Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (review)

Carnage and Culture is an enthralling, hard-hitting analysis that convincingly explains why the West for 2,500 years has militarily prevailed over opponents. Contemporary historians have failed to "appreciate that the classical legacy is at the core" of this success. Hanson's thesis, that since the beginnings of Western Civilization in ancient Greece, the West has rarely been defeated militarily by an Asian or Middle Eastern power, challenges the prevailing view that Eastern and Western cultural development were roughly equivalent until the sixteenth century, when the West invented firearms. The author readily concedes that non-Western armies have won spectacular victories, conquered swaths of territory and had long periods of glory and achievement, but over time they have been unable to stand up to the lethality of Western arms.

Hanson's icon-smashing explanation is that shock infantry units in possession of advanced weaponry and equipment, well trained, highly motivated, and largely voluntary, have proved to be unbeatable. The uberous amalgam of capitalism and freedom (individualism, free empirical inquiry, civilian audit, and dissent) fueled technological innovation and is the key to understanding the West's success in battle as well as the West's domination of the modern world. Hanson demonstrates his thesis by examining nine major battles from Salamis in 480 B.C. to Tet in 1968. "Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Cortés, and the British and American Officers of the last two centuries," says Hanson, "enjoyed innate advantages that over the long duration could offset the terrible effects of imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain, and inferior numbers—or a simple 'bad day.' These advantages were immediate and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of a distant past." So much for Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and other geographic determinists, the weakness of whose reductive mantra, location, location, location, is exposed.

Throughout the book the reader stumbles across gems of information that repeatedly challenge the short-sighted contemporary view of history, make you rethink things you thought you knew, and shift the political perspective back toward the reasonable—historical truth triumphs over political correctness. The author reminds us that the greatest slaughter of any colonial peoples occurred not in modern times, but was the Roman conquest of the Gauls in France over a two hundred year period—perhaps as many as two million were killed while millions more were enslaved. Hanson suggests that on the top ten list of human slaughter this information surely pushes the Gauls ahead of the Aztecs and American Indians.

In his detailed recitation of battles lost and won, Hanson does not glamorize or romanticize war. His descriptions of what it is like when the "metal meets the meat," the carnage, are poignantly graphic. On Cannae he writes, "thousands of plumed swordsmen in perfect order were transformed nearly instantaneously from a majestic almost living organism into a gigantic lifeless mess of blood, entrails, crumpled bronze, bent iron, and cracked wood." In the chapter on Tenochtitlan he lampoons "deskbound" academics, challenging them to conjure up the "utter dread that existed in the minds of those who were routinely sliced to pieces by Toledo steel, shredded by grapeshot, trampled by mailed knights, ripped to pieces by mastiffs, and had their limbs lacerated with impunity by musket balls and crossbow bolts."

The most satisfying and probably the most controversial chapter in Carnage and Culture is the author's evaluation of the Tet offensive from 31 January to 6 April 1968 and his overall analysis of the war in Vietnam. Employing intellectual tactics much like the shock military tactics he describes, he challenges the supposed "lessons of Vietnam" in head to head, direct clash encounters. He takes few prisoners...