The Watershed
The word of the title means a dividing line, usually a high mountain range from which the accumulated precipitation flows in different direction, depending on the side of the mountain. In the sense of this book, watershed means that until a particular point in history or more accurately, until a number of specific points, the direction was upward and from that points in time, at least as the people felt it, the direction was downward. There is a stress on the number of points in time, as there were many factors and it is not altogether correct that all the factors were moving in a coordinated fashion.
The previous chapters enumerated the changes that occurred in the centuries preceding the watershed: the conversion to nation states, the replacement of the previously ruling elite by the middle class, a new elite that was based upon money and not upon birth, and the Industrial Revolution. It was a tremendous change, probably greater than all previous changes in history. The destruction of the aristocratic Republic in Rome, and its replacement with the Empire was probably similar to the victory of the middle class in the western word, but it was only a change of the ruling elite, without the other elements. The effects of the changes in Europe were not identical everywhere. It was strongest in France, after all it was the epicenter of the revolution, but its spread over the world was unequal, so the reaction was unequal too.
The main symptom to the reaction of the changes up to that point in time was that people were optimistic and saw the future through a rosy filter, and after that point, they became pessimistic and sought solutions to better their future. Some did it consciously; some looked for prophets to follow. It is obvious that bettering the future does not mean looking for a better job or a better house, but changing the basic parameters of society to fit better the personal ambitions.
It is a common wisdom that the First World War was the watershed of the modern world. It closed an era and opened another. This book does not agree with that common wisdom. It is true that the First World War was a terrifying experience, probably unique in human memory, but it was not the cause. It was one of the results of deeper causes.
A century before the First World War, there were the wars of Napoleon. They did not reach the intensity of the First World War, they had no technology for it, but they were gory and terrifying enough. One certainly could put the same label on the wars of Napoleon as on the First World War: a unique experience in human memory as far as terror and intensity were concerned. Up to that point in time, of course. The same applies to the First World War too. One can never know what is around the corner. Despite the undoubted similarity, the state of mind of Europe after those wars was nothing like the state of mind of Europe after the First World War.
Indeed, after the wars of Napoleon, the industrial and scientific revolutions have transformed the world. Man had entered the Nineteenth Century using only his and animal power, supplemented by that of wind and water, much as he entered the Thirteenth, or for that matter, the First Century. It is true that steam power was already in existence, but it came into general use only after the wars. At the turn of the century, steam power was used only in deep mines to pump water.
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, man's capabilities in transportation, communication, production, manufacture and weaponry multiplied thousand fold by the energy of machines. Steam power came and went; and the new century has already started with electric power.
Industrial society gave man new powers and new scope, while at the same time building up new fissures in prosperity and poverty, in growth of population and crowding in cities, in antagonism of classes and groups, in separation from satisfaction in individual work. Science gave man new welfare and new horizons while it took away belief in God and certainty of things he knew. By the time he left the Nineteenth Century he had as much unease as ease. To paraphrase Dickens," It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
This was the picture of the western world at the end of the Nineteenth Century. It is true that a fin de siecle usually brings out decadence. We all remember the great fear at the end of the Twentieth Century that was not only fin de siecle but also fin de millennium, but the end of the Nineteenth .Century was not decadence; in was rather a confused period in which people were looking for new approaches. Anything but the old.
Barbara Tuchman wrote a book about that period, the last quarter century leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. The title of the book is The Proud Tower. She took countries of the western world, not only Europeans, as the United States was already a fully-grown partner in world politics, and analyzed the prevailing problems connected with a country or with the west as a whole. So, she described the overseas expansion of the United States, the convolutions of the Dreyfus case in France, the philosophy of Nietsche and the music of Richard Strauss in Wilhelmine Germany. She also touched world wide political movements, as the peace movement of Nikolai II of Russia and Bertha von Sutter, the effects of the anarchists as a world-wide nihilistic movement and the acceptance of the Socialists as legitimate political partners in most of the countries of Europe. The last sentence ought to be redefined. It is true that the general prosperity reached the workers too, at least a part of them, and the representatives of those workers, lower middle class really, became acceptable political partners. So, Keir Hardy and later Ramsay MacDonald in the United Kingdom, Liebknecht and Bernstein in Germany , Millerand and Jaures in France became part of the mainstream in their respective countries.
