Attitude Adjustment - Beyond delusions of grandeur.
The battle of the Lechfeld, which was fought on a rainy Friday in August of A.D. 955,
does not figure in any of those books describing the most decisive or most significant
battles in world history — books by historians like Edward Creasy or our own Vic
Hanson. This is a shame, and a bit unfair, but understandable. Lechfeld was decisive,
very decisive, but it was decisive only for one small and inconsequential nation:
Hungary. Even if not of any great moment to the world at large, though, the battle of the
Lechfeld deserves a chapter all to itself in the annals of Attitude Adjustment.
The Hungarians had first showed up in Europe some decades earlier as
marauders from the east. Brilliant horsemen, sweeping across the
landscape with terrible swiftness on their light steppe ponies,
overwhelming the clumsy knights of early-medieval Europe with thick
showers of arrows, they terrorized the continent from the late 9th
century on. Gibbon speaks of "the black swarm of the Hungarians," and
some scholars think that the word "ogre" originates in the old Slavic
word Ugri, meaning "Hungarian." Another historian, writing of the
situation in Europe round about A.D. 900, says:
The unhappy condition of the West at the time is well shown
in the history of Burgundy, a state which would appear to be
comparatively inaccessible, but which within half a century
was raped by Viking, Moslem and Magyar in turn.
["Magyar" is the Hungarian word for "Hungarian".]
Well, in summer of 955 the Hungarian army was enjoying a razzia
through southern Germany, in support of the enemies of the German
king, Otto the First. Unfortunately for them, Otto was a great general,
while their own leader — he rejoiced in the name of "Bloody Bulcsu"
— was a mediocre one. Otto met the Hungarians at the Lechfeld in Bavaria and, after a
bitter all-day battle, routed them. According to national legend, only seven soldiers got
back to Hungary alive, out of an initial host of 40,000. (Otto's army was only half the
size, making his feat even more impressive.) "The loss of the Hungarians was greater in
the flight than in the action," says Gibbon, "and their past cruelties excluded them from
the hope of mercy."
After Lechfeld, the Hungarians abruptly stopped raiding and settled down to farm the
Pannonian plain. Forty years later, their great king Stephen embraced the Cross, and the
transformation of the savage Magyar horde into the Christian Kingdom of Hungary was
complete. Attitude adjustment, see?
History contains many other instances of attitude adjustment, of course. The Roman
conquest of Britain occurred, in theory, with the fall of Colchester in A.D. 43; but it
was not a fact until the crushing of Boudicca's rebellion 17 years later, with a "butcher's
bill" in six digits. Only then did the British adjust their attitude and become good
citizens of Rome. More familiar to Americans are Sherman's "pacification" of the
South, and the thorough and devastating defeats of Germany and Japan in WWII. In
every case, those who had suffered bloody and catastrophic defeat were thereby
persuaded to give up a fight they saw all too clearly they could not win, and adjusted
their attitude to deal with the new reality.
All of which came to mind, of course, as a result of reading daily news and comment
about the Middle East this past two weeks. My personal approach to Middle East
commentary is that in a matter as deep, fraught, and tangled as this, it is not a bad idea
to see what really well-credentialed commentators have to say. Now, I don't mean to
imply that such pundits are going to be infallibly correct. Seriously well-credentialed
people are often seriously wrong. It was not — or not just — amateur bloviators who
failed to foresee the collapse of the USSR; plenty of experts got it wrong, too. Some
extremely well-credentialed persons screwed up the Vietnam War, "lost China,"
slumbered through the later months of 1941, failed to come up with anything to fix the
Great Depression, and so on. Still, other things being equal, you are considerably more
likely to gain genuine understanding from reading Professor Polyglot than from surfing
the thoughts of Billy Blogger.
In re the Middle East, hardly anybody is better credentialed than Walter Laqueur. A
bibliography published on Laqueur's 65th birthday in 1986 ran to 66 pages — and that
only covered English-language publications, and omitted a full decade's worth of daily
journalism. Laqueur has written a shelf full of books on European history, the Middle
East, Zionism, terrorism, Soviet affairs, U.S. foreign policy, and so on. This man is, in
short, a heavy hitter. (He is currently cochairman of the International Research Council
of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.) So what does this seriously
well-credentialed person have to say about the current Mideast situation? Well, in the
op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal on March 27th, Walter Laqueur unburdened
himself. Key passage:
However inhuman it sounds, the conflict will have to run its course, until both
sides have suffered up to and past their breaking point. Only then will there
be a willingness to compromise. At the moment, any outside attempt to stop
the fighting will not succeed, or will do so only for a very short time.
I think there is some weakness of logic there. Surely it is not necessary for both sides to
suffer "up to and past their breaking point"? So long as just one of them reaches that
point, the conflict is over. And whether a "willingness to compromise" will follow,
depends (it seems to me) on which side that is. If the Israelis reach that breaking point
first, then Israel will be destroyed, and her people killed or scattered, for the third time
in history. If the Arabs reach it first, then they will undergo attitude adjustment. That is,
they will awaken from their delusions of grandeur to perceive the dismal failure of their
societies in this modern age. Then they will embrace the Cross... Well (and with all
respect to Ann Coulter), that is surely too much to hope for; but they will at least
embrace constitutional politics and rational economics.
Which one of these eventualities will come to pass, I don't pretend to know. At this
point, either seems possible. Israel, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is losing the
demographic battle, and labors under all the disadvantages that a modern democracy
has when dealing with amoral, unprincipled guerillas supplied from a hinterland of
hostile states. On the other hand, the more I learn about the modern Arabs, the more vast
and hopeless appears the failure of their societies — political failure, cultural failure,
economic failure, and military failure. Numbers alone don't decide these issues when
the systemic gap is wide enough. In the Opium Wars, a few hundred British sailors,
working at the end of five-month lines of communication, humbled the Chinese Empire,
population over 300 million. Even as the Arabs are pulling ahead in numbers, they are
sinking ever deeper into despotism and spiritual squalor. (The current flowering of
Islamic fundamentalism is a symptom of that squalor, not a remedy for it.) I wouldn't
personally bet any money on the final outcome of the Arab-Israeli struggle.
"The conflict will have to run its course... any outside attempt to stop the fighting will
not succeed, or will do so only for a very short time." It seems a cruel thing to say —
yes, an "inhuman" thing — but I believe Laqueur is right on this central point. Attitudes
in the Middle East will not adjust until there has been a Lechfeld, a march through
Georgia, a Berlin, a Tokyo (God help us, please, not a Hiroshima). All the "peace
process" machinations, all the diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing, all the "shuttle diplomacy"
busyness is just putting off the evil day. Current U.S. policy — jumping in like a
nervous referee to stop the fight as soon as blood is drawn — just postpones the
necessary attitude adjustment, and ensures that the eventual great clash will be more
horrible.
— Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor |
