Civilization: The West and the Rest (35 page)

By contrast, the Belgians ran the worst of all African empires in the Congo,
¹¹⁷
while the Third Reich deserves to be considered the worst of all the European empires – the
reductio ad absurdum
and
ad nauseam
of the nineteenth-century notion of the civilizing mission, because its actual effect on the territories it briefly controlled was to
barbarize them. The aim, as Himmler conceived it in September 1942, was that ‘the Germanic peoples’ would grow in number from 83 million to 120 million and would resettle all the land Germany had conquered from Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union. They would go forth and multiply in splendid new provinces with names like Ingermanland. Autobahns and high-speed railways would connect a ‘string of pearls’ – fortified German outposts – as far as the Don, the Volga and ultimately even the Urals. In Himmler’s words, the German conquest of ‘the East’ would be ‘the greatest piece of colonization which the world will ever have seen’.
¹¹⁸

In reality, the Nazi Empire turned out to be the least successful piece of colonization ever seen. Launched in 1938, the campaign to expand beyond Germany’s 1871 borders peaked in late 1942, by which time the empire encompassed around one-third of the European landmass and nearly half its inhabitants – 244 million people. Yet by October 1944, when the Red Army marched into East Prussia, it was gone, making it one of the shortest-lived empires in all history, as well as one of the worst. This fleeting duration is, of course, primarily to be explained in military terms. Once the Third Reich was embroiled in a war with not only the British Empire but also the Soviet Union and the United States, its empire was surely doomed. Yet there is a secondary, endogenous explanation for the Third Reich’s failure as an empire.

From the point of view of simple demographics, there was in fact nothing implausible about the project of putting 80 million Germans in charge of the European continent. In theory, it should have been easier for Germany to rule Ukraine than it was for Britain to rule Uttar Pradesh. For one thing, Kiev was nearer to Berlin than Kanpur was to London. For another, the Germans were genuinely welcomed as liberators in many parts of Ukraine in 1941. And not only there. All over the Western Soviet Union there were ethnic minorities whom Stalin had treated with suspicion and violence in the 1930s. Most assumed that German rule would be an improvement on Russian rule. Yet the Germans wholly failed to exploit these advantages.

The ‘arrogant and overbearing Reich Germans’, strutting around in their snazzy uniforms, alienated even the ethnic Germans they were supposed to be freeing from foreign oppression. Worse, they took
positive pride in starving the newly subject peoples. ‘I will pump every last thing out of this country,’ declared Reichskommissar Erich Koch, when put in charge of the Ukraine. ‘I did not come here to spread bliss …’ Göring boasted that he ‘could not care less’ if non-Germans were ‘collapsing from hunger’.
¹¹⁹
A clear indication of what such inhumanity implied was the treatment meted out to Red Army prisoners of war in the wake of Operation Barbarossa. By February 1942 only 1.1 million were still alive of the 3.9 million originally captured. Herded together in barbed-wire stockades, they were simply left to the ravages of malnutrition and disease. Nor were the Nazis content to starve the conquered. They also relished inflicting violence on them, ranging from impromptu beatings (which could be administered either for failing to give the Hitler salute or for presumptuously giving it, according to taste) all the way to industrialized genocide. This was indeed Hereroland writ large.

A few Germans saw the folly of this. In the words of Gauleiter Alfred Frauenfeld in February 1944:

The principle of ruthless brutality, the treatment of the country [Ukraine] according to points of view and methods used in past centuries against coloured slave peoples; and the fact, defying any sensible policy, that the contempt for that people was not only expressed in actions against individuals but also in words at every possible and impossible occasion … all this bears testimony to the complete lack of instinct with regard to the treatment of alien peoples, which in view of its consequences can only be called … disastrous.
¹²⁰

It was, as an official at the Ministry for the East put it, a ‘masterpiece of wrong treatment … to have, within a year, chased into the woods and swamps, as partisans, a people which was absolutely pro-German and had jubilantly greeted us as their liberator’.
¹²¹

