(I) THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN HISTORY
Aurelius Augustinus was a Berber from Numidia. His mother was a Christian and he was a conscientious intellectual particularly interested in theology, ethics, and history. For a time he lived in Carthage and fathered an illegitimate child. His life was not saintly but he was not a notably immoral person. He was attracted to Manicheism, the doctrine begotten in Persia that existence is a struggle between the forces of good and of evil. Moved by the eloquence of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, Augustinus, better known as Augustine or St. Augustine (354-430), converted to Christianity. He lived in the time when the Roman Empire was beginning to collapse. Imperial authority had cracked in the Balkans and along the Rhine borderlands. As Rome was still the center of the world-Augustine knew nothing of the Chinese Empire, whose fate anyway at that time was not very reassuring either-the times must have seemed like the coming of the end. And in a sense they were. The Vandals, a tribal people from the furthermost reaches of Germania, lands on which Roman legions never even gazed, traversed Gaul and Hispania, by then invaded by Franks, Burgundians, and Goths. They crossed over to northern Africa and besieged the city of Hippo, where Augustine had been elected bishop as the culmination of an austere, saintly, and extaordinarily productive life. For Augustine these disheartening events were evidence that he was right in considering the history of the world as a rotten appendage of the City of God. If history had any meaning, it did so only insofar as it permitted humanity to understand that it was meaningless and that its only significance lay in its conclusion and the triumph of Christ over all the rulers of the Earth. Augustine had so few illusions about his fellow men that he named his own successor because he knew "how churches are usually disturbed after the death of their bishops by ambitious and quarrelsome men". He died during the siege of his see by the Vandals.
During the period of Western history known as the Enlightenment, an European cultural phenomenon known in French as l'illustration and in German as Aufklarung, the more influential intellectuals were less literal-minded about the Bible than Augustine. Important advances had been made in mathematics. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) had formulated certain natural laws that explained how objects fall and how they do so at a constant, incremental rate despite differences in weight. Although it was Galileo who posed the question, Newton's answer would have struck a reasonable person as counter-intuitive. One can grasp relativity by observing with the naked eye at a distance how airplanes flying at the same speed seem to land or take off at faster or slower speeds depending on their sizes. That such impressions should merit serious consideration makes Newton's absolutist reasoning all the more surprising. The astonishing thing was that it explained why and how planets moved around the sun the way Copernicus (1473-1543) and Kepler (1571-1630) had claimed they did. The universe, in sum, made sense beyond appearances, and even though there were lots more stars than planets, it was to be assumed that if certain points in heaven obeyed the laws of gravity there was no reason to suppose the rest did not do likewise. If the universe was rational, then obviously some intelligence had designed it and it was only natural to assume that God existed. There was a little difficulty here. Natural laws did not leave room for waywardness and as humans were part of nature-even a Christian thinker such as Descartes described living bodies as machines-then all the prayers in the world could not move God one whit to change the natural order of things. This belief was called deism and as it was not atheism and its root was "deus" (god in Latin), it could be tolerated. Deism in brief was as close to atheism as you could get without landing in jail or worse. History on the other hand did not bear out the orderliness and rationality that scientists found in nature and in the heavens. But the human brain was too resourceful to be foiled by such a piffling argument.
Like Augustine, George Wilhelm Fredrick Hegel (1770-1831) was very much the high-minded, above-the-fray intellectual. Many writers have led extremely exciting, even adventurous lives. Rimbaud, for instance, is considered a revolutionary poet in French literature. He died young after being for a time a gun-runner in the Red Sea, which means he night have contributed to the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adowa. Most intellectuals are closer to clockwork-like Kant. Hegel was no exception. He was in his native Germany during the Napoleonic occupation and he tended to move about a bit. But except for a brief, unhappy time he devoted to journalism, he was mostly a professor, an extremely successful one, especially in Berlin, the capital of Prussia. There was much to admire in Prussia. It was a supremely well-organized kingdom. It was spotlessly clean and Prussians from the Junkers down to the lowliest peasants were hard-working and law-abiding. Prussia was created through a complex process from a German march to a margravate to a duchy to an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire and finally to a kingdom in its own right. Hegel believed and taught that all of reality, and history especially, was imbued by what he called the Absolute (in German, like all nouns, it is capitalized). The Absolute included a dialectical logic whose basic synthesis was in the becoming between the thesis of being and the antithesis of nothingness. Epistemology and history followed this pattern. Knowledge could only be attained as part of a reality which included truth and error. Knowledge and reality were necessarily reciprocal. The Absolute was in the dialectical historical becoming. Spirit was the synthesis of the soul and consciousness. Only Absolute Spirit could understand the Absolute, which achieved the "merger" between knowledge and being that was the essence of philosophy. Absolute Spirit discovered the Absolute in history as manifest in law and particularly in the state. As it was philosophy that permitted this absolute knowledge of the Absolute Spirit, it was itself the Absolute. Factually, Hegel knew what there was to know in Europe then about India and China. Unlike Goethe, who marveled at the ingenuity and vastness of Chinese literature, all that Hegel saw in the East was immobility and stagnation, or what Tennyson called the "cycle of Cathay". And unlike Augustine, Hegel argued that history has meaning and that its realization was right here on earth and it had a strong resemblance to the Prussian state. Since Hegel believed that the superiority of the West over the East had to do with the inevitable becoming of history in consonance with the dialectic that was the "mechanism" of the Absolute and could only be understood by Absolute Spirit, the Hegelian dialectic was idealistic, part of the general German philosophical movement called idealism, although qualitatively its most complex and systemic and impressive exposition. Despite the abstractness of concepts such as Absolute and Spirit, Hegel was more down-to-earth than other German idealists. German idealism is not to be confused with the idealism of the British philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) according to whom belief in the reports of the senses is a matter of faith. German idealism was the even more radical claim that ideas are more important than things. For Plato, incidentally, ideas were "things".
To Karl Marx (1818-1883), a virulently anti-Semitic grandson of a German rabbi, German idealism was hypocritical hogwash which could only be entertained by people who, as Brecht put it, could count on having "their customary dinner". Marx was an assiduous student of Hegel's work. He admitted that his social philosophy came to him when he "stood Hegel's dialectic on its head", by which he meant that far from ideas being what determined history economic forces determined both history and ideas. His philosophy is known as dialectical materialism. Marx was a smug, self-righteous, tyrannical, and vindictive man, apart of course from having some claim on being considered a genius. On the subject of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), the German gradualist socialist leader, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), Marx's disciple and life support, once wrote to Marx that he was "a greasy Jew" which was perfectly alright because Marx had already called Lassalle a "Jewish nigger". Lassalle, incidentally, had no problem admitting Marx's influence. He was usually very realistic and practical, except when he went and challenged a rival for a woman’s love and was killed in the duel. Marx's greatest fits of indignation, kept on a tight lead in his scholarly works, were over the capitalist system in which, according to him, a few exploiters robbed the workers of their labour, the only source of value and their only possession, and reduced them to living like animals while their employers claimed that such inequities were justly sanctioned by law, government, and religion. That economics can be dismal is something that has troubled and will surely always trouble many consciences. England being at the time the most advanced capitalist country in the world, the most exploited workers, according to the Marxist canon, had to be English, but they snubbed Marx and his ideas, who hated them back for their indifference although the only place he found congenial to his pursuits was London. A part-Kalmuck (Oirat Mongol) Russian did find Marx brilliant and persuasive. He himself, Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov , was an orator and a politician non-pareil. As Lenin, he led the Russian masses in taking over the republican government that had overthrown Tsarism. Marx, who supported the hopeless Parisian Commune to its bitter end, would surely have backed Lenin in trying to introduce communism to Russia, the European country least prepared to adopt it according to strict Marxist theory. It is impossible to say whether he would have supported Stalin in the oppressive regime he established in the USSR. But it is possible to apply to Stalin various of the personal qualities that we attributed before to Marx. This is carrying speculation to the barely acceptable and it isn't the point we wish to make anyway, which is that history is always in need of justification and society can always be changed for the better. On both counts, that is what Marx wanted to do. That it turned out differently only reinforces our main argument.
There have been many explanations and many intellectual palliatives for the obvious imperfections of history. Carl von Clausewitz, a solders' soldier if there ever was one, felt disgust at Cossack harassment of the stragglers of the Grande Armée with which Napoleon had thought to subject Russia (1812-1813). France was the home of Diderot (1713-1784), the prime mover of the Encyclopédie, whereas Russia was a backward despotism composed of serfs and a relative handful of Europeanizers. Napoleon probably thought that with an army of hundreds of thousands of veteran soldiers, he was invincible and would be doing civilization a service. When he occupied Moscow, what he gained were burning, denuded ruins-the Russian city was mostly built of wood-and Russian scorched-earth policy left his army without an immediate source of food. To save face, Napoleon stuck around for a month and then ordered a retreat, which turned into a panicky run. It wasn't really winter yet, but Russian autumns are cold and snowy. The Russians were on the heels of the French. As a patrotic Prussian, Clausewitz was attached to the Russian army. The Russians did not have to seek battle against an enemy in flight, so they let loose their meanest, most brutal, peasant troops on the French. These were the Cossacks. "Cossack" is hard to define. The term does not denote a race or a tribe, much less a nationality. Cossacks do not constitute a social class. "Cossack" comes from the Turkic word "kazakh" meaning bandit or marauder. The nearest approximate definition of a Cossack is a really big, particularly hardened mujik, who, if frequent descriptions of the Russian peasant in the past are valid, means that he was as close to the beast as a civilized person can be. But there did exist a prideful Cossack tradition which went back to the time when Russia, as Mongol power waned during the 15th century, was being constituted by the Rurik rulers of Moscow, descendants of the originally Swedish Varangians who had founded principalities along the Dnieper and the Volga rivers and in the process became themselves Slavicized. The Kingdom of Russia was constituted by appanages in the full sense of domain (votchinia) over land and souls. The prince was the possessor of the largest and most populous domain. The noble class was constituted by boyars and boyar rule after the historical experience of Mongol overlordship was not lenient. The lands between the Baltic and the Black seas were a fluid frontier which the pagan Lithuanians tried to occupy, but they were not numerous enough. To resist German "missionary" effort, which had previously resulted in the virtual extermination of the Slavic Wends and the Baltic Borussians (hence Prussia), Poles and Lithuanians (after the latter's conversion) formed a kingdom, but it had only a weak hold over the Ukraine. It was here, along the lower Dnieper river, that, while Moscow's rulers became stronger and the Boyar knout harsher, free peasants repaired and gathered into a nucleus of self-ruling, dense peasanthood, the most that they could manage in the way of political organization. It became known as Zaporozhye-today there is the city of Zaporizhia in the Ukraine-and its inhabitants as Cossacks. As there are no reports that Zaporozhye itself was torn by civil wars, it could be that social and economic conditions were not so bad.
Many Cossacks were only semi-sedentarized, perhaps the landless or the troublemakers, and they often hired themselves out as fighters to any neighboring kingdom. The Poles used Cossacks in large numbers against the Turks. When the Cossacks demanded recognition as a people from the Polish nobility, they were turned down, and repressed when they became aggressive. During the Times of Troubles (1605-1613), when Russia after Boris Godunov was torn by pretenders and Poles, Cossacks marched on Moscow and contributed to the general, bloody chaos. The Poles themselves were a rather unruly people, but Zaporozhye had two crucial weaknesses: it was not constituted as a state-basically what mujiks wanted was to till their plots of land-and it was in an area where Turks and Russians rivaled. By the late-18th century, the Russians were getting the best of it and Zaporozhye was absorbed and subjected despite the resistance of leaders such as Mazepa and Pugachev. By then also some of the same free, stubbornest of stubborn peasants had also settled in the Don basin and in the Kuban (northeastern hinterland of the Black sea). From the days when they could choose their masters, the Don and the Kuban Cossacks only retained some hereditary rights of self-rule, not much different from other Russian village councils. To make a soldier out of a Don or a Kuban Cossack took some doing, but, as this process conferred on these peasants the power to terrorize the citizenry when the authorities gave the nod, it usually worked. Cossacks were the scourge of civilians and whatever can be said of militias, such as the German SA or the Francoist Guardia Civil, pales next to what Cossacks could do. It was, then, these Cossack soldiers that Clausewitz saw in action against the starved, limping, frost-bitten remnants of the great French invasion force. What he observed was that they tracked their victims day and night and pounced when they were unawares or at exhaustion's end. But if the French still showed some martial discipline and turned on their attackers, even if they were much fewer in numbers, they usually could make them run. The Cossacks employed standard nomadic-terrorist tactics-although they were not nomads-but somehow these inspired in Clausewitz the famous dictum that, roughly, war is the continuation of politics by other means. How the sight of Cossacks massacring defenseless troops could induce such a rational deduction must be placed in another wide historical context, to which our previous allusion to Diderot is pertinent.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe, home by then to the most advanced civilization in the world, was beset by countless wars. All wars were for political power, but the excuses that were used for waging them, and which Voltaire (1694-1778), despite his acute intelligence, seemed to take seriously, involved important or seemingly important religious issues, minor and major dynastic conflicts and squabbles, and on one occasion at least the ear of an English sailor. The wars of religion were particularly intense in the Holy Roman Empire, a kingdom of Germans that never quite got organized and was fragmented into over 300 sovereignties (most of course very small), so they consisted in Christians killing Christians over religious beliefs. That, to thinkers of the Enlightenment, made as much sense as the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake in 1755. G.W. von Leibniz (1646-1716), a pre-Enlightenment philosopher and scientist, had the perfectly sound idea that, even though the world was flawed, on the whole it tended towards progress and could be in a much worse state than it was. Voltaire, who was a pen-pal of the talented flutist and composer Frederick Hohenzollern, made sport of Leibniz, even though he accepted residing at the court of his friend Frederick, who had become king of Prussia and had invaded Silesia without any provocation. The chain of warfare that ensued resulted in the dismemberment of Poland and particularly it cemented the Prussian militaristic tradition in which Clausewitz flourished. It was against this background of almost constant fighting between states that Clausewitz came up with his theory of war, the intention of which was to introduce some sense into the mayhem of history. Perhaps unwittingly, he was in this a follower of Leibniz and, in any event, after the Napoleonic wars, Europe-though not its American offshoots-entered a period of relative peace. There were major insurrections but only some minor international conflicts. The idea of progress was vibrantly alive. The occasional decadent did not share this rosy vision. The German playwright Frank Wedekind depicted a disgustingly degenerate version of human psychology. Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, climaxed in a scene of necrophilia. Wild-eyed Italian Futurists (many later recruited for fascism) were hysterical about the destructive potential of material progress. Then came World War I.
The conflict started with an act of terrorism, the assassination by a Serbian of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire. Up to the present and from the heyday of political assassinations in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, terrorism has been associated with social malcontents, particularly in the past with anarchism. Joseph Conrad, in his novel The Secret Agent, fixed the collective image of the terrorist as a sociopath bent on destruction, indifferent to the life of others, all for a hopeless or an indeterminate cause. The essence of terrorism consisted in wanton murderousness. Retouching this representation here and there, terrorism is what prevailed during World War I, but terrorism on such a monumental scale that only states were capable of mounting and carrying it out. The idea of progress was so sullied that J.B. Bury tried to discover where it had originated in the first place and a major philosopher, Martin Heidegger, gave up on technological civilization altogether. In a circuitous but unmistakable manner, Heidegger was to the Una-Bomber what Leibniz to Clausewitz. Paradoxically, Heidegger espoused Nazism, some say in part for academic advancement, in which he did not go far. He justified his Nazi past as, basically, a mistaken interpretation and he compared the extermination camps to the atomic bomb and other destructive manifestations of technological progress. Today he would have been a fanatic of organic farming. After World War II, terrorism reached the ultimate paroxysm with the strategic concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, aptly and better known by its initials, MAD, the bipolar nuclear strategy also defined as the "balance of terror".
The dislocation of schemes of world-historical interpretation, or more directly put, the utter savagery and chaos of world history, has devastating implications for ethics, which is about the concepts of right and wrong, their justification and application. On a social scale, ethics is pre-ordained by juridical systems. What is right and what is wrong are defined by laws. Societies care about justice only to the extent that laws define it and establish the procedural means by which laws are applied, quite indifferently to the substance of right and wrong. Extreme racism was enshrined in American legislation before the Warren Court began to tear it down. History constantly shows that for states might makes right, and this goes against the grain of ethics. If you believe in free will-quantum physics with its unpredictable energy leaps is the window of opportunity that science offers for this idea-then ethics is about how individuals should behave. If you are a determinist, ethics consists in societies instilling moral obligations in individuals, or failing to do so, in which case other "psychological forces" take over. In either case, ethics is about individuals. All individuals belong in states and are part of history. In the context of history, individual lives are absolutely meaningless. In their raids, Vikings assaulted and killed whom they could. Their victims were simply luckless. Sometimes luckless Vikings ended up pulling Moorish oars. At the battle of Lepanto thousands of Christian galley slaves were freed. Many more thousands remained and died in Turkish captivity. Whatever greatness the British navy had previously attained, it never scaled the glories to which Nelson led it. The intellectuals who founded the Parthenopean Republic (1799) in Naples had no reason to believe that progressive ideas were going to provoke in Nelson and his adulterous mistress Lady Hamilton such a white rage that they would all end up in the gallows. Lady Hamilton, whose name comes from her cuckolded ambassador husband, was not in the good graces of the British establishment and died in France from cirrhosis. The Filipino writer and physician Jose Rizal (1861-1896) was not a man of violence. His own cultural background was probably closer to that of the Spanish colonizers of his country than to that of the great majority of his own countrymen. When the colonial authorities increased their pressure on him, he volunteered to go to Cuba, in rebellion at the time, as a field doctor on the Spanish side. But when Rizal arrived in Barcelona, the authorities embarked him on a ship back to Manila where he was executed. Any suspicion that Rizal was fearful of dying is dispelled by the moving patriotic poem in impeccable Spanish which he wrote in his own steady hand hours before he stood in front of a firing squad. The emirate of Khiva was auctioning Russian serfs captured by Turkmen even as the Tsar's contingents were on the way to annex it. The "forbidden" kingdom of Tibet, which had absolutely no credible means of self-defence, was executing foreigners when the British, under Col. Francis Younghusband, were advancing on Lhasa to flush out inexistent Russians. German concentration and extermination camps were active to the end. And just prior to the fall of Kabul, the Taliban executed a hapless individual for the crime of being outspoken!
In the shadows of its arbitrariness world history has no consolations for the individual concern with ethics and justice. Injustice cannot be undone. One act of injustice suffices to undo the possibility itself of justice. History is rational because it is as subject as science to the principle of cause-and-effect, which is an empirical and not a logical principle. But if by "rational" we mean a fitting of things in a way that does not conflict with rational premises, then history is very irrational. If in a war, one of the sides has no chance of winning, then it is not rational, just because the war is still going on, to carry out atrocities which will not make a whit of difference to the outcome of the war. Fatal accidents are as much a part of reality as are earthquakes. Death can overtake us in many unforeseen ways. But when arbitrary death is caused within a presumably rational context, such as the maintenance of authority or the enforcement of laws, or even during warfare, even unprovoked and totally unjustified warfare, then history cannot be considered rational at all and talk of justice and progress is nonsense. But humanity cannot seem to shake off its desire to reconcile history and ethics. Most humans don't really care much about history, but all humans affirm some kind of "belief in history" by merely getting on with it. Whether they say so or not, individuals tacitly consider that history is not hopeless. Even historians partake of this attitude. They will cackle if the word justice is mentioned but they can spend a lifetime studying the political parties of a Latin American republic or the history of banking houses some of which will have gone bust before their chroniclers are done. This is by implication an affirmation of the ultimate rightness of things. Even those historians whose extreme commitment to specialization will not allow them to go beyond tortured phrases or statistical tables in order to avoid an ethical stance of any sort, will accept that it is possible to make balances of right and wrong within discrete historical periods. If we exclude his belief in the apocalypse, Augustine might have agreed with this, for he could hardly have made a moral equivalence between the rise of Christianity in Rome with the sack of Rome by Alaric. In addition, from a rigorously objective point of view, it would be very eccentric indeed to deny progress in our times, although, as we shall argue, progress can be illusory. In the space of a few decades, humanity as a whole has made such scientific and technological leaps that it does not take a seer to prognosticate that, for example, artificial intelligence or a qualitative jump in longevity are, in terms of the ages, around the corner. Presently, most progress leaves out the majority of Earth's population, but it is conceivable that it will eventually reach every corner of the world and every single human being. It could even be argued that somehow "might", in individual ethical terms the antithesis of "right", is "on the side" of humanity as a whole. It is a complex argument and it can only be made through the narration of history itself, which is what this book is about.
So why bother with palliatives and justifications and what not to make sense of history? Together with some Islamic near-theocracies or outright theocracies, Americans are singular among advanced nations in believing by a large majority in God and His benevolence. Occasionally mass deaths will trigger a strong reaction. In the wake of the extremely meticulous investigation of the explosion and crash in 1994 of a New York to Paris TWA flight near the southern shore of Long Island, the word "closure" entered the everyday vocabulary of Americans. It indicated some mysterious but alleviating psychological process or mechanism that reconciled the relatives of the victims to the insensate suddenness and shock of death. The thorough examination of the TWA crash in part responded to the suspicion that the tragedy had been caused by a "terrorist missile". As it turned out, the jetliner was downed by a freakish accident-sparks ignited vapors in the planes half-filled fuel tanks-that investigators had not come across before. In concrete terms, what closure meant was the recovery of identifiable body parts and their proper burial, which of course left no doubt whatever about the remote possibility of there being survivors. In the context of the massive swing of American society towards the application of the death penalty to certain categories of convicted murderers, the vague concept of closure was also applied in the case of the witnessing by relatives of victims to the execution of their killers. As many later have admitted, this spectacle did not really bring "closure" at all and the gap of grief was as unfilled by it as it had been when the criminal act had been discovered. "Closure" seemed to have only a relative consolatory effect. More likely it was a fairly ineffectual attempt to introduce some sort of compensation for the inherent unfairness of life, not unlike Clausewitz' effort to make some sense out of the savagery of war.
The inadequacies of closure became flagrant when, on September 11 of 2001, three hijacked airliners were crashed by Muslim fanatics: two against the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a third against one side of the Pentagon. The aesthetics of the imposing, geometrical structures in New York city, for a brief period the tallest in the world, had been deplored by many, but in time they displaced the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings as "signatures" of the New York City skyline. More than that, they had acquired the status of a symbol of American power. When compared with the Stalinist Baroque of Moscow skyscrapers, they denoted the triumph of freedom and capitalism over tyranny and communism. Their location in the Wall Street financial district made them a prominent object of hatred for those who despised American global economic and political hegemony. Worse than the material loss of the collapse of the towers was of course the loss of life. The idea of closure as bringing about some sort of "reconciliation" between dying and surviving was swallowed up in a deep well of futility, especially when the operation of recuperating human remains consisted of a sort of ad hoc laboratory built atop the mountainous Fresh Kills landfill, in Staten Island, where rubble from the disaster site was crushed and minutely sifted through for fingernails, fragments of skin, or any other trace of what had been 2,800 living, unwary victims of terrorism. September 11, or just 9/11 as the devastating attack on New York city has come to be known, constituted not only an overturning of any vestige of "historical meaning", which has been overturned often enough and, numerically speaking, in countless worse ways, but a challenge to the United States itself. As such it could not go "unpunished" even though the direct perpetrators themselves had perished in the catastrophe.
One reaction was vehement and consensual. It consisted in singling out "terrorism" as being in itself the absoluteness of evil. William Safire, the right-wing, syndicated lexicographer, just about covered all the conceptual and verbal territory that was needed to corner terrorism as the enemy that had to be exterminated. He discarded the attack on the WTC as adequately described by such as qualifiers as "horrific", "horrid", "horrible", "tragic", "infamous", "senseless", "mindless", "fanatical", "dastardly", or "cowardly", the last because the terrorists that carried it out were "maniacally fearless". He also doubted the applicability of terms like "attack", "assault", "bombing", "catastrophe", "destruction", and "massacre". He sounded indignant at the description of "those who plotted, financed and carried the infamous mass slaughter"--"terrorist massacre" in another version--as "militants, resistance fighters, gunmen, partisans, or guerrillas". The accurate and damning term for "a person or group who murders even one innocent civilian to send a political message is terrorist". From a historical point of view, the ambiguities in this judgment were left hanging. After all, if no qualifier served to define terrorism adequately, what exactly was terrorism? But it really didn't matter because Safire was expressing the widespread understanding that terrorism, whatever it was, was the enemy. This view accorded with the general tenor of journalistic "analyses" in which there existed no "middle ground" in the fight against "terrorism". To close the circle of ideological condemnation a link was commonly established between modern technology and an "old theology". The latter was a reference to the Islamic concept of jihad or holy war. According to Bernard Lewis, an authority on Islam, jihad is valid in Muslim law when applied to infidels and apostates. In the Koran, though, it is clearly written: "Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. Allah does not love aggressors." The Koran, the most thoroughly monotheistic work ever written, is only partially "legislative". But in Muslim law, the atrocity committed against the WTC could have been interpreted as an attempt to turn America into a Muslim nation. If so, it certainly did not work. But no one, either in the Muslim world or outside of it, could seriously interpret the terrorist attack to which New York City was subjected as part of a jihad. Even less justified was equating jihad and terrorism. There is nothing about a jihad in the Palestinian struggle against Israel. (Ironically, the immediate perpetrators of 9/11 would probably have agreed wholeheartedly with those in America who invoked the concept of jihad.)
The initial response of the American government was concrete and decisive. On one point official policy and unofficial interpretation were as one: America was at war against terrorism. If Safire and many of his journalistic colleagues were not very clarifying on the definition of terrorism, president George W. Bush kept the world focused on one and only one culprit: Osama bin Laden. The evidence that bin Laden was the financial and intellectual stay of an international terrorist organization called Al Qaida and that Al Qaida organized and carried out the attacks against the Twin Towers was generally accepted. From his hideouts in Afghanistan, bin Laden himself later did not bother dissimulating. Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, roughly equivalent to Christian seminarians or theology students. When the Taliban entered the Afghan civil war even the usually sophisticated journal The Economist scoffed at them. But they had obtained backing in Pakistan and gradually overcame the warlords who kept the country fragmented and unstable (1996). In power, the Taliban instituted a theocratic reign of terror. When the USA demanded that Afghanistan turn Osama bin Laden in, the Taliban refused. American invasion was prompt and decisive. It was evident that it was a war of revenge, as shown by American soldiers hoisting the New York city flag and the "Don't Tread On Me" standard from the American War of Independence. There was one jarring detail. It appears that the Pentagon initially applied to its operation against the Taliban the phrase "infinite justice" and just the mention of "justice" brought into the picture the muddle of the interpretation of history. The idea of a war in the name of justice was dropped and in its place the American government declared "war on terror", which, as it has turned out, is not much of an improvement from the perspective of extracting some sense from 9/11. "War on terror" later became concretely war against Iraq. The alleged reasons for this were that Iraq possessed chemical, biological, or nuclear "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) and that it was an actual physical threat to America. A connection between the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden was made out of whole cloth. The idea of attacking Iraq might have obeyed the still lingering desire for closure. President Bush declared Iraq a member of an "axis of evil", which also included Iran and North Korea. In the absence of reliable evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 and that it didn't pose a terrorist threat to America, the most likely explanation for the choice of Iraq as a "logical" step in the "war on terror" is that it represented the weakest of the trio of international evil-doers designated by Bush. Also, Bush’s closest advisors, vicepresident Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, had axes to grind and were as determined as their boss to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld had been given the invidious task of forming the informal American-Iraqi alliance against Iran. Cheney had grudgingly supported President George Bush’s decision to limit the Gulf or First Iraqi war to liberating Kuwait (1990-1991) and clamping down on Hussein without actually conquering Iraq. Secretary of state Colin Powell has rendered his garments so often after leaving office that he is not included as a point man on Iraq, but he never at any moment demonstrated any hesitation about following the president. All of this of course made nonsense of righting historical wrongs. But the spurious reasoning in America was that deposing Hussein and destroying Iraq would be the final measure of revenge for 9/11 and achieve the craving for closure which Afghanistan had not assuaged. Osama bin Laden had survived to go emitting his threats and tirades against America. In time, American priorities became so irrationally skewered that the Taliban made a comeback in Afghanistan along the border areas of that country with Pakistan because the USA had gone on a snark hunt in Iraq.