The First World War was not the watershed, although it was horrendous enough. It is worth while to quote the thoughts of Winston Churchill on the subject:
"All the horrors of all ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust in the midst of them…When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, Christian States had been able to deny themselves, and they were of doubtful utility."
Winston Churchill jotted down these thoughts on a sheet of War Office paper, when he was Secretary of State for War, between 1919 – 1921. The horrors of the war were seen 'post factum'. The truth is that when the war started it had a near unanimous support, and even a popular demand. The people were much more enthusiastic about the war than the politicians, probably because the politicians were better informed. It is possible that in the modern age the peace movements, of which there were plenty before the war, and mother's organizations dislike wars and military service in general, but their sons usually do not share their dislike.
Martin van Creveld, the military historian, wrote that for every man who served in an army during a war and became a pacifist for life, there is another one who glorifies the memory of his war service, and bores his descendants with his properly embellished exploits in war. Military service for young adults is a biological imperative. It is doubtful that without that imperative it would be possible to draft young citizens for a duty where they have a good chance of getting killed or maimed for life.
War was always hell, and a war manned by a mass intake of conscripts and equipped with weapons, created by modern science and technology, was certainly so. However, wars are not athletic contests and there is no way of grading them. Was the European war between 1914 – 1945 worse than the European war between 1618 – 1648? Who can tell? But even if it was so bad, it was not the real watershed. It was not the cause but one of the results. I know that these lines contradict the accepted thesis about the origins of that war, but then we are not talking about the immediate causes. The immediate cause of the war, the so-called trigger, was the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the following ultimatums by the Austrians. That was the apparent cause of the war, but even conventional historians renounce that story as the real cause. There were a number of causes to that war, and those causes were the real watershed, that separated the world in which the West was optimistic and expansionist, and the present in which the West is in a defensive position, that is called the New World Order.
There were three main causes to the First World War and its continuation, the Second World War. The first cause was one of demography. The population of the rich world, which was Europe, North America and Oceania, grew from 304 millions in 1850 to 732 millions in 1950, a growth of about 150 %. The additional people needed food, shelter, clothing and work. It is possible that an identical growth of population in the areas of Oriental Despotism would not have caused a similar conflagration, but western political traditions were different. Even the most absolute rulers felt themselves responsible for the well being of their subjects; even because of fear of their reaction. That political tradition was felt even more in modern times.
Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, made the most comprehensive social legislation in Europe of the 19th century. Bismarck certainly was not a liberal. Still, he made the necessary legislation and Adolf Hitler, also no liberal, even extended it. He justified it on ideological grounds: socialism inward, nationalism outward. Bismarck justified it as a political expediency, but both acted on identical principles. The same happened elsewhere in the western world. Social legislation created a safety net, which was what the rulers intended them to be. They were insufficient to replace the previous social arrangements, which will be described later in this chapter.
It is correct that there was a competition between Germany and the western Democracies; it is also correct that there were alliances that had to generate the war at the first serious crisis, but the underlying problem was the demographic pressure. There was a huge emigration from Europe to the Americas and to Oceania, but it was insufficient. There were attempts to settle Europeans in the highlands of Africa and in Algeria, but they were a drop in the ocean. The teeming millions remained in the European cities and they were a combustible material for any conflagration.
The chapter on the Industrial Revolution quoted Cecil Rhodes who wanted to prevent civil war in the United Kingdom by settling the surplus population in Africa. It also quoted a memorandum written by Kurt Niezler, a senior advisor to Bethman-Hollweg, that the German population is growing by 800 – 900,000 people every year, and those people need food, shelter, clothing and work. Work for the additional people in the conditions of the early 20th century, meant more production, more competition for export markets and eventual conflict. That is what happened in reality.
