The 20th Century. Was It Satan’s Century?
“AT ITS worst, this has been Satan’s century. In no previous age have people shown so great an aptitude, and appetite, for killing millions of other people for reasons of race, religion or class.”
The 50th anniversary of the liberation of innocent victims imprisoned in the Nazi death camps prompted the foregoing comment in an editorial in The New York Times of January 26, 1995. The Holocaust—one of the most widely known genocides in history—exterminated some six million Jews. Nearly three million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished in what has been termed the “Forgotten Holocaust.”
“An estimate for the period from 1900 until 1989 is that war killed 86 million people,” says Jonathan Glover in his book Humanity—A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. He adds: “Death in twentieth-century war has been on a scale which is hard to grasp. Any averaging out of the numbers of deaths is artificial, since about two-thirds (58 million) were killed in the two world wars. But, if these deaths had been spread evenly over the period, war would have killed around 2,500 people every day, That is over 100 people an hour, round the clock, for ninety years.”
Consequently, the 20th century has been called one of the bloodiest centuries humanity has ever known. In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam writes: “We have seen the triumph of evil after the values of humanism have been vilified and trampled on.” In the struggle of good against evil, has evil really won?
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Evil, under whatever name you wish to call it, dominated the 20th Century. People died for the most incredible reasons, tens of millions of them died for a reason as stupid as a conflict of Economic Systems. Tens of millions more died because of a conflict of National Identity Viewpoint. We will not mention those who died simply because they could not get uncontaminated drinking water! These things are not reasons, they are merely words we use to mask our collective insanity.
The very things that should have enlightened us for the betterment of the world in general, in fact just gave us more methods of slaughtering more of our fellow men (and women and children). The airplane shrunk the earth as nothing else could have, and yet it also bacame our prime method of attack when we decided to once again start the killing. What is really so horrible is that the world, all of it, did not learn one damn thing from living through and experiencing it. Now, apparently, our concept of God is going to be the reason for our future murder and oppression.
It is allso worth mentioning the medical advances made during that time period for without those advances, I would be dead right now. It is now possible to stop the heart, overhaul it with tissue and various tubes from the same body, then restart the whole apparatus and have the recipient be up and moving about fairly easily within three days time. To what end? After all that wondrous work and procedure we have only to pause for a moment to remember that one 15 cent bullet will negate all of that good work and we are right back at square one.
Where will it all end? The same place it has always ended; in a town in some obscure country you never heard of, or on a roadside where you once travelled while visiting friends or relatives. It never seems to change.
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My further thoughts on the graphs of public approval of the righteousness of various wars, specifically World War I, found here:
In response to:
It is interesting to note that from Oct 1941 to Dec 10 the percentage saying it was a mistake dropped from 35 to 21. Did the bombing of Pearl Harbor create that change? Logically it should have had no effect since the question was about a different war. But I suppose if people were logical there would be no need for polls to measure their illogic.
I say:
I find it more curious the giagantic fluctuation between January of 1937 to October 1939 — from 64% “mistake” to 48 percent and back up to 59%. The rest of the poll results are pretty well a down-ward spiral, Americans recharging their attitude toward The War to End All Wars away from believing it was a matter of watching their sons dying in large quantities across the globe for a couple feet of the land of some other smuck at a time. This fluxuation (assuming it isn’t a “outlier”) would have to be tied to events in Europe, which I guess I would have to look up.