A Hundred Years Later

The history of governments in most of the world for most of the time has been one of  various levels of barbarism.  In Europe  Greece during its greatest days condoned slavery and subjugation by conquest. The Roman empire was largely based on those things. The Christian middle ages were a model for later totalitarianism.  The politics of the Renaissance were brutal and bloody, and the religious wars following the Reformation were awful. English authorities were still torturing and murdering English men and women for their religious opinions in the Sixteenth Century, and the Scottish government hanged a man for blasphemy in 1697.  The rulers of France were breaking men on the wheel in the mid-1700s.  Governments in Spain, Russia, and much of the rest of the continent were worse as were those in Africa and Asia.  The reason we have the term “oriental despot” is the throughout history most of the populated areas of North Africa and in  Asia from Anatolia to the Pacific have  been governed despotically.  The Inca and Aztec empires  were rigid autocracies  (with the Aztecs adding in gruesome mass human sacrifice of prisoners), and the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors who replaced them ruled as brutal tyrants.  In North America the English colony of Massachusetts put women on trial as witches as late as 1692, and the trade in slaves continued for over a century after that.

From the 1600s on thinkers in western Europe devised new theories of the proper nature of government and argued for the liberal values of individual rights, freedom of conscience and expression, liberty, and limitations on the powers of  the state. By the end of the 19^th Century these ideas had led to the abolition of slavery and serfdom, a general toleration of dissenting religious opinions, and limitations (varying in degree from place to place) on the powers of authorities throughout the parts of the world governed by Europeans or descendants of Europeans.   There was a fairly generally held belief in a progressive evolution toward better societies, not out of naivete but because people had been  observing it happen.

Things changed with the tragedy of the First World War.  The war made a reversion toward barbarism possible,  and in its aftermath in  Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, and some of the  states created from parts of the old Austrian empire barbarism arrived.  The Second World War following from the First got rid of the Nazis but otherwise made the spread of barbarism more likely. Communist tyrannies took control in China and Soviet-dominated areas of eastern and central Europe. The postwar demise of the British and French  empires led to the creation of  locally controlled governments in Asia and Africa which were almost uniformly worse than the colonial administrations they replaced and often horribly  worse. 

The defeat of the Soviet Union in the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet empire caused  many people to believe at the time of the millennium that the regressions of the 20th Century were  an aberration, and that evolution toward a more liberal world would resume. For many that hope has faded. Now pessimists in this country fear a coming  end of the United States as a liberal republic will make a general triumph of barbarism inevitable.

I see  their point  but don’t accept their conclusion. There are both time and opportunity for America and the world to produce a better outcome.  Still a person being realistic has  to admit that in many ways  the great war that ended a hundred years ago today put civilization behind a good sized eight ball. The tragedy did not end on 11/11/1918.