The demographic growth also ensured that the war, once it started, could have gone on practically indefinitely or at least until one side accepted defeat. The war was one of attrition, meaning that it aimed to kill as many from the enemy as possible, so that eventually the remaining people would be unable to man the trenches. The principle of the war of attrition claimed that there is a point in time when the losses cannot be replaced. Whether the losses were in manpower or in material, was irrelevant. This is indeed what happened in the American Civil War, which was a war of attrition par excellence. There the battle losses of the South could not be replaced and that was the end of the war.
This did not happen in the First World War. Niall Ferguson in his book, the Pity of War, shows a simple chart about the available manpower in Germany during the war. As the losses of Germany were somewhat less than the combined losses of France and Britain, the chart should be representative to the Allies too. It is true that the birthrate in France was lagging behind Germany, but the birthrate of the United Kingdom was still high. As the combined population of France and the United Kingdom was larger than of Germany, they also could continue the war indefinitely. Of course, they also had problems of moral. The French Army experienced an open mutiny in 1917.
Year Males attaining War deaths Surplus
the age of 18
1914 670,000 241,000 429,000
1915 674,000 434,000 240,000
1916 688,000 340,000 348,000
1917 691,000 282,000 411,000
1918 699,000 380,000 319,000
1919 711,000
According this chart, despite the losses, the German manpower was growing all the time, and the yearly intake was still increasing. According this chart the Germans could have continued the war practically indefinitely, and so could the Allies, provided they had the materials and the moral. It seems that the moral gave out before the manpower. There were plenty of people in fighting age, the problem was in their willingness to fight.
The second real cause of the war was a simple biological imperative that compels young males, after puberty and before settling down and raising families, to be aggressive and being willing for self-sacrifice. It is a biological imperative that exists in all animals living in gregarious social systems. They include the primates too, and the humans together with them. It is doubtful that without that biological imperative, it would be feasible to draft young males to armies, after all it is known to all that it might be extremely dangerous. This factor is valid for armies where the soldiers are drafted, meaning that they put themselves in harm's way as a civic duty, but it exists in professional armies too. Professional armies are getting paid, but when one analyzes the motives of those serving in professional armies, it is found that no salary is high enough to be killed for it. There is always an additional element, and it is the biological imperative. It is true for professional soldiers and for mercenaries too.
In addition to the biological imperatives, humans have brains and memories too. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, people still remembered the horrors of the First War and there was a chilling lack of enthusiasm on both sides of the conflict. When the First War broke out, the soldiers who were called to the colors, marched through the main streets of the cities with young girls strewing flowers on them and cheering them on. It seems that flowers strewn by young girls were not only aphrodisiac tools, but had patriotic results too.
When the Second World War broke out, even Hitler has forbidden the marches of the recruits through the centers of the cities, knowing full well that the experience of 1914 will not be repeated. No flowers will be thrown, and a chilly reception may be worse than no reception at all. In 1914 it was different and not only in Germany.
It is an interesting point but it seems that in 1914 there were no memories of the horrors of war. The last war in Western Europe was in 1870, much before the youngsters who eventually fought in the Great War were born. They were taught in the schools about the glory of the wars of Napoleon and they wanted to reach the same glory. The result was that the fields of Alsace were full of corpses in red pantaloons and blue coats, mowed down by German machineguns.
The First World War was spawn by demography and by a biological imperative that pumped adrenaline into the veins of the young, as it was designed to do, and the young duly demanded their right to be killed. It must be said to the favor of the politicians of that time that they, almost without exception, accepted the war with horror or with fatalistic despair. It is not entirely certain that they themselves were fully aware of the tremendous potential of a war waged by mass armies and equipped by modern industry. If they would have been fully aware then the number of stupid mistakes and miscalculations, on both sides of the line, would have been less.
