Carnage and Culture:
Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
Victor Davis Hanson (Doubleday, September 2001, 492 pp., $29.95)
Reviewed by J. Clements
Military
history must never stray from the tragic story killing
Victor D. Hanson
The general public itself is
mostly unaware of their cultures own singular and continuous lethality in
arms
for the past 2,500 years
there has been a peculiar practice of Western
warfare, a common foundation and continual way of fighting that has made Europeans the
most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.
So begins an early portion of this unique and forceful book that goes far beyond
the suggestion of its humble title. The work
will be of particular interest to students of historical fencing studies as it provides a
unique perspective on the military tradition underlying our entire Western martial
heritage.
Victor Hanson offers a lively,
highly readable and controversial view of Western military tradition as being a direct
offshoot of the values inherent in Western civilization.
The central lesson of the book is how The Wests rise to
dominance was not an accident. Its military prowess over the centuries has been the result
of "larger social, economic, political, and cultural practices that themselves
seemingly have little to do with war. Professor
Hanson argues convincingly that we possess a long standing Western cultural stance
toward rationalism, free inquiry, and the dissemination of knowledge that has its roots in
classical antiquity. He states his case
unapologetically, relating that while most historians admit of a European dominance
in arms from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, fewer profess that since its creation
the West has enjoyed martial advantages over its adversaries or that such dominance
is based not merely on superior weaponry but on cultural dynamism itself.
The book presents its material by
selecting nine important battles that Hanson chooses to present larger ideas about the
nature of Western civilization and its cultural values in contrast to Asia, Africa,
and South America, in order to explain Why the West Has Won. He uses these to address larger questions as to
why Europeans colonized Asian and Africa, and the Americas and not vice versa, and why
Western values especially in the realm of military science have proven their
worth and now dominate the world.
The dramatic European
expansion of the sixteenth century may well have been energized by western excellence in
firearms and capital ships, but those discoveries were themselves the product of a
long-standing Western approach to applied capitalism, science, and rationalism not found
in other cultures. Thus, the
sixteenth-century military renaissance was a reawakening of Western dynamism. It is better to call it a
transformation in the manifestation of European battlefield superiority that
had existed in the classical world for a millennium and was never entirely lost even
during the darkest days of the Dark Ages. The
Military Revolution, then, was no accident, but logical given the Hellenic
origins of European civilization.
Central to his thesis is the idea of individualism and civic
militarism ideas of which were spawned exclusively in ancient Greece (and their
ancillaries consensual government, civilian audit, free speech, dissent, and market
economics). As a classical scholar, Hanson
misses no opportunity (sometimes repetitively so) to somehow relate every facet of history
back to the ancient Greeks. From here he
stresses the importance of a traditional Western way of war founded upon the
concepts of shock infantry and battle of annihilation (this was in fact the very title of
his earlier work on ancient Greek warfare).
Hansons presents a view not
often encountered of the resilience and lethality of the West that makes
perfect sense. The basis of the book is that
In battles against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the new World, tribal and
imperial alike, there is a shared legacy over centuries that allowed Europeans and
Americans to win in a consistent and deadly manner or to be defeated on rare
occasions only when the enemy embraced their own military organization, borrowed their
weapons, or trapped them far from home. To
this he concludes From the fighting of early Greece to the wars of the entire
twentieth century, there is a certain continuity of European military practice
.this
heritage of the Western war is not found in its entirety elsewhere, nor does it begin
earlier than the Greeks. And that the military affinities in Western war
making across time and space from the Greeks to the present are uncanny, enduring, and too
often ignored.
