Antichrists and False Prophets

[The following is Episode 14 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

                In the opening years of the twentieth century, the peoples of Europe and America looked at the future with a feeling of nearly unbridled optimism.  They had been witnesses to discoveries and inventions undreamed of just generations earlier.  Their world was at peace, and their governments in the hands of rational leaders and capable administrators.  The dark ages of superstition, empire building, and oppression of the weak by the powerful seemed to be behind them, or at least on the wane.  It was a new age, a time of hope, a time of progress, which held great promise that the decades ahead would exhibit the culmination of humanity’s long, and sometimes turbulent, evolution.  A passage in the closing chapter of a history book, published in 1906, illustrates the general outlook of that time:  “Throughout the last century,” it says, “the sentiment of the brotherhood of man has been greatly deepened and strengthened.  This new moral sentiment constitutes a force which is working irresistibly in the interest of a world union based on international amity and good will.

                “It is most significant,” the passage continues, “that at the same time these movements towards world unity have characterized progress in the political and moral realms, wonderful discoveries and inventions in the physical domain – the steam railway, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and a hundred others – have brought the isolated nations close alongside one another and have made easily possible, in truth made necessary, the formation of the world union.”

                Eight years after this passage was written, the world would find itself engulfed in a war more destructive than any that had ever come before it – a war that would include every major nation of Europe, and eventually the United States.  And in its aftermath, other nightmares would follow: mass murders, brutal, repressive regimes, weapons of a destructive scale unrivaled in any earlier age, and the threat of destruction to Earth’s environment itself.  Together, these nightmares would make the twentieth century one of the most horrible and devastating in the history of humanity.

Looking back from the present day, it is hard to imagine that general feeling of optimism that swept across the peoples of Europe and America one hundred years ago.  But to them, it appeared that civilization really had been obeying some hidden but powerful law of progress and evolution, just like the one that Charles Darwin had described as operating on biological life.  The ordinary lives of people were being affected by scientific advances in profound and unforeseen ways, with such new or recent inventions as the horseless carriage, the airplane, the phonograph, and the telephone.   Having invented the electric light bulb in 1879, Thomas Edison went on to make it generally available to the masses by his building of power stations, and these were followed by the formation of electric companies.  In the 1870’s, James Clerk Maxwell, a British physicist, revolutionized the world of science by discovering a special relationship between light, electricity, and magnetism, explaining their properties in terms of a unified theory of electromagnetism.  And Maxwell’s achievements would inspire, in the early twentieth century, a young physicist in Switzerland named Albert Einstein to make revolutionary discoveries of his own about the relationship between matter and energy.  In the political and social sphere, the peoples of Europe and America could also see evidence of the invisible hand of progress. Slavery, that great scandal of western civilization, had been banned in every nation of Europe by 1863, and in America, at the end of the Civil War, with the 13^th Amendment in 1865.  Only in South America did the institution linger on, until finally being outlawed in Brazil in 1888.  Women’s suffrage movements grew in strength and power in the 1800’s, and by the early 1900’s, women had obtained the right to vote in America, Britain, and many of the nations of Europe.  In the economic sphere, public reaction to the rise of powerful corporate monopolies in the age of the robber barons led to a growing anti-trust movement, and the emergence of new government regulations passed explicitly to limit the power of large companies and to promote competition.  And in the private sphere, temperance movements, which became particularly powerful at the turn of the century, sought to impose a different type of regulation, intended to control man’s personal vices, and in particular his vice of alcohol consumption.

