by Noam Chomsky
11
The Legacy of War
The Sacralization of War
Eight hundred years ago, a Spanish pilgrim on his way to Mecca observed that “the warriors are engaged in their wars while people are at ease,” continuing their lives while the warrior castes pursued their age-old rituals of mayhem and murder. The origins of these rituals are not very clear. Some anthropologists have argued that they trace back to the origins of agriculture, when the decline of hunting left men in need of some new status symbol and means “to maintain the old glory and companionship which formerly existed during hunting expeditions.” The constraints on the warrior elite that are described by the Spanish pilgrim, within Europe at least, may be related to what is sometimes called “the sacralization of war,” that is, the merger of militarism and the Church. Church records from about that time reveal efforts to create some kind of space for the Church itself and for non-combatants more generally. One edict of 1045 declares that “there should be no attacks on clerics, monks, nuns, women, pilgrims, merchants, peasants, visitors to councils, churches and their surrounding grounds, cemeteries, cloisters, the lands of the clergy, shepherds and their flocks, agricultural animals, wagons in the fields, and olive trees.”
How well this edict of the Council of Narbonne was observed beyond the domains of the Church one can learn from Arab sources on the “Frankish invasions”—what the West calls the Crusades. Refugees fleeing to Baghdad after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, half a century later, reported that the invaders had sacked and destroyed all the towns and cities in their path, massacred peasants and townspeople, and, when they reached the Holy City—quoting from contemporary chroniclers—”the fair-haired and heavily armored warriors spilled through the streets, swords in hand, slaughtering men, women, and children, plundering houses, sacking mosques, leaving not a single Muslim alive within the city walls.” When the killing stopped a few days later there were thousands lying in pools of blood on the doorsteps of their homes or alongside the mosques. There was a Jewish community in Jerusalem—their fate was the same. The community finally retreated into the main synagogue, which was burned to the ground by the Frankish invaders, while those who managed to escape were hunted down and killed, and the rest burned alive. And so the first crusade came to an end with the blood of the conquered running down the streets as the knights, in their own words, “sobbing for excess of joy,” came to the Church of the Sepulcher “and put their blood-stained hands together in prayer”—a quote from contemporary Western history in this case. The Frankish chroniclers themselves did not conceal these facts at the time. They described then how the warriors of the church “boiled Pagan adults in cooking pots” and “impaled chickens on spits and devoured them grilled.” One Frankish chronicler felt that they went a bit far. “Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens, they also ate dogs.” There should be some limits, after all.
Richard the Lionhearted later followed similar practices, roping together prisoners who were a burden—captured soldiers, along with women and children of their families—and delivering them to soldiers of the Cross, who “fell upon them viciously with their sabres, lances, and stones until all the wails had been stilled,” an Arab chronicler reports. The atrocities and the destruction peaked with the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, which led to huge massacres, pillage, carnage, and destruction of much of the residue of Greek and Byzantine civilizations, with mass killings of civilians, priests, monks, and others. Shortly after, the Mongol invaders, led by Genghis Khan, followed very much the same course in the same regions.
This, from the Christian side, was all part of the “sacralization of war,” what modem historians call the “clerical reformation of the fighting laymen,” an attempt to add a spiritual dimension to the atrocities and the brutalities of the age of chivalry. To quote a modern British historian,
The knight who joined the crusades could attain what the spiritual side of his nature ardently sought—perfect salvation and remission of sins. He might butcher all day ‘til he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel sobbing for joy [actually, “sobbing for excess of joy,” as they themselves put it] at the altar of the sepulcher, for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord?
“One can understand the popularity of the crusades,” the same historian goes on—not the first, and certainly not the last, effort to cast the mantle of nobility on some hideous and shameful enterprise.
All of these are among matters that might be borne in mind when we read impressive rhetoric today about the coming clash of civilizations, the paradigm for the new era now coming into view—and of course what I have mentioned is only a pea on a mountain.
Let’s go back to the edict of the Council of Narbonne in 1045. Recall the exceptions that were listed: there should be no attacks on clerics, monks, nuns, women, etc. That list of exceptions gives some indication of the targets of war—in other words, those that had to be excepted—and its legacy. What the Spanish pilgrim described was no doubt true, but it was a very unusual moment. The feats of the Warriors of the Cross and Genghis Khan are much more typical.
Probably the extremes of savagery—recorded savagery, at least—are in the earliest histories, in the Bible. I suppose that in the entire literary canon there is nothing that exalts genocide with such fervor and dedication and enthusiasm as the commandments of the warrior God to his chosen people—for example, his commandments delivered to King Saul by the prophet Samuel, who was the most just of the judges, and who conveyed the commandment to Saul to attack Amalek and spare nothing, killing all men, women, infants, and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses—the reason being that centuries earlier the Amalekites had stood in the way of the Hebrews conquering their Holy Land. Saul, as you may remember, spared one person, the king of Amalek, and some of the cattle. Samuel, when he discovered this, was enraged and cut down the captured prisoner before the Lord at Gilgal. And so the story continues.
