It is almost impossible to accurately describe what happened in Europe on August 4, 1914.

The period before and after the First World War is not a simple break but like the day before and after an explosion.

The quiet of sorrow after catastrophe never arrived; instead, the First World War triggered a chain reaction that continues unabated.

The war destroyed the European comity of nations beyond repair, unprecedented by earlier conflicts.

Inflation wiped out the entire class of small property owners irreversibly, more radically than any previous monetary crisis.

Unemployment soared to unprecedented levels, affecting entire nations, not just the working class.

The civil wars during the uneasy peace of the 1920s were bloodier and crueler than earlier ones.

These civil wars caused mass migrations of groups who were unwelcome and unassimilable anywhere.

Migrants became homeless, stateless, and rightless, regarded as the scum of the earth.

Despite knowledge and warnings, no event or consequence could be undone or prevented.

Each event had the finality of a last judgment, seeming like unredeemably stupid fatality rather than divine justice.

Before totalitarian politics attacked Europe’s civilization, the instability exposed the fragile political system and the suffering of many groups suddenly excluded from protection.

The seeming stability of the world made these displaced groups appear as exceptions to an otherwise sane order, leading to cynicism among both victims and observers.

This cynicism was mistaken for growing wisdom, but it actually resulted in greater confusion and stupidity.

Hatred, already present pre-war, became central in politics during the 1920s, creating a vague, pervasive hatred without a clear target or responsibility.

This hatred was aimless, unpredictable, and incapable of healthy indifference.

The atmosphere of disintegration was worse in defeated countries and fully developed in newly created states after the fall of the Dual Monarchy and Czarist Empire.

The last solidarity among nonemancipated nationalities in the “belt of mixed populations” evaporated with the fall of the central despotic bureaucracy.

Now, every group was against every other, especially neighbors: Slovaks vs. Czechs, Croats vs. Serbs, Ukrainians vs. Poles.

Conflicts were not just between minorities and majorities but also among dissatisfied minorities themselves, e.g., Slovaks persecuting Hungarians.

These regional quarrels seemed petty but were crucial in the political destinies of Europe.

From the collapse of multinational states Russia and Austria-Hungary, two victim groups emerged uniquely suffering: the stateless and minorities.

These groups lost the inalienable Rights of Man, unlike the dispossessed middle classes or unemployed.

The stateless and minorities had no governments to protect them, forced to live under exceptional Minority Treaties (except Czechoslovakia), mostly unrecognized or under lawlessness.

The presence of minorities and stateless persons introduced a new element of disintegration in postwar Europe.

Denationalization became a weapon of totalitarian politics.

European nation-states were constitutionally unable to guarantee human rights to those who lost their national protections.

Persecuting governments imposed their own standards of values on opponents.

Those labeled as scum by persecutors (Jews, Trotskyites) were universally stigmatized as undesirables.

The Nazi SS newspaper Schwarze Korps in 1938 explicitly called Jews “scum of the earth,” tying this to the image of stateless beggars crossing borders.

This propaganda was more effective than Goebbels’ rhetoric, as it linked the plight of innocent people to the totalitarian claim that inalienable human rights did not exist.

The democracies’ affirmations of human rights were seen by many as idealistic, hypocritical, and cowardly in the face of harsh new realities.

The phrase “human rights” became synonymous with hopeless idealism or feeble hypocrisy for victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike.