Mr. Dreher, @ 10:54 AM, writes:
“Regarding being in actual war, instead of fake war (“Politics is warfare by other means.” — Clausewitz) how does one retain one’s humanity under such conditions?”
By having the mental and moral toughness to recognize that war, violence and (often senseless) killing are part of being Human. The majority part, most of the time. By recognizing that sometimes, one has to do nasty, vicious, cruel things in order to survive–and that NOT doing those things often puts you at the mercy of those who would love to do nothing so much as put YOU in your grave.
And by recognizing when one has to do those things, and when one does not. That’s the graduate exam question.
“How do you not collaborate with what you believe to be wrong?”
By staying alive to have the luxury of not collaborating.
” Are ironic distance, self-doubt and pondering complicated truths over simple, utilitarian lies luxuries no one can afford when he’s fighting for his personal survival, and the survival of all that is dear to him? ”
Two billion years of experience says that the answer is “Damn right they are.” Don’t get me wrong: sometimes luxuries are nice to have. Survival, however, generally comes first.
The question is what the price is to be paid for such luxuries, and when it has to get paid.
That’s the extra-credit question on the graduation final exam.
I submit that a large part of the problem with that subspecies of Humanity known as “post-Western” man is that he has forgotten that there is more than one possible answer to that question—that, every so often, he has to take his own side in a fight.
Your servant,
Lord Karth

Certainly, in this case the Germans were clearly the enemy. But the boys he was seeing before him were not his personal enemy so much as they too were, like him, the victims of the ‘evil regime’. Yes in war it becomes kill or be killed. Just as people who see violence…let’s say a violent attack on a stranger or someone in a car wreck that is about to burst into flames. In our world most make the instant decision to ‘not get involved’. It’s either get involved & risk being killed or let the person being attacked die or run away from the burning car. People have all kinds of excuses and explanations…including of course being paralyzed by fear…. for not making the fate of others their rubber-meets-the-road concern. But make no mistake; what ruins so many is the ultimate denial necessary to protect their sense of personal morality, once on a higher plain, now attacked in ways one cannot otherwise imagine. That’s no small part of why war was deemed hell long ago. Why vets almost never talk to anyone (and certainly not their families) about what they saw. The common belief being, incidentally; that, only through war experiences can one likely transcend into the abyss of true human horror. That has absolute merit but is by no means absolutely true.
It’s funny…and I can bet some other readers in my camp will know exactly what I mean when they read what I say here…. It is so easy to tell when someone they know or meet or read has never really been in a life and death situation, challenged to make a split second decision to risk their life, never stared death in the face or witnessed grotesque violence. I call it ‘The before-and-after Club’. You are transformed instantly & you recognize that instantly. And you can sense effortlessly when someone they know, meet, talk with, read…is essentially intact with their naïve beliefs formed in childhood, more or less intact in later years. But I also have a strong belief that at some point every wound must become a scar.

Yes…and?
I’m a bit surprised you didn’t extend this to the Israeli/Palestinian situation.
I’ll be watching for Stari to extend it to the Brown People immigration.
But you are right, it is what it is. Nature red in tooth and claw.
Now, the counterpoint from Star Trek:The Original Series…
“We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we won’t kill today.” – Kirk: A Taste of Armageddon

Wow. What a great piece, Rod. This was really one of your best, and that’s saying a lot. Rieff’s piece was also really powerful and beautiful.
Let me also say that if you haven’t already, you really, really should read some of Simone Weil’s writings. Don’t let the quote about Indochina turn you off (it was rather extreme, even for her). She is in general, though, one of my favourite writers (as well as, reportedly, one of the favourite writers of the late Pope Paul VI). ‘Crunchy conservatives’ in particular (as well as crunchy liberals, socialists, etc.) should read her; her blend of socialism, agrarianism, tradition, and Christian mysticism (though she borrowed a lot from some other traditions, most especially the Albigensians) and her powerful critique of the Enlightenment and modernity in general, is very hard to categorize, but I think you’d find it interesting.

Re the Resistance, per leading UK satirist Craig Brown, from 1966 and All That from 2005:
Those against the Germans were known as the Three French. The leader of the Three French was General de Girl. Together with his partner, Viv la France, he outsmarted the Nazis by remaining in Britain while they were in France, then returned in triumph the second they left, his chest heaving with brightly coloured medals that he had bravely pinned on himself without a thought for his own safety.
from Chapter 32
A New Elizabethan Age (2)
The Queen’s Coronation – exactly fifty years before her Golden Jubilee – took place in black-and-white, as colour was still strictly rationed.
It was a magnificent ceremony, signalling the dawn of a new Elizabethan Age: an Englishman, Sir Gordon Richards, won the Derby; another Englishman, Sir Stanley Mathews, captained an English team to victory in the FA Cup. The annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race was won by an English crew. Meanwhile, an English athlete, Sir Roger Miles, became the first man to slide down a bannister in four minutes.

