WHY THE WEST HAS WON (and will) Part 1
Freedom is the Ultimate Weapon
By Victor Davis Hanson
Even the plight of enterprising killers can tell us something. In the summer of 401 B.C., 10,700 Greek hoplite soldiers-infantrymen, heavily armed with spear, shield and body armor-were hired by Cyrus the Younger to help press his claim to the Persian throne.
The recruits were mostly battle-hardened veterans of the 27-year Peloponnesian War, mustered from throughout the Greek-speaking world. Many were murderous renegades and exiles. Both near-adolescents and the still-hale in late middle age enlisted for pay. Large numbers were unemployed and desperate for lucrative work as killers in the exhausted aftermath of the internecine war that had nearly ruined the Greek world. Yet there were also a few privileged students of philosophy and oratory in the ranks, who would march into Asia side by side these destitute mercenaries-aristocrats like Xenophon, student of Socrates, and Proxenus, the Boeotian general, as well as physicians, professional officers, would-be colonists and wealthy friends of Prince Cyrus.
After a successful eastward march of more than 1,500 miles that scattered all opposition, the Greeks smashed the royal Persian line at Cunaxa, north of Babylon. The price for destroying an entire wing of the Persian army was a single Greek hoplite wounded by an arrow. The victory of the Ten Thousand, however, was wasted when their employer, Cyrus, rashly pursued his brother, Artaxerxes, across the battle line and was cut down by the Persian imperial guard.
Suddenly confronted by a host of enemies and hostile former allies, stranded far from home without money, guides, provisions or the would-be king, lacking ample cavalry or missile troops, the orphaned Greek infantrymen nevertheless voted not to surrender. Instead, they prepared to fight their way back to the Greek world. That brutal trek northward to the shores of the Black Sea forms the centerpiece of Xenophon's Anabasis ("The March Up-Country"), the author himself one of the leaders of the retreating Ten Thousand.
Though surrounded enemies, their generals captured and beheaded, forced to traverse the contested lands of more than twenty different peoples, caught in snowdrifts, high mountain passes and waterless steppes, suffering frostbite, malnutrition and frequent sickness, the Greeks nevertheless reached the safety of the Black Sea largely intact, less than a year and a half after leaving home. They had routed every hostile Asian force in their way. Five out of six made it out alive, the majority of the dead lost not in battle, but in the high snows of Armenia.
During their ordeal, the Ten Thousand were dumbfounded by the Taochians, whose women and children jumped off high cliffs in a ritual mass suicide. They found the barbaric white-skinned Mossynoecians, who engaged in sexual intercourse openly in public, equally baffling. The Chalybians traveled with the heads of their slain opponents. Even the royal army of Persia appeared strange; its pursuing infantry, sometimes whipped on by their officers, fled at the first onslaught of the Greek phalanx.
What ultimately strikes the reader of the Anabasis is not merely the courage, skill and brutality of the Greek army-which after all had no business in Asia, other than killing and money-but the vast cultural divide between the Ten Thousand and the brave tribes they fought. Where else in the Mediterranean would philosophers and students of rhetoric march in file alongside cutthroats to crash headlong into enemy flesh? Where else would every man under arms feel equal to anyone else in the army-or at least see himself as free and in control of his own destiny? What other army of the ancient world elected its own leaders? And how could such a small force led by an elected committee navigate thousands of miles home amid thousands of hostile enemies?
Technological superiority does not in itself explain the miraculous Greek achievement, although Xenophon at various places suggests that the Ten Thousand's heavy bronze, wood and iron panoply was unmatched by anything found in Asia. There is no evidence either that the Greeks were by nature "different" from King Artaxerxes' men. The later pseudoscientific notion that the Europeans were racially superior to the Persians was entertained by no Greeks of the time. Although they were mercenary veterans and bent on booty and theft, the Ten Thousand were no more savage or warlike than other raiders and plunderers of the time; much less were they kinder or more moral people than the Asian tribes they met. Greek religion did not put a high premium on turning the other cheek or on a belief that war per se was either abnormal or amoral. Differences in climate, geography and natural resources tell us equally little. In fact, Xenophon's men could only envy the inhabitants of Asia Minor, whose arable land and natural wealth were in dire contrast to their poor soil back in Greece. Indeed, their leaders warned that any Greeks who stayed might become lethargic "Lotus-Eaters" in so wealthier a natural landscape.
The Anabasis makes it clear, however, that the Greeks fought much differently than their adversaries and that those unique characteristics of battle-a sense of personal freedom, superior discipline, matchless weapons, egalitarian camaraderie, individual initiative, constant tactical adaptation and flexibility, a preference for the shock battle of heavy infantry-were themselves the murderous dividends of Hellenic culture at large. The peculiar way Greeks killed grew out of consensual government, equality among the middling classes, civilian audit of military affairs and politics apart from religion, freedom and individualism and rationalism. The ordeal of the Ten Thousand, when stranded and near extinction, brought out the polis that was innate in all Greek soldiers, who then conducted themselves on campaign precisely as civilians in their respective city-states.
