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Eric Hobsbawm
Barbarism: A User’s Guide
I have called my lecture ‘Barbarism, A User’s
Guide’, not because I wish to give you instructions in how to be
barbarians. [1] None of us, unfortunately, need it. Barbarism
is not something like ice-dancing, a technique that has to be
learned—at least not unless you wish to become a torturer or some
other specialist in inhuman activities. It is rather a by-product of
life in a particular social and historical context, something that
comes with the territory, as Arthur Miller says in Death of a
Salesman. The term ‘street-wise’ expresses what I want to say
all the better for indicating the actual adaptation of people to
living in a society without the rules of civilization. By
understanding this word we have all adapted to living in a society
that is, by the standards of our grandparents or parents, even—if we
are as old as I am—of our youth, uncivilized. We have got used to
it. I don’t mean we can’t still be shocked by this or that example
of it. On the contrary, being periodically shocked by something
unusually awful is part of the experience. It helps to conceal how
used we have become to the normality of what our—certainly
my—parents would have considered life under inhuman conditions. My
user’s guide is, I hope, a guide to understanding how this has come
about.
The argument of this lecture is that, after about a
hundred and fifty years of secular decline, barbarism has been on
the increase for most of the twentieth century, and there is no sign
that this increase is at an end. In this context I understand
‘barbarism’ to mean two things. First, the disruption and breakdown
of the systems of rules and moral behaviour by which all
societies regulate the relations among their members and, to a
lesser extent, between their members and those of other societies.
Second, I mean, more specifically, the reversal of what we may call
the project of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, namely the
establishment of a universal system of such rules and
standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states
dedicated to the rational progress of humanity: to Life, Liberty and
the Pursuit of Happiness, to Equality, Liberty and Fraternity or
whatever. Both are now taking place and reinforce each other’s
negative effects on our lives. The relation of my subject to the
question of human rights should therefore be obvious.
Let me clarify the first form of barbarization,
i.e. what happens when traditional controls disappear. Michael
Ignatieff, in his recent Blood and Belonging, notes the
difference between the gunmen of the Kurdish guerrillas in 1993 and
those of the Bosnian checkpoints. With great perception he sees that
in the stateless society of Kurdistan, every male child reaching
adolescence gets a gun. Carrying a weapon simply means that a boy
has ceased to be a child and must behave like a man. ‘The accent of
meaning in the culture of the gun thus stresses responsibility,
sobriety, tragic duty.’ Guns are fired when they need to be. On the
contrary, most Europeans since 1945, including in the Balkans, have
lived in societies where the state enjoyed a monopoly of legitimate
violence. As the states broke down, so did that monopoly. ‘For some
young European males, the chaos that resulted from [this collapse].
. .offered the chance of entering an erotic paradise of the
all-is-permitted. Hence the semi-sexual, semi-pornographic gun
culture of the checkpoints. For young men there was an irresistible
erotic charge in holding lethal power in your hands’ and using it to
terrorize the helpless. [2]
I suspect that a good many of the atrocities now
committed in the civil wars of three continents reflect this type of
disruption, which is characteristic of the late twentieth-century
world. But I hope to say a word or two about this later.
The Defence of Enlightenment
As to the second form of barbarization, I wish to
declare an interest. I believe that one of the few things that
stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the
set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
This is not a fashionable view at this moment, when the
Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and
intellectually naive to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs
to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism. It
may or may not be all that, but it is also the only foundation for
all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human
beings to live in anywhere on this Earth, and for the assertion and
defence of their human rights as persons. In any case, the progress
of civility which took place from the eighteenth century until the
early twentieth was achieved overwhelmingly or entirely under the
influence of the Enlightenment, by governments of what are still
called, for the benefit of history students, ‘enlightened
absolutists’, by revolutionaries and reformers, Liberals,
Socialists, and Communists, all of whom belonged to the same
intellectual family. It was not achieved by its critics. This era
when progress was not merely supposed to be both material and moral
but actually was, has come to an end. But the only criterion which
allows us to judge rather than merely to record the consequent
descent into barbarism, is the old rationalism of the Enlightenment.
