[lit-ideas] Asymmetric Warfare during the Peloponnesian War
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 15:49:09 -0800
The Spartan-led coalition had the greatest land force and the Athenian-led
coalition had the greatest sea force; so when the Spartans were ravaging the
farms outside Athens, the Athenian navy was raiding the coastal towns of the
Peloponnese. The sort of raiding that went on escalated in terms of its
barbarity as the war wore on. The Spartan hoplite forces had no opponents
to engage their phalanxes, and the Athenian Navy had no Spartan ships to
confront them; so they engaged in what we technically call "asymmetric
warfare," but what Victor Davis Hanson in A War Like No other (p 89 ff)
terms "terror."
Both sides engaged in it, causing me to consider the possibility that the
barbarous asymmetric warfare engaged in by the Islamists might someday
inspire us to engage in a similar type of warfare. I concluded that it
probably couldn't because there is no area were the Islamists possess
military superiority. We have no need to seek out temporary areas of
military superiority. There are no areas where we are not militarily
superior.
p. 99: ". . . The archconservative Plato hated such unconventional war in
his own time (429-347). He seems to have blamed its fourth-century ubiquity
on its odious birth during the Peloponnesian War. Then in his teens and
twenties, he had seen imperial Athens lose the war, his aristocratic friends
fail in their efforts at oligarchic overthrow, and his mentor, Socrates,
executed by radical democrats shortly thereafter. Apparently connecting the
dots, he offered a strange rant about the pernicious use of 'naval
infantrymen,' Plato deplore battle in which there were no clear-cut
combatants to settle the issue through discipline and courage.
"Instead, rabble 'jump ashore on frequent stops and then run back as quick
as they can to their ships. They think there is no shame at all in not
dying courageously in their places.' Apparently so disgusted was he at the
practice of employing ships to tarnish the reputation of war and the heroic
code of good hoplite infantry that he scoffed that in mythical times it
would have been better for the Athenians to have given old King Minos all
the hostages he wanted rather than to have resisted him by sea, and thus
have initiated the successful maritime example that led to the present
shame."
How do you hold your own citizen's to a consistently high standard when your
opponents are slaughtering women and children? Look what they did: They
slaughtered innocent women and children. Let us go do the same to them.
That is what happened throughout the Peloponnesian war. And that fall from
a higher-level of warfare, affected the entire society, and Plato deplored
it. Because of this vicious cycle, honour and courage were frequently no
longer considered expedient.
Hanson gives several examples of excesses on both sides but the following
may be the most egregious and it isn't about what the Spartans did to the
Athenians but something the Spartans did to their own slaves - something
that wouldn't have occurred in an earlier era, that is in an era when
barbarous warfare was not considered the norm:
p. 102: "The Spartans were often worse - as a horrendous case of mass
murder of 2,000 helots [Spartan slaves] attests. Terrified by the Athenian
base at Pylos (425), which raised the specter of a wide-scale helot revolt,
the Spartans passed a proclamation offering freedom to any of their
Messenian serfs whose prior military record on behalf of the state might
serve as proof of courage and their past benefaction. Once 2,000 came
forward, the Spartans crowned them and paraded them as heroes around
temples. Then in secret they executed all of them on the logical fear that
such resolute men might someday pose a threat to the Spartan state. How so
many serfs were slain in secret - Thucydides says 'no one knew how any of
them died' - we are not told. The murder of the helots was never
acknowledge by the Spartans. It is one of the tragic quirks of history, or
perhaps a reflection of the biases of ancient historians themselves that
more is known about how 120 Athenians died in Aetolia than 2,000 murdered
serfs in the Peloponnese."
I almost lopped off his last sentence in that it wasn't necessary to the
subject, but more than that I didn't think it was accurate. But I've
included it now because I don't think it is accurate. Violent activities
happening between two antagonists are always more visible than what goes on
internally within a given country. We know a lot about German suppression
of opposition leading up to and during the Second World War, and Stalinism
has become a synonym for such suppression, but the Armenians have needed to
campaign to get anyone to notice that the Turks engaged in their brutal
slaughter. That is no quirk of history. Like the Spartans, the Turks
never admitted it, and you only had the testimony of a rag-tag bunch of
Armenian survivors to pit against the Turks. How do you side with
individual survivors? Often it isn't politically expedient. It wouldn't
fit the dictates of Realpolitik to do so. Your opinion of the Turks is
probably already low but taking up the cause of the Armenians wouldn't help
your relations with the Turks; so you don't do it - or there is an impetus
not to do anything even if you think you should, besides, for don't you want
to get them into the Common Market? Besides, what could you do? . . . and
other rationalizations.
Lawrence Helm
San Jacinto
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