The phrase “best light cavalry in the world” is used by the narrator in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

Thanks Hector. I bought “Gravity and Grace” a few months ago, after you’d raved about Weil, but I found it disappointing because it was a collection of aphorisms and suchlike by her. Which of her works would provide a more conventional introduction to her thought?

Simone Weil seems to me to have been wrong about SE Asia. The Japanese were even crueller than the Dutch in Indonesia, and much, much worse than the French in Indochina or the British in Burma and Malaysia. It is possible that SE Asian countries would have taken a decade or two longer to gain independence had it not been for WW2, but I rather doubt that many would consider the suffering under the Japanese to be a price worth paying for earlier independence. This is not to defend European imperialism, but just to note, what is part of your point, that most conflicts are between light grey and dark grey rather than black and white.
I do think your main point is interesting, though. I’m fascinated by the idea of the whites vs. Comanches as a tribal war. You might be interested in South African history, which I’ve been reading about lately – it fits that sort of mould very closely – in the late 19th century, the Boers and the Zulus were two imperialist tribes, quite similar in many respects, and almost constitutionally incapable of perceiving anyone outside their own tribes as human. The black vs. white motif has been pasted over that history by the Apartheid regime, and also by anti-imperialist liberal historians. Fascinating stuff.

ie zionism.

Rombald, when I was an undergraduate, I did some volunteer work with Amnesty International. I was startled to discover that as bad as apartheid South Africa was (this was the 1980s, and S.A. was in the news a lot), it was actually better on human rights than many black African nations. If you thought of the whites there as one African tribe among many, the picture of the human rights situation on the African continent changed. I saw that the whole continent was pretty much a human rights disaster, with many countries run by one tribe that used its power to grind competing tribes into the ground, along tribal lines. The difference in S.A. was that the ruling tribe had white skin, which made that narrative play differently to Western eyes.
I presented all this to an opinion-writing journalism class I was in, and really, really upset a black student in the class, who felt I was defending apartheid. No matter how much I protested that I was doing no such thing, only putting the evil of apartheid in broader cultural context re: the evil of tribalism in power in Africa, nothing mollified him. He was visibly angry over my paper. He simply could not emotionally accept that there was any other way to look at the situation.
Of course I’m very glad that apartheid, which was evil, ended. But we in the West overlook all the time similar injustices ruling tribes inflict on weaker tribes in other African countries, because the oppressors and the oppressed have black skin.
This also accounts for the double standard to which Israel is frequently held, when compared to its Arab neighbors.

I’ll be watching for Stari to extend it to the Brown People immigration.
Yes, whatever else their problems the Comanches did indeed have an excellent immigration policy. And today, do we not admire Sitting Bull, Geronimo etc who fought their dispossession? I’d give some counter-examples– the Indian equivalent of today’s mass immigration enthusiasts — but they have been so expunged from history that I know of none.
No doubt the existed though, I cansee the Indian equivalent of Mr. Agn Stoic; “hey, these folks are really smart, what with their ‘wheel’ and ‘iron’ and ‘cattle’. Let’s let millions of them settle in our land”. Worked out well for them, didn’t it?