Let me illustrate the width of the gap between the
period before 1914 and ours. I will not dwell on the fact that we,
who have lived through greater inhumanity, are today likely to be
less shocked by the modest injustices that outraged the nineteenth
century. For instance, a single miscarriage of justice in France
(the Dreyfus case) or twenty demonstrators locked up for one night
by the German army in an Alsatian town (the Zabern incident of
1913). What I want to remind you of is standards of conduct.
Clausewitz, writing after the Napoleonic wars, took it for granted
that the armed forces of civilized states did not put their
prisoners of war to death or devastate countries. The most recent
wars in which Britain was involved, that is to say the Falklands war
and the Gulf war, suggest that this is no longer taken for granted.
Again, to quote the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, ‘civilized warfare, the textbooks tell us, is
confined, as far as possible, to the disablement of the armed forces
of the enemy; otherwise war would continue till one of the parties
was exterminated. “It is with good reason”’—and here the
Encyclopedia quotes Vattel, an international lawyer of the
noble eighteenth-century Enlightenment—‘“that this practice has
grown in a custom within the nations of Europe”.’ It is no longer a
custom of the nations of Europe or anywhere else. Before 1914 the
view that war was against combatants and not non-combatants was
shared by rebels and revolutionaries. The programme of the Russian
Narodnaya Volya, the group which killed Tsar Alexander II, stated
‘explicitly that individuals and groups standing outside its fight
against the government would be treated as neutrals, their person
and property were to be inviolate.’ [3] At about the same time Frederick Engels
condemned the Irish Fenians (with whom all his sympathies lay) for
placing a bomb in Westminster Hall, thus risking the lives of
innocent bystanders. War, he felt as an old revolutionary with
experience of armed conflict, should be waged against combatants and
not against civilians. Today this limitation is no more recognized
by revolutionaries and terrorists than by governments waging war.
I will now suggest a brief chronology of this slide
down the slope of barbarization. Its main stages are four: the First
World War, the period of world crisis from the breakdown of 1917–20
to that of 1944–47; the four decades of the Cold War era, and
lastly, the general breakdown of civilization as we know it over
large parts of the world in and since the 1980s. There is an obvious
continuity between the first three stages. In each the earlier
lessons of man’s inhumanity to man were learned and became the basis
of new advances in barbarism. There is no such linear connection
between the third and the fourth stage. The breakdown of the 1980s
and 1990s is not due to the actions of human decision-makers which
could be recognized as being barbarous, like the projects of Hitler
and the terror of Stalin, lunatic, like the arguments justifying the
race to nuclear war, or both, like Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is
due to the fact that the decision-makers no longer know what to do
about a world that escapes from their, or our control, and that the
explosive transformation of society and economy since 1950 produced
an unprecedented breakdown and disruption of the rules governing
behaviour in human societies. The third and fourth stages therefore
overlap and interact. Today human societies are breaking down, but
under conditions when the standards of public conduct remain at the
level to which the earlier periods of barbarization have reduced
them. They have not so far shown serious signs of rising again.
