Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, by Mark Mazower, Allen Lane, 496pp, £20 in UK
It was the Victorians who called Africa the "dark continent", but it is actually Europe that most merits the sobriquet. Pre-colonial Africa may have been a savage place but it never knew murder on such a scale as the Holocaust or rape at the level of the Thirty Years War, nor did it throw up conflicts where fifty millions died, as in Europe between 1939-45.
The Victorians may have thought they were bringing the light of civilisation to benighted heathens in Africa and Asia, but what kind of light do we now think it was, faced as we are with the terrible events of the 20th century? One is reminded of Gandhi's remarks when asked what he thought of western civilisation: "It would be a good idea."
Mazower is concerned to tell the true story of Europe in the 20th century, not the sanitised, triumphalist version that appears in the Spectator and other organs of elitist complacency. The subtext of his cleverly themed narrative is that human beings are pretty depressing creatures who know the price of everything but the value of nothing, and are quite prepared, when it suits their book, to sell the much-vaunted "democracy" in which we live for a mess of pottage, or to turn to the man on horseback when the going gets tough.
As Mazower argues, nobody dispassionately reviewing the evidence of the inter-war dictatorships and of the turmoil since then could seriously argue that people have a real commitment to democracy rather than to bread and circuses and the bottom-line. Even the so-called "heroes of liberty" who pulled down the Berlin Wall in 1989 in expectation that they were entering a land of milk and honey have been sadly disabused. And in the former Soviet Union freedom from the communist yoke has meant little more than massive governmental corruption, soaring crime rates and the hegemony of the Russian mafia.
Mazower's best chapters are on Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Hitler came nearer to success than the smug "democracy always triumphs" propagandists would have us believe; interestingly, Mazower argues that both the Fuhrer's decline and fall and the demise of the Soviet Union came about as a result of "own goals" rather than an irresistible urge for freedom by the people. Communism made the mistake of underestimating human nature and thinking that a "new Man" could be created. By the use of systematic terror Stalin succeeded for a time, but once he died the game was essentially up. As JeanPaul Sartre shrewdly saw, deStalinisation was a slippery slope that could end only with the abolition of Soviet communism itself.
To say that Mazower's book is a series of "bright ideas", not all of them wholly convincing, may seem patronising, but it helps to convey the effervescent energy of a book that never flags and is never boring. Mazower has a deft way with telling statistics, as when he points out that 61 per cent of Himmler's SS were bachelors in 1939 and that there were sixty million changes of address in England during 1939-45. However, he has seriously underestimated casualties during the "Great Patriotic War" of 1941-45. The figure he quotes for Russian war dead - twenty millions - was the CIA figure produced for President Kennedy in 1963, but more recent researches in newly opened Russian archives, by eminent scholars such as John Ericsson, show that the true figure was nearer to fifty millions, or about a quarter of the total population - a truly mind-numbing statistic. Mazower underscores the point that post-1989 western triumphalists seldom acknowledges that, but for the Red Army's defeat of Hitler, democracy in Europe would not have survived.
Not even the Common Market escapes Mazower's terrible swift sword. He argues that the EU is not a by-product of democracy but of the dreams of dictators, first Napoleon and secondly Hitler, for what else was Albert Speer's New order but a pilot version of the EEC? My only serious criticism of the author is that he seems to lose his nerve when it comes to contemporary society, for his analysis of western consumerism and popular culture is unacceptably Panglossian; he pulls punches here as he does not in the earlier sections. But there can be no mistaking this book for anything other than an original, thought-provoking, iconoclastic and often brilliant piece of work.
Frank McLynn is a biographer and critic