Posted on Fri, Jun. 27, 2008

• The War of the World, 11 p.m.-midnight Monday, WPBT-PBS 2

The title of this three-part PBS documentary series is no sloppy typo but deliberate wordplay on H.G. Welles' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, which describes a devastating attack by Martians armed with death rays and robotic fighting machines that leaves most of the world's great cities in ruins. To Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, the book was not science fiction but ''a work of astonishing prescience'' that accurately foretold the horrendous world wars of the century that would follow, with a single mistake: ''Those responsible were not Martians -- they were other human beings.'' And, Ferguson wonders, how could a century marked by so much scientific and economic progress have gone so violently wrong -- ``What made men act like Martians?''

In The War of the World, a three-part PBS series series written by Ferguson from his book of the same name, he tries to answer his own question. Tracing a century that began with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and ended with vicious religious bloodletting in the Balkans that hinted of the horror to come on a September morning early in the next millennium, Ferguson offers up a documentary that is provocative, engaging, maddening and altogether spectacular television.

A professional contrarian -- he has written one book contending that World War I would have ended relatively quickly and happily if the British had stayed out of it and let Germany win, another arguing for a modern American empire -- Ferguson has been jabbing his thumb in the eyes of his fellow historians for years. And now he has expanded his target to the entire American television audience.

As he implies in the title, Ferguson argues that World Wars I and II and the Cold War that followed were not separate conflicts motivated by competing ideologies but one long struggle between the Judeo-Christian West and the Asiatic East, triggered by economic derangement and fueled mostly by racism. Notions of good guys and bad guys are nonsensical, in Ferguson's view; even World War II ``was a war between evil and lesser evil.''

A bit of this is obvious -- clearly the ascendance of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin has roots in both the Great Depression and the geopolitical rubble of World War I. Some is arguable. Certainly the moral compromises in the World War II alliance of the United States and Great Britain with the Soviet Union, a dictatorship built on political terror and slave labor, have been little explored by historians.

As Ferguson notes, within weeks of liberating Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe, Stalin began filling them with his own political opponents. ''In order to defeat an enemy they routinely denounced as barbaric, the Western powers had made common cause with an ally that was morally little better, just more ruthlessly effective at waging total war,'' he observes.

Even so, no sane person can doubt that an Allied victory in World War II was vastly superior to a world ruled by Adolf Hitler. Like most sweeping theories of history, The War of the World is an engine speeding along the track in hopes that you won't get too close a look at some of the rickety boxcars behind it.

Not all wars are born of economic desperation: World War I broke out in the midst of the giddy prosperity preceding the Great Depression, the Cold War during one of the greatest economic booms in American history.

And much of what Ferguson labels racism is something else altogether. The hideous atrocities committed by the Japanese against Chinese and other Asians during World War II can hardly be labeled ''racist'' when both victims and perpetrators were Oriental. Likewise, all the parties warring upon one another during the 1990s in the charred remains of Yugoslavia -- Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians -- were racially indistinguishable.

But no matter how violently you disagree with Ferguson's overall conclusions, The War of the World (which is a three-hour PBS distillation of a six-episode series that appeared on British television) is an exhilarating ride. Ferguson's piquant narration combines with a breathtaking collection of archival film to push the show into something approaching intellectual overload. From the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to slave laborers on frozen Siberian steppes to American troops murdering Japanese POWs, the newsreel images tumble in a cascade that's no less arresting for all its ugliness. And even if you want to smack him occasionally, it's hard to resist a host who explains American victory in the Cold War by snapping, ``It was the economy, stupid!''