Conceitos, Teoria, teoricos (textos e vídeos)

[marcelo l.]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200710220002

Bateman on Hanson: An Altercation Altercation
October 22, 2007 12:02 pm ET by MMFA Staff

By LTC Bob Bateman

Most Altercators know me as a soldier, and this is as it should be. But our gracious host and I share at least one thing in common: We are both academic historians.

Eric, of course, is a full-time professor, while I am only adjunct. But our foundations are the same. As historians we share certain professional values. For example, as historians we privilege the written word. In our historical writing, we both seek to create a thesis for the reader which accurately represents a synthesis of facts and ideas that come from sometimes quite disparate sources. And finally, in developing that thesis, we are bound by the facts. This is as it should be; we are historians. But one might further contend that Eric and I both have a problem with people who distort the historical record. In short, we hate liars.

Eric's book When Presidents Lie is explicit on that point, describing as it does the problems which arise for the entire nation when our chief executives lie. My own book on the events at No Gun Ri in 1950 devotes fully half of the text to understanding how lies worked their way into the historical record and people's understanding of what took place near that small South Korean village more than 50 years ago. The bottom line for both of us is a strong sentiment against people putting falsehoods into the record.

In both of those situations, the lies were direct. They were fabrications constructed by actors on the historical stage, and they were exposed through straightforward historical spadework. Far more insidious is the lie built by another historian in order to support an agenda that has little or nothing to do with history. Against that type of lie there has traditionally been little defense. Those who know better (academic historians in this case) often cannot match the volume of the polemicist who cloaks himself in the garb of legitimate-seeming history. It is a sad fact that "popular" usually trumps "academic" in the bookstore, so the falsehoods put together by the fabulist often drown out his academic critics. The general public, for its part, is often taken in by the fact that the fabulist appears learned and, therefore, should be trusted.

So what is an honest historian to do? Writing a competing academic book usually does not work, since such works are usually only read by peers within academe. Blasting the offending book in the reviews sections of academic journals is similarly ineffective. An op-ed in a major newspaper is not viable, because there just is not enough space to engage in more than rhetoric. All of which usually meant that those with popular lies to tell won out most of the time. Enter the Internet.

Our host has been kind enough to provide me a bully pulpit for the next several weeks as I take down one of the most profound perverts of the historical record in the modern era, Mr. Victor Davis Hanson.

If you are not familiar with him, Hanson, or "VDH" as he sometimes styles himself, is a historian of classical Greece, or at least he was a historian of that place and era. Now he is something different. Since 2001 he has laid claims to being a military and cultural historian for the ages, in addition to becoming a columnist for the National Review Online and other hyper-conservative outlets. Personally, I do not care what he writes in an op-ed, so long as he does not torture historical facts in order to validate his own pet theories. But Hanson does exactly that, and so, from my seat, he is the worst sort of polemicist: one who claims academic credentials as a neutral observer, but then insidiously inserts political interpretations of his own present-day biases into the historical record.

Hanson's best-known general thesis, which he has pounded upon since his book Carnage and Culture came out in 2001, is that there are elements in Western culture (that is to say European culture, but only those who derive their heritage from the Greek/Roman traditions) that make us unique and always successful in war. His "evidence" is laid out in his version and interpretation of nine battles and/or campaigns which took place over roughly 2,500 years. In Carnage and Culture these are: Salamis (480 BC), Gaugamela (331 BC), Cannae (216 BC), Poitiers (732 AD), Tenochtitlan (1520-21 AD), Lepanto (1571 AD), Rorke's Drift (1879 AD), Midway (1942 AD), and Tet (1968 AD).

Hanson is tricky. He plays upon a uniquely American dichotomy. Generally speaking, we Americans respect academic qualifications, but at the same time harbor deep-seated biases against those we deem too intellectual. The line there is squiggly. Thus, Hanson tries to claim academic qualities, but then immediately switches gears and denigrates any potential opposition as mere "academic" history (with its unreasonable insistence on things like footnotes or endnotes so that your sources can be checked). Indeed, he dismissed the whole lot by saying, "Academics in the university will find that assertion chauvinistic or worse -- and thus cite every exception from Thermopylae to Little Bighorn in refutation."

He further eroded any potential critique by claiming that such would be part of the "cultural debates" (conservative code for "campus liberals hate America"). Indeed, that occurred in the very first paragraph of his book when he wrote, "While I grant that critics would disagree on a variety of fronts over the reasons for European military dynamism and the nature of Western civilization itself, I have no interest in entering such contemporary cultural debates, since my interests are in the military power, not the morality of the West."

His technique worked -- until now. Carnage and Culture was a national best-seller, and Hanson is himself now regularly invited into the highest levels of the executive branch of government to speak and advise. All because he twisted facts to tell a story as he wanted it to be, not as the facts themselves lay out. And because he silenced his critics.

Hanson's dismissals of those who would correct the record he distorted are based upon two biases: "Campus liberals" would engage in culture wars, and "non-military historians" don't know about military history and are thus unqualified to speak on the topic at hand. Well, Victor, I am afraid that I'm not going to be so easy to dismiss. Although I teach at Georgetown now, I used to teach at West Point, and the topic I taught is the same that I have studied for 18 years, military history. It is one thing for you to brush off an inhabitant of, say, the history departments at Yale or the University of Wisconsin as knowing nothing of the military or military history. It is quite another to attempt the same with an Army Airborne Ranger who also happens to be an academic historian and who thinks that your personal signal work is a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading, intellectually dishonest feces.

[marcelo l.]

Bateman on Hanson, Round 1: Cannae, 2 August 216 B.C.
October 29, 2007 1:33 pm ET by MMFA Staff

Eric writes:

Twenty-five years or so ago, I was traveling with a backpack somewhere in Morocco, and I spent a couple of nights in some tiny town that didn't have electricity where people dreamed of America in a way that was really quite moving. A kid my age asked, over and over, "what kind of country" America was. Of course, that question has many answers, depending on the context, but one of them today surely is: "America, thanks to George W. Bush and his supporters, is the kind of country that kidnaps people in other countries, takes them off to be tortured, without trial, and then 'disappears' them. At least some of these people are innocent." Or is there some other way to read this story in The Washington Post?

On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush announced that the CIA's overseas secret prisons had been temporarily emptied and 14 al-Qaeda leaders taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But since then, there has been no official accounting of what happened to about 30 other "ghost prisoners" who spent extended time in the custody of the CIA.

Some have been secretly transferred to their home countries, where they remain in detention and out of public view, according to interviews in Pakistan and Europe with government officials, human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees. Others have disappeared without a trace and may or may not still be under CIA control.

[...]

At least one former CIA prisoner has been quietly freed. Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence agent captured after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was detained at a secret location until he was released last year.

Ani gained notoriety before the Iraq war when Bush administration officials said he had met in Prague with Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker Mohamed Atta. Some officials, including Vice President Cheney, cited the rendezvous as evidence of an alliance between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The theory was later debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Sept. 11 commission, which revealed in 2004 that Ani was in U.S. custody.

The Iraqi spy resurfaced two months ago when Czech officials revealed that he had filed a multimillion-dollar compensation claim. His complaint: that unfounded Czech intelligence reports had prompted his imprisonment by the CIA.

[...]

In June, a coalition of human rights groups identified 39 people who may have been in CIA custody but are still missing.
Note that they conveniently held Mr. Ani so he could not contradict the lies of Dick Cheney (trumpeted by William Safire) regarding the phony Prague meeting upon which so emphasis was placed.

America is also, by the way, the kind of country that produces a Quote of the Day like this one, God save us: " 'Obama sounds too much like Osama,' said Kayla Nickel of Westlink [Christian Church in Witchita, Kansas]. 'When he says his name, I am like, 'I am not voting for a Muslim!' " Here. Oh, and it is also the kind of country where The Wall Street Journal's editors' idea of "torture" is the Democrats allegedly using "a universally hailed Attorney General nominee as a political pawn to appease the antiwar left even as they refuse to say what kind of interrogation they do support." Here. Note, first of all, the logical incongruity of calling Mukasey "universally hailed." If an "antiwar left" is opposed, he is, by definition, not "universally hailed." Note also, by the way, that the position of what the Murdoch-owned and operated Journal calls the "antiwar left" is also the position of the majority of Americans, while the Journal itself speaks only for a recidivist right wing that has brought dishonor and disaster to the nation.

