Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914

by Gabriel Kolko

Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political results of these traumatizing experiences in the twentieth century.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War I, War, World War II

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

A historian specializing in 20th century Ameican politics and foreign policy, Gabriel Morris Kolko earned his BA in history from Kent State University in 1954, his MS from the University of Wisconsin in 1955, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at SUNY-Buffalo before joining the history department of York University in Toronto in 1970.

Reviews

[Kevin Carson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always read in general terms that Stalin was cautious and subordinated the interests of foreign communist parties to the defensive needs of the USSR. But I was, no exaggeration, extremely surprised at the extent to which he acted as a reactionary or constraining force on communist parties and leftist anti-Axis resistance movements in Western and Southern Europe.
He ordered anti-Axis partisan guerrillas and communist parties in Greece, Italy, and France to surrender to the invading Americans and Brits, and to collaborate with them and participate in the conservative capitalist provisional governments they set up, rather than attempt to hold on to the territory they'd manage to take away from the Axis occupation forces through their own armed activity.
Had Stalin not existed, there likely would have been a revolutionary wave in Southern and Western Europe greatly surpassing the post-WWI wave that produced the spartacist uprisings in the German cities, the Bavarian soviet republic, and the Bela Kun regime in Hungary. And after WWII, unlike WWI, indigenous conservative/bourgeois officials and parties were almost entirely discredited by fascist collaboration, which meant only British and US military forces stood in the way of total victory by any leftist seizure of power in the wake of Axis collapse.
Kolko argues that, had ELAS resisted the British takeover in Greece, or leftist partisans similarly used force to hold onto their gains in northern Italy and liberated France, suppressing them (if it could have been done at all) would have required the diversion of British and American forces on a scale that would have seriously delayed or imperilled their offensive against the Germans. And British and American publics -- and the troops -- would have been extremely hostile to diverting efforts from fighting Germany to suppressing the anti-Nazi resistance.
So basically Stalin prevented Western Europe and Greece from falling to leftist regimes beyond the control of either the US or the USSR, and pretty much single-handedly enabled the Western Allies to restore capitalism.
The same held true, to a lesser extent, in the interwar period. The USSR backed foreign revolutions for a brief period that ended with the Chinese Communist Party's suppression by the Kuomintang in 1927, but after that Stalin and the Comintern consistently put a damper on the revolutionary ambitions of foreign communists in the interest of its own ententes with capitalist powers.
This was true of the united front policy of the 1930s, when Stalin ordered communist parties to be friendly to bourgeois liberal parties and accept their leadership in anti-fascist coalitions. It was true after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, when he ordered them to *stop* participating in anti-fascist coalitions, in order to avoid attracting Hitler's ire against the USSR. And the subordination of foreign communists to western bourgeois governments resumed once again after Hitler's attack on the USSR in June 1941.
The most extreme example was the Spanish Civil War, when Spanish communists went so far in their attempts to placate the bourgeois Republican government as to forcibly take back factories, land, and other private property from the anarchist militias that had expropriated them and give them back to their previous owners. Indeed the diversion of military forces to attack anarchists in Catalonia and elsewhere probably contributed to Franco's victory.

[Joe Surkiewicz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A radical history of world since 1914. Makes more sense then the crap we've been force-fed by our corporate media.

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tries to summarize way to much and is written primarily as a vehicle to criticize Leninist parties so anything outside that scope, like the Iran–Iraq war, isn't going to be getting much attention.

Not only Leninists but conservative believers in conspiracy theories have insisted that the Communist role in history has never been passive, for they either argue (as in the case of the Communists) that an elite party must perform an irreplaceable function in creatively leading the masses through the shoals of historical events to attain victory, or that it was principally Bolshevik machinations that brought down otherwise viable societies. The decisive weight that Communist leaders have assigned to their own roles was an essential justification for their own existences and the total obedience they demanded from their followers. The contemporary organizational demise of Communist parties virtually everywhere but Asia, where they have wholly abandoned their original social goals in practice, is itself testimony to their confusion and lack of control in coping with reality. That Communist parties triumphed in the past was ultimately a reflection of the crisis in global politics after 1917, and essentially a protest against the way that the world operated rather than the result of Lenin’s acumen. Indeed, after 1928 the USSR acted purely on the basis of its national interests rather than that of its internationalist pretensions, and it did far more to inhibit events wherever it could do so than to encourage further upheavals.
...
The history of Communist parties, in essence, was principally one of improvisations and ad hoc responses to situations and opportunities that its enemies created, as in Russia in October 1917, China after 1946, and Vietnam in 1975, often compelling them to rely principally upon armed struggle rather than the preferred political route to attempt to prevent themselves from being destroyed, as in the cases of both Greece and the Philippines. The ability of victorious parties to remain relatively passive and survive until their enemies’ failures and contradictions caused them either to disintegrate or created a situation ripe for action was much more useful to leftists than any other quality. With the partial exception of the Bolshevik Revolution, it has far more often been the old order rather than radical parties that has determined the Left’s choice of paths to power. All social democratic and even most Bolshevik parties have permitted themselves to be repressed before acknowledging the failure of parliamentarianism. One can never forget the innumerable occasions during this century when antisocialist leaders of nations, including Italy's liberals, have abolished democratic systems because of a ruling class's unwillingness to tolerate pacific leftist political challenges to their follies.

[Bill Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye opener for sure