Was World War I the start of ‘warfare as pest control’? According to Professor Niall Ferguson, as World War I progressed, the British began to view the Germans as aliens and vermin, even though the two nations had a great deal in common ethnically. This, Ferguson says, was the start of ‘warfare as pest control’.Do you agree with this? Compare the 'new' and traditional chronology of the last century at War of the World
I would say personal ambition, envy and despotism were the main causes of the two world wars. Both wars started by Germany, with despots being head of state. If a democratic government had triumphed in Germany, then I doubt WWII would have happened.
Historian Professor Niall Ferguson says, 'There were not, he says, two world wars and a ‘cold’ war, but a single Hundred Years' War.
The programme just reheated an old argument. His hypothesis is very naive - Empires fall, leave a vacuum that's filled by nationalism which leads to ethnic cleansing as the majority dispose of the minority. The rearrangement of the chairs (states)only made worse what was already happening before the Empires. They played off nationalities against each other within their borders for decades as any reading of history will show.
Further, his argument takes no account of the rise of new Empires in Japan and the USA (both getting only a passing mention).
I realise that this is a "populist" history of the 20th Century but that should not mean it is shallow and one dimensional.
I was really disappointed with this. While I admire Ferguson for attempting to come up with a broad new approach to viewing 20th Century world history, the detail of the argument didn't really support anything new. None of it was as radical as it claims to be - the history presented (in terms of names, dates, events, etc.) was nothing new, and it wasn't even closely related to his broader argument.
Even then he seemed to confuse and conflate race, ethnicity and nationality, and he simply focused on empires instead of the great powers that ran them. Yet it was telling that he came back to class and nationalism on a number of occasions. I'm not saying this should be as simplistic as saying it was one thing or the other, but that appears to be what Ferguson is doing. Maybe the argument will develop with further shows, but the first episode was hardly an incentive to watch the second.
Was WWI the start of warfare as pest control? I don't even know what that's supposed to mean, but it was hardly the first time that opposing sides at war had portrayed the other as inferior, barbaric or vermin.
As for the chronologies, that's a real straw man. It's been a good few decades (if ever) since anyone argued that a chronology (let alone a history) of the 20th century should be based solely around the dates that Kings, Prime Ministers and Presidents came to power.
"Historian Professor Niall Ferguson says, 'There were not, he says, two world wars and a ‘cold’ war, but a single Hundred Years' War." Why is this theory being touted as a bold new rethink about the 20th Century?
"as World War I progressed, the British began to view the Germans as aliens and vermin, even though the two nations had a great deal in common ethnically."
Yes, the perfidious British should have been thinking about racial fellowship, rather than the meat-grinder in Flanders which German imperial ambitions had unleashed.
Of what is Mr Ferguson a professor exactly? Surely not history! His arguments reek of a superficiality that goes far beyond the necessity of reducing information to fit into an hour-long tv presentation. We hear of dumbing-down in the classroom but I cannot imagine the rot had risen so far. Indeed, I think there will be many an academic historian open-mouthed aghast after yet more of these ignorant ponderings.
In Professor Ferguson's world, countries and motives are stuffed into large envelopes marked with titles such as America, Japan and Germany. And who could fail to notice the absence of one labelled France as the prosecution of appeasement continued with the Britain envelope as the only apparent defendant? By this gaping omission, every assertion that Ferguson made over appeasement was rendered worthless.
Who and what was to blame for the war? Surely, it was the supine weakness of the western powers, argues the prof, while fiddling with a dusty copy of The Times to prove that the British establishment was both sympathetic to the nazis and antisemitic bedfellows - remaining fully silent about the failure of german resistance to counter nazification or any other relevant point. Oh, and the Depression. In America it produced Roosevelt, in Germany it produced Hitler because... er, slurred-reason-nothing-substantial-to-support-the-point-whatever-the-point-was-in-the-first-place.
When did the second world war start? 1937, says the bringer of wisdom, immune to nuance and interested only in the fighting - forgetting in the moment that his whole theory is predicated on a 100 year continuum. Yes, prurience, the hallmark of poor scholarship, was in much evidence again as Ferguson toured european sites where traces of victims might be visited - failing entirely to solicit a local word from any who might represent those who were destroyed.
"warfare as pest control"? Soundbite scholarship. This is the final proof that Professor Ferguson is no substitute for the worthwhile study of modern history.