But never mind that.

Now here's LTC Bob Bateman's dismemberment of the scholarly reputation of the ill-informed McCarthyite Victor Davis Hanson, Part II. (Part I is here, and Hanson's response to it is here.)

It may be moderately obscene, I admit, but I have always enjoyed teaching students about this battle. At the tactical level, it is the story of a force, outnumbered and fighting far from their base, defeating another force almost twice their size and doing so in such a decisive manner as to stun the world and be passed down for more than 2,000 years. At the operational level of war, competing philosophies of conflict are at play. Finally, at the strategic level of war, there is a lesson to be learned about the strategic vision of one leader, and the inability of another to grasp more than what happens on the battlefield. In short, the story of Cannae is complex and a challenge to teach.

Rather than rail overmuch here at the outset, however, I prefer to allow Mr. Hanson to light his own petard. Hanson's basic contention is that face-to-face infantry battle is a cultural legacy exclusive to the "West." In Carnage and Culture, he sets out to demonstrate this by resurrecting the hoary old 19th century model of "Decisive Battles" and claiming that the study of battle is the One True Way. Here is how he lays out the reason for his focus upon individual battles:

In an analysis of culture and conflict why should we concentrate on a few hours of battle and the fighting experience of the average soldier - and not the epic sweeps of wars, with their cargo of grand strategy, tactical maneuver, and vast theater operations that so much better lend themselves to careful social and cultural exegesis? Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing, which is ultimately found only in battle. (pg. 7)
Also:

There is an inherent truth in battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory.
Just a short while later Hanson rams home the point ... again:

We owe it to the dead to discover at all costs how the practice of government, science, law, and religion instantaneously determines the fate of thousands on the battlefield - and why. (pg. 8)
A few lines later he repeats himself, and at this point you are starting to think, "Hmmmm, maybe he's serious about this focus on battle as being what matters thing":

War is ultimately killing. Its story becomes absurd when the wages of death are ignored by the historian. (pg. 8)
In case you weren't listening, he keeps up the same drumbeat throughout the book.

Hanson is saying that the study of battle provides the evidence to support his main idea. Hanson outlines his overall thesis in a section subheaded "The Singularity of Western Military Culture." In that section Hanson puts it this way:

All armies engage in mass confrontations at times; few prefer to do so in horrendous collisions of shock and eschew fighting at a distance or through stealth when there is at least the opportunity for decisive battle ...
And then:

Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty ... (pg. 445)
In other words, only Western armies seek out shock battle and short, sharp, hard fights. Others try to avoid battles, using movement, misdirection, deception, and other stratagems so as not to fight.

But there is one big problem with that thesis: One of the most famous battles in all of history runs 180 degrees against Mr. Hanson's thesis. It is a battle so famous that Hanson cannot ignore it or pretend that it didn't happen, as he does with many other battles (which we will see in later weeks). But more than that, it was not just one battle, but a whole string of battles, all of which ran counter to his idea that the cultural legacy of the "West" generates an inclination for head-on battles, and that inclination leads to victory. Even worse, what eventually led to an overall victory for the Roman ("Western") side in the war was not battle, but actually the active avoidance of battle! Those last two points, however, Hanson has concealed.

The short version of what happened in the Punic Wars runs something like this: Rome and a North African city called Carthage fought a series of wars that spanned almost 120 years. During the second war, a Carthaginian leader named Hannibal marched his army from Spain, across what is now the south of France, over the Alps, and into Italy. During those marches he confronted small Roman detachments and Roman allies. He beat them all. Then, once he invaded the Roman homeland, he defeated several Roman armies in a row.

In the first major battle, Hannibal and his army directly confronted an equally sized Roman army and wiped out about 20,000 of perhaps 36,000 Romans on the field. In the next battle, he again offered direct combat with his army, again on equal terms, and in that battle his army killed 30,000 Romans while capturing the remaining 10,000. So, in two battles, Hannibal's non-Western army killed or captured something like 60,000 out of almost 80,000 Romans sent against them, while barely losing any of their own strength. Hanson, of course, never talks about these numbers or battles in any detail. He grants them light, one-sentence asides and concessions, but generally brushes past their meaning. With the addition of Cannae, these three fights are examples that run counter to Hanson's thesis. One battle might have been an exception to the rule. But when the historical record shows battle after battle where the "Western" way of war is shown up, on home turf, when the Westerners outnumbered the enemy, the thesis begins to lose air. Hanson, however, brushes this aside by admitting that Cannae "was not a fluke." But he does so in just one sentence.

But back to the narrative: Finally, the series of pitched battles culminated in the absolute destruction of the largest Roman army yet thrown against the Carthaginians. Out of an estimated 70,000 Roman legionnaires who arrived in the vicinity of the battlefield at a place called Cannae, Hannibal's army killed about 50,000 of them in a few hours. The Carthaginians did this by pretending to pull back in the middle of their line, until they sucked the Roman army into a three-sided trap, which their cavalry then closed from behind. It was the definition of a historic battle, but the really interesting stuff came later. More on that in a moment.

Now, to give the devil his due, Hanson's description of the battle that occurred in 216 B.C. is generally accurate, in the broadest outlines. He does go pretty far, however, in trying to twist the language around to suit his needs. So, while he takes no liberties with the specifics of what happened on that day, he is tricky with his use of language. Hanson tries to minimize the impact of the horrific Roman defeat at Cannae by making it seem like the actual size of the massive Roman army did not matter. Instead, he suggests, the Romans that lost there were effectively the second-stringers.

For example, he mentions, how at Cannae the African troops in the Carthaginian army were "veterans." Then he conversely describes many of the 70,000 Romans as, "adolescents who filled the Romans ranks, depleted by the thousands butchered earlier at Trebia and Lake Trasimene" (pg. 101). In another part of the text, while Hanson says that Hannibal "arrayed 10,000 skilled horsemen," he goes on to describe the opposing Roman cavalry as "6,000 poorly trained mounted Italians." (pg. 102) Now, the problem with that is that the sources do not describe the Roman cavalry as "poorly trained." It is true that the Romans generally did not have the best cavalry. But in this specific case, Hanson is just making an assertion. He does this because it fits his thesis. He does not know what training the Roman cavalry had, any more than he knows how many "adolescents" were in the Roman army that day. The historical record is, effectively, silent on those specific points. In other words, Hanson is merely guessing, but writing his guesses in such a way as to make them appear authoritative.

But all of this is small fry compared to his greatest offenses.

How, one might be asking themselves at this point, can Hanson defend his thesis of the supremacy of the Western Way of War given the facts of these battles? How can he continue to assert that the West is supreme in infantry shock battle, when all major Roman battles of the Second Punic War mentioned in this chapter show the Romans being beaten in direct head-to-head shock battle by non-Westerners? Well, the answer is moderately simple. Hanson tries to save his thesis by saying something like, "Uh, battle matters ... except when it doesn't." In fact, this is what he says:

Cannae, like so many of these landmark battles, is the exception that proves the rule: even when Roman armies were poorly led, foolishly arranged, squabbling before battle over the proper deployment, and arrayed against a rare genius, the catastrophic outcome was not fatal to their conduct of the war. (pg. 105)

What is remarkable about Cannae is not that thousands of Romans were so easily massacred in battle, but that they were massacred to such little strategic effect. (pg. 111)

Students of war must never be content to learn merely how men fight a battle, but must always ask why soldiers fight as they do, and what ultimately their battle is for. (pg. 131)
So, you see, despite Hanson having written over and over again that battle is what matters, when confronted with irrefutable historical evidence contrary to his thesis that the "West" is supreme in infantry-centric shock battles, Hanson becomes a flip-flopper. In these quotes above he is saying, because he must, that it actually does not matter who wins the battle!

