To read his copy is to picture a spasmodic man-child, overcome by facial tics and rivulets of sweat, causing the wax and makeup on his forehead to run, causing people to flee while someone from Madame Tussauds tries to unplug this hybrid of putty and wires before Stephens squints, lifts his right leg, and turns his torrent of gas into a.
Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam
Victor Davis Hanson
492pp, Faber, £20
Every so often a large historical volume is washed up on the beaches of the eastern Atlantic that hails from the further shore. Soon this jetsam is picked up by some hopeful British publisher who anticipates an upmarket bestseller for the autumn list. One such book a few years ago was Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a now-forgotten tome whose innate pessimism about empire struck a chord in the twilight years of the cold war.
Why the West Has Won is typical of a more triumphalist genre, suitable for a world again at war. Generous in its historical girth, replete with classical references that few will remember or are equipped to check, and untiring in its reconstruction of ancient events in a contemporary and racy idiom, Victor Davis Hanson's book seeks to explain the cultural lineage that has allowed 'the west' (more specifically, the US) to retain its position at the top, at once more 'civilised' and more lethally brutal than any of its opponents. Western campaigns of industrial slaughter have always been matched by an emphasis on the higher things of life: unsurpassed architecture, timeless literature and the idea of democracy itself.
At one level, this is simply a book about military encounters: nine great battles that left their mark on history. As such, it will be happily devoured by grown-up schoolboy soldiers who enjoy the sandpit cockfights once so beloved of the BBC's Newsnight. From Salamis (480BC) to Gaugamela (331BC), from Cannae (216BC) to Poitiers (732), from Tenochtitlán (1520) to Lepanto (1571), from Rorke's Drift (1879) to Midway (1942) to Tet (1968), the writer flits knowledgably and fluently across the centuries, seeking out parallels from these disparate battles to prove his various points.
For Hanson is not just a military buff; he is also a cultural historian, who seeks to understand why western battles have been so deadly and so successful. Previous explanations of western victories have usually concentrated on technological advances - the development of the stirrup, the spread of gunpowder, the invention of the machine gun - but this writer has a more sophisticated pitch. The Greek victory at Salamis over Xerxes, he suggests, grew out of the particular social formation of the Greek state; and this successful linkage, once established, was handed down, over time, to its ultimate legatee, the United States of America. Hanson singles out a lasting, defining phenomenon that he calls 'civic militarism', perceived as 'the idea of a free citizenry voting to craft the conditions of its own military service through consensual government'.
The peculiar and triumphant way in which Greeks slaughtered their enemies, Hanson argues, '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'. Not to mention motherhood and apple pie, one might feel tempted to add. Carried away on the torrents of his vivid prose, Hanson has a compelling vision of the 'free oarsmen' of Greece rowing for freedom as they allowed 40,000 of Xerxes's 'unfree' sailors to drown off Attica in one of the deadliest battles in the history of naval warfare. This lethal tradition, the keynote of western warmaking, was carried on down the ages.
At Gaugamela in Mesopotamia, the Greek slaughter of their enemies, orchestrated by Alexander the Great, was on an even grander scale. Alexander may well have killed 200,000 men in battle in just eight years, with a comparable number of civilians dead; Hanson compares him to Adolf Hitler. He suggests that the origins of these violent and decisive battles, a new kind of land warfare, lay in the local Greek wars of 'property-owning citizens' who voted democratically for the battles in which they were about to participate. Alexander invented total war and became the first 'conquistador', the forerunner of Cortés, but there was a downside to his achievements. He so distorted the Greek legacy that his empire soon collapsed into warring states; yet the established tradition of martial but freedom-loving farmers would live on.
Hanson uses the story of subsequent conflicts to illustrate his central thesis, the emergence of a definable western tradition of violent warfare, rooted in civilian democracy, that is still on show. In this context, even defeats were instructive. An unforeseen outcome of the Roman disaster at Cannae was the subsequent extension of Roman citizenship to vast swathes of the Italian population, providing the Roman state with the motivated manpower that was needed to force back and eventually expel Hannibal's Carthaginians.
At Poitiers, in the eighth century, the Frankish victory over the Saracens was brought about by heavily armed foot soldiers defeating Islamic horsemen, in a formation that harked back to the classical phalanx. This local infantry was formed from 'middling farmers' who fought to defend 'real property that they felt was their own'.
Intoxicated by his arguments, Hanson reveals that Montezuma's defeat by Cortés at Tenochtitlán was a triumph for the 'traditions of free inquiry, rationalism, and science', while the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto, 50 years later, was a victory for Venetian capitalism. The spirited British resistance against the Zulus at Rorke's Drift in 1879 was the result of drill training, defined as 'an obvious manifestation of egalitarianism', while the American victory over the Japanese at Midway during the second world war was due to 'the Americans' intrinsic faith in individualism'.
Even the American Pyrrhic victory against the Vietnamese at Tet in 1968, a military success but a political defeat, is cited as an example of western strength. Hanson is distressed that US planners in Vietnam so 'completely ignored the tenets of the entire western military heritage' (they did not have the advantage of reading his book), but concludes optimistically that while the American commitment to self-criticism may have contributed to its eventual defeat, it also helped 'the explosion of western global influence in the decades after the war'.
This is a stimulating yet ultimately pointless book, held together by an insubstantial skein of imagination and conjecture. Hanson writes in a prose style that oscillates between the sublime and the childish - 'in 480BC, democracy itself was only 27 years old' - but this is typical of many American historians, and some readers may enjoy its folksy charm. While the descriptions of individual battles are lively and provocative, the author's central thesis is distinctly dangerous and, thankfully, unproven. So seductive is western civilisation, he seems to suggest, that the use of the most violent and lethal force has been justifiable in its defence. Non-Americans might beg to differ.
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Victor Davis Hanson (Author)
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He is the author more than two dozen books, ranging in topics ...