War Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus War

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Zusammenfassung von War

Name: War
Rating: 4 (203 reviews)
Author: Margaret MacMillan

Margaret MacMillan

How Conflict Shaped Us

4 (203 Bewertungen)

25 Min.

Themen

Culture Anthropology Theoretical Philosophy The Human Condition Wars

Inhaltsübersicht

War
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What’s in it for me? Explore the debate about why and how humans make war.

What emotions do you feel when you hear the word war? Is it a sense of horror and dread? Or perhaps admiration –⁠ a feeling that war can be exciting or even glamorous?

War is obviously a complex subject, both emotionally and intellectually. Throughout the course of history, humans have been both making war and theorizing about it. And while war brings violence, destruction, and cruelty, it’s also shaped society as we know it.

We shouldn’t view peace as the norm and war as an aberration. Rather, we should explore how war and human society have evolved together – as we’ll do in these blinks. If we learn to understand war, we can also learn to avoid it.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

whether humans are more like chimps or bonobos;
how a ship captain’s ear started a war; and
why we tend to view World War I so negatively.

Humans have always made war – and we may be genetically programmed to do so.

Nestled in the Swiss alps is the quaint town of Bolzano. One of its major attractions is Ötzi, otherwise known as the Iceman. Ötzi is the mummified corpse of a man who lived around 3300 BC, well before the Great Pyramids were constructed in Egypt or Stonehenge was built in ancient Britain.

How did Ötzi die? At first, archaeologists thought that he’d gotten lost in the mountains and frozen to death. But eventually they discovered something very different: Ötzi’s body was covered in cuts and bruises, and an arrowhead stuck out from his shoulder. His own knife and arrowheads had blood on them. So it seems Ötzi died in a fight.

His story shows that humans have been wounding and killing each other since at least the later Stone Age. But why?

The key message here is: Humans have always made war – and we may be genetically programmed to do so.

For decades, scientists believed that early humans lived peaceful, nomadic hunter-gatherer lives. But now, researchers are almost certain that organized, armed conflict has always been part of our existence.

Does that mean war is encoded in our biology? Are we genetically programmed to fight? To discover the answer to that question, scientists have studied chimpanzees and bonobos – humans’ closest genetic relatives.

What they’ve found is, unfortunately, inconclusive. On the one hand, chimps can be quite violent. They start deadly conflicts with little or no provocation. The bonobos, on the other hand, are seemingly much more peaceful. When two bonobos first meet, for instance, they gaze at one another, share food, and embrace rather than attack.

So which one is more like us? The answer may be neither. That’s because, as history clearly shows, humans are capable of both extreme violence and far-reaching cooperation.

We’re still driven by the same evolutionary forces that shaped our species at the dawn of humanity. Some of them – like the desire for food – can make us violent. But we have also, in a sense, domesticated ourselves. We can choose not to go to war, or we can go to war in service of more abstract ideas, like honor or religion.

Let’s dive a little deeper into reasons for war.

Wars are motivated by greed, self-defense, emotions, and ideas.

In 1731, a British seafarer, Captain Jenkins, lost his ear. He claimed that Spanish sailors had cut it off after accusing him of smuggling. Jenkins complained to the English king, but, for seven years, nothing happened. Eventually, the captain produced what he said were the remains of his ear. And the following year, in 1739, Britain went to war with Spain.

Jenkins’ ear was, of course, merely an excuse to start the war. In reality, Britain had other motives, like its desire to enter lucrative trade with the West Indies and Spanish America. Meanwhile, the Spanish wanted to preserve their monopoly in the region.

A society’s institutions, values, and beliefs all influence the way it views and fights wars.

If you’re at all interested in the European Middle Ages, chances are you’ve heard the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

In the medieval period, stories like this were told and retold by generations of young men. They looked up to knights like Launcelot and Galahad for their honor and virtue, as well as their battlefield skills. The very idea of being a hero was a cornerstone of chivalry, a culture that encouraged men to prove their valor. The reward was usually a woman’s hand in marriage.

Nationalism, the Industrial Revolution, and cultural changes shaped modern warfare.

The date: September 20, 1792. The place: Valmy, a small village in eastern France.

The French army –⁠ poorly equipped and badly organized –⁠ is going head-to-head with the highly disciplined Prussians. The French sustain greater casualties, yet the Prussian forces are being depleted by dysentery. The Prussians ultimately decide to retreat.

People can be persuaded –⁠ or forced –⁠ to fight in wars for a variety of reasons.

On March 29, 1461, two English royal houses, the Yorks and the Lancasters, fought the Battle of Towton. It was, and remains, the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Fifty thousand soldiers participated, and as many as 28,000 of them died. The violence was so astonishing that the field on which that battle occurred came to be known as the Bloody Meadow.

Wars are undeniably bloody. And yet men, and sometimes women, have consistently been drawn to fight in them. Why?

Civilians can benefit from war, but they’re also subject to some of its greatest horrors.

Civilians are a special category of people during times of war, and various sets of rules have attempted to define how they should be treated. Usually, these rules declare that civilians and their property should not be harmed. But, of course, regulations tend to go out the window in the heat of battle.

In the age of modern warfare, military strategists sometimes coldly refer to civilians as the “collateral damage” that results from war. When their side is defeated, civilians may be killed, enslaved, or deported. But war isn’t always bad for them – in fact, it can sometimes provide benefits, like opportunities to make money. And civilians aren’t always passive bystanders. Often, they have great passion for war, just like the soldiers themselves.

Humanity has repeatedly attempted to construct rules around organized conflict.

A young Harvard graduate named John Reed traveled to Mexico in 1913. For four months, he accompanied a Mexican rebel leader called Pancho Villa. One day, Reed showed Villa a curious pamphlet. It outlined the new rules of war adopted at the Hague Conference in 1907.

Villa was very interested in the pamphlet and pored over it for hours. But he couldn’t understand the motivation for making rules about war. “It is not a game,” he said. “What is the difference between civilized war and any other kind of war?”

The experience of war, and the ways it’s depicted in art, are deeply varied.

What sensations, smells, sights, and emotions characterize fighting? There isn’t just one answer.

The ancient Greeks, for instance, had a rather dispassionate way of describing battle. Wounds were merely catalogued: a spear piercing a groin here, an arrow sticking someone in the eye there.

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Worum geht es in War?

War (2020) is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of human conflict. It considers war from different angles, examining what causes it, how we think about it, and how it affects us. By making an effort to understand war, we become better prepared to avoid it.

Bestes Zitat aus War

Nationalism provided the passion for war, the Industrial Revolution the tools, and the changes in society the bodies to fight . . . .

—Margaret MacMillan

Wer War lesen sollte

Students of international and military history
People interested in cultural and philosophical differences
Anyone fascinated or affected by human conflict

Über den Autor

Margaret MacMillan is a historian, professor emerita of international history at Oxford University, and professor emerita of history at the University of Toronto. In 2018, she was the Reith lecturer, giving talks in five major cities on the subject of war. She is also a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and the best-selling author of Paris 1919, which won numerous awards, and The War That Ended Peace, which was named a New York Times Notable Book.

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