But what about what happened afterward? If what really matters, according to this new Hanson formulation, is the bigger picture, then what happened next? What happened after the Romans were crushed, for a third time, on their home turf? Hanson writes:

Marcus Junius was appointed dictator, with formal directives to raise armies in any manner possible. He did so magnificently. More than 20,000 were recruited into four new legions. Some legionaries were not yet seventeen. Eight thousand slaves were purchased at public expense and given arms, with a proviso that courage in battle might lead to freedom. Junius himself freed 6,000 prisoners and took direct command of this novel legion of felons. (pg. 127)
Huh? Wait a second. In an earlier passage Hanson wrote, "Western armies often fought with and for a sense of legal freedom." (pg. 21) This, in fact, was a foundation to his hypothetical motivation for the Western soldiers. According to Hanson, it was because of their freedoms that men in the West fought so hard and so well in infantry shock battles.

Yet here, of 20,000 new troops Hanson is lauding the Romans for raising in the wake of the disaster at Cannae, a full 14,000 of them are either slaves or prisoners. (And I thought our recruiting difficulties in the U.S. Army were rough.) How can one be a slave and at the same time fight due to a sense of one's civic responsibility to the Roman state? This is an especially difficult question since most Roman slaves were from foreign sources in the first place, and so would have had no allegiance to Rome.

But the legions were raised, and by the end of the chapter Hanson's logic has become so twisted around that this fact, not the facts of what happened in the battle, is what Hanson contends matters. But then what did the Romans do with those legions? Perhaps this line might help. (Primer: Hasdrubal is another Carthaginian leader; Metaurus was a battle that took place in 207 B.C., nine years after Cannae.) Here Hanson is offering a hypothetical and comparing the strategic levels of war by talking about the Carthaginian political leadership vice that of the Romans.

After Hasdrubal's catastrophic setback at the Metaurus, there was no likelihood that the Carthaginian Assembly, as Rome had done after the far worse slaughter at Cannae, would have ordered a general muster of all its able-bodied citizenry -- a real nation in arms arising to crush the hated resurgent legions. (pg. 9)
Now, from that sentence one gets the impression that after the battle of Cannae, the Romans did, in fact, arise as a "real nation in arms" and that they subsequently immediately sought battle and then "crushed" the Carthaginian army under Hannibal, right?

Wrong. Though Hanson makes only one slight mention of it, the fact is that Hannibal stayed in Italy for the next 14 years. He stayed on Roman soil, moving with near impunity, year after year. How could Hannibal do that?

Well, completely contrary to Hanson's thesis about how Western armies seek battle, hold ground, and strive for short and sharp shock conflicts, the reality was that the Romans, for the next 14 years, deliberately avoided shock and pitched battles with Hannibal. (Remember these Hanson lines? "All armies engage in mass confrontations at times; few prefer to do so in horrendous collisions of shock and eschew fighting at a distance or through stealth when there is at least the opportunity for decisive battle..." and "Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty..." (pg. 445))

What the Romans actually did was exactly the opposite of the Hanson thesis. They broke up their armies into smaller forces and harassed Hannibal indirectly. They gave ground, regularly, and lived to maneuver another day. They sought to wear him down, while preserving their own forces. They avoided pitched battles on any large scale. In short, they followed the direct advice of one of the other most famous generals of all time, one who is only mentioned by name a single time in the entire chapter (and then without noting his actions). That man was Quintus Fabius Maximus, called "Cunctator" (The Delayer), and it is from him that we have the term "Fabian Strategy," which was so magnificently put into play by a fellow named George Washington a couple of millennia later.

How Hanson missed that extra 14-year part where the Romans avoided major pitched battles in Italy is curious.

Folks, this is just one chapter, and it was a chapter dealing with events within Hanson's specialty. It gets worse from here.

[marcelo l.]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200710290004

Bateman on Hanson, Round 2: Poitiers, 732 A.D., and beyond
November 05, 2007 1:23 pm ET by MMFA Staff

By LTC Bob Bateman

(The introduction to this series is here, and Round 1 is here. Hanson's response to the introduction is here.)

I really do not know what happened between the Frankish cities of Tours and Poitiers in the fall of 732. I do know there was a fight somewhere around there, and I know that it was between a strong Muslim raiding party and the forces of the Frankish battle-leader Charles Martel. I know that after this fight the Muslims returned to the south, and that Martel recaptured some of the Frankish land that the Muslims had earlier taken in the South of France. I cannot know much more than that because the only sources for this battle are scraps from two different medieval chronicles which together offer only two or three descriptive sentences about the actual fighting. But then again, I did not try and extrapolate an entire chapter out of those few lines and use that to fill a 1,700-year gap in my thesis, as Victor Davis Hanson does in his chapter on the battle of Poitiers/Tours in his book Carnage and Culture.

Of the two sources that Hanson, or anyone, must rely upon, here is the more commonly read one. This comes from the "Continuation" of the Chronicle of Fredegar:

There the victorious prince Charles came before them, with all the aid he could muster; he drew up his battle-lines and plunged in among them with miraculous courage, like a hungry lion attacking sheep. In the name of the power of Our Lord, he made such a great slaughter of the enemies of the Christian faith that, as the history witnesses, he killed 385,000 of them in that battle, together with their king, whose name was Abdirames. Then was he first given the surname Hammer, for, as a hammer breaks and smashes iron and other metals, so did he break his enemies and all foreign nations in battle. Miraculously, in this battle he lost only 1500 of his own men.
A chronicle written by a Christian in Islamic Spain wrote this of the battle:

The northern peoples remained as immobile as a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions. In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Arabs with the sword. The people of Austrasia, greater in number of soldiers and formidably armed, killed the king, Abd ar-Rahman, when they found him, striking him on the chest. But suddenly, within sight of the countless tents of the Arabs, the Franks despicably sheathed their swords postponing the fight until the next day since night had fallen during the battle.
And that is it. Not a lot to go on, is there? We can obviously throw out the numbers of dead, as that was purely a medieval rhetorical device (and indeed, one not necessarily limited to that era) meant to convey the idea of "a lot." We may, or may not, disregard some aspect of the Frankish losses for the same reason. What remains is a single descriptive line in the first account: "[H]e drew up his battle-lines and plunged in among them with miraculous courage like a hungry lion attacking sheep." Obviously, in the first version of events, Martel was attacking. He was on the move and assaulting, and he won the battle.

Using the other source, Hanson relates how the Franks were "an immovable sea" and "stood close to one another" and how "as a mass of ice, they stood firm together." (Hanson's translation is similar, but not the same as what I have.) OK, the two existing documents almost perfectly contradict each other. One described Martel in the attack, and the other seems to say that he stood still and was on the defensive. Neither says a single word about the enemy. They do not say how many there were, or how they fought. It is a conundrum. Hanson, however, has no such qualms. For him this was a classic battle of pure infantry versus cavalry.

What? What cavalry? Where?

It does seem likely that there were a fair percentage of horses on this raid. We know, for example, that the Muslim leader (who died at Poitiers) had earlier crushed a force of Franks under Duke Odo in two successive battles, and that he apparently had some heavy cavalry with him there, but the idea that the Arabs were exclusively mounted, and used only mounted tactics, seems somewhat out of whack with what we know about the period overall. The Muslim armies of this period, while using more and more horses, were still infantry-based when they were invading. The percentage of horses that may have been present at this battle was probably due to the character of the operation: It was a raid. That also suggests that despite Christian sources, the Muslims did not press hard at all. Why bother? There is no loot in fighting. But for Hanson, that is not good enough. This was a cavalry battle of the first order in his descriptions, between an all-cavalry Muslim force and the Frankish infantry. It seems Hanson's knowledge of the Arab/Muslim armies of the first three centuries after the founding of Islam, however, is based almost exclusively on histories of the Crusades, which start almost 400 years later.

Hanson says, for example, "The army of the Arabs was never designed to engage in a systemic collision of heavy infantry, followed by possession of territory and the installation of permanent garrisons, in the manner of Western imperialism of Macedonia, Roman, and Byzantine militaries. The Islamic army, itself largely mounted -- counted on swiftness, mobility, and terror..." [pg. 148] He then cites a passage from J. France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades (but neglects to include the full title, which notes that the book covers the years AD 1000-1300). Excuse me, but what good is a source describing tactical organization, structure, equipment, and doctrine 300 years after the event you are describing?

The fact of the matter is that Islamic armies were originally infantry-based. From the time of Mohammed they were designed for massed infantry shock combat, and they had (especially at the outset) very few horses. (They had camels, but you don't fight from a camel. You use it for carrying luggage and food and water.) Take, for example, the classic battle of Yarmouk in 636 A.D.