Hansons real talent as a
historian is his way of presenting cold facts in a brutal no-nonsense manner that still
manages to instill excitement and appreciation to the reader for the humanity involved
without losing the larger picture. The book
offers ten chapters beginning with the crucial naval battle of Salamis in 480 BC where a
vastly out numbered Greek fleet decimated a Persian armada to essentially save Western
civilization. Next he contrast the armies,
methods, and motives between East and West as exemplified in Alexanders victory over
the Persians at Gaugamela in 331 BC. He then
dissects the Roman defeat by Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC and manages to show how even
this was no set back. He then scrutinizes the
first battle of Poitiers in 732 AD where Western Europe was saved from the Moors by a
Frankish army. The most interesting chapter
is that on battle of Tenochtitlán during Cortezs conquest of the Aztecs in 1520. It will also be of the most interest to students
of Renaissance martial arts. Here Hanson
presents a wide range of sober facts deflate the popular view of noble Mexicas
simply being slaughtered by the guns, germs and steel of evil Conquistadors
and reveals the encounter as being at its core a conflict of cultures. Considerable material is presented that place
success on the frequently minimized importance of Spanish military skills and martial
prowess. The next chapter considers the
Mediterranean naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 between the Turks and an Euro-Italian
alliance. The details of the account provide
some of the most significant examples supporting Hansons thesis. Skipping ahead the work then analyzes the 1879
battle of Rorkes Drift during the Zulu war offering a number of observations. The battle of Midway in 1942 is then presented as
a further example of the fundamental difference between the Western way of war and that of
the rest of the planet, and how the element of cultural values plays such an important
role in how and why different peoples fight. Lastly,
he ends with an anatomy of the tactical victory but strategic failure of the 1968 Tet
offensive in the Vietnam war and how to a very large degree it characterizes the entire
conflict. He is also careful to point out (at
least toward the end) that The battles of this study are offered as representative
examples of general traits rather than absolute laws of military. They are episodes that reflect recurring themes,
not chapters in a comprehensive history of Western warfare.
Though historians and military experts
could surely debate ad nauseum the exceptions and minor details of his examples
(such as the case of the Mongols and Ottomans), as any good writer does, Hanson
generalizes in order to present the underlying fundamental elements with clarity. Indeed, at one point he specifically acknowledges,
Although important exceptions should always be noted, generalization so long
avoided by academics out of either fear or ignorance is indispensable in the writing
of history.
In many ways the work is a refutation of Jared Diamonds
Pulitzer Prize winning, Guns, Germs, and Steel, of which Hanson points out some of
the racism underlying Diamonds view. In
essence, Hansons view is that there is no clearer example of the differences in
ideas and values that form the basis of cultures than in the clash of between East and
West, specifically on the battlefield. Diamond,
a geographical determinist beloved by cultural-relativists, has argued that differences of
societies, technology, and successful civilizations can all be reduced to the luck of
where they first rooted (i.e., what crops and livestock the land supported, the topology
of their terrain, and what minerals were under their feet).
Following Diamonds theory, we could imagine that the results of
playing a good campaign of Sid Miers computer game Civilization would not be
determined by the ideas and wits of each individual players own stratagems and
decisions, but merely the random starting location each was given on the map. Anyone whos played the game at length knows
full well that just as in real life, given the available resources individual choices
affect the direction each culture takes. As
Hanson puts it early on: Land, climate, weather, natural resources, fate, luck, a
few rare individuals of brilliance, natural disaster, and more all these play their
role in the formation of a distinct culture, but it is impossible to determine exactly
whether man, nature, or chance is the initial catalyst for the origins of western
civilization. What is clear, however, is that
once developed, the West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural, and
political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation, and individual expression
than did other societies, which often were theocracies, centralized palatial dynasties, or
tribal unions.
He rightly points out that
historically, Western armies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as soldiers
everywhere, were often annihilated often lead by fools and placed in the wrong place
in the wrong war at the wrong time. But their
armies, for the cultural reasons this book has outlined, fought with a much greater margin
of error than did their adversaries. He
further contends Western armies enjoyed innate advantages that over the long
duration could offset the terrible effects of imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics,
strained supply lines, difficult terrain, and inferior numbers or a simple bad
day. These advantages were immediate
and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of
a distant past.
Professor Hansons thesis rings truer in light of recent events
post 9/11, where we witnessed Afghanistan, the so-called graveyard of Empires
collapse in a matter of weeks in the face of overwhelming technological might and brute
firepower of the worlds ultimate Western military force. Further, the current clash of
civilizations only plays out the next chapter of Hansons clear-sighted and
remarkable book celebrating the age old and arrogant Western idea that nothing is
inexplicable to the god Reason.
Because serious military history is often a weak spot among
practitioners of Medieval and Renaissance fencing and has been so overlooked in university
circles, indeed, even dismissed as not politically correct, Professor
Hansons highly original work is a timely and very welcome beacon of light. This book is highly recommended for anyone
interested in Historical European martial arts. It
particularly agreed with me as it presented ideas I had either long suspected or
previously concluded on my own. It even
reflects the germ of an idea I actually closed my 98 Medieval Swordsmanship book
with, that our Western martial heritage is very much alive and well and all around us, but
in different forms than chivalric armored knights and cavalier musketeers. Even if you end up questioning his conclusions,
you will not easily dismiss the strength of his ideas.
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