Why was the twentieth century so bloody

More than genocide, the main thrust of contemporaneity would be collective violence, essentially developed in times of war and, within it, against non-combatants. In this sense, historiographers are virtually unanimous in placing the origin of the era of contemporary terror in the Great War.

The War was a war of generalized and definitive violation of nineteenth-century war rules and principles, with the bombarding of civilians, economic blockades, territorial occupation and forced labor of non-combatants.

It therefore reached dimensions previously unknown on the scale of contemporary violence. But within it, it also contained overlapping conflict processes and violence between which the interconnections are not always made. And if to that we add the fact that warfare technology was infinitely superior to information and knowledge technology in short, it was easier to kill enemies than get to know them , we come up against the obvious difficulties involved in working out real and effective casualties, divided and separated by categories both real and analytical , which are nonetheless crucial to gauge the significance and impact of the Great War.

The accepted global figures stand at around nine to ten million dead soldiers of the 70 million mobilized and 25 million injured. Every day, 1, Germans and French died. But exactly what proportion were combatants and civilians? His seminal work has highlighted the way in which the repertoires of violence in the Great War went beyond what can strictly be considered war and did not only consist of the killing of soldiers and military personnel.

Indeed, a central element in recent studies is the extension of the repertoires of what should be considered practices of violence in the context of occupation policies, as inflicted both on soldiers and on the civilian population McPhail, ; Procacci, The processes of internal violence which the Great War fostered and helped create deportation, ethnic-national homogenization or internal wars would also elevate indices and figures to hitherto unknown heights. A good example of the significance acquired by these repertoires of violence was in the rise of internment and concentration camps of prisoners and civilians.

From the early weeks of occupation, faced with the shortage of manpower, civilians were the parties most affected by the deployment, firstly of forced labor, and later of camps where they would be interned Becker, Thus it was that the Great War came to maximize both the functionalist use of concentration camps as a war-administrative unit, and their perception as a cheap and plausible, preventative and arbitrary, anomic and adaptable means of meeting the needs created by the massive numbers of war or political prisoners in the hands of state or para-state units, of converting internees into exploited agents.

The violentization of political practices and the massive nature of the political divisions resulting from or as a consequence of the six-year period from , would do the rest to establish the premises of the new type of camps —the ultimate expression of political violence, imposition of the divider and suffering for political, social and ideological causes.

Yet it is remarkable how processes of such magnitude as the revolution in Russia, the Civil War in Finland or the elimination of the Armenian minority in Anatolia are so often taken out of their war context.

Indeed, in recent years, quite a few scholars have wondered about the relevance of analysis focused on continuities, learnings from military praxes or the generation in a colonial context of practices of unlimited collective violence Dwyer and Ryan eds. No fewer have pondered the historical caesura and pedagogy of extreme violence which the First World War meant for Europe, a conflict on an unknown scale which turned violence into a fulcrum of the contemporary European age: a factor in national construction, community identification and social purification, as well as a mechanism for action on the issue of minorities.

This war is of key significance when constructing a cosmovision of twentieth-century Europe focused on the politics of violence implemented in its states: the Russian Civil War was the context which gave rise to the Red Terror and to institutions like the Cheka and the Gulag.

This is not a short-sighted or schematizing conceptual homogenization, nor does it have anything to do with the reductionist description according to which the Gulag is supposed to be the fons et origo of Auschwitz. In a theoretical model, the inter-relationship between both phenomena can work, because the Soviet camps preceded their fascist counterparts chronologically, were born of all-out war, revolved around punitive forced labor and served as the space for political repression.

There is therefore a reasonable and legitimate doubt which should not be attributed only to an attempt to relativize the phenomenon of the German Lager or to ideological exaggeration. Precisely for this reason, they need to be studied in depth, to distinguish them better and, in this way, identify more clearly the fascist pattern of the European camps.

The Soviet camps were established in a society and under political, social and identity premises that were radically different from those in the Europe that gave rise to fascism.

