War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  2. In his excellent one-volume history of World War II, British historian H. P. Willmott (1989: 477) concludes that even 57 million dead might be “a small price to pay for ridding the world of depraved wickedness.”

  3. Keegan 1989: 594.

  4. For example, Kipling, Scott, Tennyson, and Hugo.

  5. For example, Graves, Remarque, Owen, and Hemingway.

  6. For example, Vidal, Mailer, Vonnegut, and Heller.

  7. For example, in contrast to Parkman, Bancroft, and Prescott, Frederick Merk (1978) (the late Gurney Professor of History at Harvard), hardly mentions warfare with the Indians induced by this movement, concerning himself instead with land allocation, economic development, and frontier politics.

  8. These doctrines provided Europeans and later some Asians with such an agreeable boost to their already Olympian self-admiration that many remain reluctant to abandon them even now, despite massive evidence to the contrary. Of course, the blunt racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become a minority opinion in modern North America and western Europe. However, the anti-Semitism resurfacing in eastern Europe and certain statements by some Asian leaders concerning the “mongrel” society of the United States indicate that crude racism is hardly extinct.

  Nonracist Social Darwinism universally remains a theme in conservative political thinking (including, ironically enough, “conservative” Marxism). The core idea is that whoever or whatever is currently “successful” (whether individuals, social groups, techniques, institutions, or values) is “more fit” and worthy of emulation than any less-successful or displaced competitors.

  Indeed, throughout my career, many American and European university professors of varying political persuasions have asked me why anthropologists bothered to study societies and cultures that had clearly failed to survive or were surely doomed to extinction (i.e., preindustrial non-Western cultures).

  9. During my student years in western Europe in the 1970s, in Britain, France, Spain, and Belgium, I was often haragued by both rightists and leftists concerning “U.S. imperialism” in their respective countries.

  10. For example, HNAI vol. 4, 1988: 545 (and references).

  11. A fine popular account of these can be found in Harris 1974: 97–111.

  12. Currently, the popular media prefer to portray the mentality of primitive peoples as childlike (in the romantic sense)—trusting, guileless, prerational, and intuitive. Such portrayals can also be read to imply that precivilized folks were rather dim-witted. It is tragicomic that such portraits are intended to be, and are widely accepted as, sympathetic and complimentary to those so portrayed.

  13. Alas, I cannot attribute this line recalled from my school days.

  Chapter 12

  1. Keegan 1987.

  2. For a very acute analysis of the crisis years of the European focus on the decisive battle, see Weigley 1991. Unfortunately, this author, while delineating the foolishness of the Clausewitzian concept of a decisive formal battle, goes on to underestimate the decisiveness of modern total war. He fails to note that as military powers those modern nations who have suffered total defeats (i.e., revolutionary-Napoleonic France, the American South, Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Japan), either disappeared completely or have never again, despite the passage of generations, reached first-rank status as military powers.

  3. See the very interesting report of Scott et al. 1989.

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  ABBREVIATIONS

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  Handbook of North American Indians

  HSAI

  Handbook of South American Indians

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  University of California Anthropological Records

  UCPAAE

  University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology

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  Handbook of North American Indians (HNAI). 1978–1990. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

  1978. Vol. 8, California.

  1978. Vol. 15, Northeast.

  1979. Vol. 9, Southwest.

  1981. Vol. 6, Subarctic.

  1983. Vol. 10, Southwest.

  1984. Vol. 5, Arctic.

  1986. Vol. 11, Great Basin.

  1988. Vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations.

  1990. Vol. 7, Northwest Coast.