British officers still had to present themselves at the armory to have their swords sharpened before embarking to the front in France. They were not alone. German Uhlans had to go through the same rigmarole with their lances. They also made a huge miscalculation on the need for artillery shells with the result that by the end of 1915 the war has nearly came to a standstill because of lack of ammunition. However, the elder generation was aware of the potential of modern industry to increase production at will, and thanks to it, the killing could continue for three more years.
In 1914 the young was in charge and the young wanted war. It was a general trend, not only of the militaristic Germans. In France, Charles Peguy wrote that he went 'eagerly' to the front (and his death). Henri de Montherlan reported that he 'loved life at the front, the bath of the elemental, the annihilation of the intelligence and the heart.' Pierre Drieu la Rochelle called the war 'a marvelous surprise'. The famous poem of Rupert Brooke, still resounds.:
"Now God be thanked who has matched us with his hour…
to turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary."
He also added that war is 'the only life…a fine thrill, like nothing else in the world' He was not the only British poet to wax about the beauty of the war. For Robert Nichols it was a 'privilege' and Julian Grenfell probably reached the apex of jubilation..- "He is dead who will not fight and who dies fighting has increase."
It was the same in Germany with Thomas Mann leading the pack of writers and poets, in Austria where Stefan Zweig wrote in favor of the war, and the Italians, who have probably led the rest in their lyrical support.
"This is the hour of the triumph of the finest values, this is the Hour of Youth."
Another added : "Only the small men and the old men of twenty want to miss it". The Hour of Youth uncannily reminds one of the Giovinezza, the later marching song of the Italian Fascists.
(The quotations of the war poetry were culled from Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 ,London, 1980)
There was a third cause to the First World War. It was not a specific cause to that war but a general malaise. Barbara Tuchman has touched that cause when she was writing about the anarchists and their assassinations before the war. She also wrote about the socialists but those, in opposition to the anarchists, fought against the excesses of the capitalist system. Eventually they succeeded in their fight. Thanks to them, to the general improvement of the economy and to the social legislation, most of the workers reached a respectable standard of living. It was certainly a distinct improvement as compared to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The socialists were certainly not responsible that professional revolutionaries kidnapped their ideas to establish personal dictatorships.
Anarchism was a protest movement against the results of the French Revolution. It should be clear here that whenever the concept French Revolution is used, the meaning is all the ideas and actions that separated the world of feudal Europe from the world we live in. The results of that change were already listed but it is worthwhile to list them again and complement them with additional items. The negative results of that revolution were:
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New fissures in society, between the have's and the have-not's.
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Overcrowding of cities |
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Rural unemployment
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Removal of satisfaction from individual work. People became cogs in machines.
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Destabilization of society by removing belief in God
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Elimination of a certainty by which people looked at the Universe and at life itself.
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Important these changes may be, they are only secondary to the main effect of the French Revolution.
Before the changes of the Revolution life was simple and the rules were known. The way of life of the vast majority of the people went back to a very long time, certainly to the time of the Germanic Invasions of the Western Roman Empire, probably even earlier. People lived on the land as serfs or villains to the lords of the manors. They had good times and they had bad times. Sometimes the landowner was a decent man and sometimes he was not. However, there was one constant factor in that type of life. There was a strong sense of belonging. People belonged to the village and they belonged to an extended family. Sometimes the two belongings were identical. The belonging gave people a sense of security for times of famine, sickness and old age. It was a form of social security. It is possible that there were primitive people who exposed their old to the elements but it was not so in the European traditions. The sense of permanency was not only because the unchanging way of life but also because of a geographical permanency. People were born, lived and died in the same village. The lords of the manor might have changed and they did change. That was history. The serfs were permanent, but then they were never part of history.
The large majority of the people in Europe, those who were the agricultural backbone on whom the whole feudal edifice was built, might not had a comfortable life, but they had a life with permanent rules and they were past experts in coping with them. They had their work cut out by the climate and by the corvee they owed to their lord. The priests told them what to think and what to believe. They had children regularly and those children died regularly too. If not, then the midwife took care of maintaining the balance. It was a monotone, stationary and primitive life, but it was a form of existence, probably better than most people had in other parts of the world.