There are several reasons why the First World War
began the descent into barbarism. First, it opened the must
murderous era so far recorded in history. Zbigniew Brzezinski has
recently estimated the ‘megadeaths’ between 1914 and 1990 at 187
million, which—however speculative—may serve as a reasonable order
of magnitude. I calculate that this corresponds to something like 9
per cent of the world’s population in 1914. We have got used to
killing. Second, the limitless sacrifices which governments imposed
on their own men as they drove them into the holocaust of Verdun and
Ypres set a sinister precedent, if only for imposing even more
unlimited massacres on the enemy. Third, the very concept of a war
of total national mobilization shattered the central pillar of
civilized warfare, the distinction between combatants and
noncombatants. World War I was the first war to be waged
specifically against the enemy’s civilian populations, though
civilians were not yet the primary target for guns and bombs. Once
again, this was an ominous precedent. Fourth, World War I was the
first major war, at all events in Europe, waged under conditions of
democratic politics by, or with the active participation of, the
entire population. Unfortunately democracies can rarely be mobilized
by wars when these are seen merely as incidents in the international
power-game, as old-fashioned foreign offices saw them to be. Nor do
they fight them like bodies of professional soldiers or boxers, for
whom war is an activity that does not require hating the enemy, so
long as he fights by the professional rules. Democracies, as
experience shows, require demonized enemies. This, as the Cold War
was to demonstrate, facilitates barbarization. Finally, the Great
War ended in social and political breakdown, social revolution and
counter-revolution on an unprecedented scale.
This era of breakdown and revolution dominated the
thirty years after 1917. The twentieth century became, among other
things, an era of religious wars between a capitalist liberalism, on
the defensive and in retreat until 1947, and both Soviet Communism
and movements of the fascist type, which also wished to destroy each
other. Actually the only real threat to liberal capitalism in its
heartlands, apart from its own breakdown after 1914, came from the
Right. Between 1920 and Hitler’s fall no regime anywhere was
overthrown by communist or socialist revolution. But the communist
threat, being to property and social privilege, was more
frightening. This was not a situation conducive to the return of
civilized values. All the more so, since the War had left behind a
black deposit of ruthlessness and violence, and a substantial body
of men experienced in both and attached to both. Many of them
provided the manpower for an innovation, for which I can find no
real precedent before 1914, namely quasi-official or tolerated
strong-arm and killer squads which did the dirty work governments
were not yet ready to do officially: Freikorps,
Black-and-Tans, squadristi. In any case violence was on the
rise. The enormous surge in political assassinations after the War
has long been noticed, for instance by the Harvard historian
Franklin Ford. Again, there is no precedent that I know before 1914
for the bloody street-fighting between organized political opponents
which became so common in both Weimar Germany and Austria in the
late 1920s. And where there had been a precedent, it was almost
trivial. The Belfast riots and battles of 1921 killed more people
than had been killed in the entire nineteenth century in that
tumultuous city: 428 lives. And yet the street corner battlers were
not necessarily old soldiers with a taste for war, though 57 per
cent of the early membership of the Italian Fascist party were.
Three-quarters of the Nazi storm-troopers of 1933 were too young to
have been in the War. War, quasi-uniforms (the notorious coloured
shirts) and gun-carrying now provided a model for the dispossessed
young.
I have suggested that history after 1917 was to be
that of wars of religion. ‘There is no true war but religious war’
wrote one of the French officers who pioneered the barbarism of
French Algerian counter-insurgency policy in the 1950s. [4] Yet what made the cruelty which is the
natural result of religious wars more brutal and inhuman, was that
the cause of Good (i.e. of Western great powers) was confronted with
the cause of Evil represented, most commonly, by people whose very
claim to full humanity was rejected. Social revolution, and
especially colonial rebellion, challenged the sense of a
natural, as it were a divine or cosmically sanctioned
superiority of top people over bottom people in societies which were
naturally unequal, whether by birth or by achievement. Class wars,
as Mrs Thatcher reminded us, are usually conducted with more rancour
from the top than from the bottom. The very idea that people whose
perpetual inferiority is a datum of nature, especially when made
manifest by skin colour, should claim equality with, let alone rebel
against, their natural superiors, was an outrage in itself. If this
was true of the relation between upper and lower classes, it was
even more true of that between races. Would General Dyer in 1919
have ordered his men to fire into a crowd, killing 379 people, if
the crowd had been English or even Irish and not Indian, or the
place Glasgow and not Amritsar? Almost certainly not. The barbarism
of Nazi Germany was far greater against Russians, Poles, Jews and
other peoples considered subhuman than against West Europeans.
