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dwellordream · 3 years

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“...Today, most – though by no means all – free countries (along with a number of rather unfree ones) have shifted from mass conscription based militaries to professional, all-volunteer militaries. The United States, of course, made that shift in 1973 (along lines proposed by the 1969 Gates Commission). The shift to a professional military has always been understood to have involved risks – the classic(al) example of those risks being the Roman one: the creation of a semi-professional Roman army misaligned the interests of the volunteer soldiers with the voting citizens, resulting in the end (though a complicated process) in the collapse of the Republic and the formation of the Empire in what might well be termed a shift to ‘military rule’ as the chief commander of the republic (first Julius Caesar, then Octavian) seized power from the apparatus of civilian government (the senate and citizen assemblies).

It is in that context that ‘warrior’ – despite its recent, frustrating use by the United States Army – is an unfortunate way for soldiers (regardless of branch or country) to think of themselves. Encouraging soldiers to see themselves as ‘warriors’ means encouraging them to see their role as combatants as the foundational core of their identity. A Mongol warrior was a warrior because as an adult male Mongol, being a warrior was central to his gender-identity and place in society (the Mongols being a society, as common with Steppe nomads, where all adult males were warriors); such a Mongol remained a warrior for his whole adult life.

Likewise, a medieval knight – who I’d class as a warrior (remember, the distinction is on identity more than unit fighting) – had warrior as a core part of their identity. It is striking that, apart from taking religious orders to become a monk (and thus shift to an equally totalizing vocation), knights – especially as we progress through the High Middle Ages as the knighthood becomes a more rigid and recognized institution – do not generally seem to retire. They do not lay down their arms and become civilians (and just one look at the attitude of knightly writers towards civilians quickly answers the question as to why). Being a warrior was the foundation of their identity and so could not be disposed of. We could do the same exercise with any number of ‘warrior classes’ within various societies. Those individuals were, in effect born warriors and they would die warriors. In societies with meaningful degrees of labor specialization, to be a warrior was to be, permanently, a class apart.

Creating such a class apart (especially one with lots of weapons) presents a tremendous danger to civilian government and consequently to a free society (though it is also a danger to civilian government in an unfree society). As the interests of this ‘warrior class’ diverge from the interests of the rest of society, even with the best of intentions the tendency is going to be for the warriors to seek to preserve their interests and status with the tools they have, which is to say all of the weapons (what in technical terms we’d call a ‘failure of civil-military relations,’ civ-mil being the term for the relationship between civil society and its military).

The end result of that process is generally the replacement of civilian self-government with ‘warrior rule.’ In pre-modern societies, such ‘warrior rule’ took the form of governments composed of military aristocrats (often with the chiefest military aristocrat, the king, at the pinnacle of the system); the modern variant, rule by officer corps (often with a general as the king-in-all-but-name) is of course quite common. Because of that concern, it is generally well understood that keeping the cultural gap between the civilian and military worlds as small as possible is important to a free society.

Instead, what a modern free society wants are effectively civilians, who put on the soldier’s uniform for a few years, acquire the soldier’s skills and arts, and then when their time is done take that uniform off and rejoin civil society as seamlessly as possible (the phrase ‘citizen-soldier’ is often used represent this ideal). It is clear that, at least for the United States, the current realization of this is less than ideal. The endless pressure to ‘re-up‘ (or for folks to be stop-lossed) hardly help.

But encouraging soldiers (or people in everyday civilian life; we’ll come back to that in the last post in this series) to identify as warriors – individual, self-motivated combatants whose entire identity is bound up in the practice of war – does real harm to the actual goal of keeping the cultural divide between soldiers and civilians as small as possible. Observers both within the military and without have been shouting the alarm on this point for some time now, but the heroic allure of the warrior remains strong.

...But as I noted above, we’ve discussed on this blog already a lot of different military social structures (mounted aristocrats in France and Arabia, the theme and fyrd systems, the Spartans themselves, and so on). And they are very different and produce armies – because societies cannot help but replicate their own peacetime social order on the battlefield – that are organized differently, value different things and as a consequence fight differently. But focusing on (fictitious) ‘universal warriors’ also obscures another complex set of relationships to war and warfare: all of the civilians.

When we talk about the impact of war on civilians, the mind quite naturally turns to the civilian victims of war – sacked cities, enslaved captives, murdered non-combatants – and of course their experience is part of war too. But even in a war somehow fought entirely in an empty field between two communities (which, to be clear, no actual war even slightly resembles this ‘Platonic’ ideal war; there is a tendency to romanticize certain periods of military history, particularly European military history, this way, but it wasn’t so), it would still shape the lives of all of the non-combatants in that society (this is the key insight of the ‘war and society’ school of military history).

To take just my own specialty, warfare in the Middle Roman Republic wasn’t simply a matter for the soldiery, even when the wars were fought outside of Italy (which they weren’t always kept outside!). The demand for conscripts to fill the legions bent and molded Roman family patterns, influencing marriage and child-bearing patterns for both men and women. With so many of the males of society processed through the military, the values of the army became the values of society not only for the men but also for women as well. Women in these societies did not consider themselves uninterested bystanders in these conflicts: by and large they had a side and were on that side, supporting the war effort by whatever means.

And even in late-third and early-second century (BC) Rome, with its absolutely vast military deployments, the majority of men (and all of the women) were still on the ‘homefront’ at any given time, farming the food, paying the taxes, making the armor and weapons and generally doing the tasks that allowed the war machine to function, often in situations of considerable hardship. And in the end – though the exact mechanisms remain the subject of debate – it is clear that the results of Rome’s victory induced significant economic instability, which was also a part of the experience of war.

In short, warriors were not the only people who mattered in war. The wartime social role of a warrior was not only different from that of a soldier, it was different than that of the working peasant forced to pay heavy taxes, or to provide Corvée labor to the army. It was different from the woman whose husband went off to war, or whose son did, or who had to keep up her farm and pay the taxes while they did so. It was different for the aristocrat than for the peasant, for the artisan than for the farmer. Different for the child than for the adult.

And yet for a complex society (one with significant specialization of labor) to wage war efficiently, all of these roles were necessary. To focus on only the warrior (or the soldier) as the sole interesting relationship in warfare is to erase the indispensable contributions made by all of these folks, without which the combatant could not combat.

It would be worse yet, of course, to suggest that the role of the warrior is somehow morally superior to these other roles (something Pressfield does explicitly, I might add, comparing ‘decadent’ modern society to supposedly superior ‘warrior societies’ in his opening videos). To do so with reference to our modern professional militaries is to invite disastrous civil-military failure. To suggest, more deeply, that everyone ought to be in some sense a ‘warrior’ in their own occupation sounds better, but – as we’ll see in the last essay of this series – leads to equally dark places.

A modern, free society has no need for warriors; the warrior is almost wholly inimical to a free society if that society has a significant degree of labor specialization (and thus full-time civilian specialists). It needs citizens, some of whom must be, at any time, soldiers but who must never stop being citizens both when in uniform and afterwards.”

- Bret Devereaux, “The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and…”

#writing #warfare #bret devereaux #ancient #roman #medieval #history #the universal warrior

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peirates · 4 years

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‘Did the Romans and ancient Greeks ... ?’

Google autocomplete is a gem and a curse. Inspired by @todayintokyo’s post on questions about Japan, I thought I’d have a look at what people are asking about Rome and classical Greece and, wow...

Christmas holidays leave a lot of time for milling around, so I’ll answer them in case anyone’s interested. (Please forgive me if any of this is incorrect/incoherent, it’s nearly 11pm as I’m writing this lol)

Did the Romans speak Latin?

Yes, Latin was Rome’s (and the Roman Empire’s) official language! Of course, many Romans or foreigners in Rome spoke other languages for the sake of communication, trade and education - Greek was particularly popular among the nobility - but Latin was what they all had in common.

Did the Romans invade Scotland?

Long story short, no. They tried, failed, and built Hadrian’s Wall to keep the ‘barbarian’ Gaels out - southern Britain was already too cold and muddy for the temperate Romans, not much point in losing more lives over more mud.

(Hadrian’s Wall was what inspired Game of Thrones’ The Wall, as confirmed by G.R.R. Martin himself, but Hadrian’s was nowhere near as high, thick or long.)

Did the Romans have glass?

Absolutely! In fact, their skill with it was much more artistic and masterful than the average glassmaker today, just search ‘roman glassware’ here on Tumblr or on Google images to see what I mean.

Did the Romans invent concrete?

Yep! It’s famed for its durability, which is due to its contents of volcanic ash (Pompeii flashbacks), lime and seawater. The seawater reacted with the ash over time to give it its strength and anti-cracking nature.

In fact, the Roman method was so effective that it lasts for far longer than modern concrete (modernity/Westernisation =/= progression, it seems) and scientists today are trying to find ways to revitalise it.

Did the Romans eat pizza? / Did the Romans eat pasta?

Sadly not, only later Italians did. Their empire deserved to crumble for not inventing either smh.

Did the Romans invade Britain? / Did the Romans invade England?

They did indeed in AD 43 under Emperor Claudius, and they only began to withdraw in the late 300s when the city of Rome was being threatened by a Germanic tribe called the Visigoths.

Did the Romans invade Ireland?

No. Even now, archaeologists have no idea to what extent they communicated or even knew of each other.

Did the Romans celebrate Christmas?

Emperor Constantine only began converting the empire to Christianity from AD 313 (they had been pagan previously), and the earliest evidence we have of Romans celebrating Christmas was in 336 AD, very late in Roman history. Throughout most of Roman history, therefore, no they did not celebrate Christmas.

(They did have a festival which was similarly important and similarly timed (mid-December) called the Saturnalia. It also involved communal partying, gift exchanges and a general spirit of liberty (e.g. slaves could order around and punish their masters) - it was one of the most anticipated festivals of the Roman calendar. However, the purpose was very different: it was to worship the pagan god Saturn, the father of god-king Jupiter and the previous ruler of the world before its occupation by humanity. Namely, the festival marked a return to the ancient ‘Golden Age’ in which nature was dominant, peaceful and uncorrupted.)

Did ancient Greece have emperors? / Did ancient Greece have kings?

No emperors, traditionally Greece was comprised of city-states ruled by kings (or theoretically by the dēmos, the people, if you were Athens). Under Roman occupation it did answer to Rome’s leaders (consuls, then later emperors), but the idea of emperors was much more late-Roman than Greek.

Did ancient Greece celebrate Christmas?

Nope. It was originally pagan and did not celebrate any Christian holidays until a) it was conquered by Rome b) Rome later converted to Christianity, thus enforcing it on the rest of the empire. However, this conversion point was so long after the ‘heroic’ and ‘classical’ periods of Greece that by the time it did become mostly Christian, it was no longer ‘ancient Greece’ in the same sense.

Did ancient Greece have electricity?

Y’all are asking the real questions out here, that’s for sure lmao.

Nope, electricity wasn’t used anywhere as a power source until Thomas Edison’s studies about two thousand years later.

God though, a good ol’ GPS would have saved Odysseus a lot of trouble.

Did ancient Greece and Rome overlap?

Oh, nelly...

Greece predated Rome by at nearly a thousand years, but Greece’s and Rome’s histories together lasted for centuries, even before the latter conquered the former. It’s why they are studied together as one field of academia. Many Italian settlements were in fact Greek colonies. Classical Greek helped shape Latin. Much of Roman religion was inspired by that of the Greeks. Many Greeks could speak Latin and many Romans could speak Greek. Roman art, philosophy and architecture was particularly fascinated by that which was Greek - to put it in meme format, the crab is Roman culture and the crocodile is Greek culture. And these are just the absolute basics, entire tomes have been written on Greece’s and Rome’s somewhat symbiotic relationship.

TLDR hell yes they did.

Did ancient Greece have a flag? / Did ancient Greece have a constitution?

Nah. Although history often refers to Greece as one country, one culture, it was more a collection of independent city-states with their own identities and constitutions.

They all had three things in common: religion (+ the moral/social codes which came along with it), language, and (in most cases) enemies from abroad - therefore in later centuries, as well as their city-based nationalities, they did all call themselves the Hellenes. If you were a fellow Hellenic, you’d be able to work and live in other Greek cities with less trouble than if you were to try, say, in a ‘barbarian’ land such as Persia. Greeks were civilised; everyone else was an uncultured brute. Hence, their sense of unity was more from fear of the outside, from xenophobia, than from internal harmony.

Because of this, there was never an altogether complete sense of assimilation. Different cities had distinct dialects, favoured different gods/cults within the wider Pantheon, often warred against each other (especially Athens and Sparta, whew), fed their own specific cultures and law-sets and reputations. Nationality and citizenship in that age were not really about country or region, the world was just too small for that. You wouldn’t say ‘Hi I’m Phoebe and I’m Greek’, you’d say ‘Hi I’m Phoebe and I’m from the city of Halicarnassus.’ The closest analogy I can really think of is the cities in the dystopian series, Mortal Engines.

So no, they didn’t have a single flag or constitution. There was just not enough unity between them all.

Did ancient Greece trade?

Initially I was going to wave this off as a silly question because ‘hurr durr everyone trades’ but ACTUALLY.

