Practically all the current major conflicts and crises have their origins in the last century, which is far from being done with us
I was just reading a sample of observations by eminent people on the 20th century. Here are a few of their quotes:
“I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history.”
Isaiah Berlin, Russian-British political philosopher and historian of ideas
“We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”
Primo Levi, Italian chemist and novelist, and Nazi death camp survivor
“I can’t help thinking that this has been the most violent century in human history.”
William Golding, British novelist
“If I had to sum up the 20th century, I would say that it raised the greatest hopes ever conceived by humanity, and destroyed all illusions and ideals.”
Yehudi Menuhin, British violinist and conductor
For a long time, many people, or at least those in the affluent West and some in East Asia, thought we were done with all that bad stuff from the 20th century. Of course, that was never the case. But there was the pervasive matrix of an illusion that was sold to us thanks mainly to the end of the Cold War and the supposed triumph of the West, which thereby brought History to an end.
Now, consider this number: 114 million. That’s the number of people currently being displaced by war, conflicts or climate change. If we were born to different parents, we could easily have been among them. Tomorrow, or not too far into the future, we or our children could be joining them. There have never been so many refugees and desperate migrants all at once seeking to live somewhere else. If you wonder why so many Western countries are panicking about being swamped by refugees, well, that’s why. But Western interference and subversion around the world, and the legacies of colonialism have been major contributors to their displacement. So perhaps Western leaders shouldn’t complain so loudly.
Talking about really bad 20th century-like stuff, I just read this in a news report: “The first 88 people on the list [of those killed] were all from the extended al-Astal family. The next 72 were Hassounas. The next 65 al-Najjars. The next 60 al-Masrys. The next 49 al-Kurds; [in Gaza] family trees dismembered, whole branches of them obliterated.
“It has been almost two months since the list was released on October 26, and the death toll given by Gaza’s health ministry has nearly tripled, approaching 20,000 … More than 100 people in the al-Astal family alone had been killed in Israeli attacks. Of 88 family members on the October 26 list, 39 were identified as children and 25 as women.”
If those names were Jewish-sounding, I could have been reading about the Holocaust, the lessons of which we supposedly have learned from in the past three-quarters of a century and would never repeat. We can now draw a direct line from the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 to the second Nakba of today.
Most conflicts hitting the headlines in recent years have all been a continuation of tragedies from the last century. As an example, the Ukraine war easily comes to mind, unless you are naive and ignorant enough to believe Vladimir Putin woke up one morning and decided to invade a foreign sovereign country just for fun. Contexts matter.
A fight over which side Ukraine should be allied with was long planned in Washington. Consider the infamous leaked draft of the “defence planning guidance for 1994-99” financial years budget of the Pentagon, better known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
“We continue to recognise that collectively the conventional forces of the states formerly comprising the Soviet Union retain the most military potential in all of Eurasia; and we do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others,” wrote Paul Wolfowitz, one of the future key architects of the disastrous Iraq invasion under George W. Bush.
“We must, however, be mindful that democratic change in Russia is not irreversible, and that despite its current travails, Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capacity of destroying the United States.”
When Bush became president and Wolfowitz was appointed No 2 at the Pentagon, the administration began planning for Ukraine to join Nato, against which Putin had warned repeatedly as a red line for Moscow.
Then, in 2014, Washington supported the “revolution” that overthrew the democratically elected but pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. The US said it was just supporting democracy. The Russians saw it as clear proof of a deliberate state subversion in their own backyard. Putin then showed that he was true to his word. The rest, as they say, is history.
But if you think all that is just conventional warfare, think again. One of the achievements of the Cold War was arms control or nuclear disarmament.
But Russia and the US have reversed all those gains. The US first withdrew in 2002 from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which was followed by the Russians.
In 2019, both sides abandoned the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty after mutual accusations and recrimination. Other pacts that could put guardrails on nuclear weapons have proved to be ineffective or problematic. The US has never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) while the Russia has withdrawn its ratification. Now, it appears neither side considers itself bound by the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty. Throw in China’s nuclear modernisation programme, and we are in greater nuclear danger than ever.
Meanwhile, after the Russians launched their invasion, Western leaders started warning about an invasion of Taiwan by mainland China. However, Beijing has likewise drawn a parallel analogy with Ukraine. The West, led by the US, is trying to draw the island into the Western alliance and upend its long-standing one-China commitment. And, like Putin over Ukraine, Xi Jinping has drawn, repeatedly, Taiwan as the reddest of all red lines for Beijing.
You may think I am excessively pro-Chinese/Russian, and you are perfectly free to defend your own pro-Western/American narratives. But we can all agree that all these conflicts and others have their roots firmly in the last century.
Consider another disaster. The worst humanitarian crisis today may actually be in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rather than Ukraine or Palestine, with more than 6 million people displaced. You and I are at least partly responsible. The country has long been plagued by the resource curse, not the least of which is that it supplies the world with more than 60 per cent of cobalt that is essential for rechargeable batteries in your smartphones and electric cars. And its mining truly involves slavery conditions.
Its ongoing conflicts involving Rwanda and any number of militias and rebel groups have their roots in the continental war that killed millions between 1996 and 2002 and were ultimately triggered by the Rwanda genocide.
But since it’s Africa and it involves people with black skin, it’s not the kind of sufferings and mass killings that attract our attention and sympathy.
So, outside the centres and key nodes of the global economy, the world has been as bad as it ever was, both before and after the Cold War. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost across the Global North; so all their long-hidden fascists and racial supremacists are coming out of the woodwork. We are in for a long terrible century.
In one of the more provocative debates about periodisation among historians, Ivan Berend and Eric Hobsbawm have called the 19th century “the long century”, running from 1789 to 1914; and the 20th century as “the short century”, going from 1914 to 1991.
I am a big fan of Hobsbawm but it seems increasingly clear that their hypothesis is not tenable.
The short moment of American unipolarity after the Cold War was just a lull before the storm. Short of a human extinction event such as a climate catastrophe or a nuclear holocaust, the 20th century is turning out to be much longer than the 19th. We may be done with the last bloody century, but it’s not done with us, not by a long shot.