They were, under no circumstances, centers for the extermination of civilians: the death of approximately three million of them on the Gulag archipelago, out of the 18 million who passed through it Bacon, ; Applebaum, ; Davies and Wheatcroft, , indicates that forced labor, albeit in extreme conditions, was not a systematic, supra individual and preventative practice of extermination.

Compared to other overtly exterminatory Stalinist policies the dekulakization or starvation in Ukraine in particular , the Gulag was not an eliminationist space however brutally re-educative it may have been. The fact that genocide was practiced in the USSR or that it was a society that was violent in the extreme, as indicated by Gelarch , does not mean that either its political or ideological ethos was similar to that of the European fascists, or that its re-educative, homicidal tactics were comparable.

In many cases, the harshness of Soviet labor exploitation far exceeded that of the fascist camps. What the chronological and interpretative similarities essentially tell us, is about the versatility of concentrationary spaces. And a comparative study of these, and of the eliminationist practices of the different societies, will also define big enough differences for us not to assume direct continuities, even in a strictly theoretical framework. The Gulag operated more and better in peacetime than at war, and it was a mechanism that ran parallel to that of the political, social and national repression of the republics that made up the USSR.

Nonetheless, it did reproduce the historical ruptures regarding internment and forced labor to which the Great War gave rise. Indeed it might be said that they became its paradigm, and even its enormous distorting mirror. In fact, global wars tend to contain processes of internal facture within, as is apparent if we analyze the Second World War and, to a lesser extent, the First. Yet World War I marked the birth of the European civil-war era between and and, likewise, of some of the elements that help explain its virulence, essentially the macro-categories of revolution and counter-revolution.

In general historiographical terms, it would seem obvious that the massive nature of the crimes of both the First and Second World War brings the historians of to a new dimension: aware that the notion of the contemporaneity was born in the Great War, they see themselves driven to project on to the past ethical-interpretative categories through which a large part of historiography has reread the recent past.

The resulting impression is that analysis, when done from front to back, taking for granted and as recognized the birth of the fascist, eliminationist alternative in Europe, bestows much more importance on the results of the war than on the war itself. It consequently leaves the war, if not entirely void of content, at least reduced to a merely necessary condition, an entry point for the interwar opening: for the Auschwitz era.

It does so, however, not without difficulty. Indeed, one of the great debates around contemporary violence revolves around its representation and the limits of that representation. Whereas the central topos of the political science debate is prevention, the cultural studies debate considers representation. Historiography, in the meantime, has occupied a contentious space in this field as well, since, until recently, the issue of violence was interpreted and considered through the subject areas of anthropology and philosophy, but very little was reconstructed in historical terms.

A number of examples, including Katz , Millen , Wiedmer , Smith ed. The historiographical tradition focused on the machinery of extermination, plunder and the predatory behavior which Nazi territorial occupation policies entailed and, after , the direct death centers that fell under the scope of what was known as Aktion Reinhard, is one of the richest and most complex in Europe, the USA, South America or Israel.

Discussions such as those on intentionality, comparability, contextualization in the most extensive political and social project of fascism, or its Jewish specificity and uniqueness —an aspect upheld by an ever decreasing number of scholars, such as Weiss-Wendt, 43 — have fuelled, and continue to fuel, some of the major debates on the contemporary era in philosophical, legal, sociological and anthropological fields, to name a few.

In recent years, the trend has been, on the whole, to decouple the extermination from its uniqueness and place it in direct relationship with the ideological and political framework of German fascism — thus we find, as Tim Mason anticipates, close similarities and, consequently, interpretative paths, between other models, ideological approaches or national policies and fascism.

The prevailing perspective then, in the analyses of the last decade is that of victimizer more than victim. And this is despite the fact that the memorialist source is sometimes the only one with which to discover histories that are essential to the process of the Final Solution. There are aspects of the Holocaust about which there is no explicit documentation, but only euphemisms and, at most, memories. An obvious example is the history of the Sonderkommandos , the groups of Jews used to drag their fellow co-religionists to the gas chambers, remove the bodies, burn them and clean out the murder facilities.

