The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (103 page)
Read The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Online
Authors: Niall Ferguson
Tags: #History, #Modern, #20th Century, #World
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. Rudolf Schlichter,‘Armenian Horrors’, watercolour on paper c. 1920. Sexual violence was to be a recurrent feature of genocide throughout the twentieth century, though like the‘lust murders’Schlichter also depicted, the Armenian genocide was something he read about in the newspapers rather than witnessed.
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. Ethnic cleansing in action: Greek refugees throng the docks at Smyrna, fleeing from Turkish troops, September 1922.
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. Berlin bei Nacht: few works of art better capture the bright lights and deep shadows of Weimar Germany than Georg Grosz’s Grossstadt (1917).
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. The American nightmare: poverty in the Depression.
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.‘Look, you boob… !’: after a brief junket in the Worker’s Paradise, George Bernard Shaw points out the superiority of Soviet Communism to an incredulous Yankee capitalist.
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. Stalin, God of Soviet Industrialization:‘The Victory of Socialism in Our Country has been Secured. The Foundation of Socialist Economics is Complete. The Reality of Our Industrial Plan – millions of Labouring Comrades, Creating a new life.’
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. The myth of collectivization: the slogan reads,‘Collectivization Will Shock Harvesting Productivity’. Especially for Ukrainians, the reality was mass starvation.
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. The myth of self-determination: fortunately for Georgians, Stalin did not view his own people with that intense mistrust he felt towards so many of the other minority peoples of the Soviet Union.
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. Gulag prisoners build socialism – and redeem themselves – with pre-industrial tools. Thousands perished as canals of questionable economic value were hacked out of the frozen Russian ground by ill-equipped slave labourers.
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. Jacob Abter, one of the members of the Leningrad Society for the Deaf and Dumb, executed during the Great Terror for his alleged complicity in a non-existent plot to assassinate Stalin and other Politburo members.
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.
Lebensraum
imagined: an ethnic German family takes a break from harvest toil for the benefit of magazine readers‘home in the Reich’.
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. Illustration from a children’s book published by the Stürmer Verlag in 1935:‘The German is a handsome man / Who knows how to work and knows how to fight / Because he has guts and looks so grand / The Jew detests him with all his might.’ ‘This is the Jew, you see at once / The biggest rogue in all the land / He thinks himself a very prince / But is in truth an ugly man.’
