Reith Lectures - War and Humanity

[Serial_Apologist]

Although they also signed a peace treaty in 2000. It's much easier to sign a treaty than keep a peace....

Another forgotten war (or series of wars) is that in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the mid-1990s, which has resulted in the deaths of millions through conflict, disease and famine, and led to the displacement of nearly 2 million:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13286306

Listening to the third in the Reith Lectures series this morning, I sensed why there has been some dissatisfaction with them, in that the lecturer's theme is such a wide one - essentially the history of war and its impact on humanity - that she cannot but come to very generalised conclusions. She marshals her facts and arguments well over a wide range of conflicts - she is definitely a fox and not a hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin's sense - but I wonder if it would not have been better to have focussed on perhaps two examples of conflicts, an international one (like the Great War) and a civil war (like the Spanish Civil War), which has been the predominant type of conflict since 1945. Ranging so widely across history can result in a loss of focus.

I completely agree. I only caught the end of this latest one in time for the few questions. If wars - civil, international - bear any common cause across the ages their primary cause can always be put down to "power politics". These can always be specified in terms of general populations being dragooned into conflicts by those with the greatest material interests to defend, whether this be land or resources. While without a whole cultural history to be drawn into, having nothing else to "go on", no neighbourly dispute can self-inflated into tribal or national war without bringing these greater forces willingly to bear, it is not automatically pre-given that the latter will " play ball" unless it has run out of pacific options for resolution, only when more is perceived to be gained to their advantage. Following my above spat with Richard Tarleton - and admittedly not as yet having gone through the earlier talks on iplayer - I stand to be corrected, but it still seems to me that cause cannot be disassociated from specifics when it comes to how power politics have re-enacted themselves through any war one wishes to mention. Over and above questionable assumptions of warlike tendencies being inborn which go far beyond the organism's need to protect itself, this surely has to be the biggest lesson of war.

[Richard Tarleton]

Following my above spat with Richard Tarleton - and admittedly not as yet having gone through the earlier talks on iplayer - I stand to be corrected, but it still seems to me that cause cannot be disassociated from specifics when it comes to how power politics have re-enacted themselves through any war one wishes to mention. Over and above questionable assumptions of warlike tendencies being inborn which go far beyond the organism's need to protect itself, this surely has to be the biggest lesson of war.

Agreed - this set me off thinking about aeolium's example (Spanish Civil War) and how power politics played out there. Wars don't get much more "specific" in origin than the Spanish Civil War, with its roots deep in Spanish history, only to become, tragically, a proxy war between rival external forces.....

By the way, aeolium, are you classing Korea and Vietnam, the two biggest conflicts since 1945, as civil wars? Not quite sure about your statement there, there have been an awful lot of post-colonial wars, border wars, etc...Vietnam...Iran-Iraq....India-Pakistan.... Civil wars in Africa, certainly, with tribal and post-colonial factors rubbing up against eachother....I haven't thought this through.

Haven't caught up with 3 yet.

[DracoM]

Questions and comments from the Lebanese audience FAR more interesting than the trot of commonplaces from the lecturer IMO.

[aeolium]

By the way, aeolium, are you classing Korea and Vietnam, the two biggest conflicts since 1945, as civil wars? Not quite sure about your statement there, there have been an awful lot of post-colonial wars, border wars, etc...Vietnam...Iran-Iraq....India-Pakistan.... Civil wars in Africa, certainly, with tribal and post-colonial factors rubbing up against eachother....I haven't thought this through.

Yes, those are not typical civil war conflicts, though perhaps it's the case that many of the civil wars that have cropped up in the last 60 years or so have been the result of post-colonial instability (and also foreign meddling). Still, you could have a look at the wiki list of civil wars since 1945, almost too many to count. The military might of the great powers, plus military alliances, plus the UN and the international criminal court make it quite unlikely that there will be significant international conflict now, at least between small nations, but there are plenty of civil wars that no-one wants to get too involved in.

[Richard Tarleton]

Yes, those are not typical civil war conflicts, though perhaps it's the case that many of the civil wars that have cropped up in the last 60 years or so have been the result of post-colonial instability (and also foreign meddling). Still, you could have a look at the wiki list of civil wars since 1945, almost too many to count. The military might of the great powers, plus military alliances, plus the UN and the international criminal court make it quite unlikely that there will be significant international conflict now, at least between small nations, but there are plenty of civil wars that no-one wants to get too involved in.