This dream of progress, and promise of a new age, would be shattered in 1914, with the beginning of the Great War, a conflict that would draw thirty-two nations into it, and would result in the deaths of over 8 million soldiers and wounding of 21 million others.  The direct cause of this war was the assassination, on June 28, 1914, of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand.  At the time, in spite of the heinousness of the act, it hardly seemed just cause to engulf the entire world into war.  But the event was merely the spark that enflamed a Europe which had moved almost imperceptibly to the brink of conflagration.  For under the surface of what seemed to be a new, harmonious civilization, there were forces that had been growing in strength for the past century - disruptive forces that, when unleashed, would shake that civilization to its core.  One of these forces was nationalism.  A legacy of the French Revolution and the influence of Napoleon, nationalism was the idea that peoples of similar ethnic ancestry, a common language, and shared values had a right to combine under a single political entity, with the right to self-determination.  In the century after Napoleon’s fall, nationalism inspired the peoples of Belgium, Italy, and Germany to form their own independent states.  Another force that emerged in the 19^th century, much more pernicious than nationalism, was imperialism.  This was a direct product of the industrial revolution, for as the major nations of Europe saw an immense increase in their manufactured goods, they fell into direct conflict with each other to find new markets overseas.  Africa became a principal arena for this conflict, and a favored target of colonial expansion.  Disputes over interests in Africa among the British, French, and Germans nearly led to war on more than one occasion in the early years of the 20^th century.  And economic rivalries naturally turned into military ones, prompting the major powers of Europe to create huge, standing armies augmented by large navies, which now consisted of a new weapon at sea, the heavily armored battleship.  But large armies and large navies soon prove to be little consolation to a country if its rivals are similarly equipped.  The final link in this chain to disaster was forged by the formation of extensive alliances, and guarantees of mutual aid and protection among the allies.  From these interlocking alliances, two mutually hostile sides emerged: the Triple Alliance, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, and the Triple Entente, consisting of Great Britain, France, and Russia. 

The event that led to the assassination of the Grand Duke, and that triggered the Great War, was itself a product of nationalism.  In 1908, the Germanic empire of Austria-Hungary annexed the lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were populated by Slavic peoples.  This act inflamed many of the neighboring Serbians, another Slavic people, who believed that their fellow Slavs should be united with them into a single political entity that was not under the control of the Austrians.  The assassin who murdered Archduke Frances Ferdinand of Austria was a Serbian nationalist, and upon the discovery of his identity, Austria held the entire nation of Serbia responsible for his crime.  Austria declared war upon Serbia on July 18, 1914.  What happened next has been a sobering lesson for political and military leaders of later generations on the dangers of unrestrained arms races.  Russia, a Slavic nation sympathetic to Serbia, mobilized its army against the Austrians within days of Austria’s declaration of war.  In response to Russia’s actions, Germany declared war against it, prompting the French, who were allied with Russia, to mobilize its army against Germany.  And when Germany’s army launched an attack upon France through the neutral country of Belgium, Britain declared war upon Germany.  Thus, in a matter of days, all of the armies of the major powers of Europe were mobilized and committed to total war.  Germany’s intended strategy had been to defeat France quickly by sweeping through Belgium and outflanking the French army, and then, after this victory on the Western Front, to concentrate its armies against the Russians on the Eastern front and defeat them.  But after a promising opening campaign, the German army was stopped by determined French and British resistance, and settled into fighting along a line of battle that hardly moved over the next three years.  The war that ensued was one of the most horrific in human history, a war fought in trenches, where victory lay in endurance rather than heroism, and the enemies were disease, fatigue, random bursts of mortar shells, and poison gas.  Germany was the loser in this great battle, but all of Western Europe paid a heavy price for engaging in it.