And yet, the ruthlessness implicit in relations
between those who supposed themselves to be ‘naturally’ superior and
their supposedly ‘natural’ inferiors, merely speeded up the
barbarization latent in any confrontation between God and Devil. For
in such apocalyptic face-offs there can be only one outcome: total
victory or total defeat. Nothing could conceivably be worse than the
Devil’s triumph. As the Cold War phrase went, ‘Better dead than
red,’ which, in any literal sense, is an absurd statement. In such a
struggle the end necessarily justified any means. If the only
way to beat the Devil was by devilish means, that is what we had to
do. Why, otherwise, would the mildest and most civilized of Western
scientists have urged their governments to build the atom bomb? If
the other side is devilish, then we must assume that they will use
devilish means, even if they are not doing so now. I am not arguing
that Einstein was wrong to regard a victory by Hitler as an ultimate
evil, but merely trying to clarify the logic of such confrontations,
which necessarily led to the mutual escalation of barbarism. That is
rather clearer in the case of the Cold War. The argument of Kennan’s
famous ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946 which provided the ideological
justification of the Cold War, was no different from what British
diplomats had constantly said about Russia throughout the nineteenth
century: we must contain them, if need be by the threat of force, or
they will advance on Constantinople and the Indian frontier. But
during the nineteenth century the British government rarely lost its
cool about this. Diplomacy, the ‘great game’ between secret agents,
even the occasional war, were not confused with the apocalypse.
After the October Revolution they were. Palmerston would have shaken
his head; in the end, I think, Kennan himself did.
It is easy to see why civilization receded between
the Treaty of Versailles and the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima. The
fact that World War II, unlike World War I, was fought on one side
by belligerents who specifically rejected the values of
nineteenth-century civilization and the Enlightenment, speaks for
itself. We may need to explain why nineteenth-century civilization
did not recover from World War I, as many expected it to do. But we
know it didn’t. It entered upon an age of catastrophe: of wars
followed by social revolutions, of the end of empires, of the
collapse of the liberal world economy, the steady retreat of
constitutional and democratic governments, the rise of fascism and
Nazism. That civilization receded is not very surprising, especially
when we consider that the period ended in the greatest school of
barbarism of all, the Second World War. So let me pass over the age
of catastrophe and turn to what is both a depressing and a curious
phenomenon, namely the advance of barbarism in the West after World
War II. So far from an age of catastrophe, the third quarter of the
twentieth century was an era of triumph for a reformed and restored
liberal capitalism, at least in the core countries of the ‘developed
market economies’. It produced both solid political stability and
unparalleled economic prosperity. And yet, barbarization continued.
Let me take, as a case in point, the distasteful subject of torture.
The Resurgence of Torture
As I need not tell you, at various times from 1782
on, torture was formally eliminated from judicial procedure in
civilized countries. In theory it was no longer tolerated in the
state’s coercive apparatus. The prejudice against it was so strong
that torture did not return after the defeat of the French
Revolution, which had, of course, abolished it. The famous or
infamous Vidocq, the ex-convict turned police chief under the
Restoration, and model for Balzac’s character Vautrin, was totally
without scruples, but he did not torture. One may suspect that in
the corners of traditional barbarism that resisted moral
progress—for instance in military prisons or similar institutions—it
did not quite die out, or at any rate its memory didn’t. I am struck
by the fact that the basic form of torture applied by the Greek
colonels in 1967–74 was, in effect, the old Turkish
bastinado—variations on beating the soles of the feet—even
though no part of Greece had been under Turkish administration for
almost fifty years. We may also take it that civilized methods
lagged where governments fought subversives, as in the tsarist
Okhrana.