I relation to your other post about Islam, Rod.. I’m going to tell you a quick story.
In 2005 I was in Egypt doing graduate work at American University Cairo. I asked a friend of mine from one of my classes, this very bright and passionately Muslim guy, Muhammad to take a road trip with me into Upper Egypt. I rented a car, and we drove up the Red Sea coast, and then cut over to the Nile at Luxor. Muhammed’s dad owned a car dealership in Cairo, but had come from a small village about four hours south from Cairo. Muhammad, oddly enough, had never been to visit his ancestral village. Since we were passing it on the trip, he asked me if we could stop to visit his relatives, most of whom he had never met.
I of course agreed, knowing that this was going to be very interesting.
That evening, we were welcomed by his cousin, a fellah (that’s Arabic for peasant) with a large family. We sat in the front room of his house, with a large couch and dirt floor, and were entertained with sheesha and tea as all the men in the village came to pay their respects to their cousin and nephew and his strange American friend.
We sat and smoked as about thirty or forty men came in individually or in small groups, each in turns of five to ten minutes. They would greet Muhammad and I warmly, and then sit in silence for ten or fifteen minutes, and then leave.
We went on a tour of the village, saw the mosque and school that had been built by money donated by Muhammad’s dad, the local boy who’d made good.
At 9 pm a television was produced, and a thirty minute news show from Cairo was tuned in. Twenty minutes of awards to Egyptian military officers, a speech by Suzanne Mubarak (President Hosni’s wife), and then two ten minute segments, one from Gaza showing graphic footage of the latest IDF assault on Hamas, then another from Iraq showing more violence involving American troops. Like on al-Jezeera there was no squemishness about showing blood and gore, virtually all of it due to Israeli or American violence.
Then, we ate. Lamb and lentil dishes, fresh bread, all very excellent. One of the best meals I had in Egypt. This was the first time I caught very brief glimpses of the women in the house.
After dinner, we paid a visit to the village matriarch. She was the only woman I saw without a veil the thirty hours I was in the village. Later, Muhammad told me that she was the one who supervised most of the clitorectomies performed in the village. All girls were circumcised, as is usual in Sudanese and Upper Egyptian villages.
Then, we went to the tea house where all forty or so of the men in the village had gathered. I was given a chair in the middle of the room, while all the Egyptians sat along the walls smoking and drinking tea. Very few people spoke. After ten minutes, a boy maybe ten years old came in, walked up to me and started saying rude things to me – I didn’t understand much of what he said, because while I speak Modern Standard, the Egyptian patois is pretty outlandish. I ignored him briefly, until one of the older men reached over and cuffed him several times hard on the head, at which everyone laughed.
It was pretty late at this point, so we retired to Muhammed’s cousin’s to sleep.
The next morning we visited the village cemetery, and I noticed that the village was built right next to a twin Coptic Christian village with a church and small monastery – quite a few villages along the Nile are twinned like this. The original Coptic village which was millenia old, had been settled with a group of Bedouin from Arabia a couple centuries after the Muslim conquest in the 9th or 10th Centuries..
This is just one of the many times in my interactions with Muslims that I realized how very little I understood, and of how very alien they were to me. They are human beings, of course, but beyond that the cultures I have experienced in all my time in the Middle East have both caused me to grow greatly in respect for them, and also be as humble as I can when it comes to dealing with them.
I never told Muhammad that I’d been a soldier in the US Army, and that I has been in intelligence. I kept that to myself, except with my American friends, a couple of whom were actual spies – if a guy studying in Egypt on an NSA scholarship can be considered a spy. I think so.
Anyway, the one thing I am very sure of now is that most Americans have absolutely no idea what the world is really like, and that that ignorance breeds our hubris. I myself can no longer stomach it.
I’m not pacifist, and I’m a patriot. But I am no longer a militarist. And when it comes to Islam, I am not even close to being as bellicose as I once was.

the sad thing charles, is how many people who have never stepped foot in an islamic country, or even so much as had a normal adult conversation with a muslim in their entire lives, will be ready to write you off as naive. or some kind of dupe. and that your real experiences are irrelevant to some kind of self-defined ‘broader picture’ that they have availed themselves an opinion on.
which in a way, further underlines this posts theme of the embrace of the the lie. (or its cousin; ignorance.)

No doubt the existed though, I cansee the Indian equivalent of Mr. Agn Stoic; “hey, these folks are really smart, what with their ‘wheel’ and ‘iron’ and ‘cattle’. Let’s let millions of them settle in our land”. Worked out well for them, didn’t it?
Those would be the ones that quietly acculturated into the new dominant White settlers and enjoyed the benefits of the new technology.
Yeah, I’d say it worked out pretty well for them.
It isn’t all black and white, Stari. Sometimes the groups just merge.
I’m in a happy marriage to a second generation Latina – more than ten years and still going strong.

I question the use of the word lie.
It is a simplification. But when you have masses of human beings confronting each other you have to use simplifications. And the tribal worldview is the solution most people throughout history have fallen back on. In that situation an encounter between members of different tribes is not an encounter between human beings. It has become fashionable in the West to speak as if the barbarity of tribal encounters is a purely Western invention, partially because the technological resources of the twentieth century made the scale of possible barbarities so much larger. The notion that the West encountered pristinely non-violent cultures in Asia and the Americas, strikes me as a much bigger lie, and one that is implicit in much of the Western hand-wringing which followed in the wake of Hiroshima and the Concentration camps. In a certain sense, warfare is one of the ways cultures communicate, weapons (swords, rifles, horses–short of the atomic bomb) and forms of organization being passed from one to another.
The bigger danger is the social darwinist argument that superiority on the battlefield, especially given Western advantages in technology, translates into moral superiority in all aspects of life. I think there are some moments when you have to believe in a sort of manifest destiny, but one of the advantages of living in peace, even when there are barbarians threatening the frontiers of the empire, is to be able to reflect on your opponents, to recognize their virtues (in the Pagan rather than the Christian sense). I also feel that there can be a distinction between tribal conflicts, even war to the point of Unconditional Surrender imposed on tribes like Dixie or Japan, and ethnic cleansing. I don’t know much about the Comanches, but it may have been that they lacked the sort of social structure which would have made unconditional surrender meaningful.

Another great post, Rod, and your example of the Comanches vs. the Texans was perfect. In my opinion, you are making an argument against oversimplification by using an example of the simplified tribal allegiances that were required by two warring tribes in order to survive. Kind of ironic.
My question would be – at what point do those kinds of gross tribal, racial, political, ethnic, and religious oversimplifications lose their survival value and actually endanger the survival of the species? Haven’t we already reached that point, outside of war? Shouldn’t we already have a larger allegiance based upon the loosening of tribal bonds? For instance, as Americans, as humans?

