any one of the living nations will be allowed
to have the monopoly of curing or cutting up
these unfortunate patients and the controversy
is as to who shall have the privilege of doing
so, and in what measure he shall do it. These
things may introduce causes of fatal differ-
ence between the great nations whose mighty
armies stand opposed threatening each other.
These are the dangers I think which threaten
us in the period that is coming on.
In 1900 there were some obviously dying
empires, and the ‘stronger nations’ competing for
their territories were the European great powers
and Japan. But during the years immediately pre-
ceding the Great War the issue had changed.
Now the great powers turned on each other in
the belief that some must die if the others were
to live in safety. Even Germany, the strongest of
them, would not be safe, so the Kaiser’s generals
believed, against the menace of a combination of
countries opposing it. That was the fatal assump-
tion which, more than anything, led to the
1914–18 war. It was reducing the complexity of
international relations to a perverse application of
Darwinian theory.
The First World War destroyed the social
cohesion of pre-war continental Europe. The
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires broke
up; Germany, before 1914 first among the con-
tinental European countries, was defeated and
humiliated; Italy gained little from its enormous
sacrifices; the tsarist Russian Empire disintegrated,
and descended into civil war and chaos. In their
despair people sought new answers to the prob-
lems that threatened to overwhelm them, new
ideals to replace respect for kings and princes and
the established social order. In chaos a few ruth-
less men were able to determine the fate of
nations, ushering in a European dark age in mid-
century. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were able to
create a more efficient and crueller autocracy than
that of the Romanovs. The new truths were held
to be found in the works of Karl Marx as inter-
preted by the Russian dictators, who imposed
their ideas of communism on the people. In Italy
disillusionment with parliamentary government
led to fascism. In Germany, democracy survived
by a narrow margin but was demolished when its
people despaired once more in the depression of
the early 1930s. Hitler’s doctrine of race then
found a ready response, and his successes at home
and abroad confirmed him in power.
Different though their roots were, what these
dictators had in common was the rejection of
ethics, a contempt for the sanctity of human life,
for justice and for equality before the law. They
accepted the destruction of millions of people in
the belief that it served desirable ends. They were
responsible for a revolution in thought and action
that undid centuries of progress.
Stalin and Hitler were not the first leaders to
be responsible for mass killings. During the First
World War, the Turks had massacred Armenians,
ethnic hatred inflamed by fears that in war the
Armenians would betray them. Stalin’s calculated
killing of ‘class enemies’ and his murderous
purges of those from whom he suspected oppo-
sition were the actions of a bloody tyrant, by no
means the first in history. The ruthless exploita-
tion of slave labour, the murder of the Polish
officers during the Second World War and the
expulsion of whole peoples from their homes,
revealed the depths to which an organised
modern state was capable of sinking. But nothing
in the history of a Western nation equals the
Nazi state’s application of its theories of ‘good’
which ended with the factory murder of millions
of men, women and children, mostly Jews and
gypsies. There were mass killings of ‘inferior
Slavs’, Russians and Poles, and those who were
left were regarded as fit only to serve as labour
for the German masters.
The Nazi evil was ended in 1945. But it had
been overcome only with the help of the commu-
nist power of the Soviet Union. As long as Stalin
lived, in the Soviet Union and its satellite states
the rights of individuals counted for little. In Asia,
China and its neighbours had suffered war and
destruction when the Japanese, who adopted from
the West doctrines of racial superiority, forced
them into their cynically named ‘co-prosperity
sphere’. The ordeal was not over for China when
the Second World War ended. Civil war followed
until the victory of the communists. Mao Zedong
imposed his brand of communist theory on a
1
PROLOGUE 7
