minor fluctuations in grain supplies to argue that wealthy peasants were hoarding grain, and that small family farms were an inefficient way to produce food crops.
• From 1930 onwards the wealthier peasants or Kulaks were deported from their villages, collective farms were introduced, and quotas given for the supply of food from each district.
• By the spring of 1933 millions of peasants in the Ukraine and western Russia – the grain belt of the Soviet Union – were starving to death.
• The famine was so widespread that officials searching for hidden grain automatically suspected anyone who did not look starved. Out of a Ukrainian farm population of 25 million, about 5 million starved to death.
• Using the December 1934 murder of Leningrad party chief Leonid Kirov as a pretext, Stalin had his fellow party leaders arrested, giving him total control over the party and the country.
• Impressed by Hitler’s purge of the Nazi party in June 1934, he set about clearing out any possible resistance.
• These were the years of the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s term for the network of labour camps.
• The lack of resistance to the so-called Great Terror (in which no fewer than 20 million people were shot or died in labour camps) among ordinary people and senior party officials went far beyond a sense of helplessness.
• In a world where the recent past held no guidance for the future, the politics, culture and very civilization of Europe seemed to many people to be in need of renewal by whoever could seize the moment.
• The new doctrine of fascism sought to answer this need. The fascist takeover of Europe was astonishingly rapid.
• Representative assemblies were dissolved or sidelined in 17 out of 27 European countries before 1939, while another five were negated during the war itself.
• Only Britain and Finland and the neutral states of Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland maintained democratic institutions through the whole of the period from 1918 to 1945.
• In other parts of the world, including Japan in 1930-31 and Turkey in the early 1920s, democracies were brushed aside by military regimes.
• Just as important to the growth of fascism was the sense, among citizens of the defeated nations, of the betrayal of a deeply held vision.
• After the epic nature of the struggle, civilian life seemed petty and disappointing – in Italy more than half of all fascists in the early 1920s were ex-soldiers.
• All of these factors appeared in their most extreme forms in Germany, the most populous, wealthy and potentially powerful nation in Europe.
• Heightened nationalism, Jewish refugees from the east, the number of Bolshevik leaders who were Jewish, the need for an easy scapegoat all conspired to inflame anti-Semitism in Germany – a country with a small Jewish population.
• The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression changed everything. American banks called in their loans and Germany became effectively bankrupt.
• In the early 1930s the atmosphere of danger and violence on the streets and in the bars and meeting halls of Germany increased dramatically.
• The Nazi party had over 100,000 members in paramilitary uniforms – more than the permitted manpower of the German army.
• The 1930s were a good time for many Germans. Hitler’s policy of forcing the unemployed to work building autobahns and other infrastructure had a beneficial effect on the economy.
• In November 1938 the situation of Germany’s Jews, already restricted and denigrated, became much worse. The excuse was the assassination on 7 November of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris.
• While the Jews were the internal enemy, the great external threat was the Soviet Union. Russia was communist, its revolution had been led by Jews, and its people were Slavs, a race that was inferior to the Germanic Aryans. Russia was the perfect place for the German people to expand into.
• The coming war was fuelled, above all, by Hitler’s desire to see a historic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union for the mastery of Europe.
• In the decades since 1918 the internal combustion engine, paved roads, tanks, lorries, aircraft, submarines and radio equipment had all improved beyond recognition, as had methods of manufacturing vehicles, equipment and ammunition.
• The key to the astonishing success of the Blitzkrieg (lightning war) was speed of attack, coordinated through instant communication.
• In three months Hitler had taken over western continental Europe; all he had to do was wait for the British to sue for peace and thereby keep the United States out of the war.
• When no peace treaty was offered, Hitler began, in September 1940, to bomb London.
• The loss of bombers persuaded Hitler that he could not defeat Britain from the air, and he turned his attention to the east.
• To the German army and the German people it seemed that Hitler was a miracle worker. By the end of 1940 most Germans would have believed anything he said, and followed him anywhere.
• We have been brought up with these appalling facts but we do not often register them. War in Europe had become a murderous pursuit in which glory, honour and brutality merged in a lethal combination.
• By preventing Hitler from winning a quick victory, the Soviet Union began to churn out the tanks, aircraft, ammunition and supplies to equip its numerically superior forces.
• At this point we return to the most perplexing and important question of 20^th century western history – how did a civilized country like Germany slide towards not only war, but a genocide of unimaginable scale and cruelty.
• At the war’s end Thomas Mann went on German radio to tell the nation what had been found at Auschwitz.

For centuries white-skinned European Christians had regarded themselves as superior to other races, and entitled to destroy others in the name of their civilization; in the previous 150 years (and before), people of different colours and customs had been routinely subject to torture, mutilation and mass murder for no other reason than their difference; by the early 20^th century it had become routine to regard others (including the uneducated masses) as not only biologically inferior, but as an insidious threat to the health of European civilization – and to support this view with apparently rational pseudo-scientific theories. Slavery, colonization, legalized segregation were all based on the assumption of racial superiority, and a fear of the oppressed, that pre-dated and has outlasted the uncovering of the Holocaust.

• Even Roosevelt could not overcome the ingrained habits of many of his countrymen; segregation by race remained legal in the United States until the 1950s.
• Nor was America unusual – in 1948 Europeans in South Africa introduced apartheid and within a few years of the closing of Auschwitz, signs reading ‘No Blacks or Irish’ were commonplace in British boarding-house windows.
• We maintain the same attachment to the nation state that has a monopoly of violence and gives extraordinary power to a few men; we continue to develop technological instruments that are capable of killing thousands if not millions; we still believe that Nazism was a regression to some kind of tribal bestial behaviour and that human progress will help to prevent its recurrence; and we still regard our civilization as the model that the whole world should follow.

 

Chapter 18: The Post-War World: From Social Cohesion to Global Marketplace