Читаем The World полностью

‘The Duce will have Ethiopia,’ said Graziani, ‘with or without the Ethiopians.’ The year before, while inspecting a church at Jijiga, the viceroy fell through a hole concealed under a carpet, a humiliation he was determined to avenge. At Debre Libanos, Graziani ordered: ‘Execute summarily all monks without distinction, including the vice-prior.’ Two thousand monks were killed. Altogether the Italians killed 400,000 Ethiopians. The League of Nations passed then cancelled sanctions. ‘Italy considers it an honour to inform the League,’ Mussolini’s foreign minister and son-in-law, Count Ciano, boasted, ‘of her efforts to civilize Ethiopia.’ In Geneva, Haile Selassie, serene and solemn, warned the League, ‘It’s not merely a question of Italian aggression; it’s collective security,’ and asked, ‘What reply shall I take back to my people?’

There was none – and Hitler was not the only one who understood that the League was toothless. On 25 November 1936, Japan signed an anti-Soviet pact with Germany, soon joined by Italy – the future Axis alliance. Emperor Hirohito’s own views remain opaque, but it is likely that he along with his courtiers and generals became convinced that it was the time to conquer China.

In February 1936, a coup by nationalist officers had placed further pressure on Hirohito. The rebels were executed, but Hirohito, his generals and the genro, his political veterans, intensified the cult of militaristic nationalism, laced with bushido chivalry, Shinto ritual and imperial cult. Hirohito privately did not regard himself as divine, but he believed that the emperor was synonymous with nation and state. In May 1937, he backed kokutai no hongi – the fundamentals of national polity – which saw the emperor as a ‘living god’. Everyone must ‘live for the great glory of the emperor, abandoning the small ego and thus expressing our true life as a people’: this was kodo, the imperial way. Hostile to western democracies, this Pan-Asian ideology was conditional on Japanese supremacy. The genro regarded China as racially subhuman, merely a territory that Japan, thanks to the blood sacrifices of 1895 and 1904, was fated to rule.

On 7 July 1937, an unplanned exchange of fire between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge which provided access to Beijing provided the pretext to invade China – the start of a struggle that would kill fourteen million Chinese (only Russia would lose more) and provide a spark for world war.

* Self-determination was a noble ideal, still universally accepted as the correct basis for the organization of the modern world, but in practice, it was painful. The new nation states had to be hacked out of territories long ruled by multi-ethnic empires. In Ireland, Britain, faced with a Catholic Irish revolt and civil war, would now negotiate a partition between an independent Catholic republic in the south and a Protestant province in the north. Just as the creation of Greece in the 1820s had led to the departure of Muslims, now the creation of Türkiye brutally expelled the Greeks. After the Second World War, such brutal partitions created new states in Germany and Poland 1945; India and Pakistan 1947; Israel 1948.

* Enver, once Ottoman vice-generalissmo but now outmanoeuvred by Kemal, left for Berlin then Moscow and Central Asia where he declared himself amir of Turkestan and launched a Turkic uprising, resisted by Lenin’s Red Army, which was seeking to secure central Asia. Not far from Dushanbe (Tajikistan), he was killed by the Bolsheviks in a skirmish. The other two pashas, Talaat and Jemal, were assassinated by Armenians.

* During the war Atatürk’s secretary Fikriye Hanım was his main lover, but now he met the cultured Latife Us˙aklıgil, forming a triangle that ended with Fikriye shooting herself (with a pistol that was a gift from Kemal). In 1938, just fifty-seven, Atatürk died of cirrhosis at the Ottoman Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul. His vision, guarded by the army, which intervened repeatedly to seize power, endured until 2003 when the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, first as premier, then as president, enforced an Islamist autocracy, symbolically reconverting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

* ‘The right of the republics to secede freely from the Union was included in the text,’ wrote a Russian historical essayist in 2021, but ‘by doing so, the authors planted in the foundation of our state a dangerous timebomb’. The essayist was Vladimir Putin. The original four republics were Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transkavkazia (Caucasus). The central Asian republics were then added and Transkavkazia broken up. After 1940 there were fifteen.

* Mao channelled the fifth-century BC philosopher Sun Tzu: ‘When the enemy advances, we retreat. When the enemy rests, we harass him. When the enemy avoids battle, we attack. When the enemy retreats we advance.’