37 Million Casualties in "The Great War" (World War I)

            Had it not been for the rise of Nazism, the story of the German people would have been an ironic, but a happy chapter following the history of Rome’s rise and fall.  After all, it had been German barbarians who had caused the downfall of Rome, and yet, in the centuries that followed, these barbarians would produce achievements that would not only rival - but in some areas dwarf - the accomplishments of the Greek and Roman ages.  The Christian religion, which had risen, with the Germans, on the ashes of fallen Rome, would be reinvigorated, after a decline of its own, through the efforts of mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, and reformers such as Martin Luther.  In the 1700’s, Johann Sebastian Bach would usher in a new age of music that would culminate, in the centuries that followed, with the beautiful and often magnificent compositions of Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, and Wagner.  Writers like Goethe, Thomas Mann, and Heinrich Heine would create, in written verse and prose, compositions as moving and inspiring as the musical ones being created by their countrymen.  And Germany gave to the world mathematical and scientific geniuses like Karl Friedrich Gauss, a pioneer in the fields of probability and physics, and Heinrich Hertz, who made revolutionary discoveries in the science of electromagnetism.  In the 19^th century, Leibniz ushered in a golden age in German philosophy that would come to rival that of the ancient Greeks, the only one in fact that ever has, with luminaries such as Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer.  In the very century that many of these geniuses and their monumental accomplishments were dazzling the rest of the world, a true German nation came into existence, formed from a collection of numerous tiny independent states by the Prussian diplomat Otto von Bismarck.  Combining Prussian military might with skillful diplomacy, Bismarck annexed German territories bordering Prussia on the west and the north.  And then, in 1870, he provoked a conflict with France, drawing independent German states in the south into an alliance against this common enemy in the Franco-Prussian war that ensued.  In the wake of victory against France, Bismarck emerged as chancellor of a unified German state – a confederation in name, but in actuality, an empire, and one of the most powerful in the world. 

            It is one of the great tragedies of world history, that such a nation, having given the world so much, and having risen to such power and glory, would sink, within two generations, into a rogue state, perpetrating crimes against innocent victims that are unimaginable in scale, and horrific in nature.  It has been asked, many times, how such a people could have been capable of such a thing, and the answers are always less than satisfying.  An easy answer, of course, is that the Germans, in spite of their intellectual cleverness and artistic propensities, have always been at heart the same savages that terrorized the Romans.  But to fall back on such an answer is to fall on very dangerous ground, because it smacks of the same type of theories that the Nazis used to justify the treatment of their victims.  And it is all too easy to forget that the German race has many branches, beyond Germany, which extend to England, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, and the United States.  Was it then the military, Spartan lifestyle of the Germans, that made Nazism possible?  Or was it simply that, having been defeated by its enemies in the Great War, and being forced to endure an ignoble surrender at their hands, the nation sunk into despair, and lost all sense of purpose, making them susceptible to the doctrine of Nazism?  But there have been other atrocities, perpetrated by different states with different cultures and histories, that have claimed the lives of millions of victims, both before and after the rise of the Nazis.  What is the common cause, if any, that makes crimes on this scale possible?  And what is it that compels rational, decent people to engage in collective acts of violence and destruction?

            In 1899, a German biologist, Ernst Haeckl, argued that the primary cause of western civilization’s destructive and violent past had been religion.  The judgment of history, he said, “will sooner or later extract a terrible account of the Roman papacy, and the millions who have been robbed of their happiness by this degenerate religion will help to give it its death-blow in the coming twentieth century – at least, in every civilized state.”  For Haeckl, the new science of evolution presented a model whose lessons should be extended into every area of life.  And the German philosopher Nietzsche seconded this condemnation of religion.  According to Nietzsche, the Christian Church, which had its origin as a religion of slaves, corrupted and eventually destroyed respect for the old classical virtues of strength, courage, and will.  This religion of resentment, of the underclass, allowed its believers to find consolation in a promise that those who were bold enough, fortunate enough, and determined to savor life and its rewards would find a greater unhappiness in the Hell that awaited them, after death, while the meek, the timid, and the reluctant could find a countervailing happiness in a future eternal paradise.  “God is dead,” proclaimed Nietzsche, and for many of his contemporaries, it was the death of a tyrant, brought down by science, the liberator of mankind.  Ironically, the philosophies of both Haeckl and Nietzsche would resonate with many of the ideas appearing in the emerging cult of Nazism, just decades later.