Actually, to update what I said above, we’ve reached the point where simplistic tribalism is equally dangerous in war or peace, IMO.

Charles, I appreciate you telling that story. Seriously, I do. It doesn’t speak to the specific problems I was talking about, namely the politicization and radicalization of American Islamic institutions by Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and fellow travelers. One can and should make distinctions among Muslims — something I used to not do, and that I hope I have learned to do more often. That there are good Muslims who mean me and thee no harm doesn’t make the fact that there are bad ones who do any less of a fact. The problem with a cliche is not that it’s untrue, necessarily, but that it presents itself as the *whole* truth.

What does it mean for our political culture if people assume this cutthroat logic is permissible during peacetime? I mean, if people assume that things they value greatly are a threat, so anything they do to the Enemy for the sake of preserving their tribe is justified? Because guess what, we’re living in those times now.
Oh, Christ, here we go again. It’s the end, I tells ya! Watch out, folks – it’s 1850 all over again. No, make that 1914. No, 1939…
All that “violence” leading up to the 2008 election must have really seared the consciousness of all those intrepid bloggers cordoned off within the keyboard ghetto. Duck – incoming oil-soaked anathemas hurled from Daily Kos – think fast, another from Breitbart! Oh, the human vanity!
C’mon, Gladys, this is where we came in, we already know how it turns out, with the latest slutty-girls-these-days/death-of-the-Fertile-Christened posts in the final reel. Gladys? Take that I ? DREH-ROD T-shirt off RIGHT THIS MINUTE!

“That there are good Muslims who mean me and thee no harm . .”
this isn’t a criticism, rod. maybe it’s just my poor interpretation of the semantics. but this sounds like you’re talking about a smattering of people. yeah, there are good muslims who mean you and yours no harm; over a billion of them. and there are some who would would be happy to eradicate you and perhaps have the means to contribute in some bad way to some bad deed that would hurt innocent people. and those muslims number in probably the thousands.
so if your talking about 50,000 of a particlar defined tribe against 1,000,000,000 of same tribe, you’re talking 1 in 20,000. which means that you’re characterizing about 99.995% of a group against .005% of the group. which of course, is hardly a reasonable analysis.
and (with all due respect!) this is the same kind of fuzzy faceless rationalization that feeds the very problem that you point out. but you are very astute in distinguishing what a trap this mentality can be. one needs only apply it against any other large group (or tribe) of people (those mexicans, those yuppies, those rednecks, those catholics) to appreciate the potential dangers there.

Looking at white settlers or apartheid South Africans as merely another tribe in an existential battle ignores the reality that both were extensions of imperial powers which were, in no possible imagining, in a struggle for survival with “the enemy”. (I will recognize a mitigating factor when it comes to SA, in that “the West” was in a struggle with communism and, to a large extent, that battle was fought through proxies in Asia and Africa.)
Most of the “interventionist failures” of the last half of the 20th century were, likewise, proxy fights.

“If you were a Comanche in 1850, you didn’t have the luxury of being broad-minded and humanitarian towards the white man. He was coming to take your land, which would destroy your civilization. You had to fight; softness meant cultural extinction. So you fought the best way you knew how, which included gang rape of the enemy’s women, kidnapping, and gruesome tortures. A broad-minded Comanche was a dead Comanche.”
I’m confused. You make it sound as if the warlike Comanches won. But didn’t they all lose? And didn’t their gruesome behavior make it easier for the settlers to classify them as subhuman?
I was reading another blog in which the author asked why we are willing to give violence so long to work for us, while we require diplomacy to yield immediate results. Why do you find violence the intelligent option in this case, when it failed just as completely as diplomacy possibly could have?

So Charles, does the excellent lamb and lentil dinner make up for all the clitoridectomies done on all the girls, and the complete oppression of the women in every other way?
I’m glad they showed you and your friend warm hospitality; many barbarous cultures show great hospitality. But for the sake of our survival and sanity we have to see that they are barbarians, that our culture and beliefs are superior, and that if we have a direct conflict with them, we have to defeat them because of these things.

Charles Curtis: Anyway, the one thing I am very sure of now is that most Americans have absolutely no idea what the world is really like, and that that ignorance breeds our hubris.
Seldom have truer words been spoken (or posted).

