A Slow and Endless Horror - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 100

countries across its far-flung empire led to the Irish famine of the 1840s,
the devastating famines in India in the late 1800s, and ultimately to what
Mike Davis has called the “making of the Third World.” 109 Eventually, the
bureaucratic power of the modern state, coupled with military and impe-
rial ambitions, nationalism, or racism, created the concentration camps
in South Africa during the Boer War, the litle-known genocide of the
Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia (then South West Africa) under
German control in 1904 through 1907, and the Armenian genocide of
1915-1923. 110
This history has only intensified over the decades since. World War I
shatered the complacency of Europe and destroyed a generation of young
men; a decade or so after the war ended, the Depression began; that long
ordeal ended with World War II, which in turn introduced the nuclear
bomb and the Holocaust. The changed geopolitical conditions after the
war led to the foundation of the state of Israel and the displacement of the
Palestinian people; it also opened the way for the independence of India,
which came to pass with the Partition of India and Pakistan, an event
accompanied with the slaughter of around one million people. Shortly
thereafter began the Cold War, the arms race between the superpowers,
and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which in limited ways contin-
ues to this day. Over this period, the legacy of the Enlightenment took
on a darker hue; the example of the American and French Revolutions,
which had initially opened the way for nations around the world to inter-
vene in their traditions and reinvent themselves, inspired the Russian and
Chinese Revolutions, whose leaders eventually sought such systemic,
wholesale change that they plunged their nations into famine or worse
(under Stalin in the 1930s and Mao in 1958-1962). In the wake of the
Holocaust, which inspired the world to vow that it would “never again”
tolerate the atempt to destroy a people, we instead witnessed genocide
and the massive destruction of human life in Burundi, Cambodia, the
former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere, as well
as the murder of roughly five million people, still ongoing, in Congo. In
the early years of the present century, 9/11 brought to the fore interna-
tional, stateless terrorism and its counterpart, the “war on terror”; these
developments, along with events in Rwanda and Congo, suggest that in