As Nietzsche—my favorite philosopher—once said, history is a succession of atrocities. Overrunning the Middle East, the ancient Assyrians must have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Julius Caesar probably killed a million Gauls—one fifth of the entire population—and sold another million into slavery. Genghis Khan slaughtered millions. Taking into account sickness and famine, the Thirty Years War cost the lives of an estimated twelve million people. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are estimated to have killed about three and a half million. All this before we get to the vast and extremely bloody upheavals China went through during the nineteenth century. Before we get to the two world wars which, between them, may have killed 60 million. And before we get to Auschwitz on one hand and Hiroshima/Nagasaki on the other.

That is not to say there have been no hopes. The Greeks and Romans had their visions of a long-past golden Age before iron weapons were invented and enabled people to slaughter each other on an unprecedented scale. Medieval Christians hoped to enter heaven when they died. Looking back on the Pax Romana—approximately 29 BCE to 200 CE—the late eighteen-century English historian Edward Gibbon considered it the happiest in the whole of history. A contemporary of the French author and pundit Francois-Marie Voltaire, the German poet Friedrich Schiller, and the equally German composer Ludwig van Beethoven, he agreed with them that national differences were being eradicated and that progress was making the world a happier place almost by the day.

Stimulated by the spread of mechanical transport, around 1870 an international pacifist movement started making its impact felt. In 1889 (the year Hitler was born, incidentally) the Austrian Baroness Bertha von Suttner published Nieder die Waffen, down with the arms, in which she denounced war and argued in favor of universal disarmament. In 1909 the British economist and writer Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, a book in which he argued that rising productivity and expanding communications were encouraging trade while driving war into obsolescence. Both authors ended by being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: Suttner in 1911 and Angel in 1933. 1919-20 saw the establishment of the League of Nations, an organization specifically intended to ensure that the war that had just ended would also be the last one.

Probably never at any time were such hopes more intense, and shared by a greater number of people, than in the years immediately following 1989. It all started in 1945 when, following the most destructive war in history, much of the world saw itself divided between two camps: the “Western.” or free, or capitalist, one on one hand and the “Eastern,” or socialist, or communist, one on the other. Both looked at the other as the incarnation of evil. Both proclaimed themselves carriers of the one ideology that would lead mankind towards a dazzling future. While armed to the teeth, both saw themselves as “peace loving.”

For decades on end the two camps confronted one another. Doing so they fought many wars by proxy. So in Asia, so in Africa, so in the Middle East; and so, albeit on a much smaller scale, in Latin America. Taking into account such massive meat-grinders  as the Chinese Civil War (1946-49), the Korean War (1950-53), and the two Vietnam Wars (1949-1975), the number of those killed in these and other armed conflicts may well  have exceeded that of those who died in 1914-45, albeit that they were spread over forty years instead of thirty. Twice did humanity, or at any rate large parts of it, seem to stand on the verge of nuclear annihilation. Once in 1962, when the US and USSR clashed head-on over Cuba and may only have been saved by a disobedient Soviet officer. And once in 1973, when the same Powers found themselves at loggerheads over the Arab-Israeli War of that year.

Come 1989, the year of miracles. The Berlin Wall, which for decades had stood as the very symbol of the world’s partition between the two camps, came crashing down. So did the East Bloc—perhaps the one case in all of history when a major empire fell not by means of war and massive bloodshed but because almost all of its people had lost faith in it. Much of the loss of faith in question was due to the fact, which in the age of radio and television (soon to be joined by a myriad other newfangled devices) could no longer be concealed, that the East had fallen way behind. Not just in terms of affluence but in others as well; including health, education, freedom of speech and movement, the quality of the environment, and so on. Put together, they and other criteria were known as the “human development” index.

Playing the role of Norman Angell in the immediate post-Cold War period was an American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama. His 1989 article, The End of History, which was later expanded into a book, told people what millions upon millions of them wanted to believe: namely that humankind was standing on the threshold of a new epoch. One in which democracy (as defined by the West) would become the religion of almost everyone, power politics abolished, and war, if not completely disappear, at any rate confined to unimportant, relatively backward but forward-looking, regions and countries. Providing strong support for Fukuyama was another American academic, the psychologist Steven Pinker. The list of contents of his most important book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) say it all.  I quote. “The Pacification Process.” “The Civilizing Process.” “The Humanitarian Revolution.” “The Long Peace,” “The New Peace.” “The Rights Revolutions.” “Better Angels.” And, most pretentious of all, “On Angels’ Wings.”

It reads like paradise, doesn’t it? Not just political and social change, but the kind of moral improvement we poor humans have always been looking for but always failed to achieve. The kind the Biblical prophets spoke about. The kind Mahatma Gandhi had in mind before he was assassinated. Alas, it was not to be. Not in much of Asia and Africa, where what we got was an exploding population that can hardly be fed, let alone provided with a decent standard of living where everyone has access to clean water. Not, in North America, greater freedom but a repressive social regime known as political correctness that, in so far as the repression comes from below rather than above, is without precedent in history. Not in the EU, where massive immigration is even now leading to an almost equally massive movement away from neighborly love towards the xenophobia of the “extremist” political right; and that, even as once lovely city centers are being converted into hotbeds of violence and crime. Not well behaved electorates casting their votes for such things as a better education for their children but, especially in Russia and several other former Soviet republics, an entire series of new bloodthirsty dictatorships taking the place of the old. Not peace among nations, but new wars—in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Zaire, in the Sudan, in the Middle East, to mention but a few—also taking the place of the old.

So many deflated hopes. So many broken lives.