Don’t we always overestimate the “danger” from people who are different from us when they probably just want to be left alone? We forget how much we impose on others and then resent it when a few brave and fanatical souls fight back. One man’s freedom fighter…

Interesting post, Rod. Sully wrote a while back about some of the weirdness that surrounds our politics and wondered whether it was due to the fact that other nations have suffered more tragedy than we have. He compared the situation here to that in the UK. He meant in recent times, of course. But I think he is on to something. There’s a curious faux hardness (with a very soft actual center) to some of our present day posturing in terms of myths, about ourselves and our ancestors. It’s kind of sad to hear people comparing themselves to their forebearers in the U.S. when debating some piddling political issues or policy matters.
It’s certainly true that we’ve painted some of our conflicts (the Indian wars, the Civil War) in a sanitized fashion in movies and fiction in which they provide the backdrop. I mean, no John Wayne western or World War II movie comes close to the real thing. Fighting for survival is savage, there’s no getting around that. Our ancestors faced some horrific situations and we’re here because they survived and prevailed. But our present day political battles aren’t fights for survival, which is one reason why I object so strongly to hyperbole, demagoguery and exaggeration.
Maybe some of the silliness we hear nowadays, which Sullivan attributed to lack of tragedy and recent hardship, is a compensation thing, something we might have avoided to some degree if we had gotten a better grip on what our past really was like. No one is going to lose his life or freedom or become enslaved or imprisoned in concentration camps if the other political party takes control of Washington, the way subjugated people were in Europe as recently as 65 years ago. It’s incredibly soft of people to argue politics as if that was the case. Too many people these days display false toughness and bravado; people in the old days really, really had to be tough.
Despite what Scott says above, I think you’re on to something when you say that non-warfare tribalism – equating politics to warfare — can be corrosive. Some of the problems stem from lack of humility. Some from some weirdness about dudeness in an era when dudes rarely have opportunities to display real physical or moral courage. (I once noted here that the civil rights era was the last in which I think high profile groups of Americans – I mean people covered in news stories — showed real guts. No Viola Liuzzo or James Reebs or John Lewis or Fannie Lou Hamer types in present day activism on any issue, anywhere. We’re all softies in comparison to them.)
When I see people here at your blog who write, “I’m productive, the backbone of America, they – the impoverished elderly relying on Social Security, the single mothers who need help from social services, the unemployed – are leeches.” What I see between the lines is, “I dare not view them as human least their fate befall me and mine. So I’ll keep putting them into neat little boxes away from myself and mine.” Of course, bad luck and bad karma may lead some of those commenters or their families to end up in just such situations. But they have a great need to separate themselves, to other and dehumanize those who aren’t doing well, as if that builds a protective wall which will keep them from ever falling into dire straits themselves. It’s tribalism as its weakest, in terms of motive. Very tiring and quite corrosive.

Rod, re Simone Weil, I’d recommend Waiting for God. It contains one of the best writings on the Eucharist that I’ve seen, and while she was never really systematic in her thought, I think in this book you get a clearer synopsis of where she’s coming from than in some others.
Having said that, Weil is by turns amazing, insightful, inspired, and infuriating, masochistic, and obscure. She’s well worth reading, but like many other intensely mystic personalities she seems to be overzealous to the point of fanaticism, at times, and she seems to have (temporally speaking) several major neuroses and blind spots. Another way to view her would be to see her as a “fool for Christ”, which in some respects is also accurate, I think.
On the topic in general: I’d say that individuals with an extraordinarily broad and humane view exist (and sometimes even survive) in all eras and contexts, but that they are much rarer in some than in others. Along the lines of Ken Wilber, I also tend to think that each society has a moral “center of gravity”–some are much more barbaric (such as the 19th-Century Comanche, the Vikings, etc.), some much more enlightened and humane. Hopefully, the center of gravity is (very!) gradually moving upward, on the whole–though of course that could be debated.
I think that this kind of thing is also where one’s metaphysics come out in one’s attitudes. If one thinks there is no ultimate meaning in the cosmos, then, as Lord Karth says, two billion years of evidence indicate that self-doubt, pondering, etc., are indeed luxuries which few throughout history have had. To put it another way, the law of the jungle, of dog-eat-dog, of “do unto others before they can do to you” is the default of reality, and Hobbes was right. Given this perspective, it’s hard to argue that “soft” post-Western man is more than a momentary aberration. Pat points out that we seem to want diplomacy to work now, but we let war go on as long as we like; but from the “Law of the Jungle” perspective, this is logical, since diplomacy is the pathetic illusion of effete, weak-minded fools.
On the other hand, if one believes that there is some transcendent meaning, be it God, dharma, or whatever, then the observed nastiness of the history of the cosmos, and of our particular slice of it, isn’t the last word. Good men and women who lived in barbarous ages, saints of all faiths who were martyred for peace and brotherhood, people who really do want to “give peace a chance” are not necessarily deluded saps, but perhaps pointers to something beyond the misery we see in this vale of tears. As I’ve argued many times in past threads, one’s temperament has a big part in how one sees it and in what one praises and sees as worthwhile.
Finally, major kudos to John E. for the Star Trek quote. One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite episodes!

Why thank you Turmarion – I really do think it is an important quote.

