Summary of The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson: How Wars Descend into Annihilation E-Book
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Summary of The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson: How Wars Descend into Annihilation
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Summary of
The End of Everything
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Summary of Victor Davis Hanson’s book
How Wars Descend into Annihilation
GP SUMMARY
Summary of The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson: How Wars Descend into Annihilation
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INTRODUCTION
HOW CIVILIZATIONS DISAPPEAR
This book examines the history of wartime destruction of civilizations, states, and cultures, focusing on the rarer cases of abrupt wartime destruction. It uses classical civilizations like Thebes, Punic Carthage, Byzantine Constantinople, and the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán as case studies. The book warns that the modern world, including America, is hardly immune from repeating these tragedies. The wartime end of everything usually follows from a final siege or invasion, targeting a capital or cultural, political, religious, or social center of a state. The transition from normality to the end of days can occur quickly, but absolute defeat too late often revealed long-unaddressed vulnerabilities.
The book suggests that the gullibility and ignorance of contemporary governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising. The retreat to comfortable nonchalance and credulousness, often the cargo of affluence and leisure, is predictable given unchanging human nature.
The book also highlights that as scientific progress accelerates and leisure increases, there is no certainty that there will be any corresponding advance in wisdom or morality, much less radical improvement in innate human nature. The twenty-first century has already experienced bloody wars in places such as Afghanistan, Chechnya, Crimea, Darfur, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Niger, Nigeria, Ossetia, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen.
The four ancient man-made Armageddons discussed are different from the mysterious disappearances or monumental abrupt system collapses of "lost civilizations" such as the Mycenaeans or Mayans.
The book discusses the gradual decay of nations and empires, such as the dissolution of imperial Rome by barbarians and its slow metamorphosis into Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages. It argues that when a state's government disappears, its infrastructure is leveled, most of its people killed, enslaved, or scattered, its culture fragmented and soon forgotten, and its space abandoned or given over to another and quite different people.
The destruction of cities and civilizations is unusual but not yet a thing of our savage past. A small number of these catastrophes still reverberate through the centuries, sometimes changing the lives of quite different peoples. Subsequent generations in retrospect realized these annihilations had marked the abrupt end of an age and a transition to something quite different.
The size and wealth of the targeted population made a difference in the ancient world, as did the language, literature, art, and science of the vanished. The world of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean changed after the end of Byzantine Constantinople far more than following the obliteration of the barbarian Vandals in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy.
The case studies include the leveling of Thebes by Alexander the Great, the erasure of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus, Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest and transformation of Constantinople, and the obliteration of Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés. These annihilations marked the end of cultures and civilizations, and the players involved did not always realize the transformational roles they were playing.
Chapter 1 reviews the fate of Thebes, renowned in both history and myth. The annihilation of Thebes marked the iconic finale of the entire era of independent city-states that the rebellious Thebans had sought to save. After the obliteration of Thebes, one empire or kingdom succeeded another on Greek soil, first Alexander and his Hellenistic Diadochoi (“Successors”), then Rome and Byzantium, then the Ottomans, and finally the independent Greek monarchy.
Chapter 2 delves into the lethal rivalry between Rome and Carthage, which culminated in the fall of Carthage in 146 BC. The Carthaginians disappeared as a people, marking the end of the Third Punic War. Punic civilization vanished with its capital city, and the once Mediterranean-wide Carthaginian language, literature, and people receded to only distant memories in the Greco-Roman centuries that followed. Rome sought an opening to extinguish an economic rival and appropriate its wealth.
The most infamous wartime extinction was the destruction of Byzantine Constantinople on May 29, 1453, "Black Tuesday." The Greek language and Orthodox Christian religion survived scattered in southern Europe and in the outlands of Asia after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. The Ottomans harbored a hatred of Christianity and assumed that Constantinople was old and weak. The Greek shell of the sacked city remained, given its strategically invaluable site at the Bosporus, but now it was to be absorbed as the new dynamic capital Kostantiniyye of the ascendant Ottoman Empire, and in modern times renamed Istanbul.
The fall of Constantinople marked the end of the Eastern Mediterranean-centered world, the transference of Hellenic power and influence to Renaissance Europe, and the beginning of the Atlantic era. The idea of a living Byzantium reemerged only once, as an ephemeral fantasy.
