The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

including a Leningrad law student named Vladimir Putin – to join the KGB. Putin hero-worshiped Andropov and wanted to be Stierlitz. ‘My notion of the KGB,’ he remembered, ‘came from romantic spy stories.’

In 1975, Putin joined the KGB at the age of twenty-three, working in both counter-intelligence and internal surveillance. Later he was trained at the Yuri Andropov Institute. His background was conventional. He had grown up in the impoverished, leaky apartments of a decaying Leningrad block, running with street children, but his mother, Maria, forty-one at his birth, had lost a baby in the Siege and cossetted him with the special attention that can sometimes endow a child with great self-confidence. Vladimir – known as Vova – was rescued by the kindness of a Jewish neighbour who fed him while his parents worked, and by his sports training as a karate fighter. But he had a deeper secret-police connection: his grandfather Spiridon had worked in the NKVD service staff, cooking for both Lenin and Stalin; his father had served with NKVD units in the war.

‘Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light,’ said the ayatollah. ‘Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.’

In 1981, Israel bombed his facility; when he hired a Canadian gunmaker to build a supergun, Big Babylon, Mossad assassinated him.

called it Apple. The idea of computers was not new.[*16] Their development made inevitable the arrival of smartphones and computers facile and small enough to be used by ordinary people, but it took forty years to happen. In 1959, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor invented a single piece – a monolithic integrated circuit, a chip – that made the revolution possible just at the same time as Paul Baran was developing his messaging network to function after a nuclear apocalypse. In 1968, Alan Kay at Xerox predicted a ‘personal, portable information manipulator’ that he called a Dynabook, just as the first active-matrix liquid-crystal display was developed. In 1975 IBM created its first portable device, the same year that a Seattle lawyer’s son, Bill Gates, dropped out of Harvard to develop a system of instruction for computers to use – software – bought by IBM. Five years later, Gates launched a more sophisticated system, Windows.

In 2007, his iPhone changed human behaviour, creating a fashionable but indispensable machine. By 2020, around 2.2 billion iPhones had been sold, 19 billion smartphones altogether – tiny mechanisms that forever changed human nature and behaviour in ways not yet clear. Smartphones became technologies so essential they became almost membral extensions. By 2005, at least 16 per cent of humans were using smartphones; by 2019, the figure was 53.6 per cent, 86.6 per cent in the west. The internet opened a mass of new knowledge to citizens, and many abandoned more laborious yet more trustworthy sources of information. The internet thickened society, adding new layers of discourse and power to give a dynamic to already pluralistic societies – a further shift from ‘sovereign power’, in Foucault’s analysis, to ‘disciplinary power’.

The new knowledge spread openness; but, like writing, printing and television, it could be controlled and manipulated: even in democracies, its panjandrums exercised vast secret power as despots of data, and there has never been a better tool for tyranny. Its tendency to create sequestered localities of the same-minded meant that it parochialized as many as it globalized. In many countries, mobile phones were used by people who still lived in iPhone and dagger societies, dominated by kin, tribe and sect, that could barely feed or heat their people. In some cases, terrorists were beheading people with swords while chatting via WhatsApp on their iPhones.

Less flashy but as important were the astonishing improvements in public health – reduced child mortality, smallpox vaccinations, chlorinated water. These are the result of interlinked developments high and low: the invention of the lavatory linked to sewers may have saved a billion lives since the 1860s. The doubling of human life expectancy in one century and the reduction of child mortality by a factor of ten are triumphs with no downside – except our own voracious success as a species, our population rising from a billion...

While the Net was invented by Brits and Americans and developed in Silicon Valley, where the new digital titans worked out how to make it profitable, it was the closed world that would really grasp its potential: the Chinese security services were quickest to appreciate its power of surveillance. The Russians harnessed its ability to amplify and justify rage and propagate lies in the open world. The autocracies understood quickly that thei...