In some form or another, the Ten Thousand would be followed by equally brutal European intruders on the rest of the world's landscapes: Agesilaus and his Spartans, Chares the mercenary captain, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and centuries of legionary dominance, the Crusaders, Hernán Cortés, Portuguese explorers in Asiatic seas, British redcoats in India and Africa and scores of other thieves, buccaneers, colonists, mercenaries, imperialists and explorers. Most subsequent Western expeditionary forces were outnumbered and often deployed far from home. Nevertheless, they outfought their numerically superior enemies, and in varying degrees drew on elements of Western culture mercilessly to slaughter their opponents.
CULTURE WAR
In the long history of European military practice, it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army was another Western army. Few Greeks were killed stopping the Persians at Marathon; thousands died at Nemea and Coronea, where Greek fought Greek. The latter Persian Wars saw relatively few Greek deaths; the Peloponnesian War was a bloodbath. Alexander himself killed more Europeans in Asia than did the hundreds of thousands of Persians under Darius III. The Roman Civil Wars nearly ruined the republic, in a way that even Hannibal had not. Waterloo, the Somme and Omaha Beach only confirm the holocaust that occurs when Westerner meets Westerner.
Indeed, the story of military dynamism in our world is ultimately an investigation into the prowess of Western arms. Some will find that assertion chauvinistic, or worse, and cite every exception from Thermopylae to Little Big Horn in refutation. The general public itself is mostly unaware of their culture's singular and continuous lethality in arms. Yet 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.
I am not interested here in whether European military culture is morally superior to, or far more wretched than, that of the non-West. The conquistadors, who put an end to human sacrifice and torture on the Great Pyramid in Mexico City, sailed from a society reeling from the Grand Inquisition and the ferocious Reconquista, and left a diseased and nearly ruined New World in their wake. I am also less concerned in ascertaining the righteousness of particular wars-whether a murderous Pizarro in Peru (who calmly announced, "The time of the Inca is over") was better or worse than his murdering Inca enemies, whether India suffered enormously or benefited modestly from English colonization, or whether the Japanese had good cause to bomb Pearl Harbor or the Americans to incinerate Tokyo. My curiosity in this particular discussion is not with Western man's heart of darkness, but with his ability to fight-specifically, how his military prowess reflects larger social, economic, political and cultural practices that themselves seemingly have little to do with war.
Why should we concentrate on a few hours of battle and the fighting experience of the average soldier, and not on the epic sweep of wars, with their cargo of grand strategy, tactical maneuver and vast theater operations that so much better lend themselves to social and cultural exegesis? Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing, which is ultimately found only in battle. The culture in which militaries fight determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men are alive or rotting after their appointed hour of battle. Abstractions like capitalism or civic militarism are hardly abstract at all when it comes to battle, but rather concrete realities. And those are what ultimately determined whether at Lepanto twenty-year-old Turkish peasants survived or were harpooned by the thousand, whether Athenian cobblers and tanners could return home in safety after doing their butchery at Salamis or were to wash up in chunks on the shores of Attica.
There is an inherent truth in battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory. Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying. As observers as diverse as Aldous Huxley and John Keegan have pointed out, to write of conflict is not to describe merely the superior rifles of imperial troops or the matchless edge of the Roman gladius, but ultimately the collision of a machine-gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul. It is no accident that gifted writers of war-from Homer, Thucydides, Caesar, Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy to Stephen Runciman, James Jones and Stephen Ambrose-equate tactics with blood and strategy with corpses. How can we write of larger cultural issues that surround war without describing the way in which young men kill and die, without remembering how many thousands are robbed of their youth, their robust physiques turned into goo in a few minutes on the battlefield?
We owe it to the dead to discover at all costs how the practice of government, science, law and religion instantaneously determines the fate of thousands on the battlefield-and why. During the 1990-91 Gulf War, the designer of an American smart bomb, the assembler in its plant of fabrication, the logistician who ordered, received, stockpiled and loaded it onto a jet, all functioned in a manner unlike their Iraqi opposites-if there were such exact counterparts-and so ensured that an innocent conscript in Saddam Hussein's army would find himself blown to pieces with little chance to escape the attack, display heroism in his demise or kill the pilot who killed him. Why Iraqi adolescents were targets in the flashing video consoles of sophisticated American helicopters and not vice versa, or why GIs from icy Minnesota were better equipped to fight in the desert than recruits from nearby sweltering Baghdad, is mostly a result of cultural heritage, not military courage, much less an accident of geography or genes. War is ultimately killing. Its story becomes absurd when the wages of death are ignored.
