From steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp Sun Apr 30 00:49:20 2000 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id AAA40144 for ; Sun, 30 Apr 2000 00:49:18 -0700 Received: from ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp (sizcol.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp [133.33.105.11]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id AAA28010 for ; Sun, 30 Apr 2000 00:49:16 -0700 Received: from hamapc07 ([133.33.106.107]) by ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp (8.9.3/3.7W-98122215) with ESMTP id QAA01298 for ; Sun, 30 Apr 2000 16:49:49 +0900 (JST) From: "Steven J. Willett" To: classics@u.washington.edu Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 16:53:02 +0900 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Death and the military Reply-to: steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp Message-ID: <390C64EE.16848.1FB8725C@localhost> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) In _The Greek State at War_ 5.208, Pritchett quotes Tarn and Rostovtzeff respectively to the effect that (a) no public man throughout Greek history showed pity and that (b) for the Romans as well as the Greeks the ideals of humanitas, fides and clementia remained pure theory during their practical conduct of war. He quotes this with apparent approval in one of the most chilling, unpleasant chapters of the whole series, "Fate of Captives." The long table detailing the massacre of captives on pp. 218f and the even longer one on pp. 226-34 detailing the enslavement of captives make grim reading. They also set the hypocrisy and periphrastic evasiveness of modern professional militaries in perspective. At least the Greeks and Romans were under no illusions about what the business of war entailed. The current retrospectives on the fall of Saigon and the end of the war in Vietnam seem to provide a convenient foil to the "recovery" of nerve in Desert Storm and the ensuing militaristic triumphalism. But noble verbiage aside, Britain and the US are no better than Greece in treatment of civilians. One need not look back at the carpet bombings of Dresden or Tokyo: we have in the UN sanctions against Iraq a superb mechanism for the manufacture of dead women and children by the hundreds of thousands. This manufacture continues while a few talking heads, or aging journalists, meditate over a napalming in Vietnam or a desperate dash to the last helicopter out of Saigon as if they were mere historical fossils: not repeatable, not an index of what a virtuous people with a virtuous military does. The relatively new professional standing army that long (and in my opinion very wise) US tradition distrusted now has its fancy high- tech toys, its propagandistic public relations rhetoric, its obscuring acronyms and its potential to find, one day, that army interests are not the same as those of the Constitution. _The Modern Presidency and Crisis Rhetoric_, ed. Amos Kiewe, examines how rhetoric has been used from Truman to Bush in managing various political, judicial, military, economic and legislative crises. More important, in some respects, is the use of rhetoric to clothe military actions. With the assistance of weasel phrases like "collateral damage," such rhetoric makes it difficult for ignorant publics throughout the developed world to assess the real intentions and consequences of military action. What after all is collateral damage but the slight, and perfectly erroneous if regretable, loss of life attendant on any application of weaponry? When the Greeks went to war, however, they knew precisely what that meant: every citizen soldier on service understood that his fatherland had no ethical obligation to ransom him if he were captured and not killed. A prisoner was completely severed from the home state. The slave auction block always remained a waiting possibility, even when relatives had the means to buy him back. For civilians, the consequences were equally clear. Xenophon states them concisely in the "Cyropaedia" at 7.4.73 as an accepted commonplace: it's a law established among all men that when a city is captured in war, the persons and property of the inhabitants belong to the captors. No rhetoric stood between Greek citizens and consequences when they deliberated war. Increasingly, however, it does in modern democracies. The extent to which the rhetorical habit has taken hold can be measured by the infeasibility of restoring "The Department of Defence" to "The War Department." Modern militaries never make war, they only defend, even though that defence may lie several thousand kilometers away in a land most citizens can't even find on a map and may involve the sacrifice of those innocent "other" civilians who are finally just cyphers. The ability of modern high-technology weaponry to project power far from the home state makes it imperative in a democracy that the consequences be stripped bare of artifice. That is not likely. There seems in fact to be an almost direct proportional relationship between the dread of military casualties by US and increasingly by European publics and their tolerance of collateral damage, which is, after all, just the loss of merchandise. ============================================== Steven J. Willett University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus 2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan 432-8012 Voice and Fax: (053) 457-4514 Japan email: steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.up US email: stevenw@earthlink.net .