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Rob Weatherill
posted 21 November 2006

In this panoramic study of the principal conflicts of the 20th century, centred on World War Two, 'the greatest man-made catastrophe', Ferguson argues that economic instability, overlaid upon failing imperial ambitions and ethnic tensions, provoked most of the great killings. The pursuit of racial or political homogeneity during the last century became the great cause for mass slaughter. This was foreseen by HG Wells in his celebrated War of the Worlds (1898) a work which is emblematic for Ferguson, a 'Darwinian morality tale', except that it wasn't aliens from Mars that would really do the killing, but humans who would become alien to each other.

The war of the world ended, says Ferguson, in July 1953, when the Korean war petered out. Thereafter, new economic stability and a huge rise in prosperity combined with the strategic stability of the Cold War to bring an end to the great wars in Europe, but not in the Third World where 'hot' wars continued by proxy. Many of the ethnic minorities whose predicaments had helped provoke conflict earlier in the century had either been destroyed, transferred or partitioned. President Kennedy said of Germany's partition: 'A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.'

Ethnic cleansing, Ferguson's central theme, is behind every modern conflict. Racism, he notes, came relatively late into history. German anti-semitism, according to Ferguson, 'was an extreme case of a general (though by no means universal) phenomenon.' The racist worldview, according to Ferguson, is a successful 'meme' replicating itself across the world during the 20th century. Add to ethnicity the notion of the 'nation state' after 1800, and the likelihood of conflict increases with racial minorities suffering discrimination, even extermination, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Like Dawkins' selfish gene, the formidable cultural idea becomes, what could be called a selfish meme. In a recent Guardian article Ferguson suggests that it is a 'virus of the mind'. Diverging from memes theory, he even suggests that kin-preference is hard-wired into human nature and therefore not culturally propagated, not merely an 'idea' or ideology. (Hence, Ferguson never explores the critical role of the media in fomenting violent conflict.) Instead, he claims, it is instinct for us to fear and hate other humans who are genetically different. Breeding with strangers is a bad strategy if we want our genes to prosper. This is simply not true biologically.

So why is it that, throughout the world in the 20th century, people turned on their neighbours with such ferocity? De-humanisation became common: the suddenness with which people could be cast as 'aliens' was alarming. During the Armenian genocide of 1912-13, the Turks coined a description for the Armenians: 'dog food'. When Japanese soldiers entered Nanking in 1938, the 20,000 Chinese women they raped were considered less than human. As one soldier explained: 'We felt no shame about it. No guilt.' Through the classification of the enemy as inhuman, they all became fair game.

Ferguson gives much analytical weight to the concept of 'hatred', yet never really tells us what it is. Instead, he relies on the vague idea that hatred is one of humanity`s innate instincts. Economic volatility is one important trigger, as it was in the former Yugoslavia. Ferguson's thesis is more controversial in the context of sexualised violence. He is entirely psychoanalytic when he suggests that the destructive instinct is intrinsically tied to the sexual impulse. Sexual violence directed against enemies was inspired by 'erotic, albeit sadistic, fantasies as much as by "eliminationist" racism', he asserts. Bloodlust and rape go together: 'the twin urge to rape and murder remains repressed in civilised society. It is only when civilisation breaks down or is broken down, as it was in Bosnia and Rwanda, that the urge is unleashed.' What he calls the 'metastasising of violence' (which spreads and augments itself through time like cancer) requires the politicisation of ethnic difference via economic volatility and imperial ambition. The worst time for an empire is when it is weakening and breaking down, as it is then that rebellions start and have to be extinguished brutally, to avoid the perception of weakness. This had already been rehearsed, he suggests, in the 19th century by Qing China's death throes.

At base, all conflict is internecine. Perhaps Ferguson agrees in part with Spengler, who argued that the 'new Caesars', 'reawakening the powers of the blood' would launch a war on the 'rationalism of the Megalopolis'. Spengler argued that while the 19th century had been dominated by materialism, parliamentarianism, socialism and money, in the 20th century, 'blood and instinct' would regain their rights. 'The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them'. However, set against this appalling vista of Spengler, the improving statistic that, since the 1980s, warfare has decreased by 60% and in the last three years, 12 wars have ended.

Modernity is mentioned on the fly-leaf of Ferguson's book, but is not referred to in the index or in the text. The notion that modernity is about 'making it all anew,' about destruction, about the nihilism of the city, reification and atomisation; none of this is mentioned. However, the 20th century's vogue for what Ferguson calls the 'empire state' comes close. Uniquely, the empire state developed a passion for uniformity, stripping away local and imperial law, religion, tradition. It made a virtue of increasing ruthlessness and industrial efficiency, willing to make war on whole categories of people. These new so-called empires were short lived, a few decades, and the Third Reich was the shortest and most brutal, lasting at most 12 years. By comparison, the old empires, lasted centuries and were comparatively benign and multicultural, maintaining a loosely globalised economy up until the early 1900s.

Psychoanalysis and the theory of the death drive*, to which Ferguson briefly refers late in the book, show that civilisation divides us. Civilised selves are divided selves, discontented, anxious and confused in their dividedness, especially, for example, when Freud himself was writing, during the waning of the Hapsburgs. Fanatical ideologies attempt to undo that anxious civilised complexity of modern life, where nothing is ever complete, nothing is pure or certain, calling us instead to the totally regressive allure of un-dividedness, absolute strength through the pure simplicity of destructive violence and genocide linked to the Cause. Then humans can morph into pure instruments of terrifying violence. In the first instance, against Ferguson, this has nothing to do with genes or memes, or with our so-called 'animal' or biological nature. Animals never kill in such large numbers. Instead, it has everything to do with the anomie, or alienation, confusion and uncertainty within failing or economically unstable civilisations. George Bataille emphasised that civilisations periodically explode into violence, returning to a sacrificial logic, which he referred to as the Sacred - no more divided selves in this orgy of destruction, but intense singularities. Any work that attempts to 'explain' the extreme brutality that Ferguson depicts for us, is doomed, in a sense, to failure, because this phenomenon is beyond civilisation, therefore beyond our means of description and understanding.

*The reviewer is the author of two books on Freud's theory of the death drive. See Criticalpsychoanalysis.com.