World History 101: From Ancient Mesopotamia and the Viking Conquests to NATO and WikiLeaks, an Essential Primer on World History

by Tom Head

But it was Luther’s successful defiance of the Roman Catholic Church that brought the most change to Europe. After all, when the Czech theologian Jan Hus (1369–1415) had tried to do something similar a century earlier, local Catholic officials had him executed (though the small movement he founded, known as Hussitism, spread throughout central Europe and is still represented by several denominations to this day).

Luther’s rebellion was so public, and so audacious, he even took advantage of the new mass media of his time, the printing press, to spread his ideas.

The governor of the Bastille called for a cease-fire, but when some protestors were shot by foot soldiers while attempting to enter, this was interpreted as a violation of the cease-fire. The protestors made it inside, despite as many as one hundred of them falling dead from the garrison’s attacks. They captured the governor, decapitated him, and marched around with his head on a pole. For the more than two centuries since, July 14 has been a national holiday in France—and a warning to tyrants around the world.

Both Lafayette and Madison had an inspiration behind the scenes: the Virginia plantation owner Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who advocated universal human rights with unprecedented effectiveness despite being, among other things, a slave owner.

primary causes of the American Revolution are issues that observers of contemporary US politics will immediately recognize: • High taxes. Britain had spent far more money protecting its North American colonial interests from other European powers than it had planned, and it tried to make up the difference by heavily taxing imported goods to the colonies. • Free trade. The North American colonists tried to save money by importing goods from other European powers instead, but Britain wasn’t having any of that. • Civil liberties. British colonial officials had virtually unlimited search-and-seizure powers, which they used to try to find illegally smuggled goods. • Corruption. These colonial officials often kept the aforementioned illegally smuggled goods, a process we now call civil forfeiture. Sometimes they kept goods that weren’t illegally smuggled. Sometimes they took bribes. It was a messy and poorly supervised system. • Voter disenfranchisement. The British government used flimsy and unconvincing excuses to deprive American colonists of their seats in Parliament, preventing them from being able to vote on issues like, say, tax policy, free trade, civil liberties, and corruption.

“This is a country for white men,” Johnson wrote in a letter to the governor of Missouri, “and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.”

“This is a white man’s country. Let white men rule.”

The right to turn away soldiers who want to stay at your house without permission.

And that story of greatness was often ultimately the story of three men: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon, who was called “the devil’s favourite” by the terrorized British military.

The fall of the short-lived Weimar Republic, and the subsequent rise of Nazi power, tells us that there is a danger to whittling down the power of our institutions when we cannot yet foresee what will replace them.

“Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die.” —Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” —Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), mathematician and philosopher

“The Chinese people have only family and clan groups; there is no national spirit. Consequently, in spite of four hundred million people gathered together in one China, we are in fact but a sheet of loose sand . . . Our position is extremely perilous; if we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred million into a strong nation, we face a tragedy—the loss of our country and the destruction of our race.” —Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), president of the Republic of China

“He wants to turn the whole world upside down . . . I’ll kill such a son with my own hands; he’s disgraced me.” —Besarion Jughashvili (1850–1909), father of Joseph Stalin

Stalin is a cautionary tale about how far politics, war, ideology, and ambition can take you. Does too much power erode your humanity, or are the least human among us the best equipped to take power? Once you’ve got the whole world in your hand, how long can you resist the temptation to dig your fingers into it?

“People are always shouting that they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone . . . . The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.” —Milan Kundera (1929–), author

• The First World, made up of countries affiliated or allied with NATO • The Second World, made up of countries affiliated with or allied with the Warsaw Pact • The Third World, made up of all other countries

Later on in the Hebrew Bible, the Noachide commandments condemned murder, robbery, and cruelty to animals among all of humanity, not just the Jewish people (Genesis 9:5–6). And as we’ve discussed in previous chapters, both Cyrus the Great of the Persian Empire and the Indian emperor Ashoka affirmed the existence of universal standards of human rights that were applicable under their domains.

ideologies had all had their say.

?

We were waging a people’s war.”

The nations that “won” both wars weren’t the countries that actually fought them; they were the agent provocateurs who intentionally escalated them for strategic reasons. History can’t exactly record that the USSR won the Vietnam War, and that the United States won the Soviet-Afghan War, but these were the effective outcomes. They were traps. And the vast majority of their victims were neither US nor Soviet.

that the most humane thing you can do when you’re reforming something is preserve as many institutions as possible, and proceed with caution so that any necessary changes involve as little trauma as possible.

The story of the twentieth century is, to a great extent, the story of civilizations created based on ideas that fell short of their goals because of personality cults.

Many devout Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, who had their own reservations about the state of the world, initially felt that bin Laden’s concerns mirrored their own.

The subsequent wars in Afghanistan (2001–2014) and Iraq (2003–2011) have collectively claimed the lives of more than 200,000 civilians, based on the most conservative credible estimates—more than sixty-five times as many civilians as were killed in the September 11 attacks themselves. Emerging regional terrorist groups have, in turn, cited these casualties as a rationale for years of horrific attacks that they have perpetrated against other innocent civilians, and so on. As the Nigerian proverb puts it: “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

There is some limited evidence to suggest that the less racist whites seem to be, the more likely they are to allow themselves to develop racist attitudes. One 2009 Stanford study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that whites were significantly more likely to claim racist beliefs if first given an opportunity to say that they had voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Unrelated studies on the effect of moral self-licensing all seem to suggest a deeply cynical possibility: the less racist people think white people are, the more comfortable they are with revealing racist attitudes and behavior.

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