The savage work of Hernán Cortés in destroying the Aztec Empire marked the end of Central American altepetl ("city-state") civilization as a whole. The world wars of the last century likely took more human life than all armed conflicts combined since the dawn of Western civilization twenty-five hundred years prior.
HOPE, DANGER’S COMFORTER
The Obliteration of Classical Thebes (December 335 BC)
In 335 BC, the classical Greek city-state of Thebes bet on revolting from the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great to succeed or at least result in its negotiated surrender and the continuance of its civilization. However, their leaders were fatally wrong on both counts. They ignored the superiority of the Macedonian phalanx and the terror that the Macedonian occupation had instilled among some fifteen hundred conquered Greek city-states.
Theban envoys traveled south to the Isthmus of Corinth to meet supposed savior allied armies arriving from southern Greece. Under their friends' sharp questioning, the Thebans conceded that Alexander was nearby, loose in Boeotia close to their own walls. The other would-be Panhellenic revolutionaries prudently expressed sympathy but decided to pass on any war against the feared Macedonians. As a result, defiant Thebes was left alone to face the fatal consequences of its own idealism.
In their revolutionary zeal, the indomitable heavy infantrymen of the besieged Thebans confidently poured outside the walls of their surrounded ancient city to meet the invaders. They were especially worried that the growing mass of Macedonian infantry outside the walls might be able to rescue their captive garrison guards inside the city.
The war had recently started as a purported Panhellenic rebellion against Macedonian occupation forces, following the death of King Philip II of Macedon and the ascension of his son and heir, Alexander the Great. After three years of pacification by Macedon, the unexpected assassination of Philip II led to a standoff between Thebes, iconic site of Greek mythology, and an untried Macedonian boy-king leading a feared pack of veteran professional killers.
The Thebans hoped that their capture of the Macedonian garrison would prompt other Greek city-states to join them in a Panhellenic uprising against the Macedonians. However, after the allied armies of the south marched out, it became evident that none of their generals had any exact picture of what they were getting into. Instead, each Greek army calculated that if left alone, any polis would be wiped out by Alexander the Great.
Alexander was already ratcheting up pressure on the isolated city, and most in Greece were worried about the Thebans. However, the other Greek city-states rationalized their inaction by claiming that the Thebans were too reckless and unpredictable. The abandoned Thebans continued with plans for a pitched battle, similar to the French army's reputation of World War I.
The decline of Thebes, from its once preeminent role in Greece to an unpopular head of a shaky democratic Boeotian federation, ensured the erosion of the legendary phalanx of their earlier renowned general and leader Epaminondas. The current Macedonian army was a symphony of killers, augmented by thousands of nearby rural Boeotians hostile to their shared capital at Thebes. Each Macedonian battle contingent enhanced the others, each with its particular complementary role, time, and place of attack.
Alexander, a young king, had been waiting for three days outside the walls of Thebes to force submission. He had already defeated the Theban contingent at Chaeronea and was preparing for a protracted assault. However, the Theban rebels were not impressed with Alexander's moderate terms, as they believed their infantry phalanx could fight better outside their walls. The city's circuit wall also served as the outer wall of the inner citadel.
The Thebans had more confidence in their army in the field than in the city's mobilized population on the ramparts. They believed that their recent defeat at Chaeronea was due to chance, bad luck, and the untimely deaths or blunders of their own commanders. The classical Theban phalanx remained an offensive army, famed for its bodily strength and audacity.
The fourth-century Thebes prided itself as the incubator of revolution and had turned Greece upside down. The city had once become democratic under Epaminondas and Pelopidas, and the city was rebranded as a moral force. Alexander decided to deploy his entire Macedonian army, nearly the same size as the force that would wreck three Persian armies at the climactic battles of Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela, thereby destroying the world's greatest empire.
The old-fashioned farmer hoplites of Thebes were vastly outnumbered by Alexander's professionals, and the phalanx fought without closely integrated contingents of light-armed and missile troops, heavy cavalry, reserves, and a general anywhere near the equal of Alexander. There were no new tactics, equipment, or musters in the three years since the disaster of Chaeronea, and the Macedonians would defeat them in the same old way.