These lessons were taken to heart by the Frankish warriors, certainly, as we know from their own records. They were also taken to heart by the very devout Englishmen who conquered this country, seeing themselves as the inheritors of the Israelites taking their promised land and ridding the country of “that hapless race of Native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty.” That’s the way John Quincy Adams later described the project, long after his own major and very significant contributions to it had passed, and in fact when it was entering a new phase farther west.
It has only been in very recent years that the original sin of our own history has begun to be acknowledged. That’s one of the many very positive legacies of the ferment of the 1960s, which has had a significant and, I hope, lasting effect in raising the moral and cultural level of this society.
European Conquests
European history has been particularly savage, including its conquest of most of the world. These conquests were mostly small wars from the European point of view, leading military historians point out. That is, they were nothing like the wars the Europeans were fighting among themselves. Take the American Revolution as an example. The American Revolution was a kind of side show as far as the British were concerned. In exactly the same years, they were fighting a war of comparable scale in India, the Marathi War. The American Revolution was itself a peripheral part of the global wars that were going on among the major European powers. The revolution here succeeded largely because at that particular moment Britain happened to be standing against the rest of the major European powers and couldn’t devote much attention to the small war going on here, at the same time that a small war was going on in India and a major war was going on with France and Spain and others. The major powers, mainly France and England, were fighting a war here, a long-standing war, and different parts of the domestic population were supporting one side or the other. Those we call loyalists were supporting the British; those we call patriots were supported by the French; and
much of the fighting was done by the powerful forces—the French and the British—with local assistance. I think that would probably be a more accurate way of describing the Revolutionary War.
To tum to another part of the world, Robert Clive’s forces were outnumbered by about 10 to 1 at the crucial battle of 1757 that opened the way to the takeover of Bengal by the East India Company, setting the stage for the British conquest of all of India. Bengal was the richest area—so extraordinarily rich, in fact, that the British merchant adventurers and conquerors were amazed by its wealth. India itself was the commercial and manufacturing center of the world in the 18th century. It was, for example, producing more iron than all of Europe. It’s striking that over the centuries extraordinarily rich and productive areas have become the very symbols of hopelessness and despair—such as Bangladesh and Calcutta. That’s a typical feature of European conquest, which says a lot about the legacy of, in this case, small wars, from the point of view of the conquerors.
Haiti is another example. It was perhaps the richest colony in the world, and the source of much of France’s wealth. It’s now facing possible disappearance in the next few decades. Another example is the East Indies, contemporary Indonesia, which provided about 20 percent of the national income of the very wealthy Netherlands until World War II, and as a small footnote, we might bear in mind that the Marshall Plan aid to France and Holland, two major imperial powers, just about covered the costs of their bloody efforts to maintain their Southeast Asian colonies.
Probably the main factors in the European conquest were, perhaps, a slight edge in military technology, but primarily, I think, a kind of culture of savagery—“the all-destructive fury of European warfare” that “appalled” the conquered populations from the East Indies to the New World, quoting British military historian Geoffrey Parker. “Warfare in India was still a sport, while in Europe it had become a science,” a recent history of the East India Company points out. Actually, Adam Smith had drawn similar conclusions at the time, denouncing what he called the “savage injustice of the Europeans,” thinking primarily of the English, properly his main concern. The English settlers who arrived here carried on the tradition of extreme savagery in the Indian wars and the expansion of the national territory. For example, Andrew Jackson’s conquest of Spanish Florida, an important event in many ways, and the first executive war in American history.
That’s a tradition that has become the dominant one. You really have to look hard in modern history to find a war that isn’t an executive war and that conforms to constitutional principles, which require that Congress declare war. Jackson’s executive war was fought against those who were called the Seminoles. They were called the “mingled hordes of lawless Indians and Negroes.” Lawless Indians and runaway slaves—that’s the way the invaders put it. Jackson’s tactics taught the “salutary efficacy” of terror, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams observed in a famous paper that justified the massive atrocities and the invasion and aggression of the executive war, a state paper that was much admired by Jefferson and leading 20th-century scholars.
I should add that these particular wars of extermination do survive in the national consciousness. Recently there was a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on changes in culinary practices in the United States over the years. It opened with a discussion of “Seminole soup” without a trace of embarrassment. The Seminoles are also the mascot of a college football team that regularly competes for the national championship. If the Nazis had won World War II, maybe the Jews and the Gypsies would serve as mascots for the University of Munich. In general, the winners and the losers regard the legacy of war quite differently.
These traditions were carried on after the conquest of the national territory. Early in this century, US troops were liberating the Philippines—liberating several hundred thousand souls from life’s sorrows and travails. The press was very much impressed by this heroic and generous endeavor, and described it with some accuracy. The war was led by old Indian fighters who were killing more “niggers,” as they put it, so it was all old hat. The press reported very positively that the American forces were “slaughtering the natives in English fashion,” so that “the misguided creatures who resist us will at least respect our arms” and later come to recognize our good intentions. The misguided creatures, those who remained alive, were really consenting to their slaughter, a leading American sociologist explained. He was developing the thesis that he called “consent without consent.” It’s the way a child can be said to consent implicitly when the parent prevents him or her from running into a busy street. Later the child will come to see that it was all for the good—in other words, that he or she was really consenting. Same with the misguided creatures who are resisting us.
These themes persist without much change right to the present day, and so, in fact, do the echoes of the Indian wars. They were revived again during the wars of Indochina in the military and in the popular literature. During the US terror wars in Central America in the 1980s, the leading liberal intellectual journal explained that we must proceed “regardless of how many are murdered” because we have our mission, like the self-described saints who massacred the Indians of New England while carrying the Holy Book; their predecessors; and many others like them: the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan, for example, or the forces of Attila the Hun or the Romans or the Assyrians or the Hebrews conquering the land of Canaan, to sample from a very long list.
The peculiar savagery of European warfare may reflect the bloody history of Europe itself. For hundreds of years, in the leading centers of Western civilization—France and Germany—the highest and most noble vocation and duty was to slaughter one another. That exalted mission came to an end in 1945, but only because the science of war that European civilization had crafted reached such a grotesque level that the next episode would be the last, leaving no legacy of war, at least for anyone to record in chronicles or art.
The 20th Century
The legacy of world conquest itself is clear enough. To mention just the most obvious illustration, the only parts of the world that have developed outside of Europe are the parts that escaped its clutches: the United States, which joined the enterprise itself after it was liberated from England, and Japan, with some of its colonies in tow. It’s worth noting that Japan, though a very brutal imperial power, happened to treat its colonies differently from the rest. It did not rob and destroy them. They didn’t end up being Bangladesh or Haiti. Rather, it developed them at about the same rate as the imperial power itself. After World War II and its aftermath, they then resumed this growth, becoming the center of the East Asian growth area.
In the 20th century, civilian populations once again became a prime target, as in biblical days, the Frankish wars, and other unusually bloody eras. The Nazis broke new ground with industrialized genocide—and recall that this was the world’s most advanced industrial and technological power and the cultural center of the West as well. Military attacks specifically targeting civilians peaked with the allied bombings of Germany and Japan. The most horrifying of these before Hiroshima-Nagasaki was the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945. That killed somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000 people. Nobody was paying much attention to numbers at that point, so estimates range widely. It left more than a million homeless in the undefended city. The point of the fire-bombing was that the city was made out of wood, so you could get a huge firestorm, and the whole thing could turn into a horrendous monstrosity, as it did. It also removed Tokyo from the list of atom bomb targets on the recognition that further destruction would be unimpressive—it would just pile rubble upon rubble and bodies upon bodies. After the war the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that “probably more people lost their lives by fire in Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” The 50th anniversary of this atrocity was commemorated with a vivid and horrifying report in the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong—the leading business journal in Asia, which is very conservat
ive. Here, in the United States, the anniversary passed virtually without notice. To the extent that there was a reaction, it was more or less captured in a comment quoted in the Washington Post: “If that’s what it took to win, that’s what should have been done.”
All this was amid a flood of very harsh condemnation of Japan for failing to give adequate recognition of its own guilt for bombing a military base in an American colony that had been taken from its inhabitants by force and guile half a century earlier. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a crime, but in the array of crimes it’s hard to claim that it ranks very high. Quoting from the Japanese apology, Japan had officially expressed “sincere repentance for our past, including aggression and colonial rule that caused unbearable suffering and sorrow” for China and other countries of Asia. That Japanese official statement was bitterly denounced in the United States, alongside sober articles about the strange flaws in the Japanese character that prevent them from acknowledging guilt. The reason was that the apology was accompanied by a mention of the fact that there had been other imperial atrocities in Asia, implying that the records of Holland, England, France, and the United States might also not have been utterly pure. That’s outrageous, and the conclusion was that the Japanese were just once again seeking to evade their guilt. If Asians saw the matter differently, actually even welcoming the Japanese at first, that again just shows that they were “misguided creatures.”
In Europe, the bombing of Dresden was the nearest counterpart to the fire-bombing of Tokyo; it took place at about the same time. US and British air forces destroyed the city, killing tens of thousands of people and destroying lots of great achievements of Western civilization. The 50th anniversary occurred at the same time as the 50th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Tokyo. It aroused considerable soul-searching in England, but I couldn’t find any reference to it here. Remember that Britain was at that time under serious attack, something that the United States has not experienced since the War of 1812. The British had direct experience with the legacy of war. The United States had none, apart from its own murderous Civil War, since 1812. A prolonged record of victorious conquest is not good for the character, in my opinion, and I think history tends to substantiate that judgment. To take a recent example, Hitler was perhaps the most popular leader in German history, pre-Stalingrad.