TTC - Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century

Our course examines a fundamental question of our times: Why was the 20th century so violent? This terrible century saw bloodletting on an unprecedented scale. Scholars estimate that around the globe, wars cost more than 40 million lives, while government-sponsored persecutions, mass murder, and genocide accounted for 170 million victims.
Viewing the past century as a whole, this course examines the ideologies that promised utopias and total solutions to social problems (Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and others), and relates the terrible human toll of attempts to realize these blueprints. Such ideologies functioned as political religions, commanding faith and fanatical adherence and promising salvation. At the same time, the ideological regimes were an emphatically modern phenomenon, using new technology, the capabilities of the modern state, and sophisticated methods of control. The four elements making up such a regime were masses, machines, mobsters, and master plans. Masses of people to organize and the machinery of social control were the means by which a movement came to prominence. Within the regime, a mobster elite of political criminals functioned as leaders, following a master plan laying out an ideological blueprint for the future. Terror would be used to shape the intractable human material to fit the ambitions of the ideological movement.
Our course discusses how these elements came together, taking different forms and variations over the course of the 20th century. To begin with, the revolutionary legacies of the 18th and 19th centuries are examined, showing the utopian hopes vested in technological and social progress. At the same time, political philosophies that saw conflict as the motor of progress are noted. World War I had a massive brutalizing effect, inaugurating the phenomenon of total war and militarizing and mobilizing entire societies. Civilians were increasingly the targets of this war, most cruelly in the first modern genocide, the Armenian massacres of 1915. Total war also led to total revolution, as radical Socialists directed by Lenin took power in Russia in 1917 and established a new Soviet regime, championing a global revolution. In the aftermath of World War I, aftershocks of the war continued in an unsettled political landscape. Millions of refugees were uprooted, civil wars raged in many countries, and the fortunes of democracy were battered.
In the Soviet Union, an elaborate Communist dictatorship emerged, built up by Josef Stalin, the “Man of Steel,” at a massive cost in lives, as in the Gulag state camp system. The utopian outlines of the new Soviet civilization are examined. In Italy, Fascists came to power under Benito Mussolini, proclaiming slogans of order, unity, and absolute state power. The decade of the 1930s saw gathering storm clouds in international politics, with the Japanese rampage in China, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, and a growing pessimism in culture and thought. In Germany, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, promised a racial utopia, reordering German society with brutal means and the persecution of a minority group, German Jews. Unleashed by Hitler with help from Stalin, World War II brought a further escalation of total war and violence directed against civilians. The Nazis’ program of racial murder of the Jews, the murderously efficient “final solution,” unfolded against the background of ambitious future plans for domination.
No sooner had World War II ended than a new global ideological confrontation emerged, the Cold War. In China, Chairman Mao’s Communists came to power and, over the next decades, launched campaigns to reconstruct Chinese society fundamentally, no matter the cost. An even more radical project was put into effect in nearby Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge revolutionaries, under the elusive Pol Pot, abolished cities, eliminated perceived enemies among the ordinary people, and caused the death of a quarter of the population. During the Cold War, Communist regimes took differing forms; the cases of isolated North Korea, seemingly efficient East Germany, and the formidable Soviet Union are examined.
At the end of the 20th century, even with democratic revolutions taking place in Eastern Europe and Russia, darker trends also emerged. In Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic pressed “ethnic cleansing” as a way to achieve his goal of a “Greater Serbia.” In Africa, a renewed genocide occurred in Rwanda, as the Hutu government masterminded a carefully planned slaughter of the Tutsi minority. In the Middle East, Saddam Hussein’s regime championed the ideological precepts of Ba’athism and sought and used weapons of mass destruction, including chemical arms used against Iraq’s Kurdish minority.

At its conclusion, the course poses the question of the future of terror, assessing the role of terrorism in the world at present and what lessons have been learned by the hard experience of this past century. Throughout the narrative of these tragedies, the lectures also point out individuals who resisted these inhuman trends, acting as remarkable witnesses to the century, dissenting from its violent course, often at great personal cost. Their examples represent a hopeful co