Then suddenly, after millennia of uneventful existence, the world turned upside down. The signs of the change were there much before the change itself. More children remained alive and no machinations of the midwives could change the fact. The excess people had to leave their villages, having no livelihood there any more, and moved to the towns. There they discovered a new world that had no similarity to the world they came from.
It is possible that the capitalist system, another name of the victory of the middle classes, had its faults, and the slogan that each had equal chance of success was an empty claim. It is true that despite the Horatio Alger stories, there were very few shoeshine boys who became millionaires, and it was also true that the unemployed peasants, who made up the bulk of the urban proletariat, were at the bottom of the heap for success. They had no salable talents, apart of strong backs.
There is an interesting chapter in Arthus Koestler's book, Darkness at Noon, whose subject was the Moscow show trials. In that chapter, Gletkin the Ogpu investigator explains to Rubashoff, the man being prepared as a star defendant for a show trial , the policy of the Ogpu as far as punishment was concerned.
Gletkin explained that the Soviet State had to turn peasants into factory workers, exactly the same situation, as Western Europe had a century before his time. They found out, that the peasants had no sense of time at all. How could one expect from someone to turn up every morning on time for his work in a factory, when he has no watch, does not know what a watch is and has no sense what a watch is for? For thousands of years their sense of time was centered on sunrise and sunset, and their calendar around religious holidays. Gletkin's solution was to shoot all those who did not turn up on time, until the rest understood the principles of time.
Luckily for Europeans, there were no Gletkins in Europe at the time of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but they must have had the same problems. People without skills, without the support of the extended family and the familiar circumstances, crowded in the towns and having no hope to better their lot. At the same time they saw the rich, who made it, knowing all too well that they have no chance to be among them.
Eventually it became better. There was education, improved economic conditions and social legislation. It was a very slow going but at the end it worked. In 1917 Lenin wrote a pamphlet in which explained that the high living standard of the European workers, which caused that they stopped seeking revolutions but better conditions through their Trade Unions, was acquired by transferring the poverty to the colonies. The thesis was completely false, but it confirmed that the heartless beginning of the Industrial Revolution was over and the urban proletariat, at least a good part of it was already in the middle class.
Lenin's thesis was false on two counts. One was that the poverty of the colonies was caused by their exploitation by the colonial powers, and the second is that all the European proletariat was contented. At the beginning of the 20th century, the problem of alienation of the lowest stratum of the urban proletariat was still there. That was the time when H. G. Wells wrote the Time Machine, a book of science fiction, that depicts a future in which stunted underground creatures, the descendants of the proletariat of his own time, were preying on the descendants of the elite. That was also the time, when in Vienna, the legendary city of song and dance, 25 % of the population could not even afford to rent a room, and were renting sleeping space in other people's homes. Hitler was growing up in those conditions.
The alienation was a dark cloud over Europe and it appeared in the war poetry too. When Rupert Brooke wrote about a "world grown old and cold and weary" that was that alienation he had in mind. It was not only the poets. Kurt Kiezler, a close advisor and secretary to the German Chancellor, Bethman-Hollweg, kept notes and published them after the war. He noted for July 7, 1914 that the Chancellor expects that a "war, whatever its outcome, will result in uprooting everything that exists. The existing world is very antiquated, without ideas." For July 27, 1914, a few days before the outbreak of the war, he wrote: "Doom greater than human power hanging over Europe and our own people". Similar sentiments one can find in the famous sentence of Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit in our lifetime".
They are desperate words from men, who had the power to change things, if they could. It seems that there was no such a power. The demographic explosion that was behind the events of the two centuries leading to 1914 was stronger than anything Bethman-Hollweg, or anybody else, could have done.
The First World War had far-reaching political consequences. The dynasties of the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs disappeared, together with the empires. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up into its constituent parts, in Russia the new Bolshevik regime barely succeeded to reconstruct the Czarist Empire after a long and bloody civil war and Germany lost its eastern territories to the new Polish and Czechoslovak states.
