The War Of The World Robert Ferguson Analysis

The War of the World Niall Ferguson argues throughout The War of the World that “the twentieth century was the most violent global century in history, due to economic volatility, ethnic conflict, and empires in conflict”. Ferguson argues this point by presenting concepts such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Holocaust, World War I, World War II and the Armenian Genocide. However, as Ferguson presents these ideas to argue his view, he does so in a manner that portrays him as a revisionist. One of the earlier events mentioned in Niall Ferguson’s documentary is the Armenian Genocide. Despite often being overshadowed by the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide was one of the first genocides committed in the twentieth century. “In all, it is estimated that up to a million and a half Armenians perished at the hands of Ottoman and Turkish military and paramilitary forces and through atrocities intentionally inflicted to eliminate the Armenian demographic presence in
Ferguson precisely explains the horrors endured and does little to distort how truly awful the Holocaust was. In the eyes of Ferguson the Holocaust surpasses all other genocides by being the first industrialized genocide. Ferguson also describes the genocide against the Jews by the Nazis was unique in the fact that it was carried out by such educated people. Ferguson at one point describes the invasion of a Polish village, “...they were to round up the villages 1800 or so Jews. They were to pick out the able-bodied young men who could be used as forced laborers, or work Jews. They would then put the rest, the sick, the elderly, the women and the children onto trucks and drive them to a quarry in the nearby forest. There they would shoot them all”. The intense description and word choice done by Ferguson helped correctly describe the brutality of the Holocaust and also gives him credibility from other