The people of the twentieth century witnessed the rise and fall of totalitarian governments and dictators, warfare and destruction on a scale unimagined in previous centuries, and the systematic, wholesale murder of millions of innocent persons.  The hope and promise of a new, golden age for humanity, ushered in with the aid of technological advances, mass communication, and freedom from the shackles of religion and superstition were betrayed by those who held the reins of power, and abandoned by those who obeyed them.  There is no more memorable, or glaring example, of this betrayal than in the rise of Nazism and Adolf Hitler.  To understand the fatal relationship of Hitler and the German nation, we have to go back to the end of the Great War, in 1918.  It had been a bitter, four-year struggle, which drew more than 65 million troops into battle.  Nearly two-thirds of Germany’s soldiers who saw action were killed or wounded, and in France, Russia, Austria, and Rumania, the casualty rate had been even higher.  Many who had survived the war were disfigured for life, or crippled.  And for others, there were psychological scars, often as debilitating as the physical ones.  The entry of the United States into the war in 1917, on the side of Great Britain and France, eventually ended the stalemate, and turned the tide of battle against the Germans.  When their emperor, William II, abdicated and fled the country, the new republican government that succeeded him sued for peace.  They found encouragement in public statements made by the American President Woodrow Wilson, who had promised that surrender would lead to a just peace, and not a vindictive one.  But President Wilson could not restrain his French allies from exacting revenge on the Germans.  The peace terms that they imposed upon Germany, which included the acquisition of large tracts of territory and huge monetary reparations, was even more severe than the terms that Bismarck had exacted from the French, nearly fifty years earlier.  These left the German people destitute, bitter, demoralized, and disillusioned. And Germany’s stupendous fall, from one of the brightest cultural lights of the modern world to a condemned, humiliated, and emasculated pariah, affected its people in a much more pernicious way.  It robbed them of the cultural basis of their identity.  For in ways that few of us ever really appreciate, our personal sense of meaning, our goals, values, and outlooks are derived from the social structures that we’re a part of.  These can be networks of relatives, neighbors, and friends, or organizations such as our religion or place of employment, but one critical structure that has given us a sense of personal identity in modern times is the nation-state.  Our personal life stories are written in the context of that larger story, the story shared by all of our fellow citizens.  And if, in any nation, that larger story is distorted or abandoned, because of revolution, or economic collapse, or national catastrophe, its people are left without their bearings, and desperately try to regain them.  When the economies of the United States and Western Europe collapsed in the 1930’s, many of their citizens also faced disillusionment and personal despair.  In these countries, many cast aside their traditional beliefs and allegiances, and searched for replacements – new allegiances or ideologies that could make their lives meaningful, and give them hope for a better future.  It was during this era that many flirted with the ideas of Marxism and Communist revolution, even in the United States. Germany also had a growing socialist movement, but this was violently opposed by other Germans, who sought an ideology that would restore national pride.  In Adolf Hitler, these others found their champion.

Adolf Hitler's Mother, Klara

Adolf Hitler in His Youth

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in Austria, the son of a minor customs official.  His father, a stern and domineering man, had been married three times, and the third wife, Adolf’s mother, was much younger than her husband, having even been raised by him as a foster daughter years before.  She gave birth to many children, but most of these died in infancy, and Adolf became his mother’s favorite child, and the object of her indulgent attention.  He showed little promise early in his career, failing to get accepted into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and, shortly after the death of his mother in 1908, he settled into a life of squalor, standing in breadlines, begging in the streets, working occasional odd jobs, and often sleeping in flophouses.  After a time, he found a way to make a modest income for himself by painting and selling post cards and posters, but a lazy disposition prevented him from growing the business into a truly successful one.  Hitler found his first real success in the army, and in the Great War.  Although his eccentric temperament made his superior officers leery of promoting him, his bravery on the battlefield won the admiration of his officers and fellow soldiers.  And it was while he was in the army that he found his calling in life as the future savior of Germany.  It happened after he apparently suffered from a gas attack in the trenches.  Temporarily blinded, and taken to a hospital, he experienced, like St. Paul, a calling to a higher destiny.  “When I was confined to bed,” he explained, “the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great.  I knew immediately that it would be realized.”  Although he would come to compare himself to John the Baptist, as a “voice crying out in the wilderness”, and later with Jesus Christ himself, eventually he would adopt Nietzsche’s contemptuous view of Christianity, calling it “the Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate, pity-ethics.”  But after the war ended, it appeared that he had no avenue to live out his calling, and that he might even return to the destitute street life that military service had rescued him from.  He re-enlisted in the reserve army, where he was assigned the task of re-educating soldiers in appropriate, anti-Marxist, political philosophy.  In this role, he demonstrated himself to be a gifted speaker, and was appointed “education officer”, beginning a career in public speaking that would culminate, after some faltering attempts at revolution, in his elevation to Chancellor of Germany, and eventually dictator. 