This battle, which took place in the area which is now known as the Golan Heights, well inside the borders of the Roman empire, occurred just two years after the death of Mohammed. It was one of the first major battles of expansion of the new Islamic empire. At that battle, although outnumbered by roughly 4-to-1 by the Romans of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Muslims utterly destroyed the Romans, killing as many or more than had Hannibal at Cannae in 216 B.C., roughly 50,000, and doing so with an army that was smaller than Hannibal's! In this fight the Muslims had an army that was 75 percent infantry (and of the infantry, at least 50 percent heavy infantry). They then moved on and conquered the rest of Syria, then Lebanon, then Palestine, before moving on and across north Africa. It was like that for much of the first century of Islamic expansion, with infantry-based armies defeating the armies of the Eastern Roman Empire again and again. It was not until around the 10th century that the Muslims truly began to focus upon the horse as the center of their efforts in warfare. (As opposed to raiding.)

But then also one must ask, when looking at Poitiers and Hanson's thesis, how did we leap from 216 B.C. to 732 A.D.? Cannae, you recall, was the subject of the last chapter, and occurred in 216 B.C. To get to Poitiers we just leapt 948 years without a single intervening case study or example. Hanson does it again too, since the chapter after this one concerns events in 1521, almost 800 years later still. And thus we arrive at one of the core problems of Hanson's book: He makes an assertion for a thesis which he contends is valid over 2,500 years of history, and then more or less skips providing evidence for the middle 1,700 years out of that 2,500.

For a moment then, let us set our back to the problems with Hanson's version of Poitiers and proceed on to the meat of the issue. Let us address the thesis. At issue is Mr. Hanson's central assertion in Carnage and Culture: that there is a uniquely Western way of war, derived from Western culture. I may have overstated this two weeks ago. Mr. Hanson, commenting upon my characterization said last week:

I never wrote that the West was "always successful in war." How silly! That's a laughable distortion, and again Mr. Bateman should use quotation marks when he writes what I did not write. [Hanson wrote this on his blog.]
Fair enough; I will report, you may decide. This, fair readers, is what Mr. Hanson wrote in his book:

In battles against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World, tribal and imperial alike, there is a shared legacy over the centuries that allowed Europeans and Americans to win in a consistent and deadly manner -- or to be defeated on rare occasions only when the enemy embraced their own military organizations, borrowed their weapons, or trapped them far from home. [pg. 441]
He also puts it this way:

After Thermopylae, and with the exception of the Moors in Spain and Mongols in Eastern Europe, there is virtually no example of a non-Western military defeating Europeans in Europe with non-European weapons. [pg. 14].
And:

From the fighting of early Greece to the wars of the entire twentieth century, there is a certain continuity of European military practice.' [pg. 440]
And:

An examination of these battles shall show, throughout the long evolution of Western warfare there has existed more or less a common core of practices that reappears generation after generation... which explains why the history of warfare is so often the brutal history of Western victory..." [pg. 24]
And:

This, 2,500-year tradition explains not only why Western forces have overcome great odds to defeat their adversaries but also their uncanny ability to project power well beyond the shores of Europe and America. Numbers, location, food, health, weather, religion -- the usual factors that govern the success or failure of wars -- have ultimately done little to impede Western armies, whose larger culture has allowed them to trump man and nature alike. Even the tactical brilliance of a Hannibal has been to no avail. [pg. 441]
And:

First, for nearly a thousand years (479 BC to AD 500) the military dominance of the West was unquestioned, as the relatively tiny states of Greece and Italy exercised military supremacy over their far larger and more populous neighbors. [pg. 19]
Now, it does appear true that he never said "always." You can decide for yourself, based on the above sampling of his comments, if I overstated his general thrust and intent. But in making his sweeping assertion Hanson also commits one of the worst faults of a historian by throwing out some straw men. Here are Hanson's favorites:

"Adrianople (378) and Manzikert (1071) were horrendous Western defeats; but the Romans and Byzantines who were slaughtered there were for the most part vastly outnumbered, far from home, poorly led, and reluctant emissaries of crumbling empires." [pg. 13]
"Even a random catalog of exclusively abject Western defeats -- Thermopylae (480 BC), Carrhae (53 AD), Adrianople (378 AD), Manzikert (1071 AD), Constantinople (1453 AD), Adwa (1896 AD), Pearl Harbor (1941), and Dien Bien Phu (1953-1954) -- would not lead to radically different conclusions. In most of these cases, vastly outnumbered Western armies ... were unwisely deployed and poorly prepared -- and again far outside Europe." [pg 443]
The problem, of course, is that even if he were honest about the depictions, these are not "randomly selected." They are selected by Hanson. But for the sake of argument, and because they illustrate his technique wonderfully, let us just focus upon two of those exceptions that he cited no fewer than four times in the book, Adrianople and Manzikert.

Note how when he asserts his selected counter-examples, Hanson tries to let the "West" off the hook by asserting that the "horrific" losses at Adrianople and Manzikert were somewhat understandable because they were fought "far from home" or were fought by the armies of "crumbling empires," or that they were "vastly outnumbered." These are not true statements.

Adrianople was the site of a battle between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Goths. The Roman Emperor was killed during the battle, and the Goths moved on. A generation later they would invade the Western Roman Empire and sack Rome. Adrianople is now the Turkish town of Erdine. In 378 A.D., when this battle took place, it was (and still is) only 120 miles from the very capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Indeed, instead of being "far from home" it was the very opposite, as it was the closest city to the capital at Constantinople. Moreover, although it is inconvenient for Hanson, the Roman troops were not "vastly outnumbered" at Adrianople, but may well have outnumbered the Goths, as the Romans are estimated at having between 15,000-20,000 men on the battlefield. The Goths, according to modern scholarship, seem to have had only around 12,000-15,000. (Unless you include the Goths' women and young children, who were also nearby in their wagons, and which would boost their numbers immensely.) Moreover, no matter how Hanson twists it, it is difficult to call the Eastern Roman Empire "crumbling" in 378. Why? Because although he hides the fact from his non-historian readers by changing the name of the empire, his other example (Manzikert) was also fought by the Eastern Roman Empire, only by then they are depicted as the Byzantines. That second battle took place in 1071. So how can the Eastern Romans be "crumbling" if they last for another 700 years?

(By the way, Mr. Hanson, if you are reading this, please note that although you refer to the Roman Emperor defeated at Adrianople in 378 as Valerian (pg. 162), his name was actually Valens. Valerian was the Roman Emperor defeated and captured by the Persian King Sharpur I in 260 A.D.)

Hanson's second example, Manzikert, though it would be a slow march to get there, is about the same distance from the capital at Constantinople as Taranto, Italy, is from Genoa, Italy. And, unlike what Hanson would have his readers believe, the odds between the armies were just about even there too, though that apparently did not matter all that much. Hanson calls the loss "horrific," but when he does so he is apparently leaning upon 19th century interpretations of the battle. The battle was certainly a disaster for the Eastern Romans/Byzantium, but apparently there was not much bloodshed. Modern scholarship suggests that the Byzantines did not lose as many men as earlier historians thought. In fact, it appears, physical loses were nearly negligible from an Empire standpoint. What was destructive about this battle was the resultant loss of alliances for the Byzantines thereafter, and in that respect you could say that after this battle, the Empire started to crumble. Why, the Byzantine Empire only had a couple hundred more years (about the same distance in time between us and the war of 1812) left after that.

But despite Hanson's attempt to determine which battles are considered, the reality is that there were plenty of examples of the West being beaten, regularly, on home turf, during that 1,700-year gap in Hanson's evidence.

Does anyone remember Attila the Hun? It was the migration of his people, from further to the East, which triggered the migrations of the Franks, the Goths, the Vandals and the other "barbarian" tribes that destroyed Rome. By the mid-400s Attila was leading raiding parties of his Huns out of their new home base in what is now Hungary and into Western Europe.

Remember, Hanson says, "After Thermopylae, and with the exception of the Moors in Spain and Mongols in Eastern Europe, there is virtually no example of a non-Western military defeating Europeans in Europe with non-European weapons." [pg. 14].