Rather than achieving the "ethical" or "historically meaningful" goals that America sought, the Second Iraqi war and the subsequent bloody occupation of Iraq had the untoward result that they constituted a categorical denial that "war on terror" would balance the 9/11 ledger by finally achieving the closure that the dastardly attack demanded. Instead of closure and a blow against "historical evil", what the Second Iraqi war brought about was another denial of any possibility of meaning in history. America demonstrated that it is not only an international rogue, but that, even in its highest levels of government, it is willing to condone torture as a means to an end and that it is disposed to destroy an entire nation to pursue its follies. The indiscriminate killing of civilians in Iraq became a common tactic of the occupation forces, however unintentional it often might be and however many and elaborate the explanations that are given for strikes that provoke collateral damage. But the "un-meaningful" consequences of this irrational conflict vastly transcend Iraq itself. Whether coincidentally or by design, the Second Iraqi war fomented the greater danger of nuclear proliferation. Even as the plans for war became irreversible, North Korea announced that it was building nuclear weapons. From the American perspective, here was real "evil on the rise", about which America, with its military options limited by Iraq, could do so little that it was relying on China to put North Korea on a leash, a historical turnabout indeed for countries that only a few decades back were mortal enemies. More sinister still was that Pakistan, America's basic ally in its Afghan policies, admitted (not in so many words of course) that it had been the world's number one nuclear proliferator. Pakistan has been mending its ways, but the historical facts of the American-Pakistani alliance are amazing. With American connivance, it was Pakistan that made the Taliban regime possible, which made America indirectly responsible for 9/11. It is likely that it contributed to the nuclear potential of Iran, the other member of the trio of the axis of evil, a catachresis so obvious that it makes a sensible person think that Bush as a leader was as bad as the unipolar world could get.
In part the Second Iraqi war was waged to stabilize the Middle East, which has been unstable since the creation of Israel in 1948. Israel and Palestine were locked in the killing and counter-killing of the Second Intifada (2000). The Second Iraqi war exacerbated that conflict. The fact that it took place was a justification for the implacable policies that Israel under Ariel Sharon adopted towards the Palestinian insurgency. Since Sharon's mailed fist had palpable military results, arguably the Second Iraqi war was more successful in Israel/Palestine than in Iraq itself. This could be considered a historical plus if it weren't that in the confrontation between Israel and Palestine the Israeli side does not have a monopoly on either reason or morality, and Israeli inflexibility is more likely to prolong the conflict interminably than to end Palestinian recalcitrance. Here again "historical meaning" has taken a beating. But we already knew that this idea is meaningless, so all we have here is just more grist for the mill. Our argument is that history is not "meaningful" but that mankind still manages "to advance". But in what sense can it be said that the Second Iraqi war and the Israeli response to the Second Intifada are advances? In none, but that doesn't necessarily imply that humanity is now on a backward heading to catastrophe. Israel/Palestine and Iraq are part of history, not all of history. America's war on Iraq was an assault on a sovereign nation that was neither attacking another state nor acting against or subverting international norms. Under Hussein, Iraq was a state that had achievements to recommend it. Despite the blockade of its oil exports, its citizens lived as well as any in any other country in a comparable level of development. Iraq protected adequately its ancient cultural heritage, which is one of the most valuable in the world. The Baath party did much to salvage that heritage when the country was in obvious threat of destruction. Baath is possibly the Arab world's greatest enemy of Muslim fanaticism. Iraq had an honest and independent judiciary, except as pertained to political issues, in which case the tyranny stepped in and did whatever it wanted. Even the contentious non-issue of the WMD is proof that Iraq had trained a surprisingly large corps of scientists, who in the aggregate placed the country on a scientific level far above its ranking in the human development index of the UN however perversely that achievement was misused. Was a country with that background, plus many other pertinent historical circumstances, going to accept its occupation peaceably?
The present Israeli/Palestinian dilemma began with the Second Intifada. This was not like the First Intifada, which was mostly about rock-throwing. The new Intifada was about reciprocal killings on a large scale. The Palestinians responded to Ariel Sharon’s crackdown with suiciders. Israel built a "defensive wall" but this did not at first deter Palestinian aggression leading to massive Israeli retaliation. On various occasions, Israel said that the Second Intifada was dying only to have it come alive again with redoubled force. The consolidation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which is the main source of the conflict, and the Israeli intention to cut it in half only made the violence worse. Israel razed the settlements in Gaza but this was a misperception of what Palestinians want. Gaza is again a battleground and Israel now is committed to war there as it had never been before. Yet Gazans appear to still possess the means with which to fight back, despite "state assassinations" (which were useless) and indiscriminate reprisals for which the justification is the killing of "militants" although the results are overwhelmingly civilian deaths. One must consider here that even Palestinian civilians are collectively a "militant mass". Arafat, the bête noire of Sharon, died, but, as events have been showing, this has brought a cleavage between Palestinians so that the possibility of concrete results from negotiations has been diminished. Not very long afterwards Sharon became comatose and he was succeeded by Ehud Olmert, who has taken an even harder line against Palestinians. This has not daunted resistance in Gaza. And then Hizbollah entered the fray from southern Lebanon (2006). Israel retaliated by besieging Lebanon, possibly with the intention of re-igniting a civil war in that country, but it invaded Lebanese territory only gingerly and suffered unacceptable casualties. By holding Lebanon hostage, it has forced the creation of an European border-guarding force, which is not empowered to disarm Hizbollah. So Israel is still in a state of semi-war threatened on two fronts. Israelis in Tel Aviv may go about their business as if nothing were happening, but the facts are that the long war between Arabs and Israelis is set to go on for a long time still.
Ethics, then, has nothing to do with history. The past cannot be undone. History validates. It does not justify. But there are discrete balances of right and wrong. Hegel was right about deriving "historical meaning" from or in spite of injustice. Bertrand Russell has a mocking depiction of Hegel’s method. He argues that for Hegel to determine the relationship between an uncle and a nephew it is necessary to do an account of the universe. This is a trivial version of the argument that a historical fact or a historical process cannot be taken in isolation. To account for Hitler, you have to account for Germany, and to account for Germany, without going any further, you have to have a world-historical account. What’s more, it is necessary to consider Hitler in the light of all that has happened between his death and the present. Injustices must be taken in a context. Hitler was the greatest mass murderer ever. Stalin’s millions, unlike Hitler’s, were mainly the indirect result of purblind policies. Hitler’s purges were the millions that were fated to slow deaths in concentration camps whereas Stalin’s were straightforward but hard to calculate with any precision. But Hitler cannot be tried in the bar of justice, but in the bar of history, where he is likely to get a suspended sentence, not, obviously, because of what he did, but because of the consequences of what he did. We must go on condemning Hitler to prevent other "Hitlers", but we could not condemn at all if there had not existed one unique Hitler immersed in history. The consequences that followed upon what he did are the proof that humanity is not unredeemable and that history "advances". In most respects the defeat of Hitlerite Germany overturned or made unacceptable so many previous connivances and complaisancies-before WWII, racism was an overt or covert "fact of life"-that world history can be said to have entered a different phase. What has not been overcome is the tendency to the back-or-white historiography which groups good and evil separately. States have always defended their sides. Voltaire blamed humanity. Napoleon warred in the name of liberal ideals. Eurocentrism had its philosophical roots in Hegel-perhaps because none had like him a world-historical perspective-but it transcended Hegel to the idea that it was not one western nation but all of Western Civilization that carried humanity forward, in part because of moral superiority, but mainly because it was stronger. Being strong was a "good fact" of history. Whatever the strong did was per se good, although "good" not necessarily in an ethical sense. "Civilizing" was "good" whatever means were used. To stamp out rebellion in the Philippines, Americans applied torture liberally, because the benefits of American rule were "self-evident". The black-or-white ethical view of history was reinforced in the 20th century by the wholesale Western condemnation of the Bolshevik Revolution and by Wilsonian idealism at the Conference of Versailles (1919-1920). The idea of "American exceptionalism" reinforced this trend. American exceptionalism has become the contemporary version of Eurocentrism. "Ethics-in-history" became entrenched in the capitalism/communism confrontation. Communism claimed it had social justice on its side. Capitalism condemned communism as immoral/murderous. The end of the Cold War emboldened belief in American exceptionalism. The foundational arguments for ethics-in-history and American exceptionalism are based on "ethics by numbers". Germany was wicked because it killed six million Jews. Stalinism was evil because it left 10 million victims between famines and purges in the 1930s. Can one, however, ignore ethics-by-numbers in considering American exceptionalism? Or is ethics-by-numbers valid at all?
The bombing of Prague by some sixty American Flying Fortresses in February 1945 left over 700 civilians dead. Was it deliberate? All indications are that it was. The Tuskegee Institute records around 5,000 lynchings. This figure, if accurate, is meaningless. If Negroes had resisted segregation, the death toll would have risen to the hundreds of thousands. The black population of America between 1870 and 1930 averaged around 10,000,000 inhabitants. In arguing for the priority of Negro to feminine civil rights, the formidable ex-slave Frederick Douglass described the conditions under which Blacks in America lived in those decades: "When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and rage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down….then they will have an urgency for the ballot equal to our own". Douglass, incidentally, fully supported the suffragette movement. In white America it is argued that genocide was not practiced against Native Americans because there was no intention to do so. This argument is as vacuous as the entire historical argumentation from ethics-by-numbers. American historians defend their ethics-by-numbers gambit with examples of American remorse, contriteness, rectifications, and so forth. Aside from the evidence that basic racism in America is as strong as it ever was, there is the inference that over all of these historical "compensations" there hangs the common practice embodied in the forthright dictum: "Hang ‘em first and apologize later!". A review by Jeffrey Rosen of the writer Anthony Lewis’ strong commitment to the First Amendment right of freedom of expression says: "It was abolitionists, in the 1830s, who first argued that Southern states shouldn’t be able to ban antislavery tracts because of the remote possibility they might provoke an insurrection; the Supreme Court took another 130 years to enshrine the underlying principle into laws. Similarly, the court began to protect political dissidents like Communists and Ku Klux Klan members in the late 1960s, not in the 1920s and 1950s-that is, only when they were no longer perceived as a serious threat by national majorities." This statement needs qualification because the KKK in the 1920s did not need legal or de facto protection. It had it already. Another interesting contrast is that, while the prosecution of KKK murderers in America occurred decades after their crimes were committed, the crucial Civil Rights act of 1964 was followed only 12 years later by the re-imposition in most of the United States of capital punishment, which is applied disproportionately to Blacks. According to NKVD archives the total of executions in the Soviet 1930s purges was around 700,000, which is less than one percent of the population in 1939 (168,524,000). Ethics-by-numbers historians dispute the NKVD figure. Roy Medvedev, the chronicler of Stalin’s crimes, does not give a figure for the purges. He agrees that the collectivization and de-kulakization famines of 1932-1933 might have resulted in over eight million deaths. Liam Ferguson says: "Even the 1937 census was suppressed because it revealed a total population of just 156,000,000, when natural increase would have increased it to 186 million." The official census figure for 1937 was 162,500,000. A methodical assessment of civilian deaths in Iraq places the blight at over 600,000, which is nearly 3% of 25 million. Saddam Hussein never even came close to that percentage. If we consider the Iraqi wars as part of the general Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East, then the total of Arab deaths since the consolidation of Israel in 1949 is inching towards the one million figure. The Bengal famine of 1943 resulted in some 3 million dead. "Millions" is the closest figure put on civilian deaths as a result of the unnecessary prolongation of the Korean war by the megalomaniacal Gen. Douglas McArthur. The Vietnam war resulted in the death of around 3 million Vietnamese civilians. The consolidation and the results of the Bolshevik revolution produced a population loss of some 25,000,000, which is an astounding 14% of the 1911 Russian population of 167,003,000. But Bolshevism was a reaction to capitalism among whose 19th century features must be included the near halving of Ireland’s population by hunger from over 8 million in 1840 to less than 5 million in 1890. There is no consensual estimate for what population growth might have been in England during the decades of unrestricted capitalist exploitation in the 19th century. In Britain, life expectation for children during the heyday of abuse of child labor was 17. But it is a fact that the USSR lost around 28 million inhabitants between 1941 and 1946 mostly in the war against German Nazism. The USA lost few civilians during World War II. American military casualties (dead and wounded) in that war were 1,100,000. Historians bewail the brutality of the Soviet soldiers who supposedly raped 2,000,000 German women towards the end of the war, but at least 20,000 fraulein were indispensable for the running of the extermination camps. The Soviet total losses include somewhat under 9,000,000 military. That puts civilian casualties at around 19,000,000. There’s is much debate about the population of the USSR in 1941. In the absence of greater precision, it has been placed at 190,000,000. If we exclude the Soviet armed forces from the total population (20,000,000), this indicates that Nazi Germany was responsible, at least as the aggressor of last resort, for the death of around 11% of the civilian population of the USSR. The Soviets invaded Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Saxony. These provinces were also the places of refuge for civilian and German soldiers in the Baltic coastline. At some point during early 1945, eastern Germany must have contained around 22,000,000 mostly German civilians. For the Soviets to have inflicted the same number of civilian losses on Germany that the Germans did in the USSR, they would have to have killed 2,500,000 Germans, but the estimated total of German civilians for the entire war is 1,700,000, and the Soviets got to attack Germany late in the war. Unlike the Nazi Germans, the Soviets were not waging a war of extermination. Ethics-by-numbers historians have compiled a large bibliography comparing Nazism and Communism and specifically Hitler and Stalin. This enterprise is full of pitfalls. Of Hitlerian ideology, the possibility of reform is inconceivable. Humanity would have become German slaves. In 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, without any prompting or pressure from the West, denounced Stalin’s criminal aberrations without pulling punches. Under the Communist regime, led by the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, and again without a determinant external cause, the Soviet empire collapsed and the USSR dissolved itself. When the end of Nazi Germany approached, Churchill expressed his support for the summary execution of the 50 top Nazis. It has frequently been argued-it probably still is-that the Nazification of Germany can be traced to the Treaty of Versailles. But Hitler did not climb to power on an imaginary staircase. To have prevented Nazi Germany it would have taken the outright extermination of millions of Germans. But wouldn’t that have been worth it to spare the world the over 70 million dead of World War II? And how many dead serfs and workers and Jews would it have taken to keep Tsarism alive?