Like Napoleon, Hitler held the paradoxical view that he could shape destiny, but at the same time was an agent of some higher power.  He once said, “I carry out the commands that Providence has laid upon me.”  For the disheartened and disillusioned German people, his vision of a new age for Germany intoxicated many, and this vision was made all the more compelling by his ability to sway the masses.  Before coming to power, he would often give three or four speeches in a single day.  He spoke in a rasping voice which would often rise to a shrill falsetto, and his speeches tended to be long and filled with repetition.  But he had an uncanny ability to sense what his audiences wanted to hear.  As one witness described it, “Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph . . . enabling him, with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation.”  But in his message of hate, did he really find a resonance in the heart and minds of the German people?  Sadly, it seems that for many his anti-Semitic and racist rantings did strike a sympathetic chord, for there had been a culture of suspicion toward Jews among Christian peoples of Europe that dated back to the Roman empire, and the original break of Christianity with Judaism.  In fact, anti-Semitism even pre-dated Christianity, because the distinctive beliefs and practices among the Jews, and perceived exclusivity in their behavior, had produced suspicion and occasional hostility even among pagans.  There is a natural tendency among peoples to bestow upon themselves a sense of uniqueness through special identity: in ancient Greece outsiders were called barbarians, and those who were not citizens of the particular city-states in Greece were given limited privileges within those city-states, if any at all.  But for the Jews, who were robbed of their homeland, attempts to preserve a sense of special identity often resulted in friction with the host peoples that they lived among.  With the rise of nationalism, the peoples of Europe began to define themselves in new ways, in terms of national boundaries, but also influenced by ideas of race and ethnic background which marginalized others in their midst.  There have been enlightened times when peoples of diverse backgrounds and cultures have cast aside their mutual suspicions, lived side by side, inspired one another, and even merged to form entirely new cultures.  But at other times, usually during a crisis or the emergence of some new nation-state, tolerance disappears.  In its place grows a pervasive fear of the stranger, and these fears are often played upon by those in power, who use them to their own advantage.  The stranger, the alien, is stereotyped, as someone, or something, inferior.  More pernicious stereotypes give the stranger a diabolical cast, who intends to pervert, disrupt, or infiltrate the society in which he is found.  At this stage, it is his group that is usually referred to, and this group is described in ways that suggest it is a single organism, with each individual member acting merely to serve the general conspiracy, like cells in a larger body.  Hitler was particularly skilful at stirring up fears and prejudices such as these.  He once wrote: “It was and is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest, and himself rising to be its master.”  When the stranger becomes an object of fear or suspicion, the society at large deals with him in very distinct ways.  He is enslaved, or quarantined in ghettoes, or cast out.  In extreme cases, as in Hitler’s empire, he is destroyed.