Good grief, I see what you mean. There's even one missing from the list - Indonesia-East Timor, 1975-99 - perhaps they haven't classed it as a civil war, as Indonesia a neighbouring country, but definitely a post-colonial conflict. I have a niece in the Australian army who did a spell there as a UN peacekeeper, a challenging posting apparently.

[Richard Tarleton]

Questions and comments from the Lebanese audience FAR more interesting than the trot of commonplaces from the lecturer IMO.

Yes some interesting questions. I liked the one about indecisive wars that linger on, and the one on the different impacts of national and civil wars. (Actually Margaret MacMillan's answer to that contains a sentence which is odd in the context of Spain, which she refers to - "And the temptation of course is to treat the defeated badly [true in Spain's case], but I think the temptation is always much greater in a civil war because you're more unforgiving in a civil war. You feel such a resentment to the other side for having created it..." - which might be true in a case where the losing side started it. But in Spain's case the winning side started the war - it was a military coup first and foremost.)

And a swipe at Bomber Harris, an easy target...setting aside who was first to start bombing civilian populations (honours there to Germany in WW1 and WW2), the reasons for the bombing of German cities were more complex. There was a long interlude before the opening of a second front against Hitler in the West or Mediterranean, when Stalin was becoming increasingly resentful about shouldering the entire burden of fighting Germany on land, when there was only the U-Boat war going on. As Harris also said (quoted by Max Hastings): "Winston's attitude to bombing was 'Anything to put up a show'. If we hadn't [used Bomber Command] we would only have had the U-Boat war, and as he said, defence of our trade routes was not an instrument of war". Britain had to do something to annoy the Germans.

Germany even started "Baedeker bombing" - bombing places of architectural significance like Bath.....

Very little to get one's teeth into in the lecture, I thought - just too general.

[DracoM]

I'm afraid I have become increasingly disillusioned as this series has gone on. Yes, yes, why listen etc etc..........
Trite, yawn-making commonplace statements by the lecturer, and interesting stuff from the floor, AND better analyses and discusison on this thread than at any time generated by the Reith Lecturer. I mean............!

How / why on earth the BBC decided to get this lecturer is beyond credibility given what we have heard on air..

[Richard Tarleton]

Yes, yes, why listen etc etc..........

Much quicker to print it off and speed-read it - took me about 15 minutes. Being interested in the subject one hangs on for some particular insight......

[aeolium]

Yes some interesting questions. I liked the one about indecisive wars that linger on, and the one on the different impacts of national and civil wars. (Actually Margaret Harris's answer to that contains a sentence which is odd in the context of Spain, which she refers to - "And the temptation of course is to treat the defeated badly [true in Spain's case], but I think the temptation is always much greater in a civil war because you're more unforgiving in a civil war. You feel such a resentment to the other side for having created it..." - which might be true in a case where the losing side started it. But in Spain's case the winning side started the war - it was a military coup first and foremost.)

I think her name is Margaret MacMillan, not Margaret "Bomber" Harris

I'm not sure that MM meant "started" by the word "created" there. The origins of the civil war will always be blurred by the propaganda of the protagonists, and Franco's supporters may have really believed that the Republicans were responsible for the war, just as presumably Assad and his followers believe that the Syrian civil war was "started" by terrorists, not by his slaughter of demonstrators.

And a swipe at Bomber Harris, an easy target...setting aside who was first to start bombing civilian populations (honours there to Germany in WW1 and WW2), the reasons for the bombing of German cities were more complex. There was a long interlude before the opening of a second front against Hitler in the West or Mediterranean, when Stalin was becoming increasingly resentful about shouldering the entire burden of fighting Germany on land, when there was only the U-Boat war going on. As Harris also said (quoted by Max Hastings): "Winston's attitude to bombing was 'Anything to put up a show'. If we hadn't [used Bomber Command] we would only have had the U-Boat war, and as he said, defence of our trade routes was not an instrument of war". Britain had to do something to annoy the Germans.

But the Harris quotation in the lecture (transcript now available) is pretty unambiguous. And I don't think it was a "swipe", just a suggestion that in the age of total war, everything was permissible including civilian bombing and, eventually, nuclear bombing. Who did it first was irrelevant.

I think the content of the lecture is, as you say, too general, but it does at least provoke interesting questions, as the Q&A showed.

[Richard Tarleton]

duly corrected!

[gradus]

I ironed to the last lecture and it helped to combat the tedium (of the ironing).

[Serial_Apologist]

I ironed to the last lecture and it helped to combat the tedium (of the ironing).

And smoothed things over too, I imagine.

[gradus]

And smoothed things over too, I imagine.

If I'm pressed - yes.