Yet here we have Attila, who began to rampage and was soon burning out the Romans and the Franks in 451-452. The Mongols, I should note, were not to arrive for about another 500 years. (Mr. Hanson's assertion may be because he does not know the difference between the Mongols and the Huns, but they are two completely different peoples, I assure you.) In the process he and his raiding army defeated every Western force in their path, using decidedly non-European weapons and techniques, and in 451 alone they sacked and burned the following European cities: Mainz, Cologne, Tournai, Amiens, Beauvais, (they apparently skipped Trier), Metz, Reims, Worms, and Strasbourg, before turning back. (Attila later fought a rearguard fight during his withdrawal at a place near Chalons, in France.) And that was just France. He really let Italy have it, and indeed that is why Venice was built on a swampy island in a lagoon: People were trying to get out of the way. Yet Hanson skips all of these, just as pretty much 1,700 years of history is skipped, fairly obviously because it is inconvenient.

Hanson also asserts of non-Western peoples (again, "Western" for him only applies to those deriving their cultural heritage through the Romans to the Greeks) that "none outside the West drafted fighters with the implicit understanding that their military service was part and parcel of their status as free citizens who were to determine when, how, and where they were to go to war" [pg 445]. Yet that was exactly the case with the not only the Visigoths and Ostragoths who destroyed Rome, but also with the Danes, the Norwegians, the Jutes and the other sea-going warriors known collectively as the "Vikings." The Vikings conquered "Western" England, on foot, as infantry. A few centuries later Hanson just ignores the fact that the non-Western Vikings also defeated the Franks so badly (the very "Western" Franks, as this was a couple of hundred years after Poitiers), and so regularly, that the Franks basically handed over what is now known as Normandy, forever. Hanson goes on about how "Western" know-how was incomparable in allowing the Western forces to expand beyond their borders, and how this was unique, but does not mention the Viking raids which got as far as Constantinople. By sea.

He does cede that the Muslim armies took Spain, but glosses over the fact that they then held it, a country in the heart of Europe, for more than 600 years. Similarly, he completely ignores Sicily and Corsica. Instead, he focused on the Crusades to make a point. According to Hanson, "It was impossible for any Muslim army, unlike the Crusaders, to transport large armies by sea to storm the heartland of Europe" [pg. 168]. Yet in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries, the Muslim armies took to the sea and did just that, they conquered both places, sending army after army (it took 75 years of reinforcements to conquer Sicily) despite Mr. Hanson's assertions, and once completely subjugated, held them for longer than the Crusader states existed in the Middle East. Oh, and they did this with infantry-based armies.

No military historian I've ever met disagrees with a general thesis that culture contributed to, if not overwhelmingly influenced, the expansion of the West to dominate the planet from, generically speaking, the 1450s or 1500s (depending upon who is your favorite). Culture does matter in many ways. It colors your decisions about everything from equipment to logistics to your military philosophy. There are a lot of good books that deal with these ideas, in parts and in whole, I strongly recommend reading some of them. But as for Carnage and Culture, eh, not so much.

Indeed, in his distortions, obfuscations, and general torturing of the facts in order to arrive at his preconceived thesis, Hanson is on par with historian-turned-polemicist Howard Zinn. If you do not know of Zinn, do not regret. You are missing as little as you were before you ever heard of Carnage and Culture. Zinn's signature work, A People's History of the United States, now on its gazillionth printing, follows the same formula as does Hanson's, albeit on a different topic. Indeed, were they not coming from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, one could believe that they learned the craft of history under the same tutor, so similar are their methods. Both of them ignore facts inconvenient to their thesis. Both of them approach their topic as though it were a strawberry patch, picking only the ripest of selected strawberries, removing them from the area, and then using the artfully displayed fruit to "prove" to people who have never seen a strawberry bush that all strawberries are ripe. I suspect that it is not coincidental that both of them are very vocal in modern political issues, and both make illogical appeals to their historical credentials to support their respective opinions. Yes, Howard Zinn and Victor Davis Hanson, to continue the produce analogy, are two peas in a pod.

[marcelo l.]

Quem é Robert Bateman.

Bateman taught military history at the United States Military Academy. He was a commander in the 7th United States Cavalry, and served in Iraq from 2005 through 2006. He was once a "military fellow" at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is currently assigned to the Pentagon. He teaches at Georgetown University. He writes a bi-weekly column as a media critic/ethicist for the Committee of Concerned Journalists where he is known to be extremely critical of the New York Times[1]. That site is sponsored by the Knight Foundation and the journalism program of the University of Missouri. He is also a regular columnist for the military-intellectual site Small Wars Journal[2]

[Clermont]

It is quite another to attempt the same with an Army Airborne Ranger who also happens to be an academic historian and who thinks that your personal signal work is a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading, intellectually dishonest feces.

Não sei, não. Mas, talvez o autor esteja levando a coisa do lado de discussão historiográfica, para o lado da guerra ideológica, pelo fato de Hanson ser o maior intelectual aliado do horrível movimento Neocon.

Talvez os argumentos sejam bons e, realmente, apontam para eventuais deficiências e erros da hipótese de Hanson, mas, chamar o trabalho do cidadão de "fezes", não é próprio de uma discussão acadêmica.

[marcelo l.]

Isso eu notei que os termos dele são para lá de duros, Clermont, mas além do Hanson ser um intelectual do tea party, seus textos dão subsídios aos que criticam a modo de pensar "coin" nas forças armadas americanas a quem o Bateman é um teóricos.

Eu estava pensando em um dia ler é John A. Lynn - "Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America" que dizem é muito bom.

[Clermont]

mas além do Hanson ser um intelectual do tea party,

Posso estar equivocado, mas não me parece que Hanson tenha qualquer vinculação com esse novo movimento, um tanto ou quanto amorfo, chamado "Tea Party". E sim, com o mais antigo Neoconservadorismo republicano.

Pelo pouco que eu sei, originalmente, as várias tendências do "Tea Party" são radicalmente anti-estatizantes, e boa parte de suas fileiras são anti-intervencionistas, contrários as aventuras militares atuais americanas. Dizem que isto tende a mudar, pois os atuais Neocons intervencionistas - dos quais Hanson é um dos profetas - estariam tentando cooptar lideranças do "Tea Party". Mas isto ainda terá de ser visto no futuro.

[Don Pascual]

Na minha opinião as criticas de Bateman foram bem embasadas. Os textos de Hanson demonstram alguns erros um tanto quanto grosseiros (por exemplo, em relação a batalha de Poitiers, ele descreve os exercitos muçulmanos como se fossem da epoca das cruzadas... até um livrinho da serio men-at-arms da Osprey desmente ele!). A evidencia que Bateman usa, das batalhas que contradizem a premissa de Hanson também é muito bom.
Me pareceu que Hanson nao passa de um acadêmico meia-boca, disposto a fazer certas concessões quanto a fontes e metodologia, para apoiar suas proprias concepções politico-ideologicas.

[Clermont]

Faz tanto tempo que já li o livro do Hanson, que me lembro pouco dos detalhes. Eu lembro que gostei muito do estilo dele e parecia fazer sentido, pelo menos, algumas coisas. Mas, na época mesmo, eu já desconfiava de que alguma coisa não batia bem. Realmente, acho complicado essas grandes conclusões, tipo, "O Modo de Guerrear Ocidental, baseado na busca do choque direto e frontal" em oposição a um sistema assim-ou-assado dos povos Orientais.

O problema é que Hanson é, por origem, um estudioso da Grécia Clássica, que, parece, fez avançar o estudo da forma grega de combater, a chamada Guerra Hoplítica, baseando-se em características culturais, climáticas e coisa e tal. Mas, talvez, saindo deste mundinho específico, já tenha ficado difícil enquadrar o restante da história, em vários teatros de operações diferentes, numa teoria que só serviria para explicar um fenômeno, muito mais delimitado.

Realmente, como o tal de Bateman explicou, como é que se faz para enquadrar as táticas de Fábio, O Comtemporizador, que esgotou o exército cartaginês, justamente, por fugir do choque direto? E, será que os mongóis, logo depois de prepararem o cenário, por meio de manobras, fintas e escaramuças, não davam importância a um golpe direto, e esmagador, contra um adversário, por esta forma, colocado em situação de desvantagem?