The reorganization of the map of Europe did not solve anything except maybe sowing the seeds of the next war. To give justice to those who wanted to redraw the European borders for them to be more consistent to the ethnic picture, it should be added here that it was an impossible task. There was no possibility of creating viable states without incorporating ethnic minorities within them. In all of Europe, but especially in the eastern half, the ethnic communities were so intertwined that there was no logical way to disentangle them. Even after the Second World War and the forced expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, the ethnic kaleidoscope of Eastern Europe still remained tangled. The fate of the former Yugoslavia is a good example. Even after the separations of its constituent parts, the ethnic problems still remained. The Republics of Bosnia, Macedonia and the province of Kosovo are future separations waiting to happen. That they did not happen so far because there are outside forces there to prevent it.
The ethnic fragmentation of Europe was bad enough but it was not the worst. It was previously explained why the lowest stratum of the social structure was alienated from the system, but they were not the only stratum to be alienated and they were not restricted to the poor alone. A corner grocer can be a rich man in comparison to a manual worker but he can feel defenseless opposite a great department store or a shop of a multinational chain. The same was with an independent farmer opposite a huge agribusiness. It was not always economics that caused dissatisfaction and alienation. Scholars and artists saw the spiritual life as philistine and boring, and mostly without imagination. Students might have felt that there was a high wall obstructing their chances for the future. The demographic explosion was still continuing and the competition was growing every year.
These thoughts were surely enhanced by the catastrophe of the First World War but they existed much before. Sorel, Marinetti and d'Annunzio, the ideologues of Fascism, were active much before the war, so were Chamberlain, Nietsche and Wagner in Germany and a whole range of revolutionaries in Russia. Barbara Tuchman wrote in her book only about the Anarchists and the Socialists, but they were a minority among those who dreamed of destroying the society built on the principles of the French Revolution. Indeed, all the political movements that grabbed power in Europe between the two World Wars were counter-revolutions to the principles of the French Revolution. Hugh Thomas, the historian of the Spanish Civil War wrote that in Spain two counter-revolutions were fighting each other.
The ideologies and the principles were there and the battle lines were drawn. W. B. Yeats wrote in his famous poem, The Second Coming:
"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
These lines are not very far from the thoughts of Bethman-Hollweg, as recorded by Kurt Kiezler: "The existing world is very antiquated, without ideas." As with Yeats – "…the best lack all conviction."
There was an existing order, based more or less upon the capitalistic system, with constitutional rulers and parliamentary representation. There were differences; Wilhelm II of Germany and Nikolai II of Russia ruled differently from Edward VII of the United Kingdom, but the differences were more superficial than actual. Wilhelm II had to manage with an elected Reichstag that had a substantial Socialist representation, and even in Russia there was a semblance of political control. The "off-with-his-head" school was non-existent in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Russia was probably the last holdout of royal absolutism but even Russia became mellower with age. The average number of yearly executions, of all crimes, was 17 in the last decade of the 19th century. Not much, if one compares it with the average of a 1000 execution each month for the first year of the Soviet rule. Later, of course, it went up much more.
So, there was an established order with many problems. The demographic explosion was still going on and it caused most of the problems. Below the established system, there were many that were waiting for the system to collapse.
"…the worst are full of passionate intensity."
There were hundreds of political movements, whose established aim was the destruction of the existing order by revolutionary means and replace it by something better. What these movements wrought to the world after the end of the First World War, was something extraordinary and utterly unprecedented. It is worth while to examine the facts to see why they were unprecedented.
The principle of leadership in history is not new. It was more the rule than the exception that talented and charismatic people grabbed the power and ruled. They might have done so by revolutions or by coup d'etats. Thus, charisma and leadership always had historical roots. But each charismatic and powerful leader knew that he has to deliver, or else there will be new contenders with more charisma and more leadership. That was the rule. However, what has happened after the First World War was unprecedented in human history.
Apart of a few democratic countries, Europe was infested with dictatorial regimes and during a very long time they were immune from violent changes.
