Chapter 18 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of totalitarian states on the left and the right and the march toward humanity’s most horrific acts of self-destruction and “urbicide” during World War II. The chapter begins with a section on the promising urban gender, sexual, and racial revolutions of the 1920s that opened up new urban spaces of pleasure and expression for many people who had lived far more circumscribed roles before. Nonetheless, totalitarians found ways to leverage many different urban spaces into power. They rebuilt cities to strengthen their grip, then to arm themselves for a war of annihilation. New facilities devoted to drilling for petroleum, transporting it, and refining it became central to the course of the war. Acts of mass imprisonment, torture, and racial extermination led to the construction of some of world history’s most horrific built spaces. Meanwhile, the aerial bombing of cities and civilian neighborhoods became routine, culminating in fire bombings and the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The instalment of genocide as the “crime of crimes” marked a turning point in the centuries-old language of transgression: now only mass criminality motivated by race-hatred that resembled its archetype, the Holocaust, shocked the “conscience of mankind.” This depoliticization had momentous consequences for the visibility of permanent security. Now only illiberal permanent security – embodied by the Axis powers that disgraced themselves in the Second World War – counted as seriously criminal. Practices of liberal permanent security were not so shocking, notwithstanding the postwar peace movement’s attempt to link Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The most dramatic decades are mid-1960s to the early 1980s when scholars and activists who excoriated the US bombing and counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam, and its nuclear weapons program. At issue were the notions of “national security” and “military necessity,” the watchwords of the juggernaut they called the US “national security state.”