I tend to agree, the programme is one of the more extreme versions of the current style of TV history programmes where the "talking head" is filmed walking down the street of some exotic location speaking a piece to camera where the background is more of a distraction rather than an illustration to what he is saying (Richard Holmes' "In Churchill's Footsteps" on another channel last year was a similar example of this kind of "airport lounge" lecture).Was it really necessary to fly Professor Fergusson to Shanghai which currently bears no relation to the city as it was in the 1930s? I don't think so. Also so much of the budget must have been spent on Professor Fergusson's travel expenses that the producers were short of archive material and had to rely on clips from Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series designed as propaganda for US troops going out to the front for the first time. Although they are interesting with their rather crude maps and cartoon figures the commentary, which can sometimes be heard between Professor Fergusson's brogue, actually contradicts what he is trying to argue.
The argument that WWII "began" in China in 1937 is rather misleading. WWII is rather like The Seven Years' War (1756-63) in that it was a number of separate conflicts that merged together over time because of the nature and interests of the protagonists involved. The conflict in Asia and the conflict in Europe only became part and parcel of the same conflict when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbour (and simultaneously British possessions in SE Asia) in December 1941 and Hitler declared war on the USA four days later. Just because conflict had broken out somewhere else did not mean that the causes, or even the starting point, of the conflict lay elsewhere. The Seven Years' War did not start in Ohio in 1753 (requiring it to be renamed the Ten Years' War, presumably) but with Frederick the Great's seizure of Silesia (another case of a German invasion of Poland triggering a world war, but in this case with Britain in support). The European conflict absorbed the pre-existing extra-European conflicts, not the other way round, because of the interests of the major combatant. It is not simply because of a "Euro-centric" view of history or racial bias on the part of traditional historians.
You could equally make the argument that WWII started in Africa in 1935 with Mussolini's attack on Abyssinia (now Ethiopia & Eritrea) rather than in China two years later (Addis Ababa was the first capital to be liberated from the control of the Axis in March 1941). It certainly emboldened Hitler and convinced him that Britain & France did not have the stomach to fight, as well as breaking up the Stresa Front of Britain, France & Italy set up after the failed Nazi coup in Austria in 1934 designed to restrain Germany and driving Mussolini firmly into Hitler's embrace. However Professor Fergusson chose not to mention the African origins of WWII at all. Racial bias, perhaps? (I'm being ironic, here).
He also subscribed to the traditional Churchillian thesis that WWII (at least the European part of it) was avoidable had British policy-makers taken different decisions and adopted a firm line with Hitler even as late as the Munich Conference of 1938. Whilst this may contain a considerable amount of truth it nevertheless undermines his central thesis that we have endured almost a century of unbroken inter-national as well as intra-national conflict because of the break-up of the multi-ethnic empires caused by WWI. How could WWII have been avoided by a few men taking different decisions in respect of an aberrant leader of a rogue state if it was merely part of an inexorable process that had begun a quarter of a century earlier?
I thought his section on the Soviet Union in the inter-war period was appropriate and his argument that Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany were two sides of the same totalitarian coin rather than polar opposites as the left and the Tory Right both believed well put. However again it undermined his thesis that the economic collapse which started in the USA in 1929 (although Britain & France did not enjoy a post-war boom and their depression was simply exacerbated by the Wall treet Crash) caused the rise of totalitarianism. Apart from a brief period between March-November 1917, which was anyway hedged by wartime restrictions, the Soviet Union and its predecessor, Russia, had never been a democracy in any legitimate sense. Nor had its empire been broken up. Because of the Western Allies' defeat of Germany the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March 1918 (which would have broken up the Russian Empire) was largely nullified and the Russian Empire survived mostly intact (with the exceptions of Finland, Poland and the the Baltic States- the latter two of which were later reabsorbed) and reemerged as the Soviet Union ruled by "Red" as opposed to "White" Czars. Russian history and policy (particularly of the Stalinist period) is much more understandable if 1917 is viewed as a change of nomenclature rather than as a discontinuity. Stalin's policy of Russification and ethnic cleansing was thus a continuation, on a much more intense level admittedly, of previous Czarist policy dating back to ther Empire's foundations. It was not the result of the collapse of the Empire.
I haven't seen most of the first programme which is still on tape although I have watched the last section. It should be pointed out that the two great deliberate genocides of this century (in Europe at least)- the massacre of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915 (with German assistance) and the attempted extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in WWII- were both done in wartime it is true but by totalitarain regimes that were not at the point of collapse but which were exploiting existing ethnic tensions to bolster support. The defeat of both the Ottoman Empire in WWI and Nazi Germany in WWII reduced, rather than increased, the possibility of similar genocides occurring in their previous domains.