Along with the rest of the eastern Mediterranean, Greece had its own Dark Ages between the fall of its early society (aka Mycenaean Greece) and the rise of Homeric-style poetry and culture, i.e. between the 1100s and 700s BC. Communication in general was absolutely awful: there were no great armies, no great cultural progressions, and yes, no substantial trade. The fact that Greece was then feeling down in the dumps also discouraged foreign trade.

It took the bard Homer’s influence to get people to start thinking, creating, travelling and thus mass-trading again - this sudden surge in activity eventually led to Greece’s Classical Period, i.e. 4th century BC, you’ll probably imagine gleaming Athenian pillars. Increased thinking and culture led to increased politics/nationalism, increased p/n led to increased warring and military action, increased warring improved transport and communication, and WHOOSH suddenly trade took off.

So basically, Mycenaean Greek trade was good (as far as we can tell), Dark Ages Greek trade was shocking, Classical Greek trade was quite literally revolutionary.

Did ancient Greece have lions?

Yep! However, they weren’t like the sub-Saharan lions you’re probably imagining right now - those are Panthera leo, but the Eurasian lions that would have been in Greece were Panthera spelaea.

Nevertheless there were indeed lions and they played a huge role in Greek mythology and literature. The Nemean Lion was the first of Hercules’ Twelve Labours; Homer, the trendsetting legendary lad that he was, created a trope of comparing something innocent and vulnerable to something vicious and savage and desperate by using the analogy of a lamb and a hungry lion.

Did ancient Greece have a democracy?

Nope, only one city named Athens did. Don’t get me wrong, it was at the time and still is a big deal considering it hadn’t been done before, BUT there are three important things to note:

It was ONLY Athens which had a democracy - every other Greek city kept their kingships.

The Athenian democracy wasn’t what we’d call democracy. Only free, Athenian-on-both-sides men could vote and participate in local politics - this left out all slaves, all women (even if they were Athenian), and all foreigners or residents of foreign descent (no longer how long you and your family had lived in and worked in and contributed to the city and community).

It wasn’t foolproof considering it eventually got overthrown by power-seeking tyrants.

i.e. a part of ancient Greece had a democracy.

#classics #tagammemnon #classicsblr #rome #ancient rome #latin #ancient greece #classical greek #greece #[#classics: history #classics: language #|#did the romans and ancient greeks #google autocomplete #]

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15001700tt · 3 years

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So that meta about cap 3 civil war, I am going to hash it out here on my phone Bc I don’t have the mental capacity to type on my laptop (I just finished episode 6 of wandavision, I am not oka)

So the Sokovia Accords are a bunch of rules and restrictions for enhanced humans to follow. The gist is that whenever enhanced humans (basically superhero’s) want to do anything they have to abide by the accords and get the okay sign from all the countries that signed. While it’s alright to set guidelines and rules this isn’t about whether the countries are right to even sign the accords it’s about what kind of rules are in the accords in the first place. This is a fictional piece in a fictional world so I doubt I can actually find the complete accords to go through it. So I can only go off what others have mentioned and what the movie shows me.

The beginning of the movie starts with cap and Tony in opposite head spaces. Tony just lost pepper after his last mistake (IRONMAN 3) and cap is exactly where we left him in 2014, still trying to find Bucky. Caps headspace didn’t change.

Tony is very vulnerable because of the recent circumstances so of course when the lady at the college accuses him of killing her son, he will feel guilt. Coupled with his history of panic attacks and self doubt, and many many mistakes (see his own movies and age of ultron for reference)

he would of course agree that they need ‘supervision’ because he doesn’t trust himself enough to be able to do the right thing without other people to influence him. Tony isn’t weak minded, he just has a history of always choosing the wrong decisions and so when now he wants to be better and make the right decisions and Ross (that bitch) is like ‘try dangerous’ he completely feels like he has no ground to say no.

While cap is still the same old cap. He may be captain America but he might as well be the archnemisis of the government. He doesn’t trust governments or in this case countries with making decisions like these. You can clearly see this by his skepticism and going through the accords and reading them. He didn’t get to the ocean rift prison part but he recognized the signs of oppression. I think that came from the 1940s. If we’re being real here, cap got the serum and then was told to be a stage monkey for months bc the government (or military but same thing) decided that they didn’t want one superhuman soldier they wanted an army. That was a wrong decision, he went against it when he went to save the 107th. He makes a point to Tony, when Tony says that they need to be held accountable for their actions.

