Out of Control

Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century

Zbigniew Brzezinski

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780684826363
• eBook ISBN: 9781439143803
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Brzezinski provides a stark and realistic look at the world's economy and moral crisis in a brilliant analysis of today's geopolitical order. If America is to reassert its moral legitimacy, Brzezinski argues, it must address its basic dilemmas, including deepening poverty, inadequate health care and education, a greedy wealthy class opposed to progressive taxation, and the mass media's promotion of sex and violence. In the new world of rival global power clusters, Brzezinski urges a greater role for the United Nations and "redistribution of responsibilities" within the trilateral nexus of Europe, America and East Asia ( Publisher's Weekly ).

PART I

The Politics of Organized Insanity

The twentieth century was born in hope. It dawned in a relatively benign setting. The principal powers of the world had enjoyed, broadly speaking, a relatively prolonged spell of peace. Only three major eruptions of international violence had disrupted the basic tranquility sustained by the system established during the Congress of Vienna of 1815. The Crimean War of 1853–56 briefly pitted France and Britain against Russia, but without major geopolitical repercussions; while the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 signaled the emergence on the world scene of Germany and of Japan, respectively, as new potential major actors.

The dominant mood in the major capitals as of January 1, 1900 was generally one of optimism. The structure of global power seemed stable. Existing empires appeared to be increasingly enlightened as well as secure. Some, like the Austro-Hungarian, could even have been said to be examples of both moderation and ethnic cohabitation. The principal capitals, be they London or Paris or Berlin or Vienna or St. Petersburg, were beginning to enjoy the benefits of the industrial revolution while thriving also as cultural centers. Art, architecture, literature were blooming, with innovative currents generating a mood of hopeful creativity. Democracy, and even social democracy, was also beginning to make modest inroads into the existing traditional authoritarian structures, but without visibly disruptive effects. Social inequality, though widespread, seemed still normal but increasingly subject—at least in such places as, for example, Germany—to gradual correction by progressively expanding governmental intervention.

Most importantly, the dominant political outlook, at least on the surface, seemed to be relatively passionless. Nationalism was becoming stronger, but it was not yet dominant. The ruling elites partook of the considerable degree of consensus, not to speak of blood ties, that prevailed among their reigning monarchs. Growing faith in the scientific revolution was generating optimism about the future condition of mankind. The onset of the twentieth century was hailed in many commentaries as the real beginning of the Age of Reason.

And reason expressed through science, indeed, did help to transform the world for the better. The twentieth century experienced unprecedented scientific breakthroughs in the areas most directly relevant to the physical aspects of the human condition: medicine, nutrition, modern communications. The scourge of epidemics, of child mortality, of vulnerability to various diseases was dramatically reduced. Human life expectancy increased by 30 to 50 percent in many parts of the world. Innovations in surgery and in general medical treatment as well as the breakout into outer space dramatically redefined the frontiers of human life. But this progress, unfortunately, was not matched on the moral level—with politics representing the twentieth century’s greatest failure.

Contrary to its promise, the twentieth century became mankind’s most bloody and hateful century, a century of hallucinatory politics and of monstrous killings. Cruelty was institutionalized to an unprecedented degree, lethality was organized on a mass production basis. The contrast between the scientific potential for good and the political evil that was actually unleashed is shocking. Never before in history was killing so globally pervasive, never before did it consume so many lives, never before was human annihilation pursued with such concentration of sustained effort on behalf of such arrogantly irrational goals.

Admittedly, there have been other periods in history in which violence was intense. With the population of the world during the Middle Ages so much smaller, the Great Horde’s sweep through central Europe, and also into the Middle East, produced, on a relative scale, perhaps even higher mortality. Nonetheless, this as well as other comparable explosions of violence were essentially outbursts—intense, violent, bloody but rarely sustained. Slaughter, especially of noncombatants, was directly associated with physical contest and conquest; rarely was it a matter of sustained policy, based on systematized premeditation. It is the latter that represents the twentieth century’s gruesome contribution to political history.