It was this pursuit of exhaustiveness that enables us today to talk about genocide, an account of which can only be constructed, for many aspects, through memory. When it comes to looking for explanations for so much death, on the other hand, Shoah literature reproduces the eliminationist drift and Judeophobic intentionality of the racial and anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime, successfully putting to the test the framework proposed by Hannah Arendt identification-exclusion-plunder-elimination to analyze the mass killing of civilians, be they Jews from Eastern Europe or Armenians in Turkey.

Nothing strange about that: after all, the extermination camps were no more than the final link in a chain constructed in times of peace, with measures, laws and acts that are openly discriminatory against entire sections of the population and which, in times of war, served to end the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, as a result of territorial occupation practices in the East.

And this is where the weightiest part of their argument lies: in continuity. Once again, this is not without its difficulties. The memory that prevails in the Shoah account is Jewish, even though the first inmates in Nazi camps, as early as , were Communists and political dissidents, the occupying troops in also killed thousands of non-Jewish Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusians, and the gas chambers were the place of the murder and the crematoriums the place of disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Slavs and gypsies, albeit the latter were killed during a brief period of time.

The place where most Jews died, in Poland, had not undergone all the political, cultural and identity developments of the Tercer Reich in peacetime, from the first laws of exclusion of to the ghettoization and Kristallnacht of , and including the racial laws of The correlation between Jewish persecution in Germany in peacetime and the killing of Europe Jews in Poland in wartime ultimately does not convince, and at times appears teleological.

The singularization for its majority condition of a process which was, in fact, universal, is therefore something of a paradox. Too often seen as a process with two players, namely Germany and the Jews Stone ed. Up to half of the victims were in fact killed in their own place of residence. The German policy of violence spread across many strata of occupied society, for political and war reasons, such as with the partisans eliminated under the Nacht und Nebel program, or on racial grounds, as in the case of the gypsies.

And when there were extermination camps, those who were gassed were Jews who were also Hungarian, Polish, Belarusian, Italian, Estonians and French.

Or they were all of those things and also Communists, Russians or Soviets Snyder, In short, from these analyses, we can deduce that the genocide, the Final Solution, cannot be understood only from the point of arrival, namely Auschwitz, but we must also take account of its starting point: Germany, Poland, Lithuania, the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos, Ukraine and Belarus, Paris or Rome: in fact, up to half of Holocaust victims were killed in their places of residence in mass extermination operations in which the whole community took part and from which many people benefitted.

We can deduce too that the extermination camps, the death machinery for which the cogs were suitably oiled at the famous Wannsee conference, were born of economic necessity the difficulties of feeding the Germans properly, says Aly quoting Gelarch, encouraged the genocide of the European Jews, , but they were also the result of a desire to find an efficient and industrial system of human elimination, rather than the more rudimentary one developed by the Einsatzgruppen in partnership with the local population.

We can also deduce that the genocide united and gave scientific, racial, economic, political and military coherence to the different political and ideological projects political repression, racial biologism, anti-Semitism of National Socialism, understood as a social and political project and therefore of a comparable nature. And, in short, that the extermination was not only of Jews, but that there were also hundreds of thousands of civilians who were not killed for their Semitic condition not to mention the mass killing of partisans and war prisoners , as well as the killing of around three million Soviet war prisoners in total figures, around , survived of the more than 5,, detained.

This last genocide would frequently appear to pale in significance beside that other great genocide, the Holocaust. They shared chronology and victimizer, often also arenas of execution, and, according to some historians, intentionality. But what they do not share today is the same debating arena regarding history and collective identities.

Too much Holocaust kills the Holocaust, critiqued the late Tony Judt in his acceptance speech when awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize in , suggesting that too much attention has been paid to the Jewish specificity and particularity of the genocide which Hebrew tradition calls Shoah , perhaps leaving out millions of non-Jewish victims caused by the German occupiers, their allies and satellite governments or collaborators in the heat of their expansion policies throughout Europe, and the territorial and historical contexts of their killings: these include the Balkans Biondich, ; Korb, ; Trifkovic, ; Yeomans, ; Tomasevic, , France Mazower, and Italy Klinhammer, ; Pezzino, ; Battini and Pezzino, ; Fulvetti and Pelini eds.

