(Book Review)Since I'm trying to spend my free time putting together an independent study of European history, the last time I was in the states I thought I would go to the college text book stores and see what history books were being assigned to college students these days.
This book I got at a used textbook store (I think the book was designated as required reading for a Grand Valley history class, if I remember correctly).
It is, if nothing else, a very ambitious book. The author has clearly bitten off a lot to chew on here.
In his 20 page introduction, David Bell outlines the multiple interrelated themes of the book, and the many various assertions he seeks to prove.
Bell is attempting to trace the development of modern attitudes towards war.
He believes that both the attitude of modern doves, who believe that war is wrong, and that of modern hawks, who believe that war is necessary when combating a great evil, come from the history of the enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Before the French Revolution, war and military life was considered a normal part of existence,and a constant state of war was considered the norm for European kings and the military aristocracy. As a result, argues Bell, 16th and 17th century warfare was (some exceptions aside) relatively restrained and limited.
During the enlightenment, for the first time moral criticism of war appeared in mainstream intellectual thought, and this eventually culminated in the French Revolution, and the Revolutionary Assembly's formal declaration rejecting war.
Ironically, the same French Revolution lead Europe into 20 years of the bloodiest warfare it had ever seen. (Bell views the Revolutionary Wars and the following Napoleonic Wars as all part of the same long war.)
However, because after the Revolution intellectual currents were against war as a normal course of politics, it was now necessary for both sides to justify this war as a necessary evil leading to a greater peace.
It also became necessary to completely demonize the enemy, so that the gentleman's code on the battlefield no longer existed, but instead horrible atrocities were committed on both sides as part of what they viewed as a final apocalyptic war.
In his introduction and conclusion, Bell goes on to draw parallels with our modern age, and suggest that the way we view war now is a result of the intellectual upheavals in the enlightenment.
For example, Bell makes several parallels between "The war to end all wars" rhetoric of World War I, and the same belief during the French Revolution. In both cases soldiers believed they were fighting one final apocalyptic battle in order to bring about an era of world peace.
Bell also attributes our tendency to always describe the enemy of the moment in terms of absolute evil to this same intellectual history.
As you can see, there's a lot of balls being juggled here. And at times the thread of the book is in danger of being lost among all the different layers of argument, and I have my doubts about whether Bell has successfully proven everything he set out to prove.
But then this book is not written as an academic thesis, as Bell makes clear in his introduction.
"I have written 'The First Total War' for general readers, not only my fellow historians. I have therefore tried, as much as possible, to embed my arguments in sketches and stories...rather than in analysis alone....If these qualities make the book something other than the definitive, exhaustive pronouncement on the subject...so be it."
If this book is judged by the standards of strictly proving all of its assertions, then I have my doubts. But if you want something that will provide a lot of food for thought to chew on for a while, this is your book.
The first couple chapters are a bit of a mess. Bell is trying to show how pre-modern attitudes about wars were different from the modern era, but it's filled with so many exceptions, caveats, and counter-examples that I almost got a little dizzy trying to figure out what he was actually saying.
Once the book gets to the French Revolution, however, the narrative really takes off.
Bell spends a lot of time talking about the horrific French civil war in Vendee. This is the same ground that Victor Hugo covered in his novel, "Ninety-Three". And in fact Bell quotes from Hugo's book several times.
However the perspective Bell gives to the conflict is entirely different than Hugo's. Both portray the war as horrible, but Hugo shows how man's noble nature rises out of the horror. Reading Bell, one gets a much more depressing view of human nature as he gives example after example of terrible atrocities committed by both sides.
As Bell promised in his introduction, his history is interspersed liberally with interesting stories to keep the narrative alive. However, to paraphrase Dickens, the interest we find in reading these anecdotes is not the sort of interest that credits humanity. Instead, it is the interest in the macabre and the horrific that keeps us reading through Bell's list of atrocities, starting with Vendee and continuing onto the Peninsula Wars.
However, there is a point to this. This isn't some fiction out of the mind of Stephen King, but the actual record of human history. And what's more, as Bell emphasizes, these were wars that were supposedly fought for humane and enlightened reasons.
This book was published just last year, and like a lot of recently published history books, it tries to highlight some of the parallels between the 18th and 19th Centuries and the mess we find ourselves in today.
For example, Bell retells the debate in the French National Assembly concerning whether or not to invade neighboring countries and impose Republican governments on them by force.
Robespierre opposed the war, and Bell writes that:
"Robespierre showed a better grasp of some basic principles of political sociology than have some more recent democratic leaders, and his words are worth quoting:
'The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitutions. No one loves armed missionaries'." (Robespierre quoted in Bell p.118)
Also, whereas Juan Cole saw Napoleon's Egypt as a parallel to the Iraq War, Bell often compares the guerrilla war in Spain to Iraq. "In particular, Spain saw the development of a guerrilla war every bit as destructive--and eerily similar to--the insurgency now under way in early twenty-first-century Iraq" Bell writes on page 70. (One of several instances in which he directly makes the Iraq-Spain comparison.)
Although Bell makes reference to the Bush administration many times, he never mentions Bush's infamous Orwellian quote, "When we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." (Full text of remark here). But in his concluding chapter, Bell makes clear that he's very concerned about the use of language which seeks to form every new war as a conflict between good and evil.
"The survival of a belief in redemptive war has not yet, thankfully, led to a resumption of real war on an apocalyptic scale....It is only the language that is apocalyptic for now....But as I have tried to show in this book, language matters." (Bell p. 316)
Link of the Day
This Chomsky-William F. Buckley debate from 1969 is fascinating both of a time piece, and to see Chomsky wipe the floor with another right wing ideologue.
I linked to it a few years ago, but that was before the full version was available on-line (at that time it was just a 15 minute clip). The whole show has now been uploaded, and is well worth watching.
It's a bit confusing telling which order the clips go in, so I've tried to help by putting the links in order below.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
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