The major progress of torture between the wars was
under Communist and fascist regimes. Fascism, uncommitted to the
Enlightenment, practised it fully. The Bolsheviks like the Jacobins
formally abolished the methods used by the Okhrana, but almost
immediately founded the Cheka, which recognized no restraints in its
fight to defend the revolution. However, a circular telegram by
Stalin in 1939 suggests that after the Great War ‘application of
methods of physical pressure in nkvd
practice’ was not officially legitimized until 1937, that is to say
it was legitimized as part of the Stalinist Great Terror. In fact it
became compulsory in certain cases. These methods were to be
exported to the European Soviet satellites after 1945, but we may
take it that there were policemen in these new regimes who had
experience of such activities in the regimes of Nazi occupation.
Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that Western
torture did not learn much from, or imitate, Soviet torture,
although techniques of mental manipulation may have owed more to the
Chinese techniques of what journalists baptised ‘brainwashing’ when
they came across it during the Korean War. Almost certainly the
model was fascist torture, particularly as practised in the German
repression of resistance movements during the War. However, we
should not underestimate the readiness to learn even from the
concentration camps. As we now know, thanks to the disclosures of
President Clinton’s administration, the USA engaged, from shortly after the War until
well into the 1970s, in systematic radiation experiments on human
beings, chosen from among those felt to be of socially inferior
value. These were, like the Nazi experiments, conducted or at least
monitored by medical doctors, a profession whose members, I must say
it with regret, too often allowed themselves to be involved in the
practice of torture in all countries. At least one of the American
medical men who found these experiments distasteful protested to his
superiors that there seemed to be ‘a smell of Buchenwald’ to them.
It is safe to assume that he was not the only one to be aware of the
similarity.
Let me now bring in Amnesty, for whose benefit
these lectures are held. This organization, as you know, was founded
in 1961, mainly to protect political and other prisoners of
conscience. To their surprise these excellent men and women
discovered that they also had to deal with the systematic use of
torture by governments—or barely disguised agencies of government—in
countries in which they had not expected to find it. Perhaps only
Anglo-Saxon provincialism accounts for their surprise. The use of
torture by the French army during the Algerian war of independence,
1954–62, had long caused political uproar in France. So Amnesty had
to concentrate much of its effort on torture and its 1975 Report on
the subject remains fundamental. [5] Two things about this phenomenon were
striking. In the first place its systematic use in the democratic
West was novel, even allowing for the odd precedent of electric
cattle-prods in Argentinian jails after 1930. The second striking
fact was that the phenomenon was now purely Western, at all
events in Europe, as the Amnesty Report noted. ‘Torture as a
government sanctioned Stalinist practice has ceased. With a few
exceptions. . .no reports of torture in Eastern Europe have been
reaching the outside world in the past decade.’ This is perhaps less
surprising than it looks at first sight. Since the life-and-death
struggle of the Russian Civil War, torture in the ussr—as distinct from the general brutality
of Russian penal life—had not served to protect the security of the
state. It served other purposes, such as the construction of show
trials and similar forms of public theatre.
It declined and fell with Stalinism. Fragile as the
Communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even a nominal,
use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until
1989. On the other hand it is more surprising that the period
from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s should have been the classic
era of Western torturing, reaching its peak in the first half of the
seventies, when it flourished simultaneously in Mediterranean
Europe, in several countries of Latin America with a hitherto
unblemished record—Chile and Uruguay are cases in point—in South
Africa and even, though without the application of electrodes to
genitals, in Northern Ireland. I should add that the curve of
Western official torturing has dipped substantially since then,
partly, one hopes, because of the labours of Amnesty. Nevertheless,
the 1992 edition of the admirable World Human Rights Guide
records it in 62 out of the 104 countries it surveyed and gave only
fifteen a completely clean bill of health.
How are we to explain this depressing phenomenon?
