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Review: The War of the World, on PBS

Verne Gay | Off Camera

June 30, 2008

The War of the World

Three consecutive Mondays at 10 p.m. on WNET/13, beginning tonight.

Reason to watch: Star historian Niall Ferguson makes his case for understanding the violence that wracked the 20th century. His take is "revisionist," hence, there's a whiff of controversy here. Based on his 2006 book of the same name.

What it's about: Tonight's first hour begins with H.G. Wells' "astonishingly prescient" 1898 account of an epic battle between Mars and Earth, and how vast numbers of cities would be laid to waste in the 20th century by men who treated their opponents, quite simply, as "aliens."

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Says Ferguson, who narrates, we were taught that "the good guys won the hot and cold war, [but] in this series, I want to tell you that was all wrong. It wasn't class but race that was the dominant idea of the 20th century; it wasn't nation states, but empires." He adds that the history of the last century wasn't about the triumph of the West, but "the resurgence of the East." Tonight covers the start of the 20th century to the beginning of the second World War, although in Ferguson's treatment, such distinctions as "first" and "second" are largely irrelevant.

Bottom line: Of course, Ferguson - and PBS - would love reviews that proclaim this Scottish historian's revise of the convulsions of the 20th century "shocking," or "profoundly controversial." Sorry - nothing of the sort. Ferguson is a deeply serious scholar who knows his business well, while all he does here is shift his time lines (World War II really began in 1937, he says, with Japan's annexation of Manchuria) or emphasize certain inarguable truths (over others). His "shocker" here? That racial conflicts were the great fault lines of the 20th century. Umm, who says otherwise? In the process, he doesn't necessarily establish that what we learned was "wrong," but perhaps "incomplete."

Nevertheless, Ferguson's a powerful and incisive narrator ("it wasn't appeasement that led to war, [but] war that led to appeasement") while his condemnation tonight of Stalin and Bolshevism brims with absolute clarity.