Posted on 04/09/2003 12:45:30 AM PDT by Diddley
Review of Hanson's "Soul of Battle" by a reader (brothersjudddotcom).
This is an older article, but I think that it is appropo for today.
When a free and consensual society feels its existence threatened, when it has been attacked, when its citizenry at last understands an enemy at odds with the very morality of its culture, . . . then free men can muster, they can fight back well, and they can make war brutally and lethally beyond the wildest nightmares of the brutal military culture they seek to destroy.
Such is the case that the outstanding military historian Victor Davis Hanson makes in The Soul of Battle. Drawing mainly on three historical examples--Epaminondas leading Thebes against Sparta; Sherman marching through the South; and Patton driving the Third Army to Berlin.
Hanson makes a compelling case that there is no more dangerous military force in human history than a democratic populace, raised to righteous moral anger, and commanded by leaders who understand the unique strength of such an army.
Democracy, and its twin of market capitalism, alone can instantaneously create lethal armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their deaths the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them.
It is democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the soul of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved.
And what is "the soul of battle" to which he attributes such world-changing power? : A rare thing indeed that arises only when free men march unabashedly toward the heartland of their enemy in hopes of saving the doomed, when their vast armies are aimed at salvation and liberation not conquest and enslavement.
Only then does battle take on a spiritual dimension, one that defines a culture, teaches it what civic militarism is and how it is properly used.
Mr. Hanson thus provides the reader with an invaluable framework for understanding history, modern and ancient, and for understanding the often underestimated strengths of democratic society.
(Excerpt) Read more at amazon.com ...
The Soul of Battle arises only when free men march unabashedly in hopes of saving the doomed, aimed at salvation and liberation not conquest and enslavement.
Hanson illustrates this through three oustanding generals.
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