I liked his piece on how Turkey had been turned from a multi-ethnic into a relatively heteregeneous state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by the means of ethnic cleansing particularly aimed at Christians of Greek origin (although other groups too). Perhaps Muslims should be reminded of this when they seem to regard themselves as the sole victims of ethnic cleansing in the C20. Perhaps if, instead of absorbing the Turkish-Greeks into the domestic population, the Greek government had housed those expelled from Turkey in refugee camps for sixty years the world might have been more concerned about their plight.
To avoid further corrections, the word in the last paragraph of my posting above relating to Turkey after 1922 should, of course, read "homogeneous" not "heterogeneous" (had it been spelt properly!) which of course means precisely the opposite. Many apologies.
Originally posted by Holdtheline: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Bellieus: Both wars started by Germany, with despots being head of state.
I'm sure the treaty of Versailles and the extreme reperations laid on Germany after the first world war played a part in the start of the second.
Versailles wasn't that extreme, in fact it was positively lenient. The Germans lost a relatively small amount of land, part of which they had taken from the French in 1871 anyway and were forced to pay some reparations. What did they expect after starting and then losing a war that cost millions of lives? The Germans would have exacted a much harsher settlement if they had won.
Certainly in comparison to ww2 the settlement at Versailles was extremely generous to Germany and possibly a harsher settlement maybe involving the break up and prolonged occupation of Germany would have prevented ww2.
I totally agree. In fact the Germans did in fact levy a far harsher settlement including reparations, against the Soviet Union, the successor state of Imperial Russia, at Brest Litovsk in March 1918, the territorial provisions of which were only nullified by virtue of the Allied victory in the West the following November. Germany had also imposed reparations on France following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 despite the fact that the German Confederation had invaded France, not the other way around, and that therefore most of the damage was done in France. If the "harsh" settlement of Versailles in 1919 was a cause of WWII then the equally harsh peace imposed at Versailles in 1871 must rank as a cause of WWI (although, of course, Germany declared war on France in 1914, not the other way round).
Germany stopped paying any reparations after 1930, three years before Hitler came to power and until 1929 received more in grants and loans from the USA than she paid out in reparations to Britain and France. Consequently, Germany, like the USA, experienced a post-war boom that lasted until 1929 which Britain & France didn't and the cost of WWI to them was consequently much greater.
The Versailles settlement also does not explain why Italy and Japan who fought on the Allied side in WWI and benefitted from Versailles- Japan receiving the Marianas Islands from Germany and Italy receiving the South Tyrol, a largely German-speaking enclave, from Austria (which, of course, Hitler never claimed from Mussolini)- should swap sides in WWII. The problem of Versailles was not that it was too harsh but that its provisions, particularly relating to disarmament, were never properly enforced and Germany was allowed to rearm, art first covertly, then openly and finally with Allied sanction (as with the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 which directly contradicted the Versailles Treaty). Churchill once wrote that "the redress of the grievances of the vanquished should precede the disarmament of the victors". This was what precisely did not happen for most of the inter-war period as both Britain and France ran down their military establishments whilst Germany rebuilt hers. This resulted in the tragedy of full-scale war in Europe for the second time in successive generations.
I have just watched the latest episode of this series and was appalled to hear Ferguson repeat the the Soviet propaganda that in some of the Eastern European countries conquered by the Nazis the local population started to kill jews before the Nazis arrived. Such slurs were invented by the Soviet propaganda machine to discredit the local populations in the immediate post war period and sadly even historians like Ferguson still accept these fabrications as fact.
I think it's an interesting notion and alternate reading of the 20th Century - though genocide and racial superiority occurred before, e.g the Romans, the Conquistadors, or those who went to America and slayed thousands of Native Americans. The films 'Rabbit Proof Fence' and 'The Proposition' touched on a blend of the imperial and racial too...but Prof. Ferguson has made an extremely coherent reading of that century - even if I have a sneaking suspicion that it plays against the defence of empire Johann Hari accused him of in The Independent (I think Ferguson's response wiped the floor with his view , which suggests you shouldn't mess with an academic!).
I'm not sure how the ethic/racial angle will work after World War II - U.S. hegemony, which dominated the latter part of the 20th Century, wasn't/isn't constructed from racial superority. It's more to do with capitalist dominance and a moral superiority...am not sure race is there, but perhaps nation is? Pol Pot's actions in Cambodia saw no value in the population, so not sure if the thesis works - though I guess there is a sense that the Vietnamese were worthless compared to Americans? Obviously Israel should feature...so will wait and see where this goes...perhaps the advance of certain technologies aligned themselves to urges of mass-genocide?
