In one of my earlier postings I stated that war was a purifying agent, that burned out impurities and hardened a people and a society. All of that is true. War "resets" the game board with new countries, peoples and political dynamics. It redefines an age. Just look at pre-Napoleonic Europe and post-Napoleonic Europe for a good example. On a large, societal scale, war is as necessary as the forest fires are in the American Western forests to maintain a healthy society. On the individual scale, war can be a tragedy of the most heart-rending kind. Fathers and mothers separated from children for years, sometimes separated by the veil of death. Divorce, suicide, the loss of children. In some cases, though, war is a cathartic. It shows an individual what they are capable of, it redefines the individual. The Iowa farm boy who went off to WWI and WWII would never have seen the world had they not gone off to war. They would not have been the bold, and sometimes fearless politicians, or policemen that they eventually became. They may have stayed on that farm like others had for generations and our culture and society would have been poorer for that. You just never know how you will be affected. Hemingway drank, was moody, and was my generational shadow that called themselves the "lost" generation because of how many of them died in WWI. Another, such as Sergeant York, was that simple farm boy who won the Medal of Honor for killing or capturing an entire company of German soldiers single-handedly. His advice was incorporated into the training manuals for generations to come.
Humanity is at is best and its worst when it is at war. Technology advances at its fasted rate when a nation is at war. Ideas become possibilities when a nations priorities are rearranged by the reality of survival. I make no personal judgments on war other than to make observations. It is neither good nor bad, it simply is. It is a reality of where we came from and who we are. At the biological level, we are predators. Predators that use our mind and tools to dominate rather than fangs, claws and hide. Tribes became stronger because they won more fights than they lost with their neighbors for resources and land. Earlier empires survived because they could hold the barbarians off and raid them when they needed more manpower (i.e. slaves). Our entire climb through the ages is written in blood and conquest. Accept it. The only thing that has really changed is our technological ability to kill off more people, more quickly, and more precisely. More humans lost their lives to war and its secondary effects (disease, starvation, and politically motivated murder) in the 20th century than in any single century prior and yet we were at our most enlightened and "civilized" state at that time. There must then be no logical correlation between cultural sophistication and the presence or absence of war.
Now, on to a few of the sayings I mentioned earlier.
Tacitus wrote, in the early Imperial decades of the new Roman Empire (since the Republic had been cast off): "They make a desert, and call it peace." He was referring to the Roman habit of utterly destroying resistance to their rule of occupied territory. The Romans wanted a stable territory that paid its taxes and contributed to the glory of their Empire. In the Roman Republic, leaders would typically leave a conquered territories leaders, religion, and cultural practices in place, as long as that area paid its taxes and enforced Roman law (like the Federal government perched atop the States' governments). After 500 years of this, they realized that this did not always work. It allowed local tribesmen to gain power and influence that almost always lead to rebellion. Gaul, Judea, and Greece are good examples to look up. By Tacitus' time, the leaders of the Empire realized that if a territory rose up once, then it would rise up again. They had neither the time nor the patience to peacefully integrate a people through shared trade and culture. After the second uprising by the Jews, they were smashed utterly. Their capital city practically wiped off the map and their people scattered to the winds. Carthage got three or four chances to rebel until finally, as the Republic was learning its lessons, it razed the city so completely that modern historians had to search for it again. Its men killed and sold into slavery, its women handed over to the soldiers as war pay. The ruthlessness of the Roman Empire allowed it to survive because it utterly removed the ability of a people to rebel against them. Eventually, internal rebellions, economic and cultural decay pulled the Western portion of the empire down, but never an internal war of cultural independence.
Asimov wrote in one of his Science Fiction collections (one of my favorite), "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". From a purely philosophical point of view I can understand this. However, reality marks this statement as irrelevant. It is not intellect that will necessarily allow you to avoid violence, but the quality of your weapons and your ability to wage and win wars that will allow you to survive that violence. Good examples of this are the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, and the Egyptians. Around 1,200 b.c., there was a huge migration of peoples out of central Asia and Europe that pressed into the civilized regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Near East, and Northern Africa (the Indian sub-continent was ravaged at this time as well). Until that time, you had a thriving Greek culture (pre-Doric) that gave us the myth of the Minotaur, the Trojan War, and the Greek pantheon of gods. The cities of Sparta, Athens, and many others existed at this time, but were vastly different in almost every way than they would be in 500 years. In Anatolia (modern day Turkey), there were the Hittites, the first to successfully forge Iron and its alloys. Modern swords and weapons were being produced by these people. In Egypt we had an incredibly old and sophisticated civilization by this time with a standard of living beyond anything else in the world. This mass migration out of Europe and Asia was nearly the end of it all. The Mycenaean Greeks were unable to reason with the invaders and were nearly blotted from history. The Hittites, despite their superior swords, were swamped by superior numbers, their culture being nearly forgotten. Only the Egyptians managed to hang on and even then just barely. It is this invasion that is mentioned in the Christian bible by the then-captive Jews. The invasion crushed their homeland in Judea anyhow, so being in Egypt was likely a good thing at this time, however, I digress.
It was a time of unimaginable suffering. The old ways of everything had been swept away and the new ways were still being re-written. Athens and Sparta arose again as the polar capitals of the Greek world. Mycenae had to be re-discovered by archeologists. This invasion in Greece would eventually lead to the Golden Age of Hellenic thought and discovery. If not for the bloodshed, Western Civilization might never be (we can talk about Persia and their wars against Greece later). The Hittites were destroyed utterly. The area was unable to organize itself again and fell under Greek, Egyptian, and Eastern influences. The Egyptians were changed by this experience. Their culture and Empire had been decaying for centuries and this invasion gave them a new vitality that kept them going until the time of Alexander the Great and the coming of the Roman Empire.
The political and historical maps had been re-drawn. People found a newer, better peace and way of life. None of that would have been possible if those cultures had been allowed to stagnate. War and Peace, the yin and yang of our predatory evolution.
More modern examples of this abound aplenty, though I will pick a few to describe. The American Civil War was fought more about individual State's rights than it was about Slavery. It was the fact that the Southern states wanted to decide for themselves when to emancipate the slaves and not when a central government, dominated by Northerners told them. Slavery was a byproduct of the larger argument over State's Rights. Southerners call the Civil War, the War for Southern Independence. As you know, it did not work out that way. Had the Constitution been amended to allow for States to break away, then the war could have been avoided. Slavery would have eventually been abolished, of that I am sure, but when and how would have been vastly different. The North would have far fewer citizens of black heritage living in the urban cities today, the South would have more. There would not be the sense of victim-hood that permeates the black culture today. America would be a nation divided, with different political parties, priorities and realities. How would WWI and WWII have turned out without the combined energies of a true United States? It was the Civil War that permitted the United States to turn the tide in both of those wars. In Korea and Vietnam we have good examples of what happens when one side desires peace and the other side desires conquest. In Korea, we had the resolve to at least maintain the status quo. Millions of North and South Koreans died in the conflict, as well as millions of Chinese. Nearly 54,000 Americans perished in the fighting as well. Today, because we chose the "incompetent" route, according to Asimov, South Korea has a flourishing culture and economy. Its people enjoy a first rate standard of living while their Northern counterparts still starve to death because they are not permitted to grow enough food to feed themselves. Their night skies are dark for lack of power to light them while the South can be seen clearly from orbit. In Vietnam, the hippy-Boomers pulled us out of the war without allowing us to win it, or at least force a stalemate (as in Korea). The Boomers wanted peace, love, and happiness...but only for Americans. The result of our withdrawal lead to reprisals, exterminations, and misery for decades. Millions died, were killed, or displaced in the resulting Communist solidification of control. In the name of Peace, the Hippies created Hell. Today, Vietnam is adopting a more market-centered economy, less centrally planned and with a growing world trade. In other words, by 2010, the country has given up nearly everything it fought the Japanese, French, and American occupiers for. Perhaps the right of self-determination can been seen as one freedom they were able win, but at a horrific cost. Think about this. The communists wanted total control over the civilians, the economy, and everything else. Today, the communist rulers (as in China), find themselves forced to allow more freedom of choice in everything. What was the fighting for? Was all that death and deprivation worth it? If Vietnam had permitted the United States to accomplish its mission there, they would have had everything they were fighting for by 1965, not 2010. How much better would they be now if that had happened? Makes you think.
War has given us iron tools, roads, organization, nuclear power, GPS, the Internet (yes, folks, the Internet was invented by the US military), computers, space flight, and microwave ovens. There has always been a price paid in blood along the way, but those that remained had better standards of living and new technological and cultural avenues to explore. War has kept us from stagnating and has swept away those institutions that no longer served a useful purpose. It has allowed us to advance and remain healthy; as a people and a culture. America does not start wars, but we certainly do finish them (except for Vietnam and eventually as in the case of Iraq).
The sun rises higher over the Stoa and it is time to begin a productive day. Think long and hard over what was discussed here. Do not be rash and emotional, but contemplative and honest. With walking stick in hand, I depart.
--Zavost
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