ONE

The Century of Megadeath

It is not necessary to chronicle in detail this century’s bloody record of mass murder on a scale beyond human capacity to fully comprehend and to truly empathize. But a concise statistical accounting of the extraordinary toll of politically motivated killings is a necessary point of departure for defining this century’s political meaning and legacy. (The enormity of that toll deserves to be described in terms of megadeaths, mega being a factor of 10⁶.)

The unprecedented dimensions of the twentieth century’s bloodletting were directly derived from the central existential struggles that defined and dominated this century. These struggles cumulatively produced the two most massive moral outrages of our time—outrages that transformed the century of promise into one of organized insanity. The first involved prolonged and extraordinarily devastating wars, not only with very high military casualties but with an equally high or even higher civilian toll: two world wars and at least thirty additional major international or civil wars (defined as ones in which fatalities were no less than tens of thousands). The second has involved the totalitarian attempts to create what might be described as “coercive utopias”: perfect societies based on the physical elimination of prescribed “social misfits,” doctrinally defined as racially or socially precluded from redemption.

Precise figures on the cumulative toll are not possible. Some of the combatant states—especially the victorious ones—kept reasonably accurate statistics for their own casualties; the vanquished often suffered the loss of their archives and hence only estimates are possible. The problem of accounting is even more acute in regard to civilian deaths that occurred as by-products of the war. Even in the case of advanced countries, such as Germany or Japan, the loss of life caused by air attacks can only be estimated. The problem is especially acute in the case of civilian deaths in countries like the Soviet Union or China, where combat also entailed foreign occupation, massive social disruptions, and the collapse of organized governmental institutions.

More elusive still are the totals of the deaths inflicted by totalitarian regimes in pursuit of ther doctrinal agendas of hatred. Neither Hitler nor Stalin nor Mao boasted publicly of their programs of mass murder. But the deliberate killings of the Jews, or of the Gypsies, or of the Poles cannot be counted as civilian by-products of the war. Conquest through war made their killing possible, but they were killed deliberately and not concurrently with military operations. This was also the case with the massive internal social annihilations carried out by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

The figures that follow are, therefore, estimates; but what is important is the scale and not the exact numbers. It is the scale—so unprecedented that it becomes almost incomprehensible—that provides a gruesome measure both for the political passions of the century and for the technological means that the passions were able to harness. (In rounding out the totals, middle estimates were accepted—hence the totals that follow are, if anything, perhaps somewhat low.)

Of those killed in twentieth-century wars, approximately 33,000,000 were young men, mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty, who perished in the name of nationalism and/or ideology. The two world wars are counted to have consumed at least 8,500,000 and 19,000,000 military lives, respectively, causing a massive biological depletion of talent, energy, and genetic inheritance in several key European nations. Other wars elsewhere in this century caused an additional 6,000,000 or so military fatalities. Civilian casualties—as actual by-product of hostilities (and not of deliberate genocide)—accounted for about 13,000,000 women, children, and older men during World War I and for about 20,000,000 during World War II, to which must be added the estimated 15,000,000 civilian Chinese deaths in the Sino-Japanese war which started prior to World War II.

In addition, probably no less than 6,000,000 civilians perished in other conflicts. Among them, the Mexican wars of the early century, the Paraguay-Bolivia War of 1928–35, the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, the India-Pakistan partition of 1947 and the subsequent two wars, the Korean war of 1950–53, the Nigerian civil war of 1967, the Vietnam War of 1961–75, and the Iraq-Iran war of 1980–87 have been the most lethal.

In the process, killing became devastatingly indiscriminate, with civilians perishing in numbers at least as great as the military fatalities. Moreover, even worse from the moral point of view was the pervasive inclination of all combatants to view enemy civilians as legitimate targets. Although it was the Nazis and the Japanese militarists who initiated the practice of total war, democratic societies—once also at war—likewise succumbed to the tempting proposition that “the ends justify the means.” The hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed in the fire-bombing of Dresden and in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima provide mute testimony to the moral corruption facilitated by advances in the technology of death.