[EDSON]

Os mongóis só atacavam massivamente quando as linhas inimigas já estivessem bem esparsas. Sem um núcleo duro do dispositivo de defesa inimigo a matança era generalizada e defesa quase impossível.

[EDSON]

Lembrando que nesta época o arco era o principal instrumento de batalha de infantaria. O arco longo inglês e o arco mongol eram utilizados com maestria e tal artefato era um fator de grande vantagem nas batalhas.

Na batalha de Grécy (se eu não estou enganado) os besteiros franceses que eram segundo historiadores cerca de 6000 contra 5000 arqueiros ingleses, avançaram contra os ingleses que estavam dispostos em forma de WW e antes de chegarem ao alcance de suas bestas os arqueiros já comeram a lançar uma chuva de flechas sobre os mesmos que foram dizimados e logo debandaram. Integrantes da orgulhosa cavalaria francesa repudiaram seus compatriostas com insulto "deixem estes covardes passarem". Todos sabemos que em pouco eles seriam os próximos a ir pro matadouro.

[marcelo l.]

Eu li o Hanson, mas já na época que tinha lido achei que mesmo para batalha entre hoplitas tinha um defeito a analise dele, o combate era mortal e decisivo, mas como não tinha arma de cerco nenhuma das forças vencia, quem leu a guerra do Peloponeso, vai ver que a guerra era longa, no fundo a Grécia vivia uma "guerra fria" com dois lados acumulando forças desde a muito, ficou então duas cidades poderosas que finalmente tinham força impor de destruir outras "polis".

Mesmo Roma, teve depois das guerras punicas um perigo que quase a sobrepujou que foi resolvido por Mário quando tribos germanas migravam, ele pulou essa parte para já os problemas do século III e IV de uma nova ameaça dos germanos entre outras tribos.

Mas, apesar de alguns defeitos dele, é um texto bom de ser ler sobre grécia antiga. Dos atuais trabalhos eu quase não acompanho por que acredito que ele exagerou.

[marcelo l.]

http://www.cartamaior.com.br/templates/ ... a_id=17169

Você escreveu que o ultraliberalismo é uma forma fundamentalista

Sim, eu defendo isso.

Eu perguntava sobre a força do movimento Tea Party nos Estados Unidos.

Bom, na Europa conhecemos o que é o populismo.

Na América Latina também, mas suspeito que o termo é usado para nomear coisas distintas. Aqui a palavra é utilizada para sintetizar – ou criticar, dependendo do caso – experiências de centroesquerda com partidos fracos e líderes fortes.

Eu sei. Por isso me refiro ao caso europeu, que é diferente. Na Europa, é cada vez mais decisivo o voto populista de extrema direita. Um voto que cresce porque tem êxito em focalizar o inimigo de cada povo no estrangeiro diferente.

Agora o grande tema na França é a expulsão dos ciganos para a Romênia. Você se refere a isso?

É um tema grave, mas não é o ponto central na estigmatização. Em geral, a focalização sobre o estrangeiro que mencionava se refere ao diferente que, com frequência aliás, professa a fé islâmica. E isso influi em todos os governos.

Mas a extrema direita populista a que você se refere não chegou ao governo.

Sim, mas a direita de sempre, a direita a que estamos habituados e conhecemos bem, não pode governar se não se apóia na extrema direita. O poder necessita desse apoio.

Na Suécia, os conservadores ganharam mas, pela primeira vez, a extrema direita teve 10% dos votos e ganhou representação parlamentar.

Na Dinamarca e na Holanda a situação é ainda pior. Nesses dois países a questão do apoio da extrema direita à direita tradicional não é somente social, o que por si já é um problema grave, mas também de conformação de maiorias parlamentares. Os conservadores da Dinamarca e da Holanda precisam do voto da extrema direita no Parlamento. Por isso, os governos de direita aceitam muitas posições da extrema direita.

E na Itália?

Ocorre algo parecido com a Liga do Norte, que também tem uma posição ativa contra o estrangeiro diferente e pior ainda se ele tiver alguma relação com o Islã. A Liga do Norte está no governo associada com Silvio Berlusconi.

Por que você assinala uma diferença em relação à situação na França?

Porque tem outros matizes. Nicolas Sarcozy adota frequentemente temas e obsessões da extrema direita. Mas não exclusivamente dela. É um político pragmático preocupado sobretudo em conservar-se no poder. Assim, como coloca hoje a questão dos ciganos, no início de seu mandato adotou inclusive alguns temas da esquerda.

O movimento Tea Party nos Estados Unidos também se inscreve nessas correntes que você identifica na Europa?

Nos Estados Unidos, sobretudo em meio à crise, há um movimento contra os imigrantes. Mas esse não é o tema fundamental do Tea Party. Como a economia vai muito mal, a crítica se dirige ao governo de Barack Obama e tem raízes próprias. Nos Estados Unidos há uma espécie de filosofia de vida ultraindividualista. Essa filosofia diz que o ser humano é responsável pelo destino de sua vida. Mas essa filosofia de vida agrega a idéia segundo a qual o êxito econômico é uma medida suficiente para medir uma vida. Uma posição, evidentemente, fantasiosa.

Por que fantasiosa? Todos seus livros falam das responsabilidades do ser humano e do indivíduo.

Sim, mas não em estado de solidão. Eu estou profundamente convencido de que os seres humanos têm necessidade dos outros. Defender a liberdade ou o direito do indivíduo é um valor positivo. É preciso proteger os indivíduos da violência dos outros indivíduos e do Estado. Mas o indivíduo depende dos demais. A dimensão social do ser humano não pode – não deve – ser eliminada. A economia não pode ser um objetivo último, mas sim um meio.

Você critica a centralidade da noção de êxito econômico na concepção que definiu como “ultraindividualista”. Se o êxito fosse um valor a levar em conta, coisa que já seria discutível, qual seria sua concepção de êxito?

Eu tampouco me guio pelo êxito como objetivo da vida. Mas se, como ser humano, ao final de minha vida me perguntarem o que é o êxito, responderia que é ter vivido uma vida na qual vivi, amei, respeitei e fui amado pelos outros que amei e respeitei. Desculpe se uso tanto a palavra “vida” ou o verbo “viver”, mas prefiro não buscar sinônimos ou outras formas de dizê-lo. O êxito de uma vida inteira, de uma vida completa, é o êxito nas relações humanas. Uma vida sem amor terá sido desastrosa.

Li que você critica também as vidas baseadas somente no intelecto. No idioma argentino falaríamos de uma vida sem por o corpo.

Sim. E o mesmo se aplica a uma vida vivida tendo o êxito econômico como fim último. Ainda que seja redundante dizê-lo, seria uma vida que exclui a vida humana.

O Tea Party o impressiona?

Para além de fenômenos como os da Dinamarca e Holanda, e, de certo modo, da Itália, a tradição europeia é diferente. Na Europa, durante muitos anos todos os governos, de esquerda ou de direita, seguiram um modelo baseado no Estado de bem-estar social, o Welfare State. Esse modelo se fundamenta na solidariedade de toda a população, que se expressa, em última instância, em medidas adotadas a partir do Estado. Falo, por exemplo, da progressividade dos impostos. Quem ganha mais, paga mais. A redistribuição de renda é o princípio constitutivo do Estado. A tradição que aparece com o Tea Party alimenta-se, na origem, da conquista de um espaço vital. É um híbrido que combina a ideologia do xerife e o espaço do pregador.

O que o pregador agrega a essa ideologia?

A certeza de que, se eu sigo buscando meu espaço vital e o êxito, tendo um resultado econômico com fim último, tenho razão porque Deus me disse isso.

Estou predestinado como indivíduo.

Sim. Por isso há um caráter religioso de tipo fundamentalista muito importante. É importante destacar que nessa busca...

A busca parece uma batalha.

E é mesmo. E nessa batalha reaparecem inclusive temas de um passado recente. Obama é acusado até de instaurar o Gulag. Seria, para eles, um comunista.

Mas Obama não é sequer um radical, um homem de esquerda em termos norteamericanos.

