‘The End of Everything’ Review: When War Means Total Destruction
Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, Tenochtitlán: These civilizations were cut down in their prime, some with little warning.
May 10, 2024 The Wall Street Journal
There is no modern world. Despite technology, human nature remains the same. Indeed, the march of technology can