Carnage And Culture Book
Carnage And Culture Victor Davis Hanson

REVIEW ESSAY

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001). 492pp.

Carnage and culture: landmark battles in the rise of Western power by Hanson, Victor Davis. Publication date 2001 Topics Battles, Military history Publisher.
CARNAGE AND CULTURE: The Western Way of War with Victor Davis Hanson Wednesday, March 12, 2003 Is the culture of the West—the line of cultural tradition that connects modern America and Europe with ancient Greece and Rome—particularly lethal in war?
Culturally speaking, of course. Rather, that is the premise of Victor Davis Hanson’s interesting Carnage and Culture. Before I go on, let me stress the interesting, for I mean that in the very Confucian sense of the word. Hanson apes John Keegan’s Face of Battle in using a case study approach of selected battles to prove a larger point.
Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture.

Christopher Bassford, National War College (NDU), 2002

was really prepared to dislikethis book. At first glance, Hanson’s emphasis on culture looked suspiciouslylike the faux-anthropological nonsense John Keegan spouted in his AHistory of Warfare.*1 Also, I have found Hanson’sintense political partisanship in the popular press to be annoying, andthis is certainly an ideological tract in many respects. But, it turnsout, I do like the book a great deal, despite what many reviewers willno doubt see as its objectionably pro-Western chauvinism.

Mar 12, 2014 Victor David Hanson, in his book Carnage and Culture, examines battles from Salamis to Tet offensive and explains why the armies of the West have been the most deadly and effective fighting forces in the world. He looks beyond popular explanations and states that it is Western culture and values that produced better-quality arms and soldiers.

Partly that’s because I’m feeling pretty chauvinistic myself these days.But mostly I like the book because Hanson has forthrightly stated an argumentthat very much needed stating—not only to the general public (Hanson’sexplicit target) but to the historical profession itself. This is thethesis that Western military forces, since the classical Greeks but notbefore, have more-or-less consistently proven superior to non-Westernforces on land and sea because of certain cultural features—the occasionalCarrhae- or Little Bighorn-style disaster notwithstanding. That thesisis not really new, but this certainly is a timely moment to put it backon the table. Western culture has some unique qualities, with deep rootsand continuing importance, that have consistently made it militarily andpolitically superior to what Hanson darkly calls “the Other” over mostof the last 2500 years. After all, even in its moments of greatest weakness—duringthe post-Mycenaen and post-Roman dark ages—the Western core has neverbeen conquered by outsiders. “In the long history of military practice,it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western armyfor the past 2,500 years was another Western army.” (p5) Isandhlwana palesto insignificance in comparison to Verdun.

In some respects, this is an old-fashioned “Great Battles of World History”sort of book, with chapters on Salamis (480 BC), Gaugamela (331 BC), Cannae(216 BC), Poitiers (732), Tenochtitlán (1520-21), Lepanto (1571),Rorke’s Drift (1871), Midway (1942), and Tet (1968). But these commendablybrutal and unbowdlerized battle and campaign studies are merely vehiclesfor Hanson’s larger argument, so that is what I will focus on here. Hansonis brave enough to include as major elements in his study Western reverseslike Cannae and Isandhlwana. The inclusion of Cannae is a bit of a problem,however, since it is not at all clear that heavily Hellenized Carthagewas not itself part of the West. It might have been worthwhile to includeas well some major calamity that is less ambiguous in the context of thisbook, such as Manzikert, Mohacs, the Fall of Singapore, or Dien Bien Phu(though, to be fair, the latter two involve substantially Westernizedfoes as well). The cultural features Hanson credits include Western ideasof group and individual freedom; a fixation on decisive battle emphasizingthe shock collision of professional or semi-professional heavy infantry;“civic militarism” and the citizen-soldier ideal; a particularly Westernstyle of discipline, based not on fear of authority or on the heroic idealof individual bravery, but on a determination not to break formation andendanger one’s fellow citizens/soldiers; technological progressivenessand the market economics that helps it flourish; the dominance of rationalism(vice religion or superstition) in practical decision making; and traditionspermitting dissent, self-critique, and auditing of operations by elementsoutside the military and political leadership directly involved.

Perhaps the most important of these cultural features is the conceptof the free, self-sufficient citizen soldier first typified by the Greekhoplite—a notion that ultimately underlies many of the others. This concept,despite the de facto disappearance of such individuals from the commonsoldiery in certain periods, continued to have psychological power overthe behavior of Western troops and their leaders. In any case, the relevantcultural attitudes remained a reality among the officer classes, who enjoyeda relationship of near- or quasi-equality with their highest politicaland military commanders. That relationship was entirely alien to thatof, say, Chinese, Aztec, Zulu, or Ottoman subordinates with their masters. Certainly it is difficult to imagine an Ottoman commander—legally a slave—snappingat his Sultan with words like those Seydlitz used to Frederick the Greatat Zorndorf: “Tell the king that after the battle, my head is his to dowith as he pleases; in the meantime, allow me to use it in his service!”(My example, not Hanson’s.) That is so in part because of the slave systemHanson decries, but also because, even if an Ottoman commander had saidsuch a thing and survived, the Ottoman historical tradition would notlikely have recorded it—and certainly not in the approving way the Westerntradition does. Even Alexander the Great, well on the way to making himselfinto an oriental-style living god, had to put up with continual carpingand criticism from his subordinates. The same could be said for Napoleon,Eisenhower, and even Hitler.

I think Hanson makes an error, or at least misses the point, by talkingexcessively about the “lethality” of the Western approach to war. Primitivewarfare is extremely lethal, as anthropologist Lawrence Keeley has demonstratedpretty conclusively, though the body count gets racked up in innumerablesmall-scale ambushes and massacres rather than on formal battlefields.*2 Plenty of non-Western peoples—if not most—have been given to large-scalebutchery, on the battlefield and off. It is hard to think of any militaryforce more “lethal” than the Mongols. Aztec warfare was also extremelylethal, though primarily to POWs rather than to armed soldiers still inthe field. Rather, it is the decisiveness of Western warfare that is prominent,though not entirely unique. Now, “decisive battle” is a tricky phrase.Most military historians use it to mean “a really big battle,” or perhaps“a battle exciting enough to justify your buying my book about it.” Morejustifiably, it is sometimes used to describe a battle that ends in undisputedtactical victory by one side or the other. But it really means a battlethe outcome of which actually decides something of real importance—i.e.,a major political issue. Ideally, a “decisive battle” leads directly topeace (e.g., Appomattox in 1865), though in practice it may simplyresolve some intermediate issue. For instance, in 1704 Marlborough’s victoryat Blenheim was decisive in that it shut down one major theater of theWar of the Spanish Succession and effectively drove a major belligerent—Bavaria—outof the war, even though the larger struggle went on for years. Westerners,because they traditionally draw a sharp, legalistic distinction betweenwar and peace, habitually seek such decisions in hopes of getting thewar over with and getting on with normal life. Many other societies, however,see a permanent state of hostilities as normal. Their rulers are thereforenot inclined to take big chances in pursuit of a swift conclusion to hostilities—especiallyif the usual result of a decisive loss is the loser’s extermination.

One of Hanson’s strengths, on the other hand, though it is merely a tactic,lies in

Carnage And Culture