In battle, the insidious and more subtle cultural institutions that heretofore were murky and undefined become stark and unforgiving. No other culture but the West could have brought such discipline, morale and sheer technological expertise to the art of killing as did the Europeans at the insanity of Verdun-a sustained industrial approach to slaughter unlike even the most horrific tribal massacre. No American Indian tribe or Zulu impi could have marshaled, supplied, armed-and have killed and replaced-hundreds of thousands of men for months on end, for the rather abstract political cause of a nation-state. The most gallant Apaches-murderously brave in raiding and skirmishing on the Great Plains-would have gone home after the first hour of Gettysburg.
By the same token, there was little chance that the American government in the darkest days of December 1941-Britain on the ropes, the Nazis outside Moscow, the Japanese in the air over Hawaii-would have ordered thousands of its own pilots to crash themselves into Admiral Yamamoto's vast carrier fleet or commanded B-17s to plunge into German oil refineries. In battle alone we receive a glimpse of the larger reasons precisely why and how men kill and die. Those reasons are hard to disguise and harder still to ignore.
CAPITALISM KILLS
A century ago, the British historian Sir Edward Creasy wrote of Alexander's victory at Gaugamela that it "not only overthrew an Oriental dynasty, but established European rulers in its stead. It broke the monotony of the Eastern world by the impression of Western energy and superior civilization, even as England's present mission is to break up the mental and moral stagnation of India and Cathay by pouring upon and through them the impulsive current of Anglo-Saxon commerce and conquest." Nearly everything in that statement is false, except for one indisputable phrase: "Western energy." England was in India, India not in England. Alexander's brigands were hardly emissaries of culture and went east to loot and plunder, not to "civilize." But they killed without dying because of a military tradition that for centuries prior had proved unlike any other in the ancient world.
Although an army's organization, discipline and arms can surely magnify or whittle down the martial spirit of a man, bravery nonetheless is a more universal human characteristic and so tells us little. Europeans were intrinsically no smarter or braver than the Africans, Asians and Native Americans whom they usually butchered. The Aztec warriors who were blown to bits by Cortés's cannon or the Zulus who were shattered by British Martini-Henry rifles at Rorke's Drift may have been the most courageous fighters in the history of warfare. The brave American pilots who blew up the Kaga at Midway were no more gallant than the brave Japanese who were engulfed in its flames below. What trumps courage, however, is culture, which determines how militaries are armed, supplied, organized and disciplined.
Outwardly, whether Iraqis fight Iranians or Somalians battle Ethiopians, the world's regular armies are now almost identical in their Western khaki, camouflage and boots. Companies, brigades and divisions-the successors to Roman military practice-are the global standards of military organization. Chinese tanks look European; African machine guns have not evolved beyond American models; and Asian jets have not incorporated new propulsion systems with a radically novel Korean or Cambodian way of producing thrust. If a Third World autocrat buys weapons from China, India, or Brazil, he does so only because these countries can copy and provide Western-designed weapons more cheaply than the West itself. Indigenous armies in Vietnam and Central America have had success against Europeans-but largely to the degree that they were supplied with automatic weapons, high explosives and ammunition produced to Western specifications.
Some critics of the idea of Western military predominance point to the easy transference of technology. American natives, they point out, became better shots than European settlers. Moroccans quickly mastered Portuguese artillery. But such arguments have the paradoxical effect of proving the opposite of what is intended: Englishmen were in the New World and selling guns to natives, not vice versa. Moroccans were not in Lisbon teaching Portuguese the arts of Islamic heavy gunnery.
The very question of Westernization has a reductionist and sometimes absurd quality about it: there is no concept of "Easternization" within the armed forces of the West, at least in which entire Western cultures adopt wholesale the military practices and technology of the non-West. Meditation, religion and philosophy are not the same as industrial production, scientific research and technological innovation. It matters little where a weapon was first discovered, but a great deal how it was mass-produced, constantly improved and employed by soldiers.
The critical point about firearms and explosives is not that they suddenly gave Western armies hegemony, but that such weapons were produced in quality and great numbers only in Western countries. That fact is ultimately explained by a long-standing Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry and the dissemination of knowledge, whose roots lie in classical antiquity and are not specific to any particular period of European history. 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.
But there is also something radically democratic about firearms in particular that explains their singularly explosive growth in the West. Guns destroy the hierarchy of the battlefield, marginalizing the wealthy mailed knight and rendering even the carefully trained bowman ultimately irrelevant. It is no accident that feudal Japan eventually found firearms revolutionary and dangerous. The Islamic world never developed the proper tactics of shooting in massed volleys, to accompany weapons that were so antithetical to the idea of personal bravery of the mounted warrior. The effective use of guns requires the marriage of rationalism and capitalism to ensure steady improvement in design, fabrication and production, but in addition an egalitarian tradition that welcomes rather than fears the entrance of lethal newcomers on the battlefield.