Saddam had slaughtered rebel Kurds and Arabs to restore his power after Desert Storm, but in August 1995, his two sons-in-law – cousins, the brothers Hussein and Saddam Kamel, married to his daughters Raghad and Rana – suddenly fled Baghdad and drove in a convoy across the desert to Jordan, where they were given asylum. The loss of his daughters was humiliating, but the Kamels had clashed with the demented Uday, who dubbed himself Abu Sarhan – Son of the Wolf – and was once again terrorizing Baghdad: girls were raped, men beaten; a group of French tourists were forced to have sex with each other at gunpoint. All remembered not his mania but his ‘eerie quietness’. He had recently rushed into a family party, fought with his brothers-in-law and, drawing his gun, accidently shot an uncle in the leg. Hussein Kamel, who had helped procure Saddam’s illegal weapons, had destroyed them after 1991 and now, debriefed by the CIA, he confirmed their destruction. But Saddam approached the brothers through his daughters, promising protection if they returned. Foolishly, in February 1996, they all went back to Baghdad, where, after being ordered to divorce their wives, they were attacked in their house by their clan and killed after a twelve-hour shootout. The sisters blamed their brother Uday for the killing. Soon afterwards, Uday’s car was ambushed and he was wounded but survived. Blaming his sisters, he arrested them, claiming they had planned to kill him. Eventually Saddam restored so...

Donald Trump, then aged sixty-four, was already the personification of American illusion – grandson of a Bavarian immigrant and gold-rush brothel-keeper, son of a post-war Queens slum landlord. Using his billion-dollar inheritance, he became a developer of luxury Manhattan hotels and Atlantic City casinos, funded by junk bonds, constantly refinanced on the edge of bankruptcy and paying scarcely any tax on his loss-making ventures. In the 1980s, he had promoted the myth of this dealmaking with a bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, which in 2004 won him the job of presenting a TV reality show, The Apprentice. His new fame enabled him to reinvigorate his Trump franchise. Husband of three glamorous women – a Czech skier, an American model and a Slovene model – patriarch of a business dynasty, lover of a bazzoon of Playboy centrefolds and porn performers, this bombastic bazooka of complex inferiority would put on a fake voice and, claiming to be his own publicist, ring newspapers to tell them that ‘the Donald’ was having affairs with supermodels and popstars. While having an affair with his future second wife, he had quoted her praise of his sexual virtuosity to give the New York Post one of its most memorable headlines: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD’. He was a fairground huckster, for whom the truth mattered less than the spectacle, and expertise or knowledge were contemptible, but he had a gift for articulating what millions were thinking. As a ‘killer’, never a ‘loser’, he had ...

Geronimo had been a risk. The new technologies offered easier ways to wage surgical warfare. On 30 September 2011, Obama approved the killing by drone of a terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. It was far from being the first of these killings by US ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, devices that heralded a new era of warfare.[*24]

‘We must become more unpredictable as a nation,’ said Trump at one of his campaign rallies. ‘We must immediately become more unpredictable.’ In this, he had delivered.

Its flint-hearted ferocity is a return to normality in a way that the dynasts in this book – warlords, kings and dictators – would find routine: normal disorder has been resumed.

Scale matters in the World Game, but one thing is certain: whoever wins will not win for long. If this history proves anything, it is that the human ability to self-mutilate is almost limitless. ‘In individuals, insanity is rare,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.’ It is easy to criticize politicians but this interconnected world makes it ever harder to govern: ‘You philosophers…you write on paper,’ Catherine the Great warned. ‘Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.’

‘In retrospect, all successful policies seem preordained. Leaders like to claim prescience for what has worked, ascribing planning to what usually starts as a series of improvisations.’ History is driven as much by clowns as by visionaries. ‘History likes to joke,’ said Stalin; ‘sometimes it chooses a fool to drive historical progress.’ ‘I’ve seen the future,’ sang Leonard Cohen. ‘It is murder.’

‘Never place a loaded rifle on the stage,’ wrote Chekhov, ‘if it isn’t going to go off.’ He

The number of autocracies is surging, that of democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun, a character in this story and its presiding spirit, identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: ‘Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.’

The only leaders more buffoonish and lethal than the fairground hucksters elected in our flailing democracies are the omnipotent clowns of the tyranny.

The lesson of recent years is that the gains that were taken as won – the lessons of 1945, the evil of antisemitism, the crimes of genocide and war-making; the right to abortion and triumphs of the 1960s great liberal reformation – have to be fought for again.

Population growth and climate change can only be solved by either catastrophic population decline – pandemic, natural disaster or thermonuclear war – or by cooperation on a titanic scale. And here too the tendency towards power blocs might actually be helpful: when the time comes – if it comes – a cabal of potentates could make those decisions.

‘The real problem of humanity,’ said Edward O. Wilson, ‘is we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’

Human history is like one of those investment warning clauses: past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer. Vasily Grossman

The wine is heady, make haste! And time is scarce, take all of it you can. Who knows if next year’s spring, So sweet, will find you dust and ash or living man. Saadi

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy. Anne Frank