The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred
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* The ‘Single Integrated Operations Plan’ would have retaliated to a Soviet attack by unleashing all 3,267 American nuclear weapons against the entire Eastern bloc.
* Attempts to uncover a conspiracy involving Pentagon hawks, to say nothing of the Mafia, have been unsuccessful, though the Kremlin was certain such a plot existed. Other theories point the finger of blame at the KGB itself.
* Admittedly, the Americans liked nothing better than to think of themselves as the plucky underdogs. They exulted when Van Cliburn, a Texan boy, won the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. They went into ecstasies when Bobby Fischer beat the Russian chess grandmaster Boris Spassky in 1972. And nine years later they could scarcely contain themselves when their ice hockey team narrowly beat the Soviet world champions. The Soviets, for their part, showed no sign of wishing to challenge American dominance in the realms of country music, surfing or baseball.
* Jacques Poos, the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, declared that ‘the hour of Europe’ had dawned, as if Brussels could somehow halt the killing. In fact, European diplomatic initiatives did nothing to stop ethnic cleansing and European troops acting under the auspices of the United Nations all but aided and abetted the massacre of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men at Srebrenica in July 1995. It took American firepower and the defection of the Croats to halt the killing in Bosnia – just as it was American firepower that stopped and then reversed the ethnic cleansing Milo evick also attempted in the province of Kosovo.
* Spengler is now seldom read; his prose is too turgid, his debt to Nietzsche and Wagner too large, his influence on the National Socialists too obvious. Yet with his idiosyncratic seasonal theory of cultural rise and fall, he expressed better than almost anyone that inter-war revulsion against all that had been achieved by the West before 1914. ‘The last century’, he wrote, ‘was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this century blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.’ This was not a bad prediction. In particular, Spengler saw that the backlash he foresaw would manifest itself partly as a war on big cities, the embodiments of a decadent civilization.
* The Soviet figures are famously problematic. Total Soviet demographic losses have been put as high as 43–47 million by some recent scholars (i.e. including thwarted normal reproduction). The Times Atlas of World History’s total of 21.5 million includes around 7 million deaths of Soviet citizens deported to the gulag and 1 million Soviet citizens deported as members of ‘suspect’ nationalities. The official Soviet figure for total excess mortality was 26.6 million, but this may include 2.7 million wartime and post-war emigrants as well as normal natural mortality. On the other hand, it may underestimate the number of Soviet prisoners who died in Germany captivity.
† Rüdiger Overmans has substantially revised upwards the estimates for German military losses. His total figure for losses of 5.3 million includes just under 400,000 men who did not have German citizenship in 1939 but nevertheless were recruited or conscripted into the Wehrmacht or SS.
‡France and Italy – both 0.9 per cent; United Kingdom – 0.7 per cent; United States – 0.2 per cent.
* The Mongols habitually and systematically slaughtered the entire populations of cities in the path of their advance. According to Muslim historians, more than one and a half million people were butchered at Nishapur in 1221. Almost as many were put to the sword at Herat and Merv.