The dramatic European expansion of the 16th 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.
We should not expect to see precisely in Greek freedom, American liberty; in Greek democracy, English parliamentary government; or in the agora, Wall Street. The freedom that was won at Salamis is not entirely the same as what was ensured at Midway, much less as what was at stake at Lepanto or Tenochtitlán. All ideas are in part captives of their time and space, and much of ancient Greece today would seem foreign if not nasty to most Westerners. The polis would never have crafted a Bill of Rights; in the same manner, we would not turn our courts over to majority vote of mass juries without the right of appeal to a higher judiciary. The key is not to look to the past and expect to see the present, but to identify in history the seeds of change, and of the possible across time and space. Wall Street is much closer to the agora than to the palace at Persepolis. The Athenian court akin to us in a way pharaoh's and the sultan's law is not.
POLITICS BY BLOODIER MEANS
The Western way of war is so lethal precisely because it is so amoral-rarely shackled by concerns of ritual, tradition, religion or ethics, by anything other than military necessity. Western technology and science has not always been superior-Themistocles' triremes at Salamis were no better than Xerxes', and Admiral Nagumo's carriers at Midway had better planes than the Americans did. The status of freedom, individualism and civic militarism at those battles, however, was vastly different. And on nearly every occasion, it was not merely the superior weapons of European soldiers, but a host of other factors-organization, discipline, morale, initiative, flexibility and command-that led to Western advantages.
Western armies often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom. They are frequently products of civic militarism or constitutional governments, and thus are overseen by those outside religion and the military itself. Heavy infantry is also a particularly Western strength-not surprising when Western societies put a high premium on property, and land is often held by a wide stratum of society. Europeans have been quick to alter tactics, steal foreign breakthroughs and borrow inventions when in the marketplace of ideas their own traditional tactics and arms have been found wanting. Western capitalists and scientists alike have been singularly pragmatic and utilitarian, with little to fear from religious fundamentalists, state censors or stern cultural conservatives.
Western warring is often an extension of the idea of state politics, rather than a mere effort to obtain territory, personal status, wealth or revenge. Western militaries put a high premium on individualism. They are often subject to criticism and civilian complaint that may improve rather than erode their war-making ability. The idea of annihilation, of head-to-head battle that destroys the enemy, seems a particularly Western concept, largely unfamiliar to the ritualistic fighting and emphasis on deception and attrition found outside Europe. Westerners, in short, long ago saw war as a method of doing what politics cannot, and thus are willing to obliterate rather than check or humiliate any who stand in their way.
At various periods in Western history the above menu has not always been found in its entirety. Ideas from consensual government to religious tolerance are often ideal rather than modal values. Throughout most of Western civilization there have been countless compromises, as what was attained proved less than what Western culture professed as the most desirable. The Crusaders were religious zealots; many early European armies were monarchical, with only occasional oversight by deliberative bodies. It is hard to see in Cortés's small band religion and politics as entirely separate. Not a phalangite in Alexander's army voted him general, much less king. German tribesmen were ostensibly as individualistic as Roman legionaries.
Yet, abstract ideas must often be seen in the context of their times: while Alexander's Macedonians were revolutionaries who had destroyed Greek liberty, there was no escaping their ties with the Hellenic tradition. That shared heritage explains why soldiers in the phalanx, commanders in the fields and generals at Alexander's table all voiced their ideas with a freedom unknown in the Achaemenid court. While the Inquisition was an episode of Western fanaticism and at times unrestrained by political audit, the tally of its entire bloody course never matched the Aztec score of corpses in a mere four days at the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in 1487. Even on the most controversial of issues like freedom, consensual government and dissent, we must judge Western failings not through the lenses of utopian perfectionism of the present, but in the context of the global landscape of the times. Western values are absolute, but the methods of their implementation are also evolutionary, being perfect at neither their birth nor their adolescence.
I am not suggesting that the intrinsic characteristics of Western civilization predetermined European success on every occasion. Rather, Western civilization gave a spectrum of advantages to European militaries that allowed them a much greater margin of error and the ability to overcome tactical deficiencies-battlefield inexperience, soldierly cowardice, insufficient numbers, terrible generalship. Luck, individual initiative and courage, the brilliance of a Hannibal or Saladin, the sheer numbers of Zulu or Inca warriors-all on occasions could nullify Western inherent military superiority. Over time, however, the resiliency of the Western system of war prevailed, allowing horrible disasters from Thermopylae to Isandhlwana and Little Big Horn not to affect the larger course of the conflict or to lead to an overall Western collapse.
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