Why Was the 20th Century So Bloody?
By: Lauren Reiff
Tags: Politics, History, Society, World, Philosophy

It ought to send a shiver down our spines that one of the world’s most murderous centuries lurks so closely in the rear-view mirror.

How to make sense of it all? How, even, to feel the pressing weight of 120-some million dead? Perhaps because of these eye-watering quantities, such a figure fails to imprint us with the magnitude of such a loss, existing instead as a floating, abstract statistic.

Along with two world wars — the first devastating spectacles of international conflict of its kind to go down in history — and a multitude of bloody ethnic feuds — the century’s dictatorial regimes fanned the flames of mass death, managing to double the body count. Of those gunned down on smoky battlefields, just as many were starved to death, worked to death, or otherwise dragged down the road to death by countless other gruesomely creative means.

Decisively removed from this century by two decades, we’re apt to regard it as a bad dream of the past, a developmental period that — thank God, we’re through with. But we cannot really wash our hands clean from such a memory.

This is because history is not something that happens to us. Instead, it is something we actively fashion into existence; the grievous events that constituted the 20th century were both perpetrated by and perpetuated by humans.

And the irony of it all: Who could have foresaw the back-flip into the abyss of mass killing? Surely those basking in the glow of the Enlightenment as it passed over the Western world would have pointed towards a promising forecast for humanity on the horizon.

Out of the growth of intellectual reason famously blossomed a new faith in the merits of democracy in addition to a well-rooted conviction in the sacredness of the individual. The Enlightenment was a celebration of the convergence between the scientific and the humane.

But contrary to the optimism of this age, the future that lay ahead would not gamely solider on with this (admittedly somewhat delicate) experiment, but would start running amok with things, wreaking havoc — even reversing course, one could say. How else could you frame the chilling disposability of human life during the 20th century? And the sheer scale of it all, for that matter?

The Enlightenment wasn’t able to transcend the muck. Instead, in a cruel twist of fate, it provided some of the actual fodder that made the 20th century’s bloody achievements possible.

Marxism

Despite failing to live long enough to cross into the 20th century himself, the theories of class struggle that Karl Marx so militantly belabored during his existence gained a mighty foothold posthumously, first among Russian radicals, and later mutating and spreading to their Asian neighbors to the south.

The politics of Marxism diverged from those espoused by the genteel thinkers of the Enlightenment. Instead, Marxism called for revolution as opposed to peace, strength as opposed to cooperation, cold-blooded will as opposed to diplomacy.

Marxism was built on the class struggle and predicated on the notion of righteous overthrow. Claiming philosophical loyalty to the notion of the ends justify the means, the soup of Marxist thought had several other awfully revealing ingredients. One of which was a requirement for perpetual conflict, another of which was a spirit of absolutism — manifested in a dogmatic vision of what needed to be done just as much as the moral certainty with which these objectives were painted.

The way the Marxist narrative was supposed to function, the proletariat would stage an angry uprising against the bourgeois fueled by righteous revenge. But this isn’t necessarily how things played out: An organic rebellion of Marxist proportions didn’t materialize, in part because it wasn’t simply a means to harness resentment bottom-up but instead, was a top-down theory.

Marxism came wrapped up in all this theoretical gravitas, in the clunky language of socioeconomic analysis and dialectical materialism. Lenin, for example, Russia’s premier communist agitator, churned out volume upon volume of Marxist rhetoric over his lifetime.

What resulted from Lenin’s pen (and many others) was a long, dark corridor of Russian history filled with bodies. Intellectual thought had given rise to a theory so destructive that the human powers of rationality and reason had succeeded in blotting out human minds themselves. Again — the irony, the excess.

What’s significant about a lot of the 20th century was the amount of death associated with ideas, with theories. Perhaps humans had grown out of dueling each other, utilizing the sword to take care of some petty crime and exact some sweet revenge, but if it was thought that we were removed from the primitivity of senseless death, we were horribly mistaken. In reality, the 20th century mastered the art of efficient mass killing.

Now, war and death resulting from territorial squabbles or religious ideology had frequently blighted the historical calendar. But here Marxism lay claim to millions dead in the service of what was really a highly abstract idea — communist utopia. Its scale blotted out any weird misgivings about the human sacrifice it entailed. Its intellectual texts (that did so much to advance the ideology) could be conceived as a dangerous hyperextension of rationality.