Back in my university days, I took an anthropology class which touched very briefly on the relationship between two tribes in New Guinea that were in more-or-less a permanent state of warfare (in fact, very much like the two cultures in the Star Trek episode that John E. cited, simply with far more primitive weapons).
The rules were all worked out so that neither tribe faced extinction and there were elaborate rituals surrounding the very real combat.
The end result was that young males were routinely removed from both tribes. This resulted in a more-or-less static population. Neither tribe grew; neither faced extinction. And the survivors (and women) led pretty decent lives as a result (as decent as their technology allowed).
I’ve read theories that the one main reason that WWI was so terrible was that there had really been no major wars in Europe since the end of the Napoleonic era, and that populations in all of the major players had increased to the point where (a) they were facing economic problems looking after everyone and (b) there was lots and lots and lots of expendable cannon fodder.
Or look at what I think is a cause of Islamist violence and terrorism: it’s a surplus of young men (it’s almost always young men willing to die in a suicide attack) who have no economic prospects, exactly what fueled WWI. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, et al. are simply dumping their own cannon fodder problem on us (and probably not even realizing that they’re doing it).
Personally, I’m convinced that if the human race is ever to outgrow war (especially once certain natural resources like oil start becoming scarce), we’re going to need to get our population growth under control.
And, of course, as has been pointed out here before, if some countries or cultures lower their birthrate and others don’t, then the ones that don’t will be the ones with all the cannon fodder. Which means that they will ultimately win the wars with the cultures that can’t afford the big population hit that war imposes.
In other words, our choice is either to control everyone’s population growth or condemn our descendants to a return to barbarism.

The phrase “best light cavalry in the world” is used by the narrator in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
Ironically, of course, the entire horse culture developed by the Plains Indians would not have been possible without the arrival of the Europeans, who brought the horse with them.

David J White,
Well, the Europeans didn’t domesticate the horse either. Nor did they invent the gun. Or writing. Or agriculture. Or steel production. Or a great many other technologies.
I’m not certain what the point of this is. Cultures have been influencing each other by exchanging ideas, tools, technologies, plants and animals for time immemorial. Europeans developed their writing systems through a long process of cultural fertilization from the Middle East (as did India). SHould we conclude then that neither Europe nor India is _really_ a literate culture? Cultures always borrow good ideas from other cultures, and sometimes they adapt them, tweak them, make advances on them. So it was with native Americans and horse cavalry.

Rod,
I’d agree with everything Turmarion says above….she certainly did have her blind spots. Her understanding of the Nazis, mentioned above, was probably among them. She was anxious to make the case that Nazism was merely the extreme form of something dark and sick at the heart of Western culture, and that in our own way, and to a greater or lesser degree, we all share in the moral corruption that found its highest expression in the Nazis. Which is true as far as it goes, but she was so taken with this idea that she often failed to see that Nazism was also an exercise in genocidal mass sadism that was truly unique and different from your run of the mill brutal tyranny. Like a great many visionary thinkers, she saw some aspects of reality more truly and more vividly than just about any of her contemporaries, but at the cost of not being able to see other aspects of reality very well at all. She was also only 34 when she died, and probably would have mellowed a bit if she had lived longer.
WIth that caveat, she’s still a great writer; and don’t take my word for it, you can take Pope Paul VI’s word. I’d recommend ‘The Need for Roots’, which is long, but is probably the best summary of what she thought; it’s more or less her prescription for how to renew European civilisation in the aftermath of World War II. (It was written shortly before her death in 1944, and was published posthumously.) ‘On Human Personality’ is also interesting, and contains a powerful critique of rights-based liberalism.

BobSF: “Looking at white settlers or apartheid South Africans as merely another tribe in an existential battle ignores the reality that both were extensions of imperial powers which were, in no possible imagining, in a struggle for survival with “the enemy”. (I will recognize a mitigating factor when it comes to SA, in that “the West” was in a struggle with communism”
The histories I have been reading are about the 19th century, not the Apartheid era. In the 19th century, the whites were mainly Boers, and the most powerful blacks were Zulus. The Boers (i.e. Afrikaners) could only in the most tenuous sense be said to be “extensions of imperial powers”; they had long lost all political and economic links with Holland, and even their language had diverged to make it barely comprehensible to the Dutch – they really were just one tribe among many, and they were engaged in expansionism at the same time as the Zulus.

One small correction to be made.
The gun is a European invention. The Chinese had gunpowder weapons but they were basically firecrackers strapped to arrows and a version of what we call the Roman Candle. The metal tube, packed with gunpowder and firing a solid projectile is first recorded in England in the late 1200s and it looked like a large Coke bottle with an arrow for the projectile.

Sometimes the groups just merge.
This is Mexico’s official ideology. In fact it is more or less the case in most ‘Latin’ American countries. Now, whatever their charms, and those of their women, these mestizo cultures have not been terribly successful economically, from the standpoint of politic and human rights, etc. The two predominantly European — even northern European — countries have.

