Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914

Kolko (Confronting the Third World), a leading Cold War revisionist, argues here that wars have been the 20th century's principal mediator between the collapse of traditional societies and the emergence of radical movements. Leaders have consistently overestimated their capacity to control the wars they started, he maintains. Protracted wars, in turn, profoundly altered the lives of ordinary people and gave rise to unexpected political consequences. WWI's legacy of wrecked economies, for example, ``became an essential precondition for the emergence of a numerically powerful Left, moving it from the margins to the very center of... all world affairs after 1941.'' But, the author asserts, communist and socialist parties then gradually ``became gravely, perhaps even fatally, defensive and isolated,'' and as a result their popular roots atrophied. This provocative work will engage general readers as well as specialists. (Oct.)