ABSTRACT
Fascism, Nazism and the Depression, Japanese assaults both
on imperial powers and on their Asian neighbours – the list of
disasters is long and familiar. Between 1914 and 1945, perhaps
150 million people died ‘prematurely’ for political and ideolo-
gical reasons. Although national pieties have worked to conceal
the matter, this second and still more devastating ‘30-years war’
was in many ways the result of the world’s drift into an ever
more steely determination to be divided into nations, just as
each war, and each crisis, made each national cause seem to the
great majority of the world’s peoples the more just and virtuous.
In these ‘locust years’, the deadly nationalization of human