The strongest hand for the ethics-in-history and American-exceptionalism theses is freedom of expression, which by itself also constitutes a grand summary of democratic virtues as refutation of totalitarian evil. Expression includes opinions and facts. Facts are assumed to exist. Opinions are protected against authority. There exists public opinion and it is expressed through the media. Basically, then, the freedom-of-expression argument is that authority does not curtail the means for the diffusion of facts or opinions or both. Public opinion entails a majority opinion as against minority or even private opinion, although freedom of expression implies that the majority and minority roles can be inverted, as when the once very popular Sen. Joseph McCarthy in America was discredited not for his ideological excesses but because of his negalomania (1950-1954). In all possible cases authority cannot curtail the media. One of the essential characteristics of totalitarianism is that dissent is suppressed and facts are either distorted or substituted by lies. Society, as the historian Ferdinand Braudel pointed out, is the ultimate synthesis and the source of all authority. This assertion need not be wedded to the social-contract idea. However human society came about, it was from the beginning the final arbiter. From a purely abstract point of view, that is, putting aside history for the sake of argumentation, society needs authority and authority "licits" media. In the interstices between these concepts, public opinion sneaks in and is certified. But does it have a reality apart from society, authority, and media? The argument for freedom of expression requires that public opinion exist independently of the other concepts. Freedom of expression is about public opinion just as democracy is the expression of the "public will" as expressed through electoral majorities. In fact, though, public opinion cannot be clearly differentiated from media and it is not required in the sequence "society-authority-media". It is only by convention and convenience that a difference exists between public opinion and media. Yet there is a "public" for media to address. Here again we have to establish a tricky distinction: between society and public. We have to make the somewhat artificial separation within society between those who interact with the media and those who are not reached by the media at all. The latter category is dubious, but even if we elaborated on it at length the best we would probably come up with is a tiny eccentric minority, virtually weightless within the cover-all concept of society, somewhat like neutrinos, a subatomic particle with barely perceptible mass. When all options are exhausted, it will be found that there is no way to distinguish qualitatively between society and public opinion and that the latter is, starkly put, the opinion of society, although, as society is diverse, the opinion of society must be an expression of a majority. In any society, the prevailing system of beliefs is public opinion or the majority opinion. This is of the essence to freedom of expression, for there must be dissent for the argument against totalitarianism to prevail. The basic question is whether media under freedom of expression as allowed by authority sanctioned by society ever reflect dissent. If by dissent what is meant is "versions" or "variations", then dissent is possible. But if dissent must extend to the denial that version or variation constitutes dissent, then, inserting the argument again in history, it is doubtful that freedom of expression exists under any set of circumstances. Authority will never allow that it be subjected to contestation, not in any serious way. When capitalism stumbled badly after 1929, something close to dissent was permitted, which was a boost for communism in America, but once the crisis was over, communism was hounded and persecuted and obliterated. Dissent was not allowed, except at the fringes, in clandestine solitude, virtually a monologue. Since media operate with the sanction of authority, which would never allow media to become a threat to it, then ultimately it is authority which shapes public opinion with the coerced or uncoerced complicity of the media. That real dissent is a predicate of freedom of expression is a theoretical proposition. In practice, no such thing ever happens. The media are diverse, because society allows authority to tolerate, even to encourage, "groups". Sanctioned groups seek outlets and these outlets are the media. The great anti-totalitarian myth is that untrammeled freedom of expression exists.
It would be fringe-reasoning to argue that American society and Soviet society were the same in respect to media. Soviet society was dictatorial from the start and said so. It openly repressed dissent and, under Stalin, dealt with it in terrorizing mass purges. Often these measures embraced not just dissent but perceived or potential or even possible dissent. There is no question that totalitarianism cannot be equated to a relatively open society such as America’s. Questions and doubts arise when a democracy is made to seem more open than it really is. Or when totalitarianism is judged in exclusively black-or-white ethical terms. Soviet media lied or exaggerated regularly, but they sometimes did not lie and expressed historically valid points. They denounced Hitlerism when Western media were dawdling. Their condemnation of racism was continuous and consistent. Their avowed defense of social justice was based on the Soviet travesty of it, but America by and large was lacking even a rudimentary notion of social justice. The history of film is illustrative. In America, the apotheosis of racialism that is The birth of a nation (1915) was hailed as a cinematic masterpiece. Soviet films later exalted the struggle against colonialism and social abuses. When Hitler came to power, the USSR created historical epics denouncing Nazism. During the 1930s, the Jews who created Hollywood splurged creative resources and wallowed in escapism and inconsequential comedies that were considered the acme of wit and ingenuity. The only frank denunciation of Hitler and Fascism was produced not by a Jewish-owned Hollywood corporation but independently by Charles Chaplin. After World War II, while Hollywood made pictures that were inordinately and ineptly chauvinistic, good Soviet films were patriotic yet imbued with genuine pathos and realism. Apart from phony war movies, Hollywood was producing Technicolor trivia devoid of redeeming qualities. These judgments are of course too general. Hollywood did make some good films, but only to a fraction of its potential, as likewise most Soviet cinema was forgettable from debut day to the next. But history must take a long view, which is liable to simplifications. Nuances can correct the biases of simplifications, but they do not escape from the constraints of the sequence society-authority-media. Simplistics clears the underbrush but its results can be too stark. But the opposite of simplistics is either academic, which entangles history in minor and inconsequential debate, or pop-history replete with anecdotes and pro domo ethics-by-numbers, not really much of an improvement over simplifications.
This work belongs in the category of narrative history. But categories are deceiving. We can establish a narrative line from the creation of the German Reich in 1871 to the destruction of the so-called Third Reich. To do so we must stick to rational analysis, which either is implicitly in the narrative or is made explicit. We cannot speculate what course European history would have taken if Kaiser William II had not dismissed chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Germany’s declaration of war on Russia and its simultaneous invasion of Belgium and France are facts. These facts have to meld with the past of Germany. But these facts in turn cannot be isolated from the facts in the histories of France, Russia, and the UK. Just as Hegel said, history is a whole that must be considered from the perspective of the present. The trouble with Hegel is that he defined "his" present as an "absolute", which was carrying things beyond the reasonable. But if "our" present is not an "absolute", in what sense are we empowered to make valid statements about the past? Here we can only assume a Kantian position and postulate certain "categorical imperatives" about what moves history. As in the case of the sequence society-authority-media, which seems more or less consensual, we can argue for another sequence: humanity-its fundamental aspirations-historical progress. "Fundamental aspirations" can take many forms, but they cannot exclude livelihood, some means for redress of grievances, and the desire to believe freely in something. They act like historical "forces", not necessarily irresistible, yet persistent and resilient. When one or two or all of these aspirations were thwarted, Egyptian or Chinese dynasties fell. The Muslim opposition to Indian aspirations, more than British imperialism, led to the decay of the Mughal empire. After war communism, Lenin opted for the NEP, or Bolshevism could have foundered. Nazism was fine for Germans but its imposition on other nations was resisted and defeated by the UK, the USSR, and America. If communism lasted 54 years, it can only have been because it was fulfilling some fundamental aspirations, even if very badly. Colonialism did not work. It asked its subject to believe in masters they did not want. The Khmer Rouge represented the opposite of fundamental human aspirations. Cambodia was out of the mainstream of history. Yet it wasn’t Cambodians themselves who overthrew them but Vietnamese. It doesn’t matter where redress or changes come. In the 1990s, Europe could not tolerate on its soil the brutalities of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Human aspirations are elementary. They become more sophisticated with growing economic development. China is now after social objectives it could not even imagine when it was the poorest nation in the world. North Korea is surviving by bartering nuclear terror for huge economic subsidies. When progress is mentioned the natural bent is to think of science and technology. And these indeed establish benchmarks. But try this thought experiment: How much has humanity really benefited from science and technology from 1950 to the present? Domestic conditions have not changed. We live in houses or apartments and use the same appliances. We still read newspapers, hear radio, and watch television. We still watch films and hear mostly canned music, albeit of better quality. Life expectancy in developed countries has increased, but we are fell mainly by the same diseases. We still drive cars and travel in railroads and airplanes. The former great transatlantic liners have become cruise ships. If great change has occurred, it has been in communications. Before we used phones and teletypes, but faxes were on the way. Mobile phones are indeed a significant innovation, but their usefulness is relative to the importance of the information one has to impart and arguably most of what travels from one phone to another or many is mostly junk. There are many new gadgets, principally portable agendas (called after berries), but they are just that: gadgets. The internet has indeed been revolutionary, or so it would seem, although Robert Caillau, one of its inventors, did try to put its dazzle into perspective when he said that "you didn’t have to drill tunnels through mountains" to achieve it. But what do we do with it? Well, it is medium of advertising, but this is old as the hills. We can buy and indeed buy a great deal of stuff on the internet, but most of our basic purchasing is still done in physical shops and stores. The internet is creaking with information but, except for very practical purposes, like booking plane flights, it is badly written and generally unreliable. The internet, in sum, is still, like computers of yore, junk in and junk out. Computers though are superior to typewriters. And the e-mail has nearly made snail-mail obsolete. Really, in all the areas we have surveyed and especially the internet, what we observe is not dramatic change but technological improvement, some innovation, but especially the means that the capitalist system uses to create jobs and keep itself vibrant. And what has really changed are the scope of scientific knowledge and the efforts that are being made to diminish "terror".
In this work, we place terror as the opposite pole of progress. We could have chosen some other scourges: tyranny, hunger, poverty, and so on. But in Antiquity slavery was compatible with our concept of progress. Greek sculptural realism-the swivel-at-the-hip applied to Egyptian-like kouri-to this day is the consensual norm. Abstract, symbolical monuments are not the appropriate means for great historical figures. Imagine the Lincoln memorial by Giacometti! Or Rodin for that matter! Famines have always haunted mankind. Today they are not permissible. Besides, famines are fearful because of death and terror embodies the greatest fear of death. Poverty is the great scourge that humanity has to conquer. But poverty has always been with us and it is something that, if we are not among the abject poor, we deplore rather than fear. Poverty has not been an obstacle to progress at any time in history. The invention of writing was for the rich and riches entail poverty. It is possible to eradicate or lessen poverty. Terror is the one constant through the ages that rises like a tsunami against progress. Despotism is the naked use of terror for political ends. The barbarians overwhelmed the Roman empire in the West through sheer terror. After a few centuries, when the dark tide of terror subsided, progress re-appeared as the recovery of the past, but this was done under a set of circumstances different from those that brought Rome down. Islam had arisen and spread to the west and to the east. Europe had only made sorties to India. With Islam, bridges were being built all the way to China. The Crusades pitted terror against terror. In the West, they awakened interest in Asia, but they demonstrated that you could not get to furthest Asia by land. As the West prospered it reaped the achievements of Islam and began seeking ways to expedite its contacts with other cultures. Europe concentrated within itself all the knowledge in the world, after which it unleashed its terrors upon it. It converted African slavery into a profitable oceanic trade, first in Africa itself and then intercontinental. It destroyed two stone-age civilizations in America. It colonialized Asia because it could by whatever means. The Dutch exterminated entire island populations to monopolize the spice trade, although they could never manage it. Britain strangled Indian manufactures and livelihoods to benefit its textile mills. Despotism might have been an Asian political scourge, but European colonializers used it with gusto. Asians could not respond to Europeans with the same means and degree of terror. But times have changed. When America declared "war on terror", it wreaked terror and awakened terror all over the world. It made a shambles of the unipolar world and it is now trying to pick up the pieces and make itself over. But it is too late for that. There is now a multipolar world, which does not require America to ward off "evil". America also has been consecrating plutocracy as the ideal incarnation of democracy. It will not go very far in rescuing its prestige with that ideology.
The world today is in crisis. It’s not one big crisis but a gaggle of minor to big crises which in all add up to a critical situation. The latest addition has been the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo, which the USA and some major European powers have recognized, but Russia opposes vehemently. If Kosovo gets its way, then Georgia will be flayed and Iraqi Kurdistan will demand its own independence. If Kurdistan decides to do a Kosovo, the Iraqi problem will be exacerbated and the possibility of the USA doing a graceful exit will vanish. If the USA just ups and leaves, then Iraq will be immersed in perhaps a multiple civil war. Israel will like this to happen, under its indirect and unofficial supervision. But the Palestinian problem is not going away. That Gaza has become Israel’s Guantánamo on a gigantic scale only makes for more instability in the area. Even if he achieves it, the Palestinian state that Mahmoud Abbas is haggling for will be a parody and an injury upon insult. Israel/Palestine are still the major stumbling block to world stability today. One should never forget that Israel has many atomic bombs and very likely also its own ICBM-model. Afghanistan has not been pacified. Expanded NATO is considering an anti-ballistic missile system that plainly points at Russia. Yet it is reluctant to commit itself to Afghanistan, with which America, from its Iraqi experience, is also trying to have to do as little as possible. Pakistan is like a puddle of mercury. Its politicians want to negotiate with the Pathans and Baluchis, who shield Taliban and Al Qaida. Musharraf is despised not because he was a dictator but because every one thinks he is an American running dog. The result is an unstable atomic power which has so little control over its own territory that a large swath of it overlapping to Afghanistan is practically a semi-sovereign "state" that could be called Talqaida. American plutocracy keeps pointing in the wrong direction. North Korea has shown openness about its nuclear weapons program. Iran is being strong-armed for wanting to develop atomic energy. Does it want to have nuclear weapons? It could be. But shouldn’t nuclear disarmament in the region start with Israel? With perhaps the most conformist society in the world, the USA accuses Russia of being a Stalinist state. But it is probably easier to express unconventional views in Russia than it is to criticize American shibboleths in America. Taxes is a fighting word. Any criticism leveled at Israel is anti-Semitic eo ipso. The Chinese destroyed a weather satellite of their own. There was a hullabaloo in America, where they later did the same thing with the same results: more debris in outer space. America is a plutocracy telling a capitalist country with a "communist party" to reform itself. But China is probably doing more for the development of poor countries than the USA and the EU thrown in. Globalization is no more and no less than plutocracy internationalized and plutocracies are not known for wanting to make the poor les poor. Even in giving plutocracies has strings attached. The Gates Foundation is fighting malaria, but it is doing it in such way that it is getting in the way of the World Health Organization. The Jimmy Carter Foundation on its own by badgering a lot of people is close to eradicating the Guinea worm, a parasitical infection, now reduced to parts of Nigeria, that is as close as an animal can come to inflicting torture on human beings. (In justice, the Gates, Bill and Melinda, gave Carter a hefty donation.)
We are back where we started. All we can do with history are discrete balances of right and wrong. The balance in the Middle East inclines to wrong. True, might makes right, but, despite appearances in that region, it is not clear who has a corner on might. Eventually, the Middle East will have to settle down, but it cannot be said that the conditions for that "eventually" exist now. What does exist is a multipolar world and in it the USA and Israel are hard put to find backers. It may be that it is precisely in this difficulty that the solutions for the Middle East will be found. In a wide sense, this book is a narrative compendium of world history. It is mostly told like a story in which, explicitly or implicitly, all events are related to all other events from the beginning of civilization to the present. Thus, its purpose is to indicate how in history events relay one another and affect or resemble each other across ages and continents. This is not the same as saying that history repeats itself. It cannot. Sometimes the relatedness of events is tenuous. There were no diplomatic exchanges or political contacts between the state of Qin which unified China and the imperialistic Roman republic, not to mention that Mayan city-states were also flourishing at the time and neither Chinese nor Romans knew about them. But intra-historical links are defensible. One thing this book is not about is what could be called the run of mankind, the lives of common people. For that, all we can do is recommend a prolonged stay in one of the myriad slums in poor countries or in its stead viewing a work of art such as the Bengali film Pather Panchali. The outline of this work is divided into eight strictly conventional periods: (1) From the beginnings to 2000 BCE; (2) From 1999 to 1 BCE; (3) From 1 to 900 CE; (4) From 901 to 1399; (5) From 1400 to 1799; (6) From 1800 to 1913; (7) From 1914 to 1945; (8) From 1946 to the present.
(1) From the beginnings to 1199 BCE
History begins with writing and civilizations. But prehistory is a fact attested by paleolinguistics and archaeology. Since both are about humanity, then we can go further back to argue that geology too is part of the human story. And geology takes us back to the beginning of the universe and the formation of the solar system. The origins of mankind are linked to geology. Paleoanthropology is the study of how the genus homo was fleshed out. Originally, man was considered unique. The development of geology made possible the science of evolution. The first addition to the genus homo was the species known as Neanderthals. But in the 20th century, a proliferation of human-like fossils began drawing an evolutionary distinction between extant non-human primates (gorillas, lemurs, et al) and the line of extinct creatures that could be ancestors of humanity. This led to the creation of the strict hominid family (excluding apes), related to man but most of whose species were considered too backward to be considered ancestral. Gradually the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of bits and pieces of fossils, licensed a theory in which, within the genus homo, the species Homo habilis and Homo erectus were considered man’s true ancestors. This development occurred during the Pleistocene epoch characterized by ices ages and interglacials. Because of paleontological and anatomical indications it was concluded that Homo erectus had first appeared in Africa and then spread to the rest of the world. The descendants of Homo erectus, which itself became extinct everywhere, in Africa evolved into modern humans, who in turn peopled the planet. This theory has been reinforced by genetic research. But so far, a missing link, the evidence linking Homo sapiens to Homo erectus, has not been found.
The last Pleistocene ice age ended some twelve thousand years ago. We live in the Holocene epoch, considered an interglacial. But not long after its beginning humanity started living in villages and practicing cultivation and animal husbandry. This is the period in human development known as the Neolithic. All that went before is the Paleolithic. The Neolithic started in the Levant, from where, it is to be presumed, it spread to Sumer in lower Mesopotamia and to the Nile Valley, the areas where the first two civilizations appeared. The Neolithic is a phase and it did not occur all over the world at the same time. The domestication of plants and animals were replicated in different places at different times. Chinese Civilization was preceded by various Neolithic cultures. The Minoan Civilization arose in Crete and spread to the Aegean Sea island. The Indus River Valley civilization was born in what today is Pakistan. Although the Neolithic revolution occurred in the Western Hemisphere it did not immediately give rise to civilizations. Little is known of the Indus River Valley civilization, whose rudimentary writing has not been deciphered. There are indications that it might have had Sumerian influence and that it influenced the Indo-Aryans who invaded the Indian subcontinent but are not blamed for its downfall (ca1500 BCE). The writing of the Minoans also remains un-deciphered. The history of Sumer, which was not an united state but many independent city-states, flows into the wider history of Mesopotamia. Semites, which the Sumerians were not, occupied and created in Akkadia (future Babylonia) the first Mesopotamian empire (ca2300 BCE). Elam was both tributary and predatory towards Mesopotamian states. Unlike Sumer, Egyptian civilization was born politically unified. The history of Pharaonic Egypt can be divided into three periods of relative stability and continuity called the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom, separated by the two Intermediate Periods of dynastic discontinuities and divisiveness. The Old Kingdom lasted until ca2150. It includes the first six dynasties during which the capital was Memphis except for a period when it was established in Saqqara, not far from Memphis. It concluded with the First Intermediate Period (ca2150-ca2080) of political division and weak central rule. Memphis went on being the main political center, but the kingdom south of Asyut (north of modern Luxor) was divided into areas dominated of political influence.
(2) From 1199 to 1 BCE
After archaeological Chinese cultures, there exist the historical but obscure periods of Xia, Shang, and Yin. But there are precise chronicles for the Zhou period and its two subdivisions: Spring and Autumn and the Warring States. In Egypt, the 11th dynasty (ca2080-ca1937) ruled in Thebes. There were civil wars between competing dynasties. Given the importance of religion for dynastic legitimization, all Egyptian dynasties can be considered theocratic, but Thebes was closer to the priesthood and, in the rivalry with the kings of the lower Nile, it proved to be more stable. Around the year 2000, the Egyptian Sinai frontier was fortified, which indicates that the kingdom did have some effective central rule, but particularly that it was being subjected to attacks by the Amorites, who had by then penetrated Mesopotamia. Under the great Amorite King Hammurabi (ca1792-ca1750) Babylon attacked and defeated Elam (ca1764). Hammurabi also annexed Sumer (ca1761) and possibly northern Mesopotamia. After the rise of Hammurabi (Old Babylonian Empire), the history of Mesopotamia is mostly that of the long rivalry between Babylonia and Assyria. In Anatolia Indo-Europeans had become predominant with the Old Hittite Kingdom (ca1700-ca1500). It was a Hittite King, Marsulis I, who defeated the last king of the Old Babylonian Empire, Samsuditana (ca1626-ca1595), but Babylon itself fell to the Kassites. After the fall of Babylon, the Mitanni kingdom, in which an originally Indo-Aryan aristocracy ruled a Hurrian people, arose in eastern Anatolia and was dominant in northern Mesopotamia (ca1595). Other Hurrians inhabited lands as far west as northern Syria. Under Mitanni vassalage, King Ashur-uballit I (ca1354-ca1318) consolidated the territory of Assyria. Ashur-uballit forged an offensive alliance with the Hittite King Suppiluliumas against King Tushratta (ca1365-ca1330) of the Mitanni. Even though the Mitanni capital, Washshukanni or Wassukkani, was taken, the kingdom survived, but Assyria became independent and adopted an aggressive foreign policy whose main objective was to subject Babylon and its Kassite rulers. Subsequently the power of Assyria declined and Babylon might have become hegemonic in central and southern Mesopotamia. Contemporaneously, the Hittite kingdom and the Hurrian cities of Syria were devastated by attacks from hostile tribes and sea marauders. A dark age enveloped Mycenaean Greece (ca1200), which had subjugated the Minoan Civilization (ca1500).
With the dynasty founded by Ashur-dan I (ca1179-ca1134), Assyria rivalled with Babylon as not only a military but a cultural equal. During this period, Assyria resisted Aramaean attacks from Syria even as Aramaean infiltration of Mesopotamia went on. In southern Mesopotamia, the Aramaeans were known as Kaldhu or Chaldeans. Egypt ceased being an united kingdom at the start of what is often referred to as the Third Intermediate Period (ca1075). The events in Mesopotamia and Egypt left a vacuum of power in the Levant which was filled with the formation ca1000 and after of Semitic federations and states in Syria, Phoenicia, Philistia, and Israel. Aramaean and Luwian statelets were formed in Syria and southeastern Anatolia. In the following centuries, Aramaic became the common tongue of Mesopotamia. It was in that fragmented and unstable situation in the Near East, that Assyria rose again under Ashur-dan II (ca932-ca912), who appears to have put an end to Aramaean raids from Syria. Adad-nirari II (ca912-ca891) conquered Babylonia. Assyria became a militaristic kingdom utilizing ranked infantry formations and cavalry. Ashurnasirpal II (883-859) expanded Assyria besieging cities in the Levant and utilizing repressive tactics and terror as a psychological weapon of war. He founded a capital called Kalakh, also known as Nimrud (nothing to do with Nimrod the Biblical hunter), near modern Mosul. Assyrian records mention Media (ca835), the first Indo-Iranian kingdom in Persia, constituted around the modern city of Esfahan, already encroaching on eastern Anatolia. The Hurrian kingdom of Urartu was founded around Lake Van in eastern Anatolia by Sarduri I (ca840-830). Assyrian King Shalmaneser IV (782-773) warred with Urartu, ruled by Argishti (785-756). There followed another period of Assyrian decadence. Under King Sarduri II (755-735) Urartu reached the acme of its power. What is known in history as the Neo-Assyrian Empire, began with King Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727), who displaced Urartian influence in southeastern Anatolia. To do so he warred with the Aramaeans. He also had to contain attacks by the Medes and in the west he conquered disunited Lebanon and Palestine to the Egyptian frontier. But he did not reduce the Jews in their hilly kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Tiglath-Pileser's subjection of Palestine was not firm and his successor Shalmaneser V (726-721) died besieging Samaria, the capital of Israel. Israel (but not Judah) was finally reduced to vassalage and there were deportations of Jews. Sargon (722-705) broke the power of the Luwians, descendants of the Hittites, who disappeared from history. Crown prince Sennacherib campaigned against Urartu (714), already under pressure from the rampaging Cimmerians, the first of many subsequent incursions from the nomadic Indo-Iranian tribes of the southern Russian steppe. Sargon died campaigning in northwestern Iran against the Medes.
During the reign of Sennacherib (705-681) a great palace was built in Nineveh. New insurrections in Palestine were suppressed although Sennacherib did not take Jerusalem, which resisted under Hezekiah. Sennacherib was killed by two of his sons and was succeeded by another son, Esarhaddon (681-669), who took a conciliatory approach towards Babylon. Assyria was being threatened by the Medes from the east and by the marauding Cimmerians, who had destroyed Phrygia in central Anatolia (696-695). To counter the latter, Esarhaddon made an alliance with the Scythians, who had displaced the Cimmerians from southern Russia in the first place. The Kushites in Egypt were a threat to Assyrian rule in Palestine. Ashurbanipal III (669-627) sacked Thebes and destroyed the power of the Kushites (663). The Assyrians left the Egyptian Psamtik (Psammetichos) in charge as governor in Memphis. With the aid of Greek mercenaries and of Gyges, King of Lydia (western Anatolia), Psamtik ejected the Assyrians (ca660) and Egypt became once again independent. The Cimmerians were attacking Lydia, whose King Gyges asked for Assyrian help but was refused because of his alliance with the Egyptians. Babylon, under the governorship of Shamash-shum-ukin, resentful brother of Ashurbanipal, became fractious again and had to be reduced in 648. Ashurbanipal, who must have suspected Elamite intrigue, marched to the east and sacked Susa (647). Elam became an Assyrian province. The Persians, neighbors of Elam to the south, sent tribute to Assyria in 639. The Cimmerians were finally crushed by the Assyrians (ca630). Assyria reached the height of its power under Ashurbanipal, who also collected the largest library of cuneiform tablets known and prided in his knowledge of the scribe's craft. Assyria after Ashurbanipal went into decline probably characterized by civil strife. With the help of Media, Nabopolassar (626-605) drove the Assyrians out of Babylon, which became once again independent and adopted its own anti-Assyrian policy under Chaldean monarchs. In 625, Sin-shar-ishkun was king in Assyria. Under Cyaxares the Medes increased the military pressure. Finally, an alliance of Cyaxares and Nabopolassar besieged and conquered Nineveh (612). The renascent Babylonian kingdom inherited and tried to maintain the Assyrian empire. Nabopolassar's son and successor, Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562), asserted Babylonian authority in the Levant. The records for his reign cease altogether after ten years. The Temple of Solomon was destroyed and thousands of Jewish captives were taken to Babylonia. It was about the time of Nebuchadnezzar that the Jews began adopting the use of Aramaic, although Bible mentions that during the reign of Hezekiah the people of Jerusalem still spoke Hebrew. Nebuchadnezzar could not reduce Egypt nor retain Elam, which probably by then had become a Persian vassal. Babylonia was also out of the picture in Anatolia where Media and Lydia were fighting for control. Under Nabodinus (556-539), Babylonia was still imperial enough to defeat Media in Anatolia. Persia, under the rule of the Achaemenid Cyrus II the Great, overthrew the Medes ca550. Nabodinus, who had an alliance with Astyages, the king of Media, saw the luck of the draw and retrenched to a line on the frontier of Mesopotamia with Arabia. Nabodinus made another ill-fated alliance, this time with Croesus of Lydia. Persian armies under Cyrus in 545 defeated Lydia and conquered as far as Ionia (the Greek-settled fringe of Asia Minor), which after many wars had finally succumbed to the Lydians. In 542, Nabodinus went to Babylon to assume command and the fate of his kingdom. Nabonidus surrendered to Cyrus (539) and Babylon fell without a fight.