"See you on doomsday!"- Sadegh Hedayat's suicide note
Originally posted by Lett328: I have just watched the latest episode of this series and was appalled to hear Ferguson repeat the the Soviet propaganda that in some of the Eastern European countries conquered by the Nazis the local population started to kill jews before the Nazis arrived. Such slurs were invented by the Soviet propaganda machine to discredit the local populations in the immediate post war period and sadly even historians like Ferguson still accept these fabrications as fact.
No it's true - this happened. A lot of Russians were anti-communist and thought with the Nazis (as did peoples of many nations, e.g. Croatia, Lithuana, France-under-Vichy, Italy etc). I'd point you to the recent reworked 'Nazis: A Warning from History' by Lawrence Rees, who points out this kind of mass-murder from locals who were not Nazis...
"See you on doomsday!"- Sadegh Hedayat's suicide note
I totally agree. In fact the Germans did in fact levy a far harsher settlement including reparations, against the Soviet Union, the successor state of Imperial Russia, at Brest Litovsk in March 1918, the territorial provisions of which were only nullified by virtue of the Allied victory in the West the following November.
The main reason why Brest-Litovsk looks harsher than Versailles on the map is because Russia was a multi-ethnic empire rather than a nation-state, and it was therefore easier to come up with pretexts to deprive it of territory. Austria-Hungary, more multi-ethnic still, suffered an even worse carve-up in the Treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon.
If the "harsh" settlement of Versailles in 1919 was a cause of WWII then the equally harsh peace imposed at Versailles in 1871 must rank as a cause of WWI (although, of course, Germany declared war on France in 1914, not the other way round).
The 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt forced France to pay reparations and cede Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. It did NOT interfere with French domestic policy. It did NOT impose restrictions on French armed forces. It did NOT require France to demilitarize any territory. It did NOT confiscate any French colonies, or any French property in Germany. It did NOT carve separatist states out of French territory, which would include large numbers of Frenchmen against the will and thus only exist with German support. It did NOT force France to admit responsibility for the war, and it did NOT attempt to extradite Napoleon III to be tried by a German kangaroo court.
If Frankfurt was excessively harsh, then what of Versailles?
Originally posted by Sunnyblink: Certainly in comparison to ww2 the settlement at Versailles was extremely generous to Germany and possibly a harsher settlement maybe involving the break up and prolonged occupation of Germany would have prevented ww2.
Stalin in 1945 could solve the German problem by carving out an East German puppet state, kept down by a permanent 20-division army of occupation, plus the Stasi. Britain and France in 1919 were exhausted by war and didn't have that sort of power once they demobilized and would have to do the job with only their peacetime armed forces.
Occupation on it own cannot change a people's attitudes. If it could, then Radical Reconstruction of the post-Civil War American South would have succeeded. The only reason post-WWII denazification worked is because the West Germans couldn't possibly turn against the Western Allies without tossing themselves into Stalin's jaws.
Originally posted by Lett328: I have just watched the latest episode of this series and was appalled to hear Ferguson repeat the the Soviet propaganda that in some of the Eastern European countries conquered by the Nazis the local population started to kill jews before the Nazis arrived. Such slurs were invented by the Soviet propaganda machine to discredit the local populations in the immediate post war period and sadly even historians like Ferguson still accept these fabrications as fact.
No it's true - this happened. A lot of Russians were anti-communist and thought with the Nazis (as did peoples of many nations, e.g. Croatia, Lithuana, France-under-Vichy, Italy etc). I'd point you to the recent reworked 'Nazis: A Warning from History' by Lawrence Rees, who points out this kind of mass-murder from locals who were not Nazis...
It is true that the Nazis ensured that the local population, albeit very small numbers, were involved in the mass killings as Heydrich issued a specific order to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen to involve the locals in such a way that they could not later deny. However, this is very different to Ferguson's assertion, and a fictitious conversation in the film "Conspiracy" about the 1942 Wannsee Conference, that even before the Nazis arrived jews were being killed by the locals. Without Nazi orders there would have been no killing of jews and there were no "spontaneous" pogroms although the Nazi cameramen tried to show this on the few occasions such treatment was attempted.
Brilliant scholar. Ferguson has a heroic and masterful physique. Unsurpassed insights and observations. A joy and genuine honour to witness this triumph of broadcasting.
That seems to work okay... but the other one doesn't. Hmmm.
Originally posted by GCarty: The 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt forced France to pay reparations and cede Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. It did NOT interfere with French domestic policy. It did NOT impose restrictions on French armed forces. It did NOT require France to demilitarize any territory. It did NOT confiscate any French colonies, or any French property in Germany. It did NOT carve separatist states out of French territory, which would include large numbers of Frenchmen against the will and thus only exist with German support. It did NOT force France to admit responsibility for the war, and it did NOT attempt to extradite Napoleon III to be tried by a German kangaroo court.