In brief, this century’s wars extinguished no less than approximately 87,000,000 lives, with the numbers of wounded, maimed, or otherwise afflicted being beyond estimate.

These staggering numbers are matched and morally even overshadowed by a still more horrifying total, one that justifiably stamps the twentieth century as the century of megadeath: the number of defenseless individuals deliberately put to death because of doctrinal hatred and passions. Four individuals—each epitomizing a doctrine in which the physical elimination not just of individual opponents but of entire categories of human beings, defined either through race or class, was held to be socially beneficial—caused most of these politically motivated deaths.

In the name of doctrine, Hitler caused the deliberate killing of over 5,000,000 Jews (since the round figure of 6,000,000 is usually cited, it should be noted that precise tables with supporting data, providing a detailed breakdown of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, are contained in the monumental study by Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews [1985], with the horrendous toll amounting to no less than 5,100,000); about 800,000 Gypsies—with both Jews and Gypsies designated for total extinction; more than 2,000,000 Poles, with special efforts made to kill the entire Polish intelligentsia; perhaps as many as 6,000,000 Soviet (mostly Russian and Ukrainian) prisoners of war and civilians murdered or starved to death deliberately (beyond the millions killed in combat or as a consequence of combat and already included in the war totals); and at least 2–3,000,000 cold-bloodedly murdered elsewhere in Europe, with Yugoslavia alone accounting for about one-half of the victims. The Jewish holocaust included about 2,000,000 children deliberately murdered, by far the most gruesome case of infanticide in human history. In brief, Hitler had about 17,000,000 human beings put to death.

He was outdone, however, by Stalin and Mao. Stalin inherited from Lenin an efficiently operating machinery for the mass destruction of political and social opponents, and he further improved on it. Because of Lenin—through mass executions during and after civil war, through massive deaths in the Gulag initiated under Lenin’s direction (and powerfully documented in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago), and through mass famines induced by ruthless indifference (with Lenin callously dismissing as unimportant the deaths of “the half-savage, stupid, difficult people of the Russian villages”)—it can be estimated that between 6–8,000,000 people perished.

That number subsequently was more or less tripled by Stalin, who caused, it has been conservatively estimated, the deaths of no less than 20,000,000 people, and perhaps even upward of 25,000,000. Of that total, in the years 1937–38 alone, 1,000,000 were shot one by one and an additional 2,000,000 died in labor camps. An additional 1,000,000 were also executed during the preceding years, following Stalin’s accession to power in the late 1920s. Several million died during the collectivization and the artificially induced great famine of the early 1920s. Robert Conquest (in his pioneering and monumental The Great Terror) estimates that, all in all, approximately 7,000,000 were the victims of Stalin’s destruction of the peasant society and that about 12,000,000 died in labor camps. To this must be added another 1,000,000 or so put to death during and after World War II; the victims of ruthless mass deportations prior to, during, and after World War II; and the mass killings and deportations of Poles in occupied Poland and of Baits between 1939 and 1941 and again during the waning phases and in the aftermath of World War II.

In addition, Stalinist Russia had a gruesome record in its treatment of prisoners of war. According to data compiled in 1992 by the Germans, some 357,000 German POWs died in Soviet captivity during and after the war. In addition, several hundred thousand Japanese, Rumanian, Hungarian, Finnish, and Italian POWs also perished without a trace in Soviet camps. Finally, of the 180,000 Polish military captured by the Soviets in 1939, only about 40,000 subsequently reappeared. Thus close to 1,000,000 POWs can be assumed to have died in Stalin’s camps.

To this day, the former Soviet Union is dotted with enormous secret graveyards, usually located on the outskirts of big cities—often in parks reserved for NKVD dachas and sometimes in abandoned mine shafts—in which the bodies of the executed victims were systematically (usually at night) buried. Just next to Minsk (a city of less than 1 million inhabitants in Stalin’s time), a burial site containing some 200,000 executed victims was uncovered in the late 1980s. Subsequently, similar sites have been found throughout the entire land, next to every major city.