Não, claro. É um político do mainstream, também no vocabulário norteamericano. Um político normal que está dentro do sistema político. Mas passa a ser um comunista, na crítica do Tea Party, porque parece querer regular a vida dos indivíduos. Leve em conta que, quando o Tea Party e os legisladores que recebem sua influência criticam a cobertura médica obrigatória votada por iniciativa de Obama este ano, acusam o presidente norteamericano de estar metendo-se em suas vidas. O raciocínio é assim: “Seu eu trabalhei e com meu esforço consegui um bom seguro e uma boa cobertura médica, que me permitirá uma boa aposentadoria privada, por que devo trabalhar para os que não trabalharam e, assim, não alcançaram o meu êxito?”. Falta a solidariedade elementar e isso me parece deplorável.

“Deplorável” é uma palavra forte.

Certamente. Essa forma de pensar procede, antropologicamente, de uma ignorância da necessidade do outro. E o paradoxal é que também tem escassas possibilidades de gerar as condições para o êxito econômico individual da classe média. Vou explicar melhor minha lógica de raciocínio para que não fique parecendo um simples slogan. A sociedade fica desequilibrada. Se fica desequilibrada, perde a força para combater a extensão do problema da droga ou do desemprego. Para solucionar temas dessa magnitude é necessário contar com toda a população. Não é possível fazê-lo apenas com uma parte dela. Como se vê, o Tea Party tem raízes em uma ideologia vigente em setores da sociedade norteamericana desde há muito tempo, mas seus efeitos concretos aparecem hoje. A leitura é que Obama e seu projeto se chocaram com o poder econômico.

E esse poder derrotou-o nestas eleições de metade de mandato.

As conclusões são impactantes. O homem mais poderoso do planeta, que é o presidente dos Estados Unidos, é impotente contra os interesses do grande capital. A mensagem é que as instituições não permitem sequer que um presidente legitimamente eleito adote uma política distinta, ainda que seja levemente distinta, daquela que eles defendem. A recente decisão da Corte Suprema que permite às empresas fazer contribuições à campanha eleitoral representa um freio aos políticos democráticos. Neste ambiente ultraliberal a democracia corre perigo.

Tanto assim?

Efetivamente. O poder se expressa por meio das eleições. Em 2008 se expressou votando em Obama. Mas na prática o povo não pode governar porque isso não é permitido pelos indivíduos mais poderosos. Se isso for verdade e se essa tendência se aprofundar, estaremos assistindo a uma mutação radical. Tão radical como a Revolução Francesa que, em 1789, passou de uma monarquia hereditária para uma assembleia eleita pelos cidadãos. Nós que respeitamos a integridade do indivíduo – e não falo agora, como você advertirá, do ultraindividualismo – devemos nos preocupar quando o domínio de alguns poucos políticos poderosos substitui a vontade dos indivíduos.

Como a substituem?

Usam, entre outras coisas, duas ferramentas. O lobby e o controle dos meios de comunicação. Um exemplo quase caricato ocorre é a Itália, onde Bersluconi pessoalmente é dono da maior cadeia de televisão privada e, como presidente do conselho de ministros, controla os demais sinais. Ao mesmo tempo promove um ultraliberalismo combinando o uso dos meios de comunicação mais poderosos com pressões sobre a Justiça. Por isso é essencial manter o pluralismo na imprensa. É preciso evitar que seja controlada por um pequeno grupo de indivíduos. De oligarcas, como se diz na Rússia. Na França, Sarkozy ocupou-se pessoalmente de que o aporte de capitais de que necessitava o jornal Le Monde não viesse de empresários que não eram simpáticos a ele. Nos Estados Unidos, muitas emissoras de rádio e canais de televisão como a Fox repetem dia e noite uma mensagem populista.

Populista?

Sim. Já sei o que vai me dizer. Sei que a palavra “populista” tem uma acepção diferente na Argentina. Refiro-me, por exemplo, às mensagens do líder da extrema-direita francesa Jean Marie Le Pen. Em que consiste seu populismo? No fato de que encontra fórmulas tão falsas como eficazes de chegar ao povo. Diz: “Na França, há três milhões de desempregados e três milhões de imigrantes. E eu vou lhes dizer como se resolve o problema: colocando pra fora os imigrantes”. Assim age o populismo ultraconservador. Se Obama aumenta impostos para os setores mais poderosos, dirão que que o aumento de impostos afeta a classe média e repetirão isso até a exaustão.

Mas não é só uma questão de propaganda, não? Ou, em todo caso, essa propaganda simplificadora se baseia no medo provocado pelo desemprego e a crise, ou pela falta de políticas mais incisivas, ao estilo de Franklin Delano Roosevelt em 1933.

E, além disso, a população não está bem informada e não costuma entrar em raciocínios teóricos complexos. A experiência cotidiana da França é que aumentam os preços e que, ao mesmo tempo, o chefe de governo fala bem. E um senhor Le Pen diz: “Os ciganos ficaram com o teu dinheiro”. Lembremos que, em 1933, Adolf Hitler foi eleito por sufrágio universal. O populismo, tal como descrevi, apela a um raciocínio simplificado, rápido, compreensível para todos. E digo isso não como anjo. Não vivemos em um mundo habitado por anjos. Tampouco por demônios, é claro. Eu me incluo nisso. Ou seja, gente que está informada e lê os jornais ou até os escreve. E incluo você também, se me permite.

Certamente. Qualquer explicação baseada na lógica anjo-demônio é de fanáticos. Professor, como jornalista e como leitor sempre me chamou atenção uma frase sua: que fazer-se entender, para um intelectual, é um tema ético. Acredito que a disse ironizando Jacques Lacan. Mas, para além de Lacan, por que disse “ético” e não “estético”?

Porque a ética se funda na relação com os demais seres humanos. Implica um respeito. E então não se deve usar meios indignos. A sedução está bem e se justifica quando se busca despertar a simpatia de um indivíduo. É preciso mostrar-se eloquente, simpático, apelar a todos os fogos de artifício de que se disponha. Isso vale para um homem, para uma mulher, para qualquer um. Mas no espaço público considero que praticar a demagogia populista é um tipo de discurso obscuro com aparência de profundidade significa transgredir um contrato.

Que contrato?

O que se estabelece entre interlocutores, entre pessoas. Por isso é um contrato ético.

[marcelo l.]

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/20 ... ncy_manual

By Gian Gentile
Best Defense counterininsurgency critic

In general terms I would deconstruct the manual as it is now and break the singular link that it has with a certain theory of state building (known as population centric COIN). Once broken up I would then rewrite the doctrine from the ground up with three general parts: 1) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered on post-conflict reconstruction; 2) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered around military action to attack insurgent sources of military power (sometimes referred to as counter-terror or CT), but not linked to an endstate of a rebuilt or newly built nation state; 3) would be a counterinsurgency approach -- perhaps call it COIN light -- that would focus largely on Special Forces with some limited conventional army support conducting Foreign Internal Defense (FID).

The trick with this revised manual would be to present doctrinal alternatives for the U.S. Army when it goes about the countering of insurgencies and conducting stability operations with teeth. The trifecta trick would be to treat these three methods of countering insurgencies as operationally equal; that is to say, we would move away from the dogmatic belief currently held that anytime an insurgency is fought it must be of the population centric (FM 3-24, aka state building) persuasion, and that methods of CT and FID are subsumed within it and hence are seen as "lesser" operations. To reemphasize the key here is operational equality of the respective three.

Lastly, with regard to part one and the countering of an insurgency through post-conflict reconstruction which would invariably have the quality of state building to it, I would completely demolish the theory of population centric, hearts and minds COIN that FM 3-24 is currently built on, and update that part of the manual with much more current social science theory and better uses of history. Example is the really quite simplistic chart in FM 3-24 that depicts the population of "ANY" insurgency as 10% hardcore insurgents, 10% on the government's side, and the remaining 80% of the population malleable and shapeable and just waiting to have their hearts and minds won over by the counterinsurgent force. That kind of conception of populations in insurgency has not proven itself in history, nor do I think in current practice. After returning from west Baghdad in late 2006 as a Cavalry Squadron commander and witnessing firsthand Iraq's viscous and bloody sectarian civil war, when I first saw that FM 3-24 diagram I said to myself "shoot, only one line in it should be drawn across the middle with Shia on the top and Sunni on the bottom." The point here is to emphasize the limits of winning hearts and minds of a population at the barrel of a gun and to create a better, more sophisticated understanding of populations and societal motivation and actions in insurgencies and civil wars.