In this respect, it is not by chance that, in a climate of internal war, occupation and fascist radicalization, with three- or four-way slaughter and revenge fascists, antifascists, Germans and allies , a phenomenon could have taken place like the deportation of Jews and partisans to labour and extermination camps in Eastern Europe Mayda, ; Matard-Bonucci, Neither in Italy nor any any other place in Europe were the deportations an exclusively one-way phenomenon with two subjects.

They were also internal and, even more so, intracommunity processes, in terms of both victims and aggressors. This gives us clues as to the openly vengeful nature of the collective violence in the post-Second World War period: that of the groups massacred during the war, that of Soviet soldiers against defeated enemies or of partisans and guerrilla groups. Harboured within the world war were national wars, taking place at different paces and under different criteria which, in turn, provided a framework for violence armed with their own criteria, and over this was layered the violence of the world war.

The de facto disappearance of the problem of minorities took place in a propitious context of extreme internal violence: Poland is a paradigmatic case, to the extent that it saw its national complexity virtually reduced to a state of homogeneity, with the total or partial disappearance within its borders of Germans from 2. But it was by no means the only example: in addition to the expulsion and resettlement of the Germans of Eastern Europe, between 12 and 13 million people, other significant cases included the 90, Hungarians expelled from Czechoslovakia, or the 73, Slovaks ejected from Hungary Judt, The expulsion of the Germans to the east of the Oder-Neisse-Trieste line, and the national and class resettlement would, in any case, have caused internal conflicts of a national, ethnic, political and economic nature in the countries occupied by the Red Army on the western border Cattaruzza, The same can be said of the so-called civil wars on the western borders of the Soviet Union between and in what were the death throes of the extremely violent, ongoing confrontation between fascism-collaborationism and communism.

In Germany, as has been documented by Giles MacDonogh , more than three million people died as a result of occupation policies.

Plunder, internment in camps and expulsion were the mechanisms used in a denazification process of which civilians were the prime target. This was punishment for the benefits the Germans had previously reaped from the occupation and exploitation of Europe.

The post-war world was therefore a time of readjustment, of human relocation, displacement, cleansing and detention — the result of the different, overlapping occupation and civil wars that Europe underwent. The presence of the Soviet army Faraldo, in Eastern Europe, as an invasive agent subject to a paradigmatic policy of violence to the extent that it combined the violence of war, political repression and external invasion , also fostered the outbreak of a new era of violence in Europe, where war on its own soil ceased to be the main vehicle for national construction.

The end of the Second World War also marked the closure of the logic of civil war between revolution and counter-revolution: no regime was defeated in Europe between and by a Communist or Socialist revolution.

The last of the great European civil wars of the first half of the twentieth century took place on Greek soil and, when seen in perspective, marked a turning point which introduced the logic of the so-called Cold War Gerolymatos, ; Voglis, ; Mazower ed.

When the Greek Civil War ended in , the whirlwind of war —either civil or international— would not return to European soil for several decades. But that end to violence can by no means be said to date from The end of the violence, if it ever really happened, would not arrive in Europe until many years later, once the structural opportunities for the politics of violence closed: in other words, when fascist dictatorships disappeared and in Spain, the debate continues as from when that disappearance actually dates , when the possibility of the territorial occupation of other European countries ceased to be considered bearing in mind that Western Germany was occupied until , and when continental wars, particularly the internal ones, stopped being a political option.

This is not to say, of course, that violence vanished. The French wars in Madagascar and Algeria, the British in Kenya in which the vast majority of those who died were civilians , the Spanish in Ifni and the Portuguese in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique, all suggest that this whirlwind of praxes and politics of violence merely displaced the eye of the storm once again to those places where extreme heterophobia had started up, namely the African continent, in the shape of new kinds of globalized war which extended as far as Eastern Europe Kaldor, ; Moore, And when it finally seemed as if terror was over and that History, in her painful labor process, had finally abandoned her blood dialectic and considered her journey over —having reached what Francis Fukuyama called the end of History— wars returned to contradict those who had said that Europe would not see terror within its borders again.