People were eager for a change. They were eager before the war and they were even more eager after it. There were hundreds of ideas floating around, most of them in the same direction with local variations. There is not much point in describing the ideas of the groups. Those ideologies were used to reach power. After reaching power, the ideologies were used as theatrical props, without much connection with reality. Probably the only element of the ideologies that were kept was the elimination of the Jews from German life. In Russia, from the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' only the dictatorship remained.
It was for the first time in history that professional revolutionaries took over most of the continent of Europe, by a simple method of creating a mass party and telling the party, and the people, what they wanted to hear. After reaching power, the mechanism of a modern state helped the rulers to remain in power. They were taking over all the functions of the state. They even nationalized those functions that in free societies were outside of state control. By using those methods, the new rulers ensured immunity from counter revolutions and coup d'etats. As the new regimes were personal dictatorships, the regimes collapsed either with the death of the dictators, like Salazar or Franco, or with catastrophic defeats like Mussolini, or Hitler, or Metaxas in Greece. The only dictatorship that survived the death of the dictator was Russia, where it lasted another 60 years after the death of Lenin until the regime collapsed under the weight of lies. The reason for that exception was probably the special cruelty of the Russian regime; one of the heritages of the Mongol rule.
By the time the European continent reached the Second World War, practically the whole continent was under dictatorial rule, with the notable exceptions of the western democracies and the Scandinavian countries. They were not immune to totalitarian ideologies, but their democratic traditions were stronger than the infection. The pattern of the rule of the totalitarian regimes was nearly identical; they were based upon the same principles.
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They all were vehemently opposed to bourgeois parliaments and any form of "reformism". They all had the perfect answers for everything and no reforms were needed.
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They all saw the ruling party as a highly centralized, strictly hierarchical and ferociously disciplined agency for furthering their objectives.
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All wanted the leadership of professional revolutionaries.
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None of them had any confidence in the people to organize itself.
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Past history was manipulated to control the present.
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All the regimes had the opinion that revolutionary consciousness could be brought to the masses from without by a revolutionary, self-appointed elite.
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They all believed that all modern methods, newspapers, books, radio, art, sport, films, etc must advance the revolutionary aims. The propagandists of the parties neglected no mass communication method and they were strictly controlled.
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Manipulation of public opinion became a science.
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Mass demonstrations and festivals became a work of art in each of those regimes; they were part of propaganda effort.
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Economy became subordinated to politics. Statistics became meaningless as their figures served the regimes.
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They all believed that organized violence is the final arbiter in all possible conflicts.
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Security agencies in multiple layers supervised everything, including each other.
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These principles could certainly apply to Fascism, Nazism and Communism. There were differences between the regimes, because of the nature and traditions of the people, but never in the principles listed above. The rule of the totalitarian parties in the easy-going Latin countries was different from the rule in the strictly efficient Germany, and of course there was the traditional Russian rule, influenced by the Oriental Despotism, it had to suffer in medieval times.
One of the principles of the European regimes of personal dictatorships was a permanent propaganda aiming to convince the people that their actual state is the best one could expect. It shows that the personal dictatorships, loosely based upon ideological foundations were a European phenomena and the principles of European past has heavily influenced them. It was true for Soviet Russia too, where mass propaganda and brainwashing became a form of art.
In this respect the totalitarian regimes of Europe were diametrically opposed to Oriental Despotism. It is true that they controlled every activity of the population and it is also true that they ruled with an iron hand, but they attempted first to convince the population that whatever was done, it was done in their best interest. That element is missing from the handbook of Oriental Despotism. The methods of Oriental Despotism are on an entirely different level. First, they take very good care that their subjects be on the lowest possible intellectual level, and second, they allowed the children to be educated only sufficiently to prepare them to the lowest manual work. Finally, they ruled the dumbed-down people by arbitrary laws and by naked fear.
