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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
March, 2005
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's newsletter describes how the Roman Empire became Christian, and presents some notes on Martin Van Crefeld's book, 'The Transformation of War'.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson
2. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The tendency for later Roman citizens to turn away from their own culture was nowhere more evident than in the rise of Christianity. This was a religion imported from the land of the Jews, which gained its converts among slaves and foreigners. It was most un-Roman, and this very fact made it desirable to Romans of all classes. The enthusiasm for Christianity was part of a broader drive for self-realisation. Rome's traditional religion was an essentially civic matter, in which public officials officiated at ceremonies involving the whole community. By becoming Christians, people were making a personal choice and expressing their separation from the mainstream. Christians lived in Roman society, but their loyalties lay elsewhere. In his book 'City of God', Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote "Please pardon us if our country, up above, has to cause trouble to yours."
In fact, Christianity was just one of many alternative belief systems that were then spreading through the Roman Empire to divisive effect. These included Gnosticism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Mithraism, Hindu mysticism, Isis worship and the cults of the Manichaeans and Neo-Pythagoreans. Many of these were further fragmented into numerous sects, often at each other's throats. There was also renewed interest in magic, and the wearing of amulets, for example, became widespread. Rome's social fabric was being torn apart. It was hardly surprising that the imperial state tried to fight back by banning these corrosive influences and prosecuting their adherents.
During Nero's persecutions of the first century, Christians were famously thrown to the lions-a standard method of executing criminals, which is what Christians were considered to be. In the second century, while Christianity remained banned, there was a new atmosphere of toleration. When the emperor Trajan was asked by one of his provincial governors whether he should prosecute Christians whose names were being submitted to him in anonymous letters, the emperor replied, "That is not how we do things in this day and age." Under less enlightened authorities, the Christians could still be regarded as scapegoats for the empire's troubles. At Lyons in the 170s, Christians were publicly tortured and, according to Bishop Eusebius (c. 300), finished off with "the iron chair, which roasted their flesh and suffocated them with the reek." Yet Christianity thrived on such treatment. It proved futile banning people from expressing their religion, not least because Christians actively sought to become martyrs, since they thought it would speed them to eternal life.
At the beginning of the fourth century, the reforming emperor Diocletian instituted a new wave of persecutions as part of a general campaign to revive the empire. The third century had been a time of crisis all round. Under the weight of the dole and a groaning bureaucracy, taxes had reached almost unbearable levels. Government salaries had been cut back, and civil servants now eked out their pay with bribes. While the police seemed to be losing the battle with criminals, new laws poured out of the imperial court. Despite ever more severe penalties, such as chopping off the hands of thieves, this legislation had little effect (although much of it would later be adopted in the Islamic world). All along its over-stretched frontier, the empire was harassed by raiders and pirates, and it was drawn into a chronic series of small wars. In some provinces, fed up with over-taxation, insecurity, corruption and crime, so-called 'bacaudae' threw out the Roman officials and set up independent communes.
By all logic, the Roman Empire should already have collapsed under the burden of its third century problems. Yet Diocletian's reforms, which included dividing the empire between four rulers, seemed to pull it back from the brink. Nevertheless, he did not succeed in suppressing the Christians, and thirty years later, Constantine the Great made an even more radical move. Instead of trying to stamp out Christianity, he declared it to be the empire's official religion. It was now the pagans who found themselves hounded and out of kilter with the times. The Altar of Victory, which Julius Caesar had installed in the Senate as a symbol of Roman supremacy and on which senators used to swear an oath to uphold the empire, was removed as idolatrous. Q Aurelius Symmachus, a senator and pagan, pleaded for the altar to be returned, saying that while he had no wish to offend the Christians who now dominated the government, surely this one tradition could be preserved. His request was denied.
In Alexandria the local bishop railed against the famous library, the ancient world's premier storehouse of human knowledge. His complaint was that the texts were almost exclusively of pagan origin. In AD 391, a mob of Christian extremists smashed their way into the library, destroying statues and mosaics, and setting fire to the shelves full of scrolls. The Christians were eventually dispersed and part of the library's collection was rescued. In 415, another Christian mob attacked Hypatia, the professor of philosophy, stripped her naked, stabbed her to death, and burned her body in the street.
To be fair, most mainstream bishops deplored such atrocities and advocated persuasion as a way of getting their message across. The underlying point though was to restore cultural unity by creating a Christian empire. Thirty years after Constantine, the emperor Julian, tried to restore paganism, earning himself the epithet 'the Apostate', but he was killed after a short reign. From then on all emperors were Christian. Yet even in the next century, as the end approached, powerful voices accused Christianity of ruining the empire and, after the Vandals sacked Rome, some pagan temples and sacred groves were restored. Furthermore, Christianity itself was divided by various rival doctrines concerning whether Christ was divine, human or some combination of the two. It would take the rigours of a dark age before the heresies were crushed and unity was achieved. In that process, the barbarian kings who took over from the Roman Empire were major players, for when they accepted the Christian faith, they brought their entire people with them.
3. 'THE TRANSFORMATION OF WAR' BY MARTIN VAN CREFELD
"A ghost is stalking the corridors of general staffs and defense departments all over the "developed" world - the fear of military impotence, even irrelevance."
The main thesis presented by Van Crefeld is that war is not a matter of the past, as some people have suggested, but will undergo a transformation. It is large-scale, conventional war that is a thing of the past.
Van Crefeld argues that the political benefits from the possession of nuclear weapons are minimal. They have not prevented the US from failing in Vietnam, neither have they been able to help the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Before this, the US nuclear monopoly had not been enough to stop Russia from developing its own nuclear force.
"Over the last forty-five years it would be difficult to point out even a single case when a state possessing nuclear arms was able to change the status quo by threatening their use, let alone using them."
Furthermore, "the effect of nuclear weapons was to push conventional war into the nooks and crannies of the international system. ... As the small nations - e. g. Israel and her neighbors - fought each other, the superpowers stood on the sidelines."
Since 1945, there have been (up to 1990) some 160 armed conflicts, three quarters of which were of so-called low-intensity. Low-intensity conflicts (LICs) share three characteristics: - They tend to unfold in the less developed parts of the world. - They rarely involve regular forces on both sides. - Most LICs do not rely primarily on high-tech weaponry. LICs have been more bloody than conventional wars. Van Crefeld uses the example of Israel. 43 percent of the 14000 dead Israel suffered in the four decades of its existence fell during the war of liberation (1948-9), which Van Crefeld sees in many ways as a LIC.
"Assuming that politics is what wars are all about, then LICs have been politically by far the most significant form of war waged since 1945. .. From South Africa to Laos, all over the Third World, LICs have been perhaps the most dominant instrument to bring about political change."
For technical reasons, no first world nations have so far been forced to fight foreigners waging a LIC on their own territory. The notion that superior weaponry in itself can prevail was proven wrong in many instances (US in Lebanon, SU in Afghanistan etc.). However, the Western nations might be constrained by "democratic traditions" and "humanitariansm", which cannot be said for example for the Vietnamese in Cambodia. It might also be argued that the "conquering distance" in LICs was relatively high. Yet, in the past, this did not stop the Spanish from conquering America, for example. Moreover, proximity did not give the Vietnamese in Cambodia, the Soviets in Afghanistan or the Israelis the upper hand.
"In fact, there are solid military reasons why modern regular forces are all but useless for fighting what is fast becoming the dominant form of war in our age. Perhaps the most important reason is to look after the technology on which these forces depend; between maintenance and logistics and sheer administration this ensures that the number of troops in their "tails" will be far too large and the number in the fighting "teeth" far too small."
"A special chapter in the failure of conventional forces is formed by their weapon systems. ... Thus, modern weapon systems are all becoming dependent on electronics... However, the more complicated the surroundings, the greater the problems (examples: rafts installed in the Persian Gulf close to oil installations to distract Iranian missiles)" Hence, Van Crefeld notes that Israel was easily able to win complete command of the air against the Syrians in 1982, but it ultimately failed when it came to controlling the densely populated areas of Lebanon.
The period in history in which war was characterised by a "trinity of government/state, army and people" is a brief one. Van Crefeld goes on to explain at length and by the means of historical examples, why the concept of trinitarian war only applies to modern times. In short, there was previously either no state, no single army or no unified people. Now trinitarian war is disappearing again.
"Though decolonization is now all but complete, low-intensity conflict has not been interrupted in its march of conquest. Even today it is tearing to pieces many developing countries from Colombia to the Philippines. Much of this work is the work of ragtag bands of ruffians... Nor is there any reason to think that the comparatively small number of developed countries can continue to enjoy immunity forever. On numerous occasions in the past their embassies have been attacked, their ships hijacked, their aircraft bombed out of the sky... To make matters worse, many developed countries now contain sizeable minorities..."