Certainly not by the official rationalization of the practice, as
stated in the British Compton Committee, which reported rather
ambiguously on Northern Ireland in 1972. It talked about
‘information which it was operationally necessary to obtain as
rapidly as possible.’ [6] But this was no explanation. It was merely
another way of saying that governments had given way to barbarism,
i.e. that they no longer accepted the convention that prisoners of
war are not obliged to tell their captors more than name, rank and
number, and that more information would not be tortured out
of them, however urgent the operational necessity.
I suggest that three factors are involved. The
post-1945 Western barbarization took place against the background of
the lunacies of the Cold War, a period which will one day be as hard
to understand for historians as the witch craze of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. I shall not say more about it here, except to
note that the extraordinary assumption that only the readiness to
launch the nuclear holocaust at a moment’s notice preserved the
Western world from immediate overthrow by totalitarian tyranny, was
enough in itself to undermine all accepted standards of civility.
Again, Western torturing clearly developed first, on a significant
scale, as part of the doomed attempt by a colonial power, or at all
events the French armed forces, to preserve its empire in Indochina
and North Africa. Nothing was more likely to barbarize than the
suppression of inferior races by the forces of a state which had
recently experienced suppression by Nazi Germany and its
collaborators. It is perhaps significant that, following the French
example, systematic torture elsewhere seems later to have been
primarily carried out by the military rather than the police.
In the 1960s, following the Cuban revolution and
the student radicalization, a third element entered the situation.
This was the rise of new insurrectionary and terrorist movements
which were essentially attempts by volunteer minority groups to
create revolutionary situations by acts of will. The essential
strategy of such groups was polarization: either by demonstrating
that the enemy regime was no longer in control, or—where the
situation was less favourable—by provoking it into general
repression, they hoped to drive the hitherto passive masses to
support the rebels. Both variants were dangerous. The second was an
open invitation for a sort of mutual escalation of terror and
counter-terror. It took a very level-headed government to resist;
even the British in Northern Ireland did not keep their cool in the
early years. Several regimes, especially military ones, did not
resist. I need hardly add that in a contest of comparative barbarism
the forces of the state were likely to win—and they did.
But a sinister air of unreality surrounded these
underground wars. Except in the remaining struggles for colonial
liberation, and perhaps in Central America, the fights were for
smaller stakes than either side pretended. The socialist revolution
of the various left-wing terrorist brigades was not on the agenda.
Their actual chances of defeating and overthrowing existing regimes
by insurrection were insignificant, and known to be so. What
reactionaries were really afraid of was not students with guns but
mass movements which, like Allende in Chile and the Peronists in
Argentina, could win elections, as the gunmen could not. The example
of Italy demonstrates that routine politics could go on almost as
before, even in the presence of the strongest force of such
insurrectionaries in Europe, the Red Brigades. The main achievement
of the neo-insurrectionaries was thus to allow the general level of
force and violence to be ratcheted up by a few notches. The 1970s
left behind torture, murder and terror in formerly democratic Chile,
where its object was not to protect a military regime which ran no
risk of overthrow, but to teach the poor humility and to instal a
system of free-market economics safe from political opposition and
trade unions. In relatively pacific Brazil, not a naturally
bloodthirsty culture like Colombia or Mexico, it left a heritage of
death squads of policemen, scouring the streets to liquidate
‘anti-socials’ and the lost children of the pavements. It left
behind, almost everywhere in the West, doctrines of
‘counter-insurgency’ which I can sum up in the words of one of the
authors who surveyed these writings: ‘Dissatisfaction there is
always, but resistance only has a chance of success against a
liberal democratic regime, or an old-fashioned, ineffectual
authoritarian system.’ [7] In short, the moral of the 1970s was that
barbarism is more effective than civilization. It has permanently
weakened the constraints of civilization.
Let me finally turn to the current period. The wars
of religion in their characteristic twentieth-century form are more
or less over, even though they have left behind a sub-stratum of
public barbarity. We may find ourselves returning towards wars of
religion in the old sense, but let me leave aside this further
illustration of the retreat of civilization. The current turmoil of
nationalist conflicts and civil wars is not to be regarded as an
ideological phenomenon at all, and still less as the re-emergence of
primordial forces too long suppressed by Communism or Western
universalism, or whatever else the current self-serving jargon of
the militants of identity politics calls it. It is, in my view, a
response to a double collapse: the collapse of political order as
represented by functioning states—any effective state which
stands watch against the descent into Hobbesian anarchy—and the
crumbling of the old frameworks of social relations over a large
part of the world—any framework which stands guard against
Durkheimian anomie.
I believe the horrors of the current civil wars are
a consequence of this double collapse. They are not a return to
ancient savageries, however long ancestral memories may be in the
mountains of Hercegovina and Krajina. The Bosnian communities were
not prevented from cutting each others’ throats by the force majeure
of a Communist dictatorship. They lived together peacefully and, at
least among the 50 per cent or so of the urban Yugoslav population,
intermarried to a degree inconceivable in really segregated
societies like Ulster or the racial communities of the usa. If the British state had abdicated in
Ulster as the Yugoslav state did, we would have had a lot more than
some three thousand dead in a quarter of a century. Moreover, as
Michael Ignatieff has brought out very well, the atrocities of this
war are largely committed by a typically contemporary form of the
‘dangerous classes’, namely deracinated young males between the ages
of puberty and marriage, for whom no accepted or effective rules and
limits of behaviour exist any longer: not even the accepted rules of
violence in a traditional society of macho fighters.
And this, of course, is what links the explosive
collapse of political and social order on the periphery of our world
system, with the slower subsidence in the heartlands of developed
society. In both regions unspeakable things are done by people who
no longer have social guides to action. The old traditional England
which Mrs Thatcher did so much to bury relied on the enormous
strength of custom and convention. One did, not what ‘ought to be’
done, but what was done: as the phrase went, ‘the done
thing’. But we no longer know what ‘the done thing’ is, there is
only ‘one’s own thing’.
Under these circumstances of social and political
disintegration, we should expect a decline in civility in any case,
and a growth in barbarism. And yet what has made things worse, what
will undoubtedly make them worse in future, is that steady
dismantling of the defences which the civilization of the
Enlightenment had erected against barbarism, and which I have tried
to sketch in this lecture. For the worst of it is that we have got
used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable.
Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into
accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem
unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money.
Let me conclude with the story of one of the last advances of
nineteenth-century civilization, namely the banning of chemical and
biological warfare—weapons essentially designed for terror, for
their actual operational value is low. By virtually universal
agreement they were banned after World War I under the Geneva
Protocol of 1925, due to come into force in 1928. The ban held good
through World War II, except, naturally, in Ethiopia. In 1987 it was
contemptuously and provocatively torn up by Saddam Hussein, who
killed several thousands of his citizens with poison-gas bombs. Who
protested? Only the old ‘stage army of the good’, and not even all
of these—as those of us who tried to collect signatures at the time
know. Why so little outrage? In part, because the absolute rejection
of such inhuman weapons had long been quietly abandoned. It had been
softened down to a pledge not to be the first to use such weapons,
but, of course, if the other side used them. . .Over forty states,
headed by the usa, took this position
on the 1969 un resolution against
chemical warfare. Opposition to biological warfare remained
stronger. Its means were to be totally destroyed under an agreement
of 1972: but not chemical ones. We might say that poison gas had
been quietly domesticated. Poor countries now saw it simply as a
possible counter to nuclear arms. Still, it was terrible.And
yet—need I remind you—the British and other governments of the
democratic and liberal world, so far from protesting, kept quiet and
did their best to keep their citizens in the dark, as they
encouraged their businessmen to sell Saddam more arms including the
equipment to gas more of his citizens. They were not outraged, until
he did something genuinely insupportable. I don’t need to remind you
what he did: he attacked the oil fields thought vital by the usa.
World copyright © 1994 E.J. Hobsbawm
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