Not, at least, of the intensity attained during the Second World War, but certainly on a par with many of the conflicts that marked the last century in Europe.

The widespread image of a Europe hijacked by terror until and redeemed from violence in the second half of the twentieth century is mistaken and, above all, extremely complacent. The superimposition of wars and internal conflicts made Europe a fragmented, dark, bloody and savage continent. The civil wars between and and the world wars between and were, in fact, wars comprising superimposed processes, a phenomenon which always gives rise to conflicts of great violent intensity towards non-combatants.

This also explains why the reprisals and violence extended beyond the end of the armed conflicts themselves. It is therefore reasonable to think of the twentieth century as the most violent in European history. It was the most violent because after the end of a war —which its contemporaries referred to as Great War and World War because they knew of no other examples of comparable dimensions— states and their use of violence rose in a cumulative crescendo which concluded with the greatest collective annihilation ever registered in such a short space of time.

The Second World War with between 35 and 40 million deaths then went on to far outstrip its older sister. It was the most violent century because this succession of events was accompanied by another, no less bloody and foundational, series of civil wars and internal conflicts.

It was the most violent century because, despite everything that had happened prior to , the most summary of proceedings, mass executions, dictatorships implemented and maintained through civilian bloodshed were all pursued and even perfected in Europe: in no small number of cases continuing with the dynamics established in the first half of the century; in others, with new dynamics; and, in the case of Greece, serving as a link between the two.

There are often attempts to provide elements of analysis that lead to a unique definition or conceptualization, merging complex, and often distant, violent processes in omni-comprehensive narratives and interpretations. Faced with the possibly vain hope for predictability and the generalized decontextualization of analyses of violence which have been made in many areas of political science, but are particularly obvious in the study of civil wars see Newman, and Collier and Sambanis eds.

To cater for this need for historical contingency without renouncing theoretical complexity, I have proposed the term politics of violence by way of conceptual umbrella. Without wishing to open a Byzantine debate focusing on issues of terminology, I feel that the name politics of violence better encompasses, with fewer assumptions and more nuances, what we are analyzing here: the mechanisms, the politics which, at the theoretical and practical levels, different states, state agencies or groups used to access, control, monopolize and influence power through violence.

It therefore implies the existence of specific political practices whose theoretical content and practical materialization occurred through violence. Of course, here too, we need to specify what is meant by politics and what is meant by violence. In reality, this is perhaps one of the most complex debates on the contemporary age. The last two decades have been universally devoted to the era of the victim of violence and to the victim as an absolute category.

However, for the purposes of understanding collective violence, it is more enlightening to explore the motivations of the perpetrators. Many millions more were killed in dozens of other, smaller conflicts.

But economic, demographic, ethnic and political factors, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, combined to undermine imperial rule, at the same time that geopolitical factors led to the clash of empires in Europe and Asia. The British and French empires, although victorious, suffered economic, physical, and psychological injuries from which they never fully recovered. It would take another, even more destructive, war to hasten their imperial retreat.

It is an armistice for twenty years. Ferguson details the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, the Fascist takeover of Italy, the emergence of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, and the rise of militarism in Japan that preceded the outbreak of war. Revolutions or liberation struggles within a state had implications for the international situation, particularly during the cold war. Conversely, after the Russian revolution, intervention by states in the internal affairs of other states of which they disapproved became common, at least where it seemed comparatively risk-free.

This remains the case. Second, the clear distinction between war and peace became obscure. Except here and there, the second world war neither began with declarations of war nor ended with treaties of peace.

It was followed by a period so hard to classify as either war or peace in the old sense that the neologism "cold war" had to be invented to describe it. The sheer obscurity of the position since the cold war is illustrated by the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Neither "peace" nor "war" exactly describes the situation in Iraq since the formal end of the Gulf war - the country is still bombed almost daily by foreign powers - or the relations between Palestinians and Israelis, or those between Israel and its neighbours, Lebanon and Syria.