The European totalitarian regimes took very good care to enroll students and intellectuals in general on their side. In Germany, the students and intellectual were the foremost supporters of the regime, much more than farmers and workers. In the Soviet Union it was the same. It is true that the ideological cover was a sham, but it was sufficient to give opportunities to intellectuals to excel in something. There is no doubt that studies in Marxist philosophy and in racial biology were as useful as the medieval studies about the number of angels that can dance on the tip of a needle. However the professors in Eastern and Western universities who excelled in Marxist ideology and German and Italian professors who were experts in racial subjects, were assured of a professional career with long tenure.
As an interesting byproduct, the pattern of personal dictatorship based upon spurious ideologies, became the favorite form of government in the Third World. That was probably the only heritage from the colonial past that was not squandered.
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The title of this chapter is The Watershed, meaning that there was a change of direction before and after a certain point in time. It was also shown that the First World War was not the cause of the watershed but was the result of the same elements that caused the watershed.
It was also shown that there was a general disenchantment that became apparent with the outbreak of the First World War, although it was there much before. The feeling of disenchantment and alienation, the horrors of the first industrialized war in the history of mankind, and modern techniques of advertisement and propaganda, have helped professional revolutionaries to grasp power in many European countries. It was a sorry fact that within a period of twenty years from the end of the First World War, the whole of the European continent, apart of France, Britain, the Low Countries and Sweden, were either ruled by totalitarian rule or were conquered by them. Because of their method of rule the totalitarian regimes were indestructible from within. They ceased to exist only after loss in foreign wars, or after the death of their totalitarian ruler. The sole exception to that rule was the Soviet Union that survived the death of its first dictator, and even that of his successor, and imploded only after a generation. There were a number of reasons for its survival, but as far as the subject of this book is concerned, the Soviet Union as a representative of an ideology that can attract supporters from outside its jurisdiction, has terminated shortly after the Second World War. The watershed in this case was probably the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. After that event, the Soviet Union still existed, occasionally it could make terrifying noises, but if was an empty edifice waiting to collapse.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, which officially happened at the end of the 20th century, but collapsed much before ideologically, and the collapse of the other ideologically based totalitarian regimes at about the same time was the final act of the watershed that separated the old, optimistic world from the present. This statement could also be expressed in a graphic mode. We could put Chart 1 before us and point to the graph where the population of the world was 1650 millions. That was in 1900. It was still a period when people, meaning westerners, had hopes for the future, organized the world as they thought fit and were still optimistic. However, it was also the time when they started losing faith and began searching for solutions. Their doubts and their search for solutions was used and abused by professional revolutionaries, and that was the period of the totalitarian regimes in Europe and the Second World War.
When the chart reached the year 1950 with a world population of 2521 million people, and all indicators showing that the increase will continue unabated, a reaction has set in. The people began to realize that no human ideology could combat natural forces. That was the time of disenchantment and disappointment. That was the real watershed.
I have written previously that there were hundreds of ideologically based organizations that eventually coalesced into three ideologically based mass movement, Fascism, Nazism and Communism. All three had identical operational principles and all three sought a better future. The first sought it in the emulation of the past, the second saw it in a better racial policy and the third sought a better future in a classless society. Without going into the validity of those theories, there were many that genuinely believed that they have the key to unlock the better and more just future. Even when those ideologies were taken over by professional revolutionaries, Mussolini, Hitler and Lenin, and were used to create a personal dictatorship, there were many who continued to believe in the ideology. They did so even when they knew about the horrors and excesses that those totalitarian regimes committed.
In 24 October 1994 Michael Ignatieff interviewed Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, and asked him what can justify his long membership in the English Communist party. He asked a pertinent question that if he would have known about the horrors of Stalin's rule, would he have remained as a member in the party?
Hobsbawm answered that he would have remained a member of the party even then, because:
"…in a period in which….mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing."
This is the answer to the question of this chapter. Even when people realized that in the name of their belief untold cruelties were committed, they still had a hope that it will bring something better and the suffering is that of a difficult birth. The watershed happened when they lost that hope. The real tragedy of the 20th century was that people agreed to horrible excesses when they ought to have known that the demographic explosion caused the real problems.
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