Added to arrogance, callousness and brutality was downright ineptitude. As early as 1938 a Wehrmacht staff officer remarked on the ‘crass extent’ of ‘the State’s inability to govern’ in the newly acquired Sudetenland. Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for the East (Ost-Ministerium) was soon nicknamed the ‘Ministry for Chaos’ (Cha-Ost-Ministerium). The SS aspired to establish some kind of centralizing grip on the empire, but Himmler and his lackeys messed up even the resettlement
of 800,000 ethnic Germans. Otto Ohlendorf – who, as a loyal
Einsatzgruppe
commander, was responsible for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews – lamented that Himmler’s speciality was ‘organizing disorder’.
¹²²
Yet ultimate responsibility for the dysfunctional character of the Nazi Empire lay not with Rosenberg or Himmler, but with their master. It was, after all, Hitler who was in charge of the Third Reich. (Of 650 major legislative orders issued during the war, all but 72 were decrees or orders issued in his name.) It was Hitler who argued, shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, that ‘In view of the vast size of the conquered territories in the east, the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if, instead of punishing resistance by sentences in a court of law, the occupying forces spread such terror as to crush every will to resist among the population.’ It was Hitler whose preferred method for pacifying occupied territory was ‘shooting everyone who looked in any way suspicious’. In the eyes of Werner Best (one of those rare figures in the Third Reich with a semi-sane conception of imperial rule), Hitler was a latter-day Genghis Khan – a specialist in destruction, whose empire of barbarism could not hope to endure.
¹²³

In many ways, then, the Nazi Empire was the last, loathsome incarnation of a concept that by 1945 was obsolete. It had seemed plausible for centuries that the road to riches lay through the exploitation of foreign peoples and their land. Long before the word
Lebensraum
was coined, as we have seen, European empires had contended for new places to settle, new people to tax – and before them Asian, American and African empires. Yet in the course of the twentieth century it gradually became apparent that an industrial economy could get on perfectly well without colonies. Indeed, colonies might be something of a needless burden. Writing in 1942, the economist Helmut Schubert noted that Germany’s real future was as ‘a large industrial zone’, dependent on ‘a permanent and growing presence of foreign workers’. Germanization of the East was an impossibility; Easternization of Germany was far more likely as the shift of labour from agriculture to industry continued. The exigencies of the war economy vindicated this view. By the end of 1944 around 5 million foreigners had been conscripted to work in the factories and mines of the old Reich. By a rich irony, the dream of a racially pure imperium
had turned Germany itself into a multi-ethnic state, albeit a slave state. The replacement of East European slaves with Turkish and Yugoslav ‘guest workers’ after the war did not change the economic argument. Modern Germany did not in fact need ‘living space’. It needed living immigrants.

The French Empire was never so irredeemably barbaric as the Nazi Empire. If it had been, it would surely have been impossible to revive so much of it after the Second World War – and even to reaffirm the old assimilationist ambition by rebranding it as a ‘French Union’. Even the ten years between the Brazzaville Conference of 1944 and the twin blows of defeat at Dien Bien Phu and revolt in Algeria exceeded the total duration of Hitler’s extra-German imperium. Nevertheless, the world wars were the terrible nemesis that followed the hubris of the
mission civilisatrice
, as all the European empires applied the methods against one another that they had pioneered (albeit with varying degrees of cruelty) against Africans. Medical science, which had seemed like a universal saviour in the war against disease, ended up being perverted by racial prejudice and the pseudo-science of eugenics, turning even some doctors into killers. By 1945 ‘Western civilization’ did indeed seem like a contradiction in terms, just as Gandhi had said. The rapid dissolution of the European empires in the post-war years appeared to be a just enough sentence, regardless of whether or not the majority of former colonies were ready for self-government.
¹²⁴

The great puzzle is that, somehow, out of this atrocious age of destruction, there emerged a new model of civilization centred around not colonization but consumption. By 1945, it was time for the West to lay down its arms and pick up its shopping bags – to take off its uniform and put on its blue jeans.