If Frankfurt was excessively harsh, then what of Versailles?
The Treaty of Frankfurt did prohibit France from imposing tariffs on many German goods and by annexing Alsace-Lorraine which included the great fort of Metz the Rhine became almost exclusively a German river and lost its value as a natural frontier, reducing France's ability to defend herself.
Apart from ceding Alsace-Lorraine (which, as in WWII, was never properly incorporated into Germany anyway) back to France and losing the relatively insignificant territory of Malmedy to Belgium (which was no great loss as it was full of Belgians anyway) Germany got away relatively lightly as far as her western frontier was concerned under Versailles in 1919. The chief loss of territory was in the East with the creation of Poland and the Polish corridor. However this did not become an issue until much later and even Hitler recognised the Polish frontier in his treaty with Poland in 1934.
True, the Rhineland was occupied until 1930 (although the period was reduced by five years) although this was originally linked, like a similar German occupation of French border areas after 1871, to payment of reparations. The difference was that the French paid promptly after 1871, the Germans didn't after 1919 even resorting to wrecking their own economy through inflation to avoid coughing up.
I don't know what you mean about carving out separatist states- the Versailles Treaty did no such thing. It is arguable whether the French encouraged Rhineland separatist movements during their occupation but such a ploy failed to work and the British had no desire to see Germany split up following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The whole notion of reparations payments is an acknowledgement of responsibility for the war. France had declared war on Germany (Prussia) in 1870 (although it is arguable how far she was proked by the Ems Telegram). Both Napoleon III and Wilhelm II went into exile to countries which had been neutral and never returned to their native lands. It is difficult to see how either could have been tried. "Hang the Kaiser!" made a very good slogan in the 1918 British General Election but it was never seriously pursued by the Allies.
As far as the disarmament provisions the truth is not that they were too harsh but that they were never properly enforced. The Jewish Armaments Minister, Rathenau (later murdered by the Nazis) and the Army Chief, Von Seeckt, began a secret rearmament programme almost before the signature on Versailles was dry. Under secret clauses of the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 (thus setting a precedent for secret clauses to German-Soviet agreements) German forces were allowed to train on Soviet territory. German rearmament was in full swing even before Hitler came to power.
After the shock of the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 (when the French followed the 1871 precedent and occupied territory to enforce reparations payments) Britain put pressure on France to modify the Versailles settlement. It was here that the policy of appeasement was born. This resulted in the Teaty of Locarno in 1925 in which Germany accepted her borders and in return was admitted to the League of Nations. The Dawes Plan in 1924 and the Young Plan in 1930 substantially reduced Germany's reparations payments and a change of government in France which saw the emergence of Aristide Briand as Foreign Minister saw a spirit of reconciliation with his oposite number in Berlin, Gustav Stresemann, which was only renewed after WWII with the Schumann Plan that led to the creation of the Coal and Steel Community and later to what is now the EU.
There was no such spirit of reconciliation after 1871 when relations between France and Germany merely went from bad to worse. The "spirit of Locarno" was dashed by the onset of economic depression and the rise of the Nazis to power. Appeasement may well have worked had the Weimar Republic remained. Once Hitler was in power the policy was fundamentally misconceived. German expansion began not by rectifying Versailles but by annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia, areas which had never been part of the German Reich between 1871-1919 on the dubious notion that all German-speakers should belong to the same state, a claim that even Bismarck had scoffed at.
In the end neither Frankfurt 1871 or Versailles 1919 could be said to have had much effect on the following conflicts. In 1914 Germany declared war on France not vice versa (as in 1870 & 1939) and the war was about repelling a foreign invader. WWII was more about Germany's attempt to reinstate Brest-Litovsk rather than reverse Versailles.
Originally posted by Lett328: I have just watched the latest episode of this series and was appalled to hear Ferguson repeat the the Soviet propaganda that in some of the Eastern European countries conquered by the Nazis the local population started to kill jews before the Nazis arrived. Such slurs were invented by the Soviet propaganda machine to discredit the local populations in the immediate post war period and sadly even historians like Ferguson still accept these fabrications as fact.
Fergusson was right to point out the mass deportation of Jews from the Soviet sector of Poland, as well as from the Soviet Union itself, to Siberia in 1940, most of whom never returned, partly to please Hitler and partly to indulge Stalin's own anti-semitism.