All this is an unfortunate legacy of the 20th-century world wars, but also of war's increasingly powerful machinery of mass propaganda, and of a period of confrontation between incompatible and passion-laden ideologies which brought into wars a crusading element comparable to that seen in religious conflicts of the past. These conflicts, unlike the traditional wars of the international power system, were increasingly waged for non-negotiable ends such as "unconditional surrender".

Since both wars and victories were seen as total, any limitation on a belligerent's capacity to win that might be imposed by the accepted conventions of 18th- and 19th- century warfare - even formal declarations of war - was rejected. So was any limitation on the victors' power to assert their will.

Experience had shown that agreements reached in peace treaties could easily be broken. In recent years the situation has been further complicated by the tendency in public rhetoric for the term "war" to be used to refer to the deployment of organised force against various national or international activities regarded as anti-social - "the war against the Mafia", for example, or "the war against drug cartels".

In these conflicts the actions of two types of armed force are confused. One - let's call them "soldiers" - is directed against other armed forces with the object of defeating them. The other - let's call them "police" - sets out to maintain or re-establish the required degree of law and public order within an existing political entity, typically a state.

Victory, which has no necessary moral connotation, is the object of one force; the bringing to justice of offenders against the law, which does have a moral connotation, is the object of the other.

Such a distinction is easier to draw in theory than in practice, however. Homicide by a soldier in battle is not, in itself, a breach of the law. But what if a member of the IRA regards himself as a belligerent, even though official UK law regards him as a murderer? Were the operations in Northern Ireland a war, as the IRA held, or an attempt in the face of law-breakers to maintain orderly government in one province of the UK? Since not only a formidable local police force but a national army was mobilised against the IRA for 30 years or so, we may conclude that it was a war, but one systematically run like a police operation, in a way that minimised casualties and the disruption of life in the province.

Such are the complexities and confusions of the relations between peace and war at the start of the new century. They are well illustrated by the military and other operations in which the US and its allies are at present engaged. There is now, as there was throughout the 20th century, a complete absence of any effective global authority capable of controlling or settling armed disputes.

Globalisation has advanced in almost every respect - economically, technologically, culturally, even linguistically - except one: politically and militarily, territorial states remain the only effective authorities. There are officially about states, but in practice only a handful count, of which the US is overwhelmingly the most powerful. However, no state or empire has ever been large, rich or powerful enough to maintain hegemony over the political world, let alone to establish political and military supremacy over the globe.

A single superpower cannot compensate for the absence of global authorities, especially given the lack of conventions - relating to international disarmament, for instance, or weapons control - strong enough to be voluntarily accepted as binding by major states. But none has any effective power other than that granted to them by agreements between states, or thanks to the backing of powerful states, or voluntarily accepted by states.

Regrettable as this may be, it isn't likely to change in the foreseeable future. Since only states wield real power, the risk is that international institutions will be ineffective or lack universal legitimacy when they try to deal with offences such as "war crimes". Around the world, Satyagraha has proven.

The American Education Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the American educational system has undergone much transition in response to our changing society.

Though there have been many problems raised throughout the years in regard to what our school systems should be teaching our children, there have also been many developments. In the final decades of the 20th century, education has continued to evolve in order to meet society's demands. The transformation of society has created numerous. Essay Words 4 Pages. The progress made in the 20th century is staggering. Advancements in science, medicine and technology alone have brought incalculable benefits to human beings.

Yet on the darker side, the 20th century was also the most violent time of human history. Two world wars, the massacres of Stalin, the Holocaust of Hitler, and many other such events killed over hundreds of millions of people and inflicted extreme suffering on hundreds of millions more that will make this period in time and period that will be remembered forever.

The century had a trend toward weapon improvements. It wasn't until the 20th century that weapons became common in war and on the streets.

The 20th century brought automatic firearms, missiles, and nuclear warheads. This hideous time in human history became known as the Holocaust.