I’m not certain what the point of this is.
My point, Hector, is that for much of the past century people have liked to romanticize the Plains Indian culture as something wonderful and noble, and destroyed by the white settlement of the West. And yet, that very Plains Indian culture, centered as it was on the horse, was made possible only by the arrival of white people, who brought the horse with them.
When I was in freshman English, we called that kind of contrast “irony”. That was the point of my observation.
In response you’re going after a straw man, as if I had said something critical or condemnatory about the Indians.
Sheesh, I really hit a nerve somewhere, didn’t I. Touchy about something, Hector?

David, you’re right, and S.C. Gwynne notes the deep irony in the fact that the Indians got horses because of the Spanish, and the Comanches so thoroughly mastered the horse that they became the absolute scourge of the Spanish. The Texans only achieved martial parity with the Comanches when they learned how to fight from the backs of horses too, and Sam Colt invented the revolver. Comanche warriors were so good at what they did that they could fire off a blaze of arrows while lying perpendicular off the backs of galloping horses in battle. The Texans had no capabilities that were remotely similar, until the six-shooter was invented. Technology literally changed history. Until Mr. Colt’s little invention, the Indians held a technological advantage, given their sublime mastery of the bow and arrow, which may not have been technologically as advanced as the Kentucky rifles the whites had, but which were incomparably more useful for fighting.
It’s interesting too to see, in reading “Empire of the Summer Moon,” how the arrival and mastery of horse technology changed the Comanches. They were always one of the more brutish of the American Indian tribes, but when they got and mastered horses, they became a full-on warrior culture, with a society centered entirely around fighting. Technology enabled them to indulge the worst aspects of their own culture. That happens with us humans, doesn’t it?

Did the globalizing, End of History crowd ever spell it out that we’d all become one “tribe” of consumers, ruminants with credit cards? A Pax America Express would have been more benign than the preceding experiments in establishing the brotherhood of man, or at least less bloody. Nice try. The economic hangover and, down the road, peak oil have likely popped that dream. Guess we won’t be living in Wall-ee’s(sp?) world anytime soon.
If it’s to be tribes, let’s make the best of it and do what we’ll sometimes need to do without making a religion of it, as was the practice in the 20th century. You put out a forest fire for dear life but you don’t have to hate flames. It probably helps if you don’t, but rather stay calm and professional.
Where it gets really interesting is what will determine the tribes? There’s not much glue holding the US together so there’s plenty of room for troubles.

“This is a story you see over and over again in world history, throughout the globe: tribal cultures and civilizations believing unquestionably in their own righteousness, and in the subhumanization of their enemies, conquering others ruthlessly.”
This is a very thought-provoking post that covers a striking range of ideas and perspectives, but I want to list a few counterpoints.
1. I don’t think one needs to believe in one’s own righteousness to conquer others ruthlessly – think of the Athenians of Thucydides, who do not make any reference to their moral superiority in wiping out the Melians, but speak entirely in terms of the demands of power.
2. A belief in one’s own superiority need not translate into brutal wars of expansion – the history of China would bear this out. China, as the Middle Kingdom, regarded its neighbors and also Europe with condescension, but it never thought to expand beyond its ancient boundaries. The wars of China were usually defensive.
3. I think that people caught up in the kind of total conflict such as that of the Texans settlers and the Comanches justify their actions not only by means of the fears over their own extermination (it’s either us or them) but also through the belief that one is just as exposed to danger and risk as one’s enemy. What is particularly unsettling about humanitarian action is the belief that it is easy, that there need be no significant cost in human life for those who attempt to prevent or end genocide. As Kosovo showed, humanitarian war ends up hurting the civilians of the other side the most, violating the basic principle that one ought to fight wars in such a way as to minimize the suffering of innocents. But the lives of NATO troops were ultimately regarded as too valuable to risk for a conflict at which no vital interest was at stake. Thus, the method was to bomb the Serbs into submission, and civilians were the most afflicted. French Catholic philosopher Pierre Manent has an excellent critique of humanitarian intervention at the end of A World Beyond Politics.
4. Hatred is not always a major factor in warfare. You might recall the statement of C. S. Lewis, a veteran of the trenches, who said that if he and a German soldier had killed each other and then awakened in the afterlife, they would have born each other no grudges and offered each other friendship. British and German soldiers declared a truce to celebrate Christmas together in the trenches in 1914-15. Spinola, general of the Spanish forces, treated his Protestant Dutch enemies with compassion. Even the Spartans, after finally defeating Athens in the Peloponnesian War, spared the city out of respect for the role that Athens played in defending Greece against the Persians.
I think that Rieff comes down too hard on Weil – such dispassion is also found in Thucydides and Machiavelli, and perhaps it is too much for the liberal mind to bear. But Weil also said that the fact that the French had colonies made them less willing to resist the German occupiers. Because they had conquered and exploited others, the French were more readily accepting of the fate of being conquered and exploited in their turn. The fact of having dominated others made them less able to defend themselves – they were in many cases not able to generate the unconditional feeling of attachment to their fatherland to defy a superior force.

