Edinburgh Festivals

Book Festival 2001

The future of war
Sven Lindqvist, Richard Vinen, Piers Brendon

David Perks

The panel were asked to speculate on the form future wars would take. Initially, they all strayed away from categorical statements. However when pushed, the consensus was that the threat was from local wars in the Third World embroiling the West.

Piers Brendon, author of The Dark Valley - an attempt to come to terms with the conditions that lead to the last total war - was at great pains to point out the failure of historians when it comes to pronouncements about future conflicts. As for militarists themselves, Brendon made the point that the best they can do is tell us how to 'win the last war'. Yet Brendon still felt able to dismiss Francis Fukyama's end of history thesis, pointing out the fragility of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe and the Third World and the threat this posed for us. As he put it history may have 'new horrors' in store for us.

Richard Vinen, author of A History in Fragments, was equally prepared to step beyond the boundaries of caution once he had made the obligatory caveat about historians being the worst crystal ball gazers. He modestly proposed two alternatives: the end to warfare or the annihilation of humanity. For now he saw the uneven nature of war between one highly technologically superior combatant and another combatant who was likely to experience their own version of total war - total defeat. These wars would arise from localised conflicts in the Third World.

Sven Lindqvist, author of The History of Bombing and Exterminate All The Brutes took an entirely different tack. Succinctly and with the force of thoroughly well researched material, he gave a cultural account of the nature of coming genocidal conflict. He was talking about the view in the West at the end of the 19th century. In 1881 William D Hay wrote Three Hundred Years Hence. A British author was the first to predict the use of bombing from the air. It was to be used to enable the liquidation of 'lesser races'. With uncanny accuracy Lindqvist was able to find example after example of novels and authors who had described the essence of virtually all forms of mass devestation to come.

As Lindqvist put it, the justification used fictionally at the end of the 19th century to rid the planet of the 'black races' or the 'chinese' had a real foundation. This is the racial ideology that saw the white man as superior. This is the ideology that allowed the US to try to wipe the Japanese off the face of the planet 50 years later.

The link with the moral superiority of Western engagement in the Third World today was lost on his fellow panelists. Instead, the more familiar 'well we have to do something don't we' argument was accepted by Brendon, who saw Blair's intervention in the Balkans as 'his finest hour'. In the 19th century the argument was that the West had to intervene to stop slavery and end subhuman practices like cannibalism. Now it is to stop genocide.

A lesson from history might be that the threat of future war is more likely to come from Western adventures in the Third World than the other way around.