Hitler is a figure that has a strange hold on us, more than half a century after his death.  He is terrifying, repugnant, and yet, with his tiny moustache and exaggerated self-dramatizing behavior, almost comical.  And many, while condemning his anti-Semitism and unrestrained cruelty, confess a strange admiration for his ability to rouse a beaten nation, within a matter of years, into a formidable world power.  Hitler fascinates.  He is, after all, not unlike other great dictators of the more remote past, such as Julius Caesar.  Both overthrew a weak, demoralized republican government and established, in its place, a dictatorship.  Nazi children were encouraged to pray to Hitler, as if he were a type of god, but Caesar, in his lifetime, also insisted on the trappings of divinity.  And both were ruthless in destroying personal enemies, rivals, and even former allies.  Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions, in his concentration camps, but so was Julius Caesar, during his military campaigns in Gaul, in which he meted out death indiscriminately upon men, women, and children.  Why, then, do we look back upon Julius Caesar with a sort of reverence, as a great man brought down in the prime of his glory?  Only sick minds today harbor such a reverence for Hitler.  The passage of time, to be sure, helps to gloss over the ugly realities that so often surround the powerful.  And there are powerful men of ancient times for whom we still have little admiration at all, such as Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun.  We probably link Hitler more to men such as these than to Julius Caesar because, like them, Hitler’s passions seemed to be more consumed with what he was trying to crush and conquer rather than what he was trying to create.  But there is another reason that he is a more unsettling figure to us.  He rose to power in an age, and in a culture, that prided itself in its maturity.  Its educated population, and modern, stable institutions of national government, would never allow the emergence of a Caesar, or even a Napoleon.  And modernity, so many believed, freed mankind from superstition, and the witch-hunts, crusades, inquisitions, and mass hysteria associated with it.  This was the new age of science.  But Hitler, and the other great dictators of the 20^th century, were not stopped by science.  In fact, the very products of modern science – radio and motion pictures for mass communication; tanks, rockets, and airplanes for war; became the tools of conquest and domination relied upon by them.  This, as much as the inherent barbarity and cruelty of these men, is what makes them so unsettling.  And what is even more disconcerting is that these tools of modern science seemed to assist the dictators in making entire segments of the population passive witnesses, or even active collaborators, in the most terrible of their acts.  It appeared that Ernst Haeckl and other philosophers of modernity were wrong after all: science had not allowed man to rise above his bestial nature by freeing him from the shackles of religion and superstition – it had in fact provided a more effective means for those in power to channel his energies in the services of their goals, which could often be malevolent and destructive.  Haeckl never imagined, and probably would have never believed, that massacres due to war and oppression in the 20^th-century age of science would dwarf in sheer number all of those that had ever been perpetrated by religious crusades and inquisitions in all previous centuries combined.

