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October 2, 2005
Book Review: Carnage and Culture
Why do Western armies win? Sometimes, it is true, they don't win. Defeats such as the Roman disaster at the Teutoburg Forest and the American withdrawal from Vietnam attest to that. But those are exceptions; the rule remains that, when facing a non-Western adversary, the Western army wins.
In his Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Victor Davis Hanson argues Western military dominance is due to enduring features in Western cultures. Things such as Democracy, Capitalism, and Rationalism, when unleashed by a Western army on the battlefield, produce carnage unrivaled by that of its non-Western adversaries.
Carnage and Culture is both military history and philosophical treatise, and it succeeds in both counts. As military history, its account of nine landmark battles is superb. And as philosophical treatise, it offers a persuasive case for its thesis. Fundamental cultural differences are the best explanation for enduring Western military dominance. Those of us who worry about the future of our civilization can draw solace from that fact.
But in that solace, there is a warning: we will only dominate the battlefield as long as we keep those features in our culture that allowed said dominance to arise. If we lose our culture by other means, then history won't count for anything at all.
Note: Last week's review of World on Fire : How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability can be found here
Posted by Ruy Diaz at October 2, 2005 11:24 AM
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