What we must do is to transform our Empire and our people, make the empire like the countries of Europe and our people like the peoples of Europe.

Inoue Kaoru

Will the West, which takes its great invention, democracy, more seriously than the Word of God, come out against this coup that has brought an end to democracy in Kars? … Or are we to conclude that democracy, freedom and human rights don’t matter, that all the West wants is for the rest of the world to imitate it like monkeys? Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?

Orhan Pamuk

In 1909, inspired by a visit to Japan, the French-Jewish banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn
^*
set out to create an album of colour photographs of people from every corner of the world. The aim, Kahn said, was ‘To put into effect a sort of photographic inventory of the surface of the globe as inhabited and developed by Man at the begin
ning of the twentieth century.’ Created with the newly invented autochrome process, the 72,000 photographs and 100 hours of film in Kahn’s ‘archives of the planet’ show a dazzling variety of costumes and fashions from more than fifty different countries: dirt-poor peasants in the Gaeltacht, dishevelled conscripts in Bulgaria, forbidding chieftains in Arabia, stark-naked warriors in Dahomey, garlanded maharajas in India, come-hither priestesses in Indo-China and strangely stolid-looking cowboys in the Wild West.
¹
In those days, to an extent that seems astonishing today, we were what we wore.

Today, a century later, Kahn’s project would be more or less pointless, because these days most people around the world dress in much the same way: the same jeans, the same sneakers, the same T-shirts. There are just a very few places where people hold out against the giant sartorial blending machine. One of them is rural Peru. In the mountains of the Andes, the Quechua women still wear their brightly coloured dresses and shawls and their little felt hats, pinned at jaunty angles and decorated with their tribal insignia. Except that these are not traditional Quechua clothes at all. The dresses, shawls and hats are in fact of Andalusian origin and were imposed by the Spanish Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in 1572, in the wake of Túpac Amaru’s defeat. Authentically traditional Andean female attire consisted of a tunic (the
anacu
), secured at the waist by a sash (the
chumpi
), over which was worn a mantle (the
lliclla
), which was fastened with a
tupu
pin. What Quechua women wear nowadays is a combination of these earlier garments with the clothes they were ordered to wear by their Spanish masters. The bowler hats popular among Bolivian women came later, when British workers arrived to build that country’s first railways.
²
The current fashion among Andean men for American casual clothing is thus merely the latest chapter in a long history of sartorial Westernization.

What is it about our clothes that other people seem unable to resist? Is dressing like us about wanting to
be
like us? Clearly, this is about more than just clothes. It is about embracing an entire popular culture that extends through music and movies, to say nothing of soft drinks and fast food. That popular culture carries with it a subtle message. It is about freedom – the right to dress or drink or eat as you
please (even if that turns out to be like everybody else). It is about democracy – because only those consumer products that people really like get made. And, of course, it is about capitalism – because corporations have to make a profit by selling the stuff. But clothing is at the heart of the process of Westernization for one very simple reason. That great economic transformation which economic historians long ago named the Industrial Revolution – that quantum leap in material standards of living for a rising share of humanity – had its origins in the manufacture of textiles. It was partly a miracle of mass production brought about by a wave of technological innovation, which had its origin in the earlier Scientific Revolution (see
Chapter 2
). But the Industrial Revolution would not have begun in Britain and spread to the rest of West without the simultaneous development of a dynamic consumer society, characterized by an almost infinitely elastic demand for cheap clothes. The magic of industrialization, though it was something contemporary critics generally overlooked, was that the worker was at one and the same time a consumer. The ‘wage slave’ also went shopping; the lowliest proletarian had more than one shirt, and aspired to have more than two.