[Nettime-bold] 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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