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    Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power
    Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power
    Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power
    Audiobook20 hours

    Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power

    Written by Victor Davis Hanson

    Narrated by Bob Souer

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times-from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes's conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive-Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world.

    Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values-the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship-which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 10, 2019
    ISBN9781541403482
    Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power
    Author

    Victor Davis Hanson

    Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and author of The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (1986), The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1995), and Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (1996).

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    Reviews for Carnage and Culture

    4/5

    128 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is pretty insightful if you can get past the obvious biases of the author. I've found that there isn't any such thing as an unbiased account so it doesn't really bother me. I mainly got this due to the section on Rorke's Drift, but found the rest of it quite interesting as well.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant history by a brilliant historian: objective, open-minded, educated, and honest.
    • 5/5
      Interesting juxtaposition to Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel - why has "Western" culture been so historically dominant in so many influential military conflicts, and how does this help to explain the "Western World's" current (or at least, recent) pre-eminence?
    • 4/5
      The author views cultures through the lens of war and their proficiency at killing. A fascinating look at the contrasts between the West and the East. A good antidote to Guns, Germs, and Steel.
    • 2/5
      I was disappointed by the essentially triumphalist storyline that ran throughout this book. Ultimately, he does not make good on substantiating his assertion that the Western tradition of dissent, importance on intentiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship produced superior arms and soldiers.The battle descriptions are confusing and written in a colloquial manner that does not do justice to the seriousness of the subject.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant history; the best military historian writing.
    • 4/5
      Hanson's postulates, I believe correctly, the Western ideology of freedom, rational thought, and free expression produces a deadly force when mobilized against a foe. Some argue Hanson discounts the Soviet's in WWII, but during the war the Soviet's had no strategic air power, relying on the British and American bombers. After the invasion of Europe, the Germans kept their strongest and best forces arrayed against western front, especially the American sector.
    • 3/5
      Hanson's domain is Greek warfare. Whenever he strays from it, be it modern politics or, in this case, general military history, his bias limits the quality of his research. He certainly can write and his books are pleasant reads. But his methodology (and thus his results) are deeply flawed. Such "analysis" by Hanson's political friends has resulted in enough carnage in East and West. Readers beware.Historians have identified ocean-going ships and guns as the inventions that catapulted the West to dominance. This parsimony does not suit Hanson who likes to see (and finds) a cultural dominance. His catalogue of Western assets (paradigms of freedom, decisive shock battle, civic militarism, technology, capitalism, individualism, civilian audit and open dissent) and his nine data points (spanning more than 2.000 years) only show his bias. Since when can one speak of Greek and Roman capitalists? How did the galley slaves at Lepanto express their freedom of speech?For each and every example he lists, there exists a counter example -- both for supposed Westerness and his cases. His beloved Greeks were subjugated by Macedon barbarians. The Late Roman Westerners were crushed by Eastern hordes. Byzantium succumbed to the very civilized Ottoman Empire. The Japanese defeated the Russians in 1905. The Vietnamese whipped the French and the USA. When his thesis does not hold, Hanson retreats to the formulation that defeat only happened at the fringes of Western empires. What about the barbarians in Rome? The muslims in Spain? The Ottomans in Hungary? They don't suit Hanson's cultural supremacy idea and thus are not discussed. "Git there fastest with the mostest" and "firepower wins" remain better explanations. Read it for intellectual amusement.
    • 5/5
      Hanson notes that historically, in general, Western militaries have consistently decisively defeated Eastern militaries. While Western militaries may loose an occasional battle (like Roarke's Drift or Pearl Harbor) against an Eastern foe, they virtually never go on to lose the war except by voluntary withdrawl, and almost always inflict grossly disproportionate casualties regardless of the situation. About the only time Western militaries stand a risk of being decisively defeated with large numbers of casualties, it's when they're fighting another Western military (witness World Wars One and Two).In fact, Hanson argues that the idea of decisive battle, the fight-to-the-death, winner-take-all idea of combat, is an invention of the Greeks, the original "Westerners", and that cultures that have failed to adopt this idea, as well as other ideas like free scientific inquiry (which leads to more powerful weapons and technology) and political freedom (which leads to better motivated and more flexible soldiers), have ended up losing in the long run against cultures that have adopted these ideas wholeheartedly. He brings up examples from history that are hard to ignore, where Western militaries have, through personal discipline and initiative, superior technology, and a total-war philosophy, inflicted unsustainable casualties against their enemies, totally out of proportion to the number of soldiers involved on each side. He then shows how and why those cultural traits evolved, and why they have been so successful.In my opinion, this makes an excellent companion book to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel shows why some groups of humans ended up with signifigant advantages through accidents of biogeography, Carnage and Culture shows how such accidents have specifically affected various cultures and had long-lasting impacts on the modern world.
    • 4/5
      Hanson argues that liberal, free societies in the Western tradition have had a powerful military advantage over their autocratic opponents since the days of the ancient Greeks. I think that he's basically right but I'm bothered by the Soviets in WWII - but I suppose that although they were under a dictatorship you could still say that they remained in the Western tradition.