Re: <nettime> Harbouring terrorists: A lesson from history

[Peter Berenyi <berenyip@elender.hu>]

Tjebbe van Tijen wrote:

> Dear Janos
>
> I hope you will pardon me for making a major point out of a minor remark
> in the text you posted in which you rightly made the link between the
> terrorist airplane attacks in the USA and the start of World War One by a
> bomb thrown by hand in Sarajevo in 1914.

Janos only forwarded the text referenced here to nettime. It is me,
Peter Berenyi who is responsible for it.

It was originally posted to the BlueEarForum and can be found at
http://www.blueear.com/forum/wtc913berenyi.html as Janos correctly
stated in his post to nettime.

> The First World War which is mentioned by Janos Sugar in his article was
> called "The Great War" and of courser only decades later, rebaptised
> The Second World War, hence our collective fear for a
> Third one and so on..
>
> Now on one not unimportant issue raised by Janos Sugar I have some
> comments, and that is that the death toll and how the balance shifts
> through time from military to civilian victims.
>
> First of all Janos gives a number of victims of the First World War which
> has no ground, or is it a typing mistake, or are also wounded calculated?

>> "It was a long and cruel war, with close to a hundred million casualties,
>> most of them civilians."

> ... "most of them civilians"?, as far as I have understood these events,
> it is the other way around, most of them military. Which is logical as

> most of the big battles were fought by armies at both sides in trenches,
> having machine guns, heavy artillery and in some cases poison gas...  also
> many soldiers were not directly dying in combat but just got ill in the
> terrible conditions of the trenches...

I am really sorry that what I have written was misunderstandable. Let's
see the broader context, it hopefully will make things clear:

>> "We all know what followed. The Great XX. Century War was started.
>> [...] It was a long and cruel war, with close to a
>> hundred million casualties, most of them civilians. By the end of it the
>> dreadful might of all the European Powers vanished, the last step being
>> the unexpected dissolution of the Soviet Union, the former Russian Empire
>> in 1992.
>>
>> In this sorrowful, 76 years long process the United States emerged as the
>> only undeniably victorious party in spite of the fact it was only a
>> second-order Power at the beginning and in spite of its reluctance to get
>> involved at all."

I admit I've made a kind of riddle by calling it the "Great XX. Century
War". It should be clear however from the context that I was not only
referring to WWI, but a "76 years long process" from 1914 to 1992. That is,
WWI, WWII and the Cold War piled together, as well as the devastating
revolutions and the numerous satellite wars both between WW's and during
the Cold War. I had a definite purpose with departing from the standard
nomenclature in this slightly unorthodox way.

I wanted to take the stance of a future historian who would summarize the
whole thing as follows: accomplished nothing, killed many, shifted power
from Europe to America. Yes, "Great XX. Century War" includes the term
"Great War" that was sometimes used after WWI to refere to that very phase
of the war along with terms like "World War" (they actually had no way to
know that more "phases" were to come).

Why do I think it was a single "80 Years War" (much like the 30 or 100
Years Wars used to be)? Because it revolved around the same unsolved
problems, with essentially the same actors from start to end. WWI and WWII
were e.g.  surely one and the same war with a twenty years long armistice
in between.  For the end of WWI was a stalemate, with undeniable German
victory in the East and a near-breakthrough in the West that was denied. An
armistice followed with American mediation, then a revolution in Germany
(just weeks earlier it was due in France). A Germany fallen into chaos was
declared loser and was humiliated to the bone. American promises preceding
the armistice were not kept.

Had there been a fair and just peace treaty, Hitler had never been able to
seize power, in fact he couldn't even have started his movement on a large
scale. In that case the War would have been over. There was still a war to
be faught in the East aginst Bolshevism in the Russian Empire, but offering
freedom instead of the slavery the nazis forced upon them, it would have
been an easy pie for a united Europe. A modern, democratic Russia could
have emerged by mid-century.

The actual course of events was quite different however. People in Britain
and especially in France wanted to see something after four years of mud,
suffering and bloodshed. It probably didn't worth the price of 1940, but
they claimed it anyway.

It made the War at least twice as long as it should have been, opened up a
space for human foulness no one imagined possible, demanded countless
additional lives, but the net result by the end was the same. Except the
fact that balance was lost: America got disproportionately powerful while
the Eastern side of Europe suffered much more demage than strictly
necessary. Colonial system in the rest of the world was simply destroyed,
not properly transformed into free states and societies. The world-system
was left with a rotting belly.


Peter Berenyi

ps. The body-count of 100 million is reasonably accurate. You are right,
that in WWI the number of casualties was somewhere around 10 million,
most of them military personnel, not civilians. Later on this ratio
reversed.

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