Next step after 3-24 is deconstructed and rewritten would be the much more difficult task of delinking the FM 3-24 style of counterinsurgency as it exists today, with its broader permeating effects not only on the Army, but on the greater defense and policy establishment as well.

[marcelo l.]

Bateman on Hanson, Part IV (the final part):
Bateman on Hanson, Part IV (the final part):

Victor Davis Hanson, regardless of what you write, my men and I are NOT mercenaries.

By LTC Bob Bateman:

This is the final installment of this series here on Altercation. At the end, I suppose, it is appropriate to explain the genesis. Why, after all, did this series debunking the twisted version of history put forward by Victor Davis Hanson suddenly appear? What prompted a heretofore moderate and mild-mannered historian to such efforts? The answer is mundane.

A few weeks ago, during the course of some research I am doing for my boss relating to honor, cultures, and war, I picked up Hanson's Carnage and Culture. I admit that I was leery from the outset. Among many professional historians, the book has a horrid reputation (and Hanson's personal reputation as the thinnest-skinned writer out there only exacerbates this evaluation). Indeed, Carnage and Culture is one of the few works of history to ever prompt an entire book written in rebuttal almost immediately. So I opened Hanson's signature work with some trepidation. I read it as a historian does.

Hmmmm, I need to explain that.

I cannot speak for other academic disciplines, but historians are strange in the way that we read serious non-fiction. Before her own grad school experience, my wife used to literally laugh out loud at me whenever I opened a new book and began my curious progression. This is because my process is so, well, non-linear. I read the acknowledgements first, then skip to the back to scan the endnotes. After that, I return my attention to the front to read the introduction, and then flip to the back again to read the conclusion. Only at that point do I start with "Chapter One." This is how historians read the work of other historians. So it was, in this case, that I very early stumbled upon these lines about the present day written by Victor Davis Hanson:

Mercenary armies in America and Europe are the norm. They are not necessarily entirely professional militaries, but outlets for the disaffected of society who seek economic opportunity alone in serving, with the realization that those of a far different social class will determine where, when, and how they will fight and die. (Page 449)
This, as you may have now surmised, got my dander up.

Calling me names is one thing. But calling the men with whom I have served for the past 18 years "mercenary," and claiming that the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who manned the walls through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and into the 21st century are "the disaffected of society" pisses me off. You cannot seriously write a book in which you say that the service members who stood tours in the Sinai Desert, fought and died in Mogadishu, gave up years of their lives living in tents in the Balkans or aboard ships drilling holes in the Adriatic, Pacific, Atlantic, etc., did so solely to "seek economic opportunity" and not expect people to look closely to see what other sort of tripe you are pushing. So, annoyed, I wrote to Eric and asked if he would mind lending me some space. He agreed, and here we are.

Hanson's polemic position in Carnage and Culture, it turns out, is really more about his personal pining for a myth of his own creation. He seeks an idyllic pastoral past, rather like Lake Wobegon, and like that place, largely exists only in the fantasies of its creator. In Hanson's vision, even a name can evoke the image of the stalwart yeoman, which of course stands in contrast to the slacker youth of today. In discussing the future (circa mid-2001, when this book came out), Hanson even manages to cast aspersions on our present day soldiers, the ones who have joined since 2001. This is what Hanson wrote about them (Note: Here Hanson is referring to a few of the naval aviators who fought and died at Midway in June 1942.):

Even their names seem almost caricatures of an earlier stalwart American manhood -- Max Leslie, Lem Massey, Wade McClusky, Jack Waldron -- doomed fighters who were not all young eighteen-year-old conscripts, but often married with children, enthusiastic rather than merely willing to fly their decrepit planes into a fiery end above the Japanese fleet, in a few seconds to orphan their families if need be to defend all that they held dear. One wonders if an America of suburban, video-playing Nicoles, Ashleys and Jasons shall ever see their like again." (Page 351)
He wrote both of these passages without, apparently, noting the complete illogical contradiction contained within his own words within this single book. Those men he lauds, the naval aviators, did not join at the outset of the war. They were long-serving officers. They were men who had joined the peacetime military voluntarily, during the height of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s. In other words, by Hanson's logic and words, they were just as mercenary as the "Nicoles, Ashleys and Jasons" who have fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan these past six years...

Because this is my wrap-up essay, I must apologize for the disjointed nature of some of the material I am bringing up now. We have already noted how, when writing about his own period of specialization, the Classicist Victor Davis Hanson is both sloppy and inconsistent. (Mixing up, for example, the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens, who died at Adrianople in 378 AD, with Emperor Valerian, who was captured by the Sassanids in 260 AD. This is akin to confusing the current conflict we are in with the Spanish-American war because, you know, they're pretty close in time.) But mistakes like these do not really annoy me as much as another problem, the lack of documentation in Carnage and Culture.

Bear with me for a moment, because I do have strong sentiments about this topic. Carnage and Culture has not a single footnote. In a few places, when Hanson uses a large block quote, he cites the source, but that is all. None of his alleged "facts" are supported with endnotes. None of his interpretations of events are attached to footnotes which would allow other historians to examine his basis.

Remember, for a moment, the strange way that I (and other historians) go about reading a book. We start with the acknowledgements because that is where you learn who this author respects. Then we immediately move to the endnotes to give us a sense of what sources the author is using. Are they primary sources? Secondary? Is the author aware of the current scholarship on the topic, or has his research been confined? Did he do archival work or research in the sources of the relevant languages? In short, we want to get a quick sense of his scholarship. Later, while reading the main body of the text, we will flip forward and backwards from the text to the notes to check on the author's veracity. Has he documented his sources for his statements of historical fact, or does it appear that he is just making it up as he goes along?

Indeed, I am not the only one to do this. Here is an opinion about the importance of documentation with which I completely agree. In this case, the reviewer is talking about the "popular, mass market" book by Tom Ricks entitled Fiasco. But, obviously, the passion this reviewer has for rigorous documentation in history comes through clearly:

History is not the impressionistic art of autobiography, memoir, or essay, but is to be offered as an account of what happened with sources that provide the means of checking the historian's veracity. Once journalists decide that they are no longer writing dispatches of the moment but real histories in the midst of a controversial and hotly debated war -- and are intending to hype their work as a best-selling exposé -- then they become historians and so are obligated to inform the reader, and posterity itself, where and from whom they obtained their primary evidence.
This being Altercation, you already knew who had to have written that blistering commentary about the importance of documentation in best-selling works of historical import, don't you? Victor. Davis. Hanson. (Policy Review, 23 December 2006) Once again, apparently without a trace of irony.

Last week, I also expounded upon the similarities twixt Mr. Howard Zinn and Mr. Hanson. Now, I should note that unlike Mr. Hanson, Howard Zinn came to his opinions about war through direct personal experience in the Second World War. Moreover, Zinn's experiences were the result of choice. Because he had a job working in the defense industry, Zinn was exempted from the draft. Yet, during the height of World War II, when thousands upon thousands of airmen were being shot from the skies over occupied Europe, Zinn volunteered for the Army Air Corps. He was accepted, trained, and then deployed to England as a bombardier. (In WWII era aircraft, this is the officer who pulled the trigger that dropped the bombs.) He manned a .50 caliber machinegun in combat over Germany, braved flak and enemy fighters, and looked through a Norden bombsite and dropped bombs in combat. More than 25,000 of his peers died in the air over Europe doing much the same thing during the course of his war.

Hanson, who turned 18 two years before the end of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, apparently had better things to do at a time when America was at war and desperately needed smart young men in the ranks. Hanson's own idea of "civic militarism," which he espouses in his book, was, apparently, not one he felt compelled to exhibit in any sort of personal manner. He felt it sufficient to wait for the State to compel him with the draft, should it choose to do so, rather than volunteer for military service, as had Zinn.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is probably a crucial difference. On the one hand, there is a man who fought in war, Zinn, and he has a problem with war, but not the warriors.[1] On the other side is a man, Hanson, who decided not to fight in his generation's war and has no apparent problems with war, but does refer to those of us in the U.S. Army (and the other services) as "mercenary" and describes our motivations as being that solely of people, "who seek economic opportunity alone in serving."

Move along folks, move along. There's no hypocrisy to see here. Move along.