Karl Marx

No political philosophy did more to exemplify the hope that science would bring a new order to the world than communism.  A product of the nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx, it contended that societies, with their institutions and cultural values, are products of the economic systems that are at their base, and that these systems have evolved throughout history, with feudalism giving way to economies based upon manufacturing, and these in turn revolutionized by industrial production.  The final phase, according to Marx, would be a true revolution of the working class, or proletariat.  “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution,” wrote Marx, adding, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.  They have a world to win.”  Marx thought that this great revolution would happen in Germany, but it was in Russia that communism would gain its first great foothold.  It happened in March of 1917 during the Great War, when a popular uprising toppled the government of the Russian czar.  Later that year, the communist Bolsheviks took power under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, who made peace with Germany and removed Russia from the war.  Lenin was a sincere Marxist, who attempted to pave the way for a workers’ paradise, but in order to achieve this goal he made himself dictator of the new Soviet “republic”, and created an oppressive regime that had no tolerance for dissent or even freedom of the press. He didn’t live long enough to see that he had created a society which would demonstrate the truth of that famous saying of Karl Marx’s, that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  After Lenin’s death in 1924, his successor, Joseph Stalin, used the vast powers at his disposal to turn this “workers’ paradise” into a nightmarish police state.  He forced Russian peasants onto collective farms, converted prisons holding criminals and dissenters into slave labor camps, and ruthlessly executed all of his former Bolshevik rivals in a series of show trials that were actually shams of justice.  Like Hitler, he attempted to make himself an object of veneration and worship among his people.  And like Hitler, he executed millions of innocent persons living within his realm.  These men, sadly, were just two of the more memorable examples of a type that would appear often in the twentieth century – the political despot, brought to power in a cult of personality, a demagogue who enslaves his own people, and destroys others.  Religion was on the retreat, but in its place, something much more indidious appeared – a godless twin, ideology, with its own trappings of forced conversions, heresies and heretics, sacrifice for a higher cause, the vague promise of a millenial future paradise, and warnings of an imminent armaggedon – a great battle between the forces of light and darkness.  The blood of the victims of these secular crusades flowed like a torrent in the twentieth century: one million Armenians massacred by Turks, thirteen million Russians by Stalin and his communist henchmen, six million Jews by the Nazis, in addition to six million other victims of Hitler and his henchmen, eleven million Chinese during Mao Tse Tung’s “Cultural Revolution”, five million civilians of occupied countries by the Japanese, 1.6 million North Koreans by Kim Il Sung, 1.7 million Cambodians by Pol Pot, and one and half million Africans in Ethiopia.  These are just the more prominent massacres, more memorable to us only because of the sheer numbers involved.  Behind them, there are countless other atrocities, all performed in the name of some perverted ideology, and to the leaders who engineered them, the lives lost were merely numbers, nothing more.  In the words of Joseph Stalin, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”  This, in fact, could be the slogan of the 20^th century, in which writers like James Joyce and Marcel Proust examined the inner life of the individual like none before them, while on the other hand millions of nameless and faceless victims were swept away by efficiently engineered mass murders.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, 1945

Hitler and Stalin were allies, briefly, and found common cause in their mutual desire to rule as autocrats over expanding empires.  But Hitler, who had always preached as vehemently against the dangers of communism as he had against the dangers of Jewry, eventually betrayed this partnership, driving Stalin into an alliance with Great Britain and the United States.  And, just as Napoleon had done, Hitler attempted an invasion deep into the Russian interior, which would also prove to be his own undoing.

World War II Took More Lives Than Any Other War in History; More Civilians Than Soldiers Died in the War

In 1945, nearly all of the nations of Western Europe were left in ruins, just as they had been in the aftermath of the Great War, now given the more sobering title of World War I.  World War II had been more devastating on balance than its predecessor, and had exacted a heavier toll on the general populations.  New and much more terrible weapons had been deployed – bombers, rockets, and, in the end, nuclear weapons.  World War II had more than its share of mass murders, exploitation of enslaved populations, and atrocities inflicted upon prisoners.  But World War I had left a heavier, psychological toll on civilization.  It had demolished modern man’s newfound hope that he was, in many ways, a new man, and one who had outgrown the barbarities of earlier times.  Gone was the promise that the twentieth century was a new, enlightened age.  And dashed hopes gave way to complete despair as the Great Depression followed in the wake of World War I.  Despair, in turn, became ominous dread as tyrants arose who would provoke the next war: Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Tojo in Japan.  But ironically, the evil that brought on World War II gave this conflict a glory that was lacking in the first one, because it became, in the minds of many, a struggle between light and darkness, the forces of good versus the forces of malevolence.  And because the forces of good carried the day, and light triumphed over darkness, a world weary of war, and still half-buried in the rubble of the last one, ventured to risk a new hope that perhaps the next chapter in the story of civilization would be a happier one.  There was, after, all, one country that had emerged from World War II not only on the victorious side of the just, but also more powerful than when it had entered the conflict.  It seemed that the mantle of civilization itself had now passed to this nation, which was free, prosperous, and militarily strong.  Perhaps, some dared to hope, it would be here that a path to a more meaningful, positive future could be cleared in the midst of the wreckage of the twentieth century.  It would now be the turn of this country, the United States of America, to take the leading role on the world stage.  After 400 years, it was to the New World, again, that Europeans looked to seek out a new and better destiny.