Greece emerged from its dark age also as an agglomeration of city-states in which literacy was adopted from Phoenicia. The Greeks founded colonies along the Mediterranean and Black sea coastlines. Most of Europe was occupied by the Celts and the Germans, who did not develop beyond the tribal stage. Etruscan civilization (mainly also city-states) arose in central Italy. It acquired the alphabet from the Greeks and transmitted it to early Rome, an initially insignificant Latin foundation. From a wider historical perspective, the most transcendental process of this period was the conflict between Greeks and Persians (499-448). The Achaemenids were unable to subject the mainland Greeks, but these were recalcitrant to political unity until the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great (356-323) forced it upon them and went on to invade and conquer the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander's empire fragmented upon its creator's death. From it emerged Macedonia, Epirus, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Seleucid Empire. The latter claimed Alexander's Asian conquests, but it couldn't hold them. Thus were born Parthia (the Indo-Iranian successor of the Achaemenid Empire) and Bactria, a Greek state in what today is northern Afghanistan. China was unified by the state of Qin (221), which was succeeded by the long-lasting Han dynasty (226 BCE-220 CE). Korea and Vietnam acquired incipient political contours. The Indo-Aryans, who had invaded the Indian subcontinent, founded independent city-states. The first Indian empire was created from Magadha (in today's Bihar) and had its apogee under the great Maurya Emperor Asoka (273-232). Sri Lanka was a creation of Indo-Aryans who leapfrogged Dravidian southern India. Central India begat its own political formations. Rome grew from its lowly condition to absorb Etruria and all of Italy. It defeated Carthage, an offshoot of Phoenicia, and inevitably it came into conflict with the Greeks, whom it gradually absorbed culminating with the annexation of mainland Greece itself. Romans and Parthians collided in Anatolia, where Armenia became an issue between them.
(3) 1 CE-899
The first nine centuries of the Common Era were a period of great turbulence. Continuities with the previous period and within the period itself were frequently shattered. But it was also a time for the formation of long-lasting political entities and of characteristic regions. The foundations were laid for political trends in centuries to come. Three crucial discontinuities were the fall of Parthia (225), the period of disunity after Han in China (221-581), and the fall of Rome. Parthia was succeeded by the Sasanid Empire (226-651), which in turn fell to Islam, the aggressively expansionist religion and political movement founded by the prophet Muhammad (ca570-632) in the Hejaz (southwestern Arabia). In China, disunity was followed by the Tang dynasty (618-907), which eventually also fragmented. Nomadism was not as great a threat to sedentarized societies as it was during the previous period. In Western Eurasia, the Sarmatians were the successors of the Scythians, but they were mostly quiescent. In eastern Eurasia, however, the nomads, particularly the Xiongnu, were a real menace to China, whose successful resistance sent them off westwards to lead the barbarian invasions that eventually brought Rome down, though not entirely because the Roman empire in the east remained as the Greek Byzantine Empire. Long before this, the Xiongnu had pressured the remaining Indo-Iranians of the steppes. These too, the Alans prominently, would assault Europe, but initially their greater impact was on Bactria, where it led to the formation of Gandhara (in today's Pakistan), a vague political formation with a vestigial but culturally important Greek strain. Rome was beset on its eastern frontiers by Germans, Huns, Avars, and other barbarians, and it gave way to new states. Some of these, like Visigothic Spain (418-711), Frankish Gaul (481-751), and Lombard Italy (568-774), were ephemeral. There were two outstanding saplings which grew out of the massive Roman trunk: one, the Carolingian Empire (752-888), did not last long; the other, the Byzantine Empire, the true successor of Rome, had life in it until the mid-15th century. Rome itself (the city) became the core of the Papal States. England was formed on the periphery of the empire. Georgia was founded in the Caucasus.
The upheavals in India with the incursions of the steppes Indo-Iranians resulted in the formation of the Kushana empire (1st century-5th century CE), whose existence is undeniable (numismatic attestation) but which left no chronicles. As Kushana dimmed, the Guptas (320-550) created an empire in northern India and Central and Southern India were stages for hectic but not unifying political activity. The Guptas too dissipated and India sank into political fragmentation, which was barely alleviated by Harsha's Empire or Kingdom (590-647), centered on Kanauj, and so brief that it is normally referred to by its founder's name. Bengal was created in eastern India. The rest of Asia saw the historical debuts of Japan, Tibet, and Cambodia. An important group in South East Asia were the Mons, related to the Khmers of Cambodia, but, despite being civilizers in what today are Myanmar and Thailand, they did not manage to consolidate political power. The Mons were eventually displaced by peoples, the Burmese and the Thais, who originally inhabited the independent but vague Chinese principality of Nanzhao (modern Yunnan). All of South East Asia was culturally indebted to India, as was the case of the Buddhist Sri Vijaya sea-empire (3rd-14th centuries), of the states founded in Java, of Champa (a badly coordinated Hinduist kingdom in central Vietnam), and especially of powerful Cambodia. In Africa, the Eritrean kingdom of Axum was the cradle of Christian Ethiopia. Islam was an unified theocratic empire until its capital was moved by the Abbasids from Damascus to Baghdad (762), after which it broke up into many pieces: Buyid Persia, the Maghreb, Egypt, and Al Andalus, which is the general Arab name for Spain after it was conquered by Muslims from Morocco. The Christian answer to Islamic conquest in Spain was the small kingdom of Asturias.
The dissolution of the Carolingian Empire left the cores for France and Germany, both very feudalized. Germany was constituted as the loose federation of duchies known as the Holy Roman Empire (962), which ironically claimed legitimacy from the Roman empire which Germans did so much to destroy. Venice was founded in Italy by native fishermen and people fleeing the rampaging Lombards, who were tamed by the Carolingians. The Slavs began forming proto-states in central Europe (Moravia) and in the Balkans (Serbs and Bulgaria). Bulgaria is not a Slavic but a Turkish name. The Turks elsewhere were nomadic. They converted to Islam while still in the steppes of central Asia. The period ends with the cusp of Norsemen attacks all over Europe (8th-10th centuries), where, most notably, they eventually gained the foothold of Normandy in France (911) and, sailing down rivers, they founded the principalities that in time coalesced into Russia.
(4) From 900 to 1399
The period from 900 to 1399 in Europe saw the multiplication of states, the development and expansion of empires, and the unmistakable awakening of nationalism. Outside of Europe, states came and went but some had staying power. Fragile empires arose in Asia. China suffered the humiliation of nomadic conquest. And India was transformed out of all recognition by invasions from Afghanistan. Christianity and Islam were normally in conflict. State-formation was notable in Scandinavia (Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) as well as in central and eastern Europe (Switzerland, Bohemia, Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary) and in the Balkans (Valachia, Moldavia). Hungary resulted from the incursions of the Magyars, the last of the nomadic intruders to affect Europe. This was the period when the Holy Roman Empire was most imperial, although this was manifest principally in Italy and internally the empire did not manage to achieve political cohesion. But there was an undoubtedly imperialistic German drive to the east led militarily by the Teutonic and the Livonian knight-soldiers and commercially by the Hanseatic League (1267-16th century), which was originally a Swedish creation but later became thoroughly Germanized. The Byzantine Empire had to struggle in the Balkans to maintain its hegemony, but its most dangerous enemies were the Turks who, already converted to Sunni Islam, overflowed from the steppes to Transoxiana and went on to Persia and Anatolia. In Iberia, the Reconquista, or the centuries-long Christian war against Moorish Islam, begat various states (Leon, Castile, Navarre, Aragon, Portugal), but this disunion was matched by the same political tendency on the Muslim side. Originally mostly under the rule of Cordoba (756-1031), Al Andalus fragmented into Taifa kingdoms. There were periods of Muslim consolidation (under the Almoravids and the Almohads) but as time went on Christian Spain tended towards unification whereas Muslims could not overcome the pull of political disgregation. Despite being the most politically sophisticated country in Europe, Italy could not achieve unification for a variety of reasons, but in particular because of two circumstances. Rome was the principal see of the Catholic Church and, apart from the church's own resistance to external political overlordship, European rulers could not contemplate with equanimity the prospect of Rome falling under the exclusive political influence of one state. The Holy Roman emperors demanded the loyalty of the Italian cities and this created internal dissensions and stresses. Some cities would be willingly imperial (Ghibellines) but others looked towards Rome (Guelphs). What Italy had in common were two political loyalties which made for its disunion. In addition, Sicily and Naples had political traditions quite dissimilar from those of northern Italy. Sicily was for a long time under Muslim rulers. Italy had islands of strong local sovereignty in city-states like Genoa and Pisa, in Lombardy and Tuscany, and especially in Venice, which built a sea-borne commercial empire in the eastern Mediterranean. A surfeit of Norman lords in France was the catapult for Norman imperialism which achieved the conquest of England and Wales. Ireland soon followed. Scotland was later and definitely joined to England through dynastic connections. With initially papal blessing, the Normans created a southern Italian kingdom, which under later Aragonese suzerainty became known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1130-1285). When Norman rule in Italy was bequeathed to a Holy Roman emperor, the papacy activated all its influence to frustrate the Germans.
Under the Song dynasty (960-1279), China had a period of prosperity, but the nomads camped (and were sinicized) in northern China. Vietnam became free of Chinese control (938). Surrounded by the moat of the sea, Japan created its peculiar but effective political system of the indirect rule of the shoguns through figurehead emperors (1185). The empire of Majapahit (1293-ca1500) was the successor of Sri Vijaya. Cambodia declined. When Seljuks and Turcomans became a threat to the Byzantine presence in Anatolia, the Christian west launched the Crusades (1098). These lasted nearly 200 years, but could not retain the Holy Land. The Fourth Crusade was turned against Constantinople, which was sacked. The Byzantine Empire recovered but it was winged. Nomadism reached the acme of its power with the gigantic Mongol Empire, created by Jenghiz Khan (ca1162-1227), which stretched west as far as Anatolia, but its jewel was the Yuan dynasty in China (1271-1368). It soon fragmented into independent khanates. In China, the Ming (1368-1644) overthrew the Mongols. Perhaps the greatest political influence of Mongol imperialism was that, through the khanate of the Golden Horde (ca1230-1502), it kept Russia subjugated and effectively out of the European political sphere. But as nomad power declined, Russia reacted and gradually threw off its yoke. India was a tempting prize for the Persianized Turks of Ghazni in Afghanistan, who initiated raids which culminated when the Afghan Ghurids conquered northern India and their generals founded the Delhi Sultanate (1229-1526). The greatest Hindu kingdom was Vijayanagara (1346-1564), in southern India. The southern Indian Tamils invaded Sri Lanka and permanently divided that island into a Hinduist Tamil north and the Buddhist Sinhala rest of it.
Anglo-Norman imperialism extended over much of France, which led to the Hundred Years (1337-1429), during which French nationalism was awakened. Burgundy, which for a time was a rival of the French crown, was finally assimilated by France (1477). With the founding of the Turkic Ottoman Empire in opposition to the Byzantine Empire, Islam lapped into the Balkans and central Europe. The Italian ambitions of Holy Roman emperors antagonized the papacy, whose meddling in German politics finally led to a German disengagement from Italy (1356). Within the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg dynasty had grown in power and influence and finally imposed the system of the so-called hereditary-elective monarchy (1438), which did not however make the empire more cohesive. With their base in Austria, the Habsburg were steeled in opposition to the invasive Ottomans, who by then had displaced Christian power in the Balkans. From Samarkand, Timur (1336-1405), an energetic Persianized Mongol-Turk who claimed the mantle of Jenghizid legitimacy, created a blood-soaked empire which expanded to Anatolia and inflicted on the Ottomans a momentary shock. Timur's empire broke up and its political legacy was ephemeral. France's power was so uncontested that it moved the papacy to Avignon (1305) and this resulted in the enervating Great Schism within the Catholic church (1378-1417), finally resolved through a conciliar movement that restored the papacy in Rome. In Africa and mainly through Muslim influence, there were attempts to create states in ancient Ghana (not in the territory of today's Ghana) and in ancient Mali. Below the Sahara, Benin was the only manifestation of incipient statehood. In northern Africa, Morocco was constituted under the Marinids. In America, the Incas and the Aztecs initiated empire-building in Peru and Mexico, respectively.