"We are if we're not taking responsibility for our actions. This document just shifts the blame."

"No, but it's run by people with agendas and agendas change." —‘If we sign this, we surrender our right to choose.’

He says this with the experience (let’s say from both cap 1 and 2 to keep it simple) the army made the decision based on profit. And once they found out that he can actually get shit done they changed their mind and allowed the howling commandos to operate. Same with shield and hydra in WS. Hydra was growing with shield and no one even knew and even fury was willing to go with whatever pierce had set UNTIL cap challenged the idea. Cap also makes a point when he’s talking with fury.

Nick Fury: “Shield takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be.”

Captain America/Steve Rogers: “This isn't freedom. This is fear!”

Which honestly gives you a very precise and to the point idea of how cap thinks. The government can’t be trusted because governments change.

Cap 3 wasn’t about who was right and who was wrong. Tony and cap are both right. It’s almost like the two sides of the same coin.

Tony no longer trusts himself and needs someone else to make the big boy decisions and cap can only trust himself because he only knows what his intentions are and has been betrayed by people and the government enough times that he can’t put that much power into their hands anymore. Cap even says he wishes he can turn off the part in his brain that keeps fighting against it. But he can’t. Bc he stands for freedom and justice (America’s ass ;))

The subplots of cap 3 literally enforce these ideas. Tony is trying to do the right thing by doing what he’s asked, cap just wanted to keep things as they were. Tony is susceptible to change but cap isn’t. It’s literally his character arc being frozen for 70 years (I am ignoring his stunt in endgame vc that was so OOC)

Cap believes in the people around him when he knows them, he knew Wanda and he knew Bucky on levels the audience and maybe even Tony doesn’t understand. He may not be trusting if people but he believes there’s good in everyone. Tony believes that there’s only wickedness so people need to be held accountable. Which isn’t wrong but it has a Dutch tilt. That’s not how that works because no matter what people say, sometimes they have other intentions. It completely checks out that Tony would lock Wanda in the compound because he doesn’t trust her (because he didn’t trust himself) and it’s not because he doesn’t love her, he was doing this as a way to protect her! While with Bucky he didn’t seem in anyway interested in what happened in Winter Soldier so I can’t really define his thoughts towards him until Tony finds out that Bucky killed his parents. There is the point that he was willing to bring in Bucky to the CIA after the bombing in Vienna but tbh there’s a lot of plot holes when it comes to that so I can’t tackle that either.

Cap is stubborn and Tony learned to weaponize his fear and so when that backfired he was left vulnerable bc he had no strong values or trust in himself. It makes his character so much more intriguing. You have this almost narcissistic philanthropist playboy doubting his own decisions because of a few that went wrong when he was trying to go straight. Coupled with his trauma and it almost too realistic (but somehow still idealistic) the way he reacts to authority.

So when he finds out that Bucky is innocent and Zemo is out there about to release the winter soldiers (we know that this was a pseudo goal but they don’t know that) he realizes that cap was right and that he needed to stop Zemo. And when Ross (that bitch) tells him that he can’t, Tony immediately ignores him. Coupled with the fact that Ross (that bitch) put his friends and teammates in prison cells and fucking collars, which is clearly not only in the accords it’s something that was withheld from them (no wonder Wanda is so fuckin pissed off in endgame) Tony really was against the accords by the pseudo climax (again this was the fake climax bc the winter soldiers were never a threat, Zemo was never going to activate them) but when he finds out about his parents he’s pissed at cap. And Bucky which is understandable he killed his mom.

He’s mad at cap for being a little bit of a hypocrite. Remember —"No, but it's run by people with agendas and agendas change."? That’s what made Tony go feral in my opinion. Cap withholding this information from Tony was caps way to get Tony to help cap find Bucky which is from all the cap movies is the goal —> hence ‘caps agenda’.

So cap 3 ends with Tony back at the compound and Steve sends him an old ass flip phone. My theory is the cap 3 was never about the accords really, it was about the broken trust between Tony and Steve. Steve kept information from Tony that put Bucky in a bad light. This exchange between them was gut wrenching;

Captain America: I'm sorry Tony.... I wouldn't do this if I had any other choice... but he's my friend.

Tony Stark/Iron Man: So was I.

#Halie #Steve Rogers #Tony stark #I was on the road for 7 hours #I had the time #also wandavision hurt me this bad #maybe next I’ll write on for wanda #halie speaks about writing #halie speaks nonsense once again #mcu #Ironman #captain America #cap 3 #captain America: civil war

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