Most of those killed were executed in the most perfunctory, almost impersonal manner. To the Bolshevik leaders, the process involved was one of class cleansing, in which the society was purified by the “liquidation” of entire categories of enemies. Documents unearthed from the Soviet archives (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) reveal an attitude toward killing on the part of the Soviet leaders which was pathologically deprived of any humane feelings, not to speak of the fundamental contravention of any civilized notions of judicial procedures. Killing simply became a bureaucratic function, both for the leaders commanding it and for the executioners performing it.

In that respect, the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis or of class enemies by the Communists had much in common, in both cases becoming a totally dehumanized process, devoid even of passion, not to speak of compassion.

A chilling case in point is provided by the documents which Boris Yeltsin courageously revealed to the world regarding the long-kept secret Soviet massacre in 1940 of Polish officers, officials, and intellectuals taken prisoner after the joint Nazi-Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939. On March 5, 1940, L. Beria, the head of the NKVD, submitted a memorandum addressed “To Comrade Stalin,” providing a detailed breakdown of the 14,736 officers held prisoner in three camps, and of 10,685 Polish political prisoners held in various Soviet prisons. All were described as committed enemies of the Soviet Union, and the document recommended that they all be executed. On the same day, the Politburo met, and its protocol no. 13 of March 5, 1940 simply stated as follows:

Decision of 5.III. 1940—Case of NKVD USSR

I. To Convey to the NKVD USSR

1) the files of 14,700 persons contained in camps for prisoners of war: former Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officials, gendarmes, settlers and criminals,

2) as well as the files of 11,000 persons arrested and placed in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia: members of various counterrevolutionary, espionage and diversionary organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and refugees—to resolve through a special process, applying to them the highest penalty: shooting.

II. The cases are to be resolved without summoning the arrested and without presenting to them the indictments, the decisions to close the investigations and the verdict according to the following procedure:

a) regarding the persons held in camps for prisoners of war on the basis of data presented by the Administration for Prisoners of War of the NKVD USSR,

b) regarding persons arrested on the basis of data presented by the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR and the NKVD of the Belorussian SSR.

III. Resolution of the cases and the handing down of the verdict is to be entrusted to the troika of comrades composed of: Merkulov, Kabulov and Bashtakov (head of the first Special Department of the NKVD USSR).

(signed) Secretary of the C.C. J. STALIN.

That was all. With one scrap of paper, containing the brief phrase “applying to them the highest penalty: shooting,” more than 25,000 lives (representing in this particular case the social elite of a country) were wiped out. On a much more massive scale, this procedure was repeated for several years for hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, not to mention the millions that also perished through exhaustion, starvation, and maltreatment in the Gulag. Though the precise figures for Stalin’s toll will never be available, it is unlikely that the range of 20–25,000,000 victims is an exaggeration. Census statistics also indicate that additionally the biological depletion of the Soviet population during Stalin’s reign was even higher. The estimated number of killings cited above, in any case, accounts for Stalin’s direct genocide. Demographic depletion—because of reduced birthrates, loss of offspring because of higher infant mortality, births that did not take place because of imprisonment of a would-be parent, etc.—certainly had to be in excess of even the enormous toll directly attributable to Stalin personally.

Stalin’s methods were applied after 1945 throughout Eastern Europe. In every satellite state, concentration camps—in effect, death camps—were established, in which enemies of the new regimes were worked to death. Tens of thousands thereby perished. The scale of individual executions throughout the conquered region cannot even be estimated, but it certainly amounted to several hundred thousand. In some areas, where active resistance to the imposition of communism was strongest—such as Poland, western Ukraine, Lithuania, and parts of Yugoslavia—the killings were on a mass scale, often followed by large-scale deportation of the local populace, suspected of aiding the resistance. Once the Soviet Army drove the Germans out of Poland, the Soviet NKVD and its Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: The Politics of Organized Insanity
• Part II: Beyond Political Awakening
• Part III: The Peerless Global Power
• Part IV: Dilemmas of Global Disorder
• Part V: The Illusion of Control
• Acknowledgments
• Index