(5) From 1400 to 1815
This period of world history has the following salient events and processes: (1) the definitive configuration in Europe of the major nation-states; (2) the Protestant Reformation and the virtual dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; (3) the creation of European world colonialist empires; (4) the consolidation of the Qing Chinese empire; (5) the birth of the USA; and (6) the French Revolution. There were four wars that were of great importance for the future of world history: (1) the Thirty Years war; (2) the War of the Spanish Succession; (3) the Seven Years war; and (4) the War of American Independence. The unification of Spain was accomplished with the conquest of Granada (1492). Portugal had already started building a world empire and Spain followed with the discovery of America. England was not far behind Spain and the Dutch followed in the steps of the Portuguese, who were crucially weakened by the absorption of Portugal by Spain (1580). England developed politically into the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Spain also acquired an European empire when Charles Habsburg became Charles I of Spain and soon after Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. But on the European continent, it was France that gradually turned into the dominant land power. Martin Luther launched the Reformation (1517), whose consequences were as much political as religious. France tried to annex northern Italy. Spain faced simultaneously Protestantism in Germany, French imperialism, and rebellion in the Lowlands (to which Protestantism spread). And it had to do it, not from a solid economic base, but with silver from America and loans from German bankers. The multiple turbulences produced by the Reformation culminated in the savage Thirty Years war (1618-1648), the most important consequences of which were: the irreparable division of the Holy Roman Empire between Catholic and Protestant rulers (forced by circumstances to cohabit a spectral federative empire), the definitive independence of the Netherlands, the rise of Sweden as a major power, the separation of Portugal from Spanish rule (1640), and the strengthening of France and the weakening of Spain. England was not involved because it was concentrating on its internal political process, which resulted in greater economic and naval power and an irrevocable commitment to Protestantism. The Dutch tried to rival England on the high seas, but their respective resources were uneven and England relegated the Netherlands to a minor power. The Ottoman Empire threatened Habsburg Austria, but was crushed at the gates of Vienna (1683) and had to go on the defensive.
The Manchus, originally nomads, created a state in Manchuria from where they conquered China and founded the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), which ruled over a vast empire including Tibet. Japan retained the shogunate, also known as bakufu, and although it had demonstrated that it was impregnable to foreign invasion and had a prosperous autarchic economy, militarily it stagnated with respect to Europe. The states of South East Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia) were frequently at each others' throats. Vietnam divided into Tonkin and Annam (1620), but from the latter kingdom the Vietnamese expanded to the Mekong delta, which was taken from the Cambodians. In India, the Delhi Sultanate was replaced by the Mughal Empire (1526-1707), which weakened itself in trying to subjugate the subcontinent and engendered ferocious Hindu resistance in Maharashtra, although the ultimate winners were the British firmly established in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.
When the last Spanish Habsburg died, powerful France staked a claim for a Bourbon succession opposed by the Habsburg. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) ensued, during which the United Kingdom sided against France, but left the war when it appeared that the Habsburg cause could lead to an union of Spain and Austria. A Bourbon was accepted as king of Spain, which was no longer the major power it had once been. Among the results of the war was the creation of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which later became the instrument for the unification of Italy. Even more significant was the elevation of Prussia to the status of kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire. While western Europe warred, Russia modernized, and it did it so efficaciously that it eclipsed Sweden and began intervening in Poland, once the most powerful state in eastern Europe but over time enervated by lack of political organization. Russia fought successfully against the Ottomans and expanded eastwards with such impetus as to create an Eurasian empire, larger than any past or future. Dynastic disputes in the Holy Roman Empire eventually led to the Seven Years war (1756-1763), arguably the most important war in history. It ranged Austria, France, and Russia against Prussia and the United Kingdom. The war ended when Russia decided to quit it. After the war, Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioned Poland (1795). The Seven Years war had momentous consequences. The British colonial empire grew immensely at the expense of the French colonial empire in India and North America. British global naval supremacy was demonstrated conclusively. The war made Prussia and Russia major European power wielders. French resentment at British gains led to crucial aid for the American revolution (1774-1781). But France's financial situation became desperate, which led to the convocation of the Estates General (1789) and soon to the French Revolution (1789-1799), and the Napoleonic era (1799-1815). Eventually, Prussia became Germany through defeating France (1870-1871) and despoiling it of Alsace and Lorraine. The German alliance with Austria antagonized Russia in the Balkans and resulted in the entente between France and Russia, later joined by the United Kingdom. When a Serb killed the Austrian heir (1914), a rush of events resulted in the First World War. Tsarist fecklessness laid the ground for the Bolshevik Revolution and the constitution of the USSR. Germany's capitulation in this most devastating of wars encouraged extreme nationalism which fostered the rise of Hitler and Nazism climaxing in the Second World war. And in the Post-War, the USSR and the USA were soon at loggerheads in the Cold War. Even more important than the long chain of events set off by the Seven Years war was the culmination in the United Kingdom of the European process of industrialization that can be traced as far back as the central Middle Ages. No other civilization attained this feat, which does not mean that they could not have given sufficient time.
Napoleon's French European empire might be the briefest empire in history, excepting the few years when Germany and Japan were trying to conquer the world. In 1814, Napoleon was packed off to the island of Elba (off the coast of Tuscany) and Louis XVIII, brother of the beheaded Louis XVI, was crowned. A congress gathered in Vienna to re-structure Europe but the anti-Bonapartist allies now became rivals. In March 1815, Napoleon landed in Cannes. Despite the casualties his wars had caused-the conscription system had allowed France to uniform millions of soldiers-he was generally acclaimed. Marshal Michel Ney, the hero of the rearguard in the retreat from Russia, hesitated but finally joined Napoleon. This change of sides was crucial and the French military (125,000) rallied to his cause. Ney was later tried and executed. Napoleon chased Louis from the throne. The previous anti-France coalition had disbanded and only British and Prussian troops were in the field to face Napoleon. Wellington took command of the allied forces, British (93,000) and German (120,000), in the Lowlands. In June, Napoleon beat back Gebhard L. von Blücher's Prussians and thought he was done with them, but he also sent 30,000 men in pursuit, which left him about even with Wellington. The two greatest military opponents of the 19th century met at Waterloo, near Brussels (13 June 1815). The battle was touch-and-go but Blücher, eluding the force Napoleon sent to pursue him, reappeared and the French were crushed. This time Napoleon was exiled to St Helena, a British speck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where he died at the age of fifty-two. At the Congress of Vienna, the virtually extinct Holy Roman Empire was reconstituted territorially as the German Confederation. The Habsburg Empire lost minor possessions in western Germany, but gained Lombardy and Venetia. Warsaw was awarded to Russia. Prussia retained much of western Poland and the Habsburg Empire Galicia minus Lublin which went to Russia. Krakow was made an independent state which was annexed by the Habsburg Empire in 1848. Naples and Sicily were restored to the Bourbons. Norway was ceded to Sweden in retribution for Denmark's French leanings. Both Iceland and Greenland remained under the Danish crown. Genoa was ceded to the Kingdom of Sardinia. Luxembourg and the territory of Belgium (a country still unborn) were attached to the crown of Netherlands. Luxembourg also had membership in the German Confederation. The independence and neutrality of Switzerland were recognized. The Holy Alliance was an agreement between Prussia, Russia and Austria (later joined by France) to put down any threat to the European monarchical order.
(6) From 1815 to 1913
During this period Western global hegemony was uncontestable. But even as Europe and America colonialized the world, the only period that can rival the 19th century in the creation of independent states is the one that supervened with massive decolonization after World War II. Apart from the Napoleonic wars and many colonialist wars, there were few major European conflicts, as if Europe was repressing the full force of its aggressiveness to let it loose in World War I. While Spain was fighting its war of independence against French invasion and occupation, Spain's dependencies in America began their own struggles to become independent (1810-1824). Excluding Haiti the first independent state in the Western Hemisphere after the USA, Latin America was begotten as a set of seventeen states, all of them republican except Brazil which started life as a monarchy (Mexico also but only for a few years). There were a few failed attempts at confederation among them. To these republics were later added Cuba, through the American defeat of Spain in 1898, and Panamá, which America seized from Colombia in 1903 to build the canal. There were only two non-Western states which, because of their size, could have opposed European and American imperialisms: the Ottoman Empire and China, and they were too prostrate by ineptitude to do anything. The Ottomans were faced by rebellions in the Balkans which resulted, before World War I, in the creation of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, and Romania. The Ottoman Empire had as primary enemies the Habsburg Empire, which in the Balkans occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia; and Russia, which was the champion of pan-Slavism. The rest of Europe rather inclined to maintain the existence of the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean war (1853-1856) was waged by an alliance of West European states (mainly France and the United Kingdom) to warn Russia not to become too greedy or adventurous in the Balkans. As to China, practically all European states tried to carve niches of sovereignty on its coastal periphery. Japan did not go the way of China because, unlike its gigantic neighbor, it went along with rather than against European pressure and example. Outside the Balkans, other European states were born during this period: Belgium and Luxembourg were detached from the Netherlands (1830) and Norway went independent from Sweden (1905).
Italy and Germany were constituted, the former with the aid of France against Austria and the latter in open warfare with France. Although it did not involve the creation of a new state, the Habsburg Empire was forcibly converted into the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, which endowed Hungary with its own parliament, in which Latin was an official language. The bloodiest and most destructive war was the American Civil War between the non-slavery United States and the pro-slavery Confederate States of America. The French colonial empire was rebuilt from the shambles which the British made of it during the Seven Years war. This process began in Algeria and spread to all the Maghreb. Under European sponsorship, Egypt gradually severed its ties to the Ottoman Empire only to become a dependency of Britain (1882). The British colonial empire declared British India a viceroyalty. Already present in Malaya, it overlapped from India into South East Asia as the French gradually annexed what they called Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). Thailand avoided colonialization as a cushion or buffer between the two imperialisms. The British were favorably disposed to give full autonomy to their colonies of white settlement and thus were born Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. South Africa too was given self-government but only after the British had to fight the Boers to the ground with all repressive means they could use in a war they initially thought would be hardly more than a skirmish (1899-1902). Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the architect of the German Reich, convoked the Conference of Berlin (1885) in which Africa, only raggedly occupied, and islands in Melanesia and Polynesia were shared out. Germany and Italy were awarded territories to colonialize. Ethiopia was the only state that successfully resisted annexation by Italian forces which thought they were going on a field trip. There was also the Congress of Berlin (1878) and this was convoked because Russia had again overplayed its hand in the Balkans (or so Britain and other states thought) and it was forced to modify conditions it imposed on the Ottomans. Eventually, things turned out the way Russia wanted them to, but German interference made the Russians receptive to an alliance with France. Germany and Austria-Hungary were already allied. They recruited an unlikely third partner, Italy, previously the worst enemy of Austria. As to the United Kingdom, it looked at the array of forces and conditionally joined France and Russia because it considered that Germany was becoming too strong and could tilt the continental balance of power. All of this, plus French resentment over having lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, set the conditions for the start of the First World War.
(7) 1914-1945
The assassination of the Habsburg heir, Francis Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, produced an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, which was made deliberately unacceptable. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and Russia mobilized. Germany declared war on Russia and invaded Belgium in a campaign to capture Paris. Great Britain declared war on Germany. France almost lost the war during the month of August 1914 but it won the battle of the Marne and trench warfare from the North Sea to Switzerland was the result. In the East, Russia was badly mauled in Prussia, although it sent the Austrians reeling. The Ottoman Empire sided with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and Italy later joined the Allies. Both powers served to distract forces from the main theatres of operations which were the western and the eastern fronts. Germany individually was more powerful than either France or Britain singly, but against two enemies and having to keep the Russians in check the war became a stalemate. The Bolshevik revolution took Russia out of the war. But in the meantime, Germany applied unrestricted submarine warfare and provoked the entrance of the USA on the Allied side. When the submarine offensive began to wane, the Germans decided on all-out offensive in the western front. Austria-Hungary had almost knocked Italy out of the war. The German offensive failed and Italy began fighting back. In the Balkans the Ottomans and Bulgaria came under such pressure from the Allies that they capitulated, as did Austria-Hungary. Germany hadn’t even been invaded, but the home front was grumbling and crumbling. Germany surrendered without having been decisively defeated. By the Treaty of Versailles at the Paris Peace conference, reparations were imposed on Germany and the League of Nations was created. France recovered Alsace and Lorraine. Poland was generously restored, including a corridor to the port of Danzig. Poland claimed the 1772 eastern border and it warred with Soviet Russia. By other treaties, Austria-Hungary was dissolved into Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, with chunks going to Italy, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungary was much reduced, especially from the loss of Transylvania to Romania. Bulgaria lost bits of land all around, especially the outlet to the Aegean. The USA did not ratify the Versailles treaty. Germany became a weak republic with mainly "socialist" governments that hardly reflected the social turbulence, extreme nationalism, resentments, and militarism that imbrued the country. France and Britain at first were tough on Germany about reparations, but gradually the hardness softened, but Germany was not mollified. Shortly after the war Italy entered a brief process that led to Fascist dictatorship under Benito Mussolini.
Despite the underlying tendencies to conflict, the Inter-War years were a time of peace-seeking through many treaties replete with good intentions and high-sounding proclamations. The end of democracy in Germany came about with the rise of Adolf Hitler. Germany and Italy converged and aided the triumph of Francisco Franco over republican Spain. Russia had become the USSR under Lenin and not long afterwards the reprehensible Stalinist USSR. But Stalin saw better than the western democracies the danger that Hitler posed and he advocated collective security. Great Britain and France were as much against the USSR as against Germany. In 1932, Japan had snatched Manchuria from China. In 1937, there was full war between the two countries. Japan and Germany had signed an anti-Comintern pact, which Italy joined to form the tripartite axis. In 1938, Hitler started on his campaign of annexations and conquests. He annexed Austria to Germany and he got Britain and France to accept the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, although it was not supposed to be this but only the annexation of the Sudetenland. Even the perpetrators of Appeasement realized it wasn’t working. When they turned to the USSR, Stalin preferred a deal with strongman Hitler than with pusillanimous democrats. The German-Soviet pact was shortly followed by the invasion of Poland by Germany and the start of World War in Europe. Before one year was over, Hitler bypassed the outmoded French static defenses. The British barely escaped from Dunkirk. Mussolini followed Germany into war under the illusion that Hitler would find the Mediterranean more alluring that Russia, but it was the other way around: Hitler wanted Mussolini to deal with southern Europe while he subdued the USSR. But Mussolini couldn’t even defeat Greece on his own and Germany had to invade the Balkans and send troops to Libya. Then Hitler turned against Stalin and almost occupied Moscow in 1941. The Japanese invaded Vietnam and the USA imposed embargoes. Japan saw this as economic aggressions and attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, thus bringing the USA into the war. In 1942, the war started turning against the Axis: the Americans defeated the Japanese navy in Midway, Germans and Italians were defeated at El Alamein, and the German offensive against Stalingrad bogged down. After that it was a matter of time. The Russians drove the Germans back to Poland. The Allies invaded North Africa and Italy. The Japanese defense perimeter crumbled steadily in the east and it was faltering in Burma. China was divided between the communists in the north and the Nationalists in the south. The Japanese easily held them off. D-Day or the invasion of Normandy by the Allies meant that Germany was now fighting on three fronts (actually four if we count the invasion of southern France). As the noose tightened, the Soviets after heavy fighting reached Berlin. Hitler committed suicide. Italy had been out of the war since 1943. The Japanese were resisting America by committing collective suicides. But when the atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it had no choice but to surrender. The occupation of Japan was a strictly American affair, but treaties and accords had been made about how to divide Germany. During April-June of 1945, the UN was founded in San Francisco. The Security Council became its executive core with the USA, the USSR, Britain, France, and China given veto power over all military actions. Although the Allies were still allied at the end of World War II, the intrinsic antagonisms between the capitalist USA and the Stalinist USSR were there. Thus began the Post-War.
(8) From 1946 to the present
Germany was divided into four zones of occupation as was Berlin within the Soviet zone. Already in Greece there was open conflict between communist guerrillas and the pro-western government. The USA declared itself ready to come to the aid of any country under threat of communist subversion. But where Stalin started pushing was in Czechoslovakia. The spear point of the American drive in southern Germany was led by Gen. George Patton, but he was under orders not to cross into Czechoslovakia even though the Soviets had not yet liberated Prague. Elections were held in that country in which the communists obtained a plurality, in part because of the gratuitous bombing of Prague by the Americans early in 1945. The USA was so aware of the rivalry with the USSR that it applied the Marshall plan to get the economies of western Europe on their economic feet after the devastation of the war. Czechoslovakia, nominally self-ruling but under Soviet occupation, was disposed to accept American aid but Stalin put his foot down and ordered the brutal sovietization of the country. If any event marked the start of the Cold War it was this one, although it was as easy to foresee as freeze in a Russian winter. In the Middle East, Israel was created against the unanimous opposition of all Arab states. The Berlin blockade was a gross infringement of the agreements by which occupied Germany would be run. But Stalin did nothing to prevent the airlift that saved the city from its complete Soviet engulfment. Although much ink has been spilled on how the American doctrine of world-wide containment of communism came about, the facts tell us that it was reactive and spontaneous: it was either that or nuclear war. The Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in 1949. The nuclear-arms race was another inevitability, but it is no likely that either Soviets or Americans ever seriously considered engaging in an atomic war, such was the terrifying destructive power of the hydrogen or fission-fusion bomb, which the USA and the USSR developed nearly simultaneously. In America there was a great deal of public debate over how to use atomic weapons as extensions of policy during the Cold War. It made the reputation of Henry Kissinger. It engendered concepts such as "flexible response" and "brinkmanship", but when push came to shove both superpowers either avoided confrontation or, if it came, one or the other backed down, as the Soviets did when they removed missiles they were installing in Cuba; or when Kissinger declared a world-wide nuclear alert when the USSR put Israel on notice not to advance into Egypt beyond the Suez Canal in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The Israelis, who had won anyway, retreated from the city of Suez which they had previously surrounded. When World War II was over, in China it was the beginning of the civil war between the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and the communists of Mao Zedong. Chiang’s American advisers ferried his troops to Manchuria, where the Soviets had left large Japanese arms caches to the communists. This strategy was hopeless and debilitated rather than strengthened the Nationalists. Manchuria was lost and with it the soldiers who could have fought the main communist offensive in central China. By 1949, Mao was in Beijing and Chiang in Taiwan, both claiming to represent the republic of China in its entirety. When Stalin gave thumbs up to the North Korean attack on South Korea, the USA immediately stepped into breach and pushed back, too far as it turned out for the Chinese intervened and drove Allied troops-the American intervention had the sanction of the UN-south of Seoul. Talk in America of using atomic weapons was probably more for public consumption than as a real policy alternative. The war entrenched to a halt at a line that left as much territory in the north as in the south as when the war began. Under president Eisenhower, secretary of state John Foster Dulles created phantom alliances that ringed the USSR and China.
The French had tried to re-impose their colonialist regime in Indochina, but like the Dutch in the East Indies, they did not have the means to do it. Indonesia’s leaders were unequivocally nationalist, even if Sukarno, the recognized head of the independence movement, had no special animus against communism. But in Vietnam, the largest and most important part of Indochina, the leaders of the forces for independence, all loyal to Ho Chi Minh, were definitely communists. Thus when France cut its losses and divided Vietnam in two: a communist north and a pro-western south, the USA was one step away from intervention in if the communist north made a grab for South Vietnam. This indeed happened when the south Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold nation-wide elections because he said that the communists in the north would make sure it was a victory for the communists. The North Vietnamese began guerrilla operations and the USA did step in. All of this was part of the containment of the spread of communism. Before then, the solid anti-communist West was firmly in place and there was no chance of communist expansion, except in Latin America when Castro took over Cuba. The USSR had its own empire from East Germany to Mongolia. China was not, as many Americans believed, a Soviet sub-empire but an empire in itself. Even though it supported the anti-colonialist wars in the countries of Indochina, it never tried to impose itself on them. Against the Chinese behemoth the USA had bases in Japan and in Taiwan, which it fenced out of mainland China with the Seventh Fleet. But the world over there was a divide between rich and poor countries, and in the Post-War decolonization increased the number of independent (often seemingly) but poor countries, which called themselves collectively the Third World and were, in theory, the field where capitalism and communism could joust for power. But it wasn’t quite that way, because, however poor, most countries had ruling classes that controlled the masses and they were not inclined to communism. Even the masses for that matter were not seduced by communist collectivism. But in America it was believed that if Vietnam was lost, Thailand would be lost next. This was an addendum to containment called Domino Theory. India was the greatest mainstay for a policy of non-alignment between capitalists and communists. It was a massive democratic rock in the center of Asia that China attacked but could not dream of overcoming.
Most former colonies in Africa declared themselves from the start as "socialist". There were also socialist countries in the Middle East. But there the USA had a copper-bottomed alliance with Israel, which in 1967 conquered the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The USA watched impassively. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the umbrella for all opposition to Israel, was incensed. The conditions for permanent Arab-Israeli hostility were laid down. They would become virtually irremediable when in the 1970s Israel began acting towards the conquered remains of Palestine as if they were its natural Lebensraum, which was the Nazi doctrine that justified the extermination of Jews and the persecution and slaughter of Poles and Russians. Israelis in sum started constructing settlements in the midst of and to the chagrin of Palestinians. Socialism in the Third World could mean almost anything; besides, in black Africa, a sub-continent that Europe exploited (where it could do so profitably), ethnically contorted, and starved of education and other basics, whatever designation countries adopted, the result was always incompetence and corruption and with more and more frequency murderous prolonged civil wars, even genocide. The only place in the Third World where the USA committed itself fully against communism was Vietnam and there it lost without any effect on the stability of Thailand. So basically the Cold War was not where it seemed to be, but where it always had been: in the arms race. Here again there was much theorization but ultimately it came to that the competition had its own momentum and its own rationale. Big bombs required big planes, but planes were too slow, so Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) were invented, and ICBMs could be installed in submarines and one nuclear cone could be fragmented into various warheads, and so on. Eventually, both the USSR and the USA had so many nuclear weapons and means of delivering them that it became obvious that no one could gain from nuclear war. This was known from the start but, for the sake of politics, it was not admitted, until both sides tacitly agreed that such was the case. This was called the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) equilibrium and to make sure that it wasn’t broken a treaty was signed banning Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABMs). Other aspects were technical, scientific, and economic. As long as there was the prod of the arms race, the USSR could barely hold its own in technology and science, but economically its system was at a disadvantage. Magnitogorsk, the showcase of Stalinist industrialization, was such a blotch in the landscape that people breathed coal particles and were showered by acid. The Soviet rip-off of the Concorde crashed in an air show. The USSR never even tried to duplicate the American space shuttles.
In the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev had repudiated Stalinism. His successors were "communist conservatives". They broke Cold War immobility by invading Afghanistan. In America, capitalist conservatism became predominant in the 1980s. The man who incarnated this "revolution" was Ronald Reagan. He challenged the USSR in two fronts. He announced that the USA was pursuing an anti-ballistic missile (SDI), which was an infringement of the ABM treaty, and he authorized an alliance between the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) to give logistical support to the insurgent warlords trying to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. The USSR too was changing and this was a real revolution within the old Bolshevik revolution. Mikhail Gorbachev became secretary general of the CPSU and he began to reform Soviet society and to open it to democratic practices, though his project was gradualist. Gorbachev and Reagan became anti-Cold War partners. The SDI project was downgraded and the Soviets evacuated Afghanistan. The issue to the Afghan conflict was left in the hands of the ISI, which was imbued by Islamic mystique, and the Pakistanis finally swung their support to the extremely retrograde Taliban movement.
The 1990s started on both hopeful and sour notes. The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, in an act that can only be characterized as deliberately self-destructive, considering that his country was becoming a significant weapons threat to Israel, went and invaded and annexed Kuwait on reasons so flimsy that they did nothing to dissimulate what was an obvious act of unjustified aggression. With the exception of Palestinians, whose cause Hussein ardently espoused, and of Jordan, whose King Hussein was under two fires and had no where to go but to a neutralist stance, he was execrated by all Arab countries. American president George Bush, Reagan’s successor, had little difficulty in putting together a large coalition basically to support the first American war on Iraq (Gulf War). It is just conceivably possible that Hussein might have thought that his large but unsophisticated army and tank forces could take on American soldiers with night-vision goggles and tanks that launched heat-seeking missiles and total coalition control of the air, which might indicate a touch of madness, but reality quickly set in. Iraq was utterly defeated. Bush did not order the total invasion of Iraq, but the conditions that were imposed on the country were so onerous and constraining that the only sovereignty it retained was the power to keep the country from coming entirely apart. To this was added rigorous on-ground inspection and constant air surveillance. In the USSR, Gorbachev’s reform program included keeping that country together, but the communists, who in principle should have been supportive, sequestered him briefly and Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, undermined the USSR. There followed helter-skelter privatization and a transition that converted the former Soviet management class into wild-and-wooly capitalists. China instead, which had adopted deep but orderly economic reforms, began an economic boom that has been going to this day and has made it one of the most powerful economies in the world, and with that enhanced military potential and global influence. At a slower but still solid pace, India’s economy too began to grow at a socially transforming rate.
No one contested America’s unipolar position in the world, which included decisive interventions in the Balkans to curb ethnic-cleansing and even genocidal tendencies. But president Bill Clinton over-reached when he encouraged NATO to recruit states that were formerly part of the Soviet empire. Rapt in its own chaos, Russia could do little. Already ailing and somewhat adrift, Yeltsin handed power to Vladimir Putin on the last day of the 20th century. Tension between Arabs and Israelis had been on the increase. The USA came under various international terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire, was financing at least some of them. The CIA had him tagged, but bin Laden was now under the wings of the Taliban regime which America itself had helped install through its Pakistan proxy. Efforts to pin down and kill bin Laden failed. Afghanistan even turned down the Saudis, who had partly financed them, when they asked to be given bin Laden. In 2000, in one of the most dubious electoral results in American history, George W. Bush, son of former president George Bush, was made president by the Supreme Court. Without anything remotely near a mandate, Bush came to the White House with an aggressive three-pronged agenda: re-activation of the SDI; condemnation and hostility to "rogue states"; and super tax cuts for the very rich. It was argued that these would have America booming as never before, even though the Clinton years had been of economic expansion, so Bush’s plan seemed somewhat supernumerary. The "rogue state" Bush had particularly in mind was Iraq. In 2001, terror on a spectacular scale struck NYC and Washington. Osama bin Laden, which under Bush did not have the priority that Clinton’s government gave him, was identified as the author of the attack. Afghanistan refused to hand him over and the USA invaded with the support of local anti-Taliban warlords. Osama bin Lade was not captured. Then, in a badly justified and badly planned aggression, the USA made war on Iraq against world-wide and UN opposition. The result of this has been a prolonged and bloody occupation and the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Instead of decreasing, terrorism increased. In Israel/Palestine, a lopsided war pitted the two sides. Bush backed Israel to the hilt. Hostilities are still going. The Iraq war undermined the UN and divided the previously unshakable NATO alliance. North Korea had agreed to freeze a nuclear program that could have provided it with plutonium for nuclear weapons and it now re-activated it and eventually tested a nuclear bomb underground. Iran was developing a nuclear program of its own. With the unlikely excuse of defending Europe from attack by Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles, the USA pushed a plan to install anti-ballistic radar and missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland. Under the authoritarian Putin, Russia had experienced an economic revival and now vehemently opposed the American project, which was put on hold. All of this meant the end of the American unipolar status in the world. And as to the American economy, Bush’s tax largesses at first seemed to work, but as his second term neared its end the economy fell into a crisis which set the clock back to where it was when Clinton first became president. A relativistic multipolar world in which America’s agenda, and even its historical reputation, has been shredded, is now the global norm.