The War of the World Quotes

“La retórica europea de los nazis halló especial resonancia en todos aquellos conservadores para quienes el dominio alemán parecía un mal menor frente al comunismo soviético.”
― Niall Ferguson, La guerra del mundo

“The New York Times detected the sexual dimension of Turkish policy, reporting that ‘the Turks frankly do not understand why they should not get rid of the Greeks and Armenians from their country and take their women into their harems if they are sufficiently good looking.’ Kemal saw no need to massacre all the Greeks in Smyrna, though a substantial number of able-bodied men were marched inland, suffering assaults by Turkish villagers along the way. He merely gave the Greek government until October 1 to evacuate them all. By the end of 1923 more than 1.2 million Greeks and 100,000 Armenians had been forced from their ancestral homes. The Greeks responded in kind. In 1915 some 60 per cent of the population of Western Thrace had been Muslims and 29 per cent of the population of Macedonia. By 1924 the figures had plunged to 28 per cent and zero per cent, their places taken by Greeks.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked. ‘If we can’t shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the ‘Spanish Lady’. Strikingly, the global peak of mortality was in October and November 1918.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,’ recalled one British soldier, ‘holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews’ aim, Nilus insisted, ‘to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan’.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“What the complacent Russians forgot was that their strengths – above all, their technological superiority – were not a permanent monopoly conferred by Providence on people with white skin. There was in fact nothing biological to prevent Asians from adopting Western forms of economic and political organization, nor from replicating Western inventions. The first Asian country to work out how to do so was Japan.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“In July 1900, at the time of the intervention against the Boxers, between 3,000 and 5,000 Chinese were drowned at Blagoveshchensk when they were forced by whip-wielding Cossacks and local Russian police to swim across the wide and fast-flowing Amur to the Chinese side. No boats were provided and those who resisted or refused to get in the water were shot or cut down with sabres. This little-known incident, a harbinger of so many twentieth-century massacres, lay bare the utter contempt with which the Russians regarded all Asiatic peoples. As Nikolai Gondatti, the governor of Tomsk, explained in 1911: ‘My task is to make sure that there are lots of Russians and few yellows here.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which ‘all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed’. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world?”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“Aunque Chamberlain seguía negándose a escuchar el consejo de Churchill de vincular a Rusia al tratado anglofrancés, Halifax hizo pública una nota de prensa afirmando que, en el caso de un ataque alemán a Checoslovaquia, «Francia se verá obligada a acudir en su ayuda, y no cabe duda de que Gran Bretaña y Rusia estarán al lado de Francia». Lejos de ir en contra de un supuesto pacifismo popular, esto reflejaba exactamente el talante predominante entre la opinión pública británica, que en ningún momento se había mostrado tan abúlica como Chamberlain y su entorno.”
― Niall Ferguson, La guerra del mundo

“crisis seemed to vindicate the Soviet model. For, if Marxism-Leninism stood for anything, it was the prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Now it seemed to be doing precisely that. Understandably, the more the American dream turned to nightmare, the more people were attracted to the Russian alternative of a planned economy – insulated from the vagaries of the market, yet capable of feats of construction every bit as awesome as the skyscrapers of New York or the mass-produced cars of Henry Ford. All the totalitarian state asked in return was complete control of every aspect of life.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“It was a war of evil against lesser evil.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“The whole notion of exemplary violence seemed to fire Lenin’s imagination. On August 11, 1918 he wrote a letter to Bolshevik leaders in Penza that speaks volumes: Comrades! The kulak uprising must be crushed without pity… An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them… Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks… P.S. Find tougher people.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“The Russian commander whose ship was torpedoed by SMS Emden off Penang on October 28, 1914, was certainly unprepared for the new age of global conflict. Only twelve rounds of ammunition were ready on deck; but there were sixty Chinese prostitutes below.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“the libel that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover appears to have originated in twelfth-century England. By the fifteenth century it had reached German-speaking Central Europe; by the sixteenth, Poland, and by the eighteenth century it was firmly established all over Eastern Europe, from Lithuania to Romania. In 1840 there was an international outcry over a ‘blood libel’ case in Damascus. But such allegations did not manifest themselves in Russia until the later nineteenth century. Nor was outright violence against Jewish communities a Russian tradition. What became known in Russia as ‘pogroms’ – literally ‘after thunder’ – had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“In the 1990s the world’s population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

“The overwhelming impression is of professionals transformed into psychopaths – morally blinded, perhaps, by their narrow specialisms (that, at least, was the historian Friedrich Meinecke’s theory). Whether collecting rail fares, conducting experiments, devising slogans, writing theses or designing ovens, it was thousands of people like Scholz, Prü fer, Fischer and Oberhäuser who turned Hitler’s deranged dream of genocide into reality. They, just as much as the sadistic SS-men described by Rudolf Reder, were the real perpetrators.”
― Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred