UMUC
European Division
Social Sciences Newsletter
Term 1, 2000/01, pp. 3 & 4
 
 

Some Consequences of War
By Warren Johnson
 

The letter "W" in Greek disappears without a trace, or almost so, Marshall (1999) maintained. Were it not so, it would precede the initial "a" in "aristocrats" who, from ancient times up to the late Middle Ages, were the "wariest" of all people.  Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 B.C.E.) insisted that "war is the father of all things" (Caplow and Hicks 170).  Perhaps he was right.  He also insisted that "the way up and the way down are one and the same".  In other words, the way up to Sardis, for instance, is the same as the way down to Ephesus--lending his remarks an economic interpretation (Shell 61).  Indeed, why else would (w)aristocrats concern themselves with war at all, except to sustain or advance their own interests?  Interests or not, wars have consequences.
 

Wars create new tactics.  The cannon changed the aristocratic war--not "because they were inhumane in their effects but because they degraded war, putting as they did the noble man-at-arms at the mercy of the vile and base born" (Howard 14).  More important, by the end of the fifteenth century armies throughout Europe were following the example of the Swiss pikes men who constituted an "invulnerable hedgehog".  'Battles' or 'battalions' of pikes several thousand strong brought costly men-at-arms down from their horses (Howard 17).  Soon the wars of knights became the wars of mercenaries and remained so, to some extent, down to Napoleon's time. Meanwhile the coat-of-arms became more and more emblematic (Keegan).

Wars create people on the move.  Many of them are poor, downtrodden, and humble. Some are not. Sometimes the intellectual spirit of the times rides the waves of migrations. Some of the Greek philosophers of old were just one step ahead of the invading Persians, for instance, Xenophanes. Almost a thousand years later, as Rome fell to the tribes and as the Vandals invaded North Africa, St. Augustine wrote his finest work, The City of God. Four centuries later, when the Vikings attacked Ireland, Irish scholars fled to the continent. Amidst the to and froing of the Crusades in the 12th and 13th century, Islamic writers conveyed to the West not only the works of the ancient Greek philosophers, but added their own brilliance to the general sum of European knowledge; the writings of Avicenna, for example, were widely acclaimed in the European Middle Ages (Haskins). And in 1453, when Constantinople was seized by the Ottomans, monks seeking refuge in the West brought with them the philosophical viewpoints that would inform the work of Copernicus ninety years later (Kuhn). In our times the contribution made to American wisdom by refugee-scholars is rich beyond all compare.

Wars create new technology.  At this moment rocket technology is being applied to dentistry.  Israelis, using technology originally designed to detect the slightest variation in three-dimensional space, developed a simulated person used by dental students in Greifswald, Germany. "DentSim" checks the quality of dental procedures, spotting even the slightest mistake (Associated Press 1).  Rocket technology originally developed in Germany during W.W.II returned to Germany in a different form.  How state-of-the-art technology is applied is evidently an open question.  It can be used for peace, it can be used for war.

Wars create new definitions.  Heirs to the warrior class--a few hundred families who intermarried during the Late Middle Ages--are long gone (Howard). The worldwide empires of yesteryear are gone too. Germany and Japan have risen from the ashes.  Call it the Phoenix Effect (Caplow and Hicks 177), or call it "the conquered vanquished their conquerors".  England, the United States, and Russia are almost allies again.  Yet a remark made by Tacitus (c. A.D. 55--c. 117) almost twenty centuries ago, when Roman legions conquered Britain, continues to haunt the world: Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant ("They make a wilderness and call it peace").  As for the well-to-do classes following the Roman success in Britain, Churchill (22) found this to say in Tacitus, "Step by step they were led to practises which disposed to vice--the lounge, the bath, the eloquent banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but part of their servitude."

Wars create new entities.  Diverse ethnic groups once held together by common authority have split up into sundry entities, for example, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo; Eritrea and Ethiopia (Caputo 1980; Giorgis 1989); Palestine and Israel. The nearly two hundred nations represented by the United Nations exclude fifty of the un-represented ones such as Assyria and Botwa, and some of the autonomous republics of the former Soviet Union such as Altai or Tuva. Furthermore, the list is growing faster as ethnic groups such as Kurds seek to mold a national identity defined by geographic boundaries. The list of entities commonly called nations ordinarily excludes the numerous tribal nations in America such as the Lakota, the Oneida or the Lumbee. The list never includes the ones that have disappeared completely.

Wars create refugees. Aristocratic wars are over, but wars evidently are not. Janowitz noticed, say Caplow and Hicks (121), relationships of production based on the production of violence. We can see them too. Worldwide, due in large measure to heightened violence generated by low intensity combat, around 30,000,000 refugees are on the road today. To be a refugee changes one's identity forever. Perhaps one is stateless. Perhaps one remains a stranger in a foreign land. Perhaps one's roots are lost. Nothing is the same anymore once a people are driven from their homes. Small wonder that a little girl--now grown up--could be asked years ago, "Are you Catholic?" And when she answered "no", be asked "Are you Protestant then?" And when she answered "no" again, be asked in tones of growing alarm, "Then what are you?" And she answered, "We are refugees."
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Notes and References

Associated Press. 17 April 1999. "Raketentechnik revolutioniert Ausbildung von Zahnmedizinern". ("Rocket technology revolutionizes dental training"). Augsburg: Augsburger Allgemeine.

Caplow, Theodore and Louis Hicks. 1995. Systems of War and Peace. New York: University of America Press, Inc.

Caputo, Philip. 1980. Horn of Africa. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc.

Churchill, Winston. [1956] 1963. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Vol. I. New York: Bantam Books, Inc.

Giorgis, Dawit Wolde. 1989. Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia. Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, Inc.

Haskins, Charles Homer, [1923] 1957. The Rise of Universities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Howard, Michael. 1976. War in European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keegan, John. [1976] 1995. The Face of Battle. London: Penguin Books.

Kuhn, Thomas. [1957] 1997. The Copernican Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Marshall, David J. 1999. In a letter confirming the role of "w" in the Greek language and in particular its gradual orthographic disappearance in words such as aristocrats.

Shell, Marc. [1979] 1993. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.