All this theory, all this soaking in abstract philosophy proved disastrous. The Enlightenment advanced civilization and celebrated the glorious contributions of the human mind, but here was blistering evidence of its runaway excesses. Rationality, when in the service of ideology, could be deadly; it could supersede a moral loyalty to the considerations of humanity. In this case, Marxism could trample over ethics with its neat-and-tidy utopian vision.

Marxism stands as historical evidence of the chilling toxicity of theory. Who could have imagined how enduringly it sustained the death toll?

When humans rationalize we aren’t always making something good. Instead, we’re constructing something that works. This distinction marks the capacity of the human mind as something that needs to be consistently governed by ethics. But these the Marxists gleefully cast off, heeding the siren call of power, efficiency, and hyperextended reason.

All of these creatures of destruction descendant of Marxist sentiment are imprinted on the 20th century’s worst crimes. Consider Stalin’s purges and appallingly bungled collectivization efforts, or Mao’s mass starvation, or even Hitler’s industrialized process of human extermination. Each dictator had a clear picture of their ideal state. Each fell slave to the idea of utopia in addition to a toxic theory. And each rationalized their process by means of these utopian visions and beloved theories.

In a less consciously evil category, the world wars were equally efficiently destructive. One of the elements that made the 20th century one of the deadliest was the not only the sheer industrialization of death, but the rationalization of it.

Nietzscheism

Another man who never really made it into the 1900s — in this case, just barely crossing the threshold of it — but whose ghosts lingered on was Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who scoffed at the notion of morals, spearheaded the glorification of strength above all else, and famously declared that “God is dead. . .and we have killed him”, left a philosophic legacy that — who could have known — enchanted 20th century minds.

Hitler, for one, tore a page from Nietzsche’s musings and modeled his Nazi project on its precepts. Power and instinct gained dominance over virtue and bridled reason.

What mattered was a German nation with strength and vigorous obedience, unbound from the sticky web that was a moral conscience. Energy mattered, not wisdom. Results mattered, not means. Hardness and certainty were idolized, and sentimental thoughts and ethical unease were scolded as the mark of a weak person. And weak persons were anathema in the 20th century.

Nietzsche’s signature cynicism was behind his conviction that morals would gradually enter extinction. In his writings he invoked the Darwinian simplicity of the survival of the fittest — and had no problem condoning the use of violence to achieve certain ends.

He patterned human nature on the animal kingdom, an interesting “regression” for someone of the 19th century. Nietzsche turned philosophy back to earth, unveiling uncomfortable truths of psychological import in the process. He was smart but cynical, and dismayingly, served as chief inspiration for some of the century’s worst developments (which, it should be said, was not his intention).

The Nietzschean amoral stance accompanied by the dazzling ideal of supreme strength translated to people becoming very good at doing very bad things. The horrible efficiency of war and genocide in this era and the smoldering ruin it caused stands as a premier example. Again, we see the excesses of both industrialization and rationalization at work here.

Could it have been avoided?

Jonathan Glover, author of the book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century admits to seeing the horrors of this era as somewhat inevitable, carefully putting forth the following:

“But the French Revolutionary guillotine and the republican baptisms — and the interest in the possibilities of gassing — all show how naturally inhumanity combines with technology. No doubt the facts of twentieth-century history would have been different if the assassination of the Archduke had not taken place, but inhumanity would still have been combined with modern technology. It is hard to see that there was much chance to escape some variant of the bloody twentieth century we know.”

His view is one that takes into account how just as humans are creative (innovating and discovering) we are still just as cruel. For example, developing better weapons made us better at a thing but importantly, not better people. And it can be very hard for creativity to resist being co-opted by cruelty.

The readiness of humans towards cruelty, revenge, or persuasion to succumbing to these dark forces fails to vanish as the centuries tick by. And the more we age as civilizations, the greater a threat we actually become to ourselves.

The 20th century turned out to be a devastatingly flammable brew of philosophy, politics, and technical advancements. In that fated century, experiments of political utopia and weapons of mass destruction came to pass.

What a strange, contradictory mixture of idealism and the death wish. What a nod to the shiver-inducing drive we humans have to push the envelope.

The heady industrialization of 20th century wars and political projects constituted technical progress while callous rationalizations were heralded as ever-more-sophisticated philosophy.

But progress, we should note, is not always good. We can encounter excess; we can trip ourselves up. Humans can become very good at doing very bad things. And the blood-spattered 20th century is all too willing to serve as a reminder of just the full strength of these very capacities.