The other day I read two of the stories of Adele Blanc Sec by Tardi. It is a comic book series telling the adventures of a woman private detective in the Paris of the Belle Epoque ( the 1900 years). The stories are a grotesque feuilleton dealing with dinosaurs and Egyptian mummies coming back to life in the jardin des plantes, with the help of a sect of Parisian notables who worship an Assyrian demon. It seems to be coming straight from the popular tabloids of those days, with their urban legends of jack the ripper and crocodiles in the sewers and the jews kidnapping little children. This glutinous package of tall tales gets a strange power from the way tardi draws his pictures. He makes heavy use of the colour sepia, which was the colour of photographs of those days, so that all the pictures seem like photos you would have found in a drawer of your grandmother’s wardrobe. This use of colour adds to the feeling of comfortable distance I feel about the whole period ( the 1900’s) : a feeling of a period which is far away in time, yet still within a human range ( the time of my grandparents). I guess that there is an emotional border we put to the past, beyond which it becomes the past of history books. In my case, it is the 1900’s, but maybe for my son, it will be the 1940’s.

Or maybe there is something special about the 1900s themselves, which will make people in the future look back to that period in the same way as we think of Homeric Greece or Vedic India: the times when the west reached its peak of power, and industrial civilization itself was as its rawest, fullest expression: the age of railways, telegraphs, chemical warfare, steamer ships, captains of industry, colonies and colonial expositions, the first skyscrapers and the airplanes. Tardi’s stories have a peculiar ring of truthfulness about them, as if that age seemed just right for baby dinosaurs to crack open their eggs in museums, and for police captains to roam the streets looking for victims to offer in sacrifice to an Assyrian demon: make that kind of story take place say in the 1950’s and it would seem childish and archaic, move it back to the 1850’s and it would feel in advance of its times. But their peculiar brand of craziness comes in as exactly the kind of counter energy that the bourgeois smugness of the 1900’s would naturally create as reaction: something loathsome yet whole, of a huge ancient power breaking forth to destroy modern civilization. Lovecraft’s monsters – he wrote in the 20’s but was very much a man of 1900 by temperament – also fit in perfectly well with that setting.

Maybe the most important lesson we have learned from the 20th century is that, with the managerial possibilities offered by modern bureaucratic systems, someone with even the most bizzare political ideas can, if he gets to power (by whatever means), rule a country for quite some time. Modern bureaucracies are pretty powerful instruments of coercion. Within a few years, which is quite a short span of time in historical terms, they can set up a massive propaganda apparatus involving an adapted school curriculum, a secret police with its network of informers, and distribution of propaganda material through the media. Another important, and depressing lesson, is that most people will adapt to the new regime, however monstrous it may be.

It is also interesting to note that the ideological revolutions which appeared in the 20th century took everyone by surprise. Communism was born as a radical ideology in the 19th century and had to contend for a long time with the strong competition of Anarchism. But all of a sudden, after the First World War, Fascism appeared in Italy, and by 1932 it also held Germany under its sway. Communism, for its part, won its first victory in Russia – against the predictions of Marxist thinkers of the 19th century, who considered Russia a backward agricultural country unfit for a revolution of the proletariat. Anarchism died after a brave, but marginal fight during the Civil War in Spain.

The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978 also took everyone pretty much by surprise. As did Al Qaeda. Sionism has also proved to be a surprising ideology. When it started in Central Europe in the 19th century, probably few people expected it to to be able to actually reclaim Palestine, and to evolve into a warlike movement backed by a modern, lethal army.

The pattern that comes out from the above is, that you can have ideological movements springing up and spreading pretty fast, and taking root in unexpected places ( Russia, the industrial backwater, supposedly unfit for communism. Iran, the rapidly modernising country, ruled by a staunchly pro-Western monarch). And if they take power, they can, given the power of modern bureaucracy, rapidly coerce the vast majority of the population into submission.

Nazi Germany was defeated by the economic might of the USA. Good did not win because it was Good, but because it happened to be bigger and stronger. The USA/USSR rivalry was a more complicated story, partly a war by proxy and partly an economic competition. Broadly, the USA won because its system ensured better productivity and innovation.

But what of the ideological revolutions of the future? What if they happen within the centre of world power itself? For eight years, the neo-conservatives have held power in Washington D.C., and they have done substantial damage to the USA and to the world – the war in Iraq, the world economy, neglect of environmental issues. Yet their damage, though great, has been limited. America’s powerful democratic political system is still in place and it will hopefully ensure a return to relative normalcy and common sense.

But what of the future ? What if a more powerful destructive ideology appears in the USA, for example an apocalyptic version of Christianity, which would preach war against Islam and the Communists in China?

Another possibility is that a new form of belief appears. The industrial revolution has done lasting damage to the human soul, by throwing him into senseless patterns of consumption, and a generally materialistic outlook on life. In the past thirty years, we have seen a mish-mash of New Age and ecological groups appear as a reaction to this. Maybe one fringe movement will evolve into something sinister, for example a fusion of shamanism/esoterism, ecology and terrorism. We could imagine a group called the Earth Mother, with a mission to “heal the Earth”, and organised into a hierarchy of shamans ( connected to the Earth Mother by some secret rites) and common soldiers.

Technological revolutions could also bring about the arrival of a race of genetically-modified supersoldiers. These would be a breed of stronger , more intelligent warriors who would quickly grow impatient about taking orders from lesser human beings like us, and they would take over power. We could see the rise of a “genocracy” of improved humans, and the return of slavery.