FERGUSON : The war of the world (fülszöveg)
WORLD WAR II, we have been told all our lives, was our greatest triumph, the moment when the forces of light, the Western democracies, prevailed over the forces of darkness, the Nazis and the other Axis powers, in a conflict the latter started in 1939 and which ended with their defeat six years later. In this extraordinarily brilliant and vivid book, Niall Ferguson challenges our enduring assumptions about what was, without question, the most titanic struggle the planet has ever seen. The War of the World redefines the Second World War as the central act of an epic fifty-year struggle between rival empires. Far from culminating in the triumph of the West, this struggle was part of an inexorable shift in the global balance of power toward the East. The central question Ferguson poses and answers is why that shift had to be so appallingly violent.
What made the twentieth century—an age of unprecedented material and scientific advance—also the most violent in all history? What went wrong with modernity? The stock explanations, Niall Ferguson demonstrates, are inadequate, whether they blame military technology, extreme ideology or dictatorial demagogy. For none of these can tell us why violence was so heavily concentrated in certain places—Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea—and at certain times, above all the 1940s. The key, he argues, was the lethal coincidence of three forces: economic volatility, ethnic disintegration, and the end of empires.
The world of 1900 was in many ways as globalized as our own. Markets for goods, labor and capital were integrated as never before. Men and women had never mingled so freely as they did in cities like London, Berlin and Shanghai. Yet it was precisely such cities that were devastated in what Niall Ferguson calls the War of the World—a war waged against innocent civilians not by some ruthless alien invader, as H. G. Wells had imagined, but by their fellow human beings.
An epic historical narrative that takes the reader from the fields of Flanders to the plains of Poland, fromthe walls of Nanjing to the beaches of Normandy, The War of the World is Niall Ferguson's masterpiece. He brings to life an age in which the irregularities of boom and bust tore apart multicultural communities; an age poisoned by the hateful idea of irreconcilable racial differences; above all, an age of imperial endgames in which the agonizing death throes of old empires coincided with the rapid rise and fall of new and ruthless empire-states.
Only by adopting the indiscriminately violent methods of total war could the Western powers defeat these enemies. Yet military victory could not arrest that descent of the West which, Ferguson argues, was the true arc of the twentieth century.
Drawing on a pioneering combination of history, economics and the cutting-edge interdisciplinary study of human violence, The War of the World is a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era.
|
|
|
|
| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