Armchair Pessimist raises a valid question with his comment, “there’s not much glue holding the US together, so there’s plenty of room for trouble”. What are the “glues” that hold these United States together?
And how do we improve and spread these glues around to more people?
That’s worth a thread discussion of its’ own, I’m thinking.
(Not sure how to introduce that topic on its’ own; hope someone else will do so)
As for the topic of savagery: When someone is shooting at you with the obvious intention of killing you, the natural reaction is to become as “savage” as necessary to survive. Yet, after the action, we were considerate enough to treat the enemy wounded and remove them to a nearby medical unit for extra care. It wasn’t just the Geneva Convention rules motivating us; there was some simple compassion for other soldiers who were, in a sense, very much like ourselves, had we been wounded!!

Now, whatever their charms, and those of their women, these mestizo cultures have not been terribly successful economically, from the standpoint of politic and human rights, etc. The two predominantly European — even northern European — countries have.
Which, as I stated in an earlier post on this subject, is why I believe that the best strategy for dealing with our Southern Immigrants is for young White men to marry these incoming lovely brown ladies, have many children with them, and raise their offspring in Northern European cultural mores.
It dilutes the immigrant breeding pool and reinforces US social norms in the next generation.
And the ladies are indeed charming…

RE: The wars of China were usually defensive.
The Tibetans and Vietnamese might disagree. And, of course, what we think of the ‘Chinese homeland’ today wasn’t always ethnically Chinese. Many of the tribal cultures of Southeast Asia today (e.g. the Hmong) used to live in southern China, until they were forced out by ethnic Chinese expansion.
Re: But Weil also said that the fact that the French had colonies made them less willing to resist the German occupiers. Because they had conquered and exploited others, the French were more readily accepting of the fate of being conquered and exploited in their turn.
Ah, I can see you’ve read ‘The Need for Roots’. Yes, that’s exactly what she said, and I think there’s a fair amount of truth to it.

“What does it mean for our political culture if people assume this cutthroat logic is permissible during peacetime?”
Uhhhhh, what’s peacetime?
Anyway, the main thing history teaches us is that every indigenous people (tribe) got to BE indigenous by displacing (and usually slaughtering) the people who were there before them.
Captcha: state merry

“Now, whatever their charms, and those of their women, these mestizo cultures have not been terribly successful economically, from the standpoint of politic and human rights, etc. The two predominantly European — even northern European — countries have.”
Note to Stari Momak:
I am sure that throughout much of the history of the Roman empire, one could often hear the complaint from the Romans that those pesky low-wage invaders from the North, the Germanic peoples, could never truly understand civilization, and could never be properly integrated into the mestizo diversity that was the glory of Rome (note: the emperor Septimius Severus was North African, Diocletian was from Dalmatia, and Augustine was a Berber).

Hector, you are right about the Tibetan and Vietnamese experience of Chinese aggression. But my point is that ethnic unity and a narrow cultural identity often serve to limit territorial expansion. I don’t think that the Chinese can imagine themselves in global terms as easily as Americans or even other Westerners can. Chinese imperialism in that regard will always be narrower in its scope. This isn’t to say that it isn’t necessarily less brutal or oppressive, but rather that it operates according to a different dynamic. Confucius Institutes are not the equivalent of Christian missionaries from the West – the former merely does PR, whereas Christian missionaries can bring about deeper and more far-reaching changes in a society. Hence the paradox of Western imperialism – its legacy is not only violence, but it creates and establishes institutions that can enable the colonized to rise and occupy positions of authority, as with the Catholic and Anglican churches in Africa.

Political Atheist: I am sure that throughout much of the history of the Roman empire, one could often hear the complaint from the Romans that those pesky low-wage invaders from the North, the Germanic peoples, could never truly understand civilization, and could never be properly integrated into the mestizo diversity that was the glory of Rome (note: the emperor Septimius Severus was North African, Diocletian was from Dalmatia, and Augustine was a Berber).
ROFLOL!!! Amen, kudos, and high five!!!

Charles’s post above made me feel physically ill.
He visited a culture where 50% of the population are at the age of nine ritually tortured and mutilated by their own relatives for no other reason than to ensure that they would never be tempted to dishonour themselves and their husbands.
And because they gave him a nice lunch and a cup of tea he left nodding sagely to himself about how we should not be so hasty to judge others by our own standards.
But generally the more violent and oppressive a culture the higher the standards of courtesy and hospitality it rigidly imposes on itself.
A typical New Yorker or Londoner may well knock me over running for a bus and not even apologise – but even the most yobbish would blanch at the idea of celebrating his daughters ninth birthday by taking her to some vicious old crone who will hack out her clitoris without anaesthetic.
These people in Upper Egypt may well be polite, generous, pious etc but they are fundamentally evil in a sense which it is difficult for anyone in the West to even comprehend.
Unfortunately there is little we can do about this particular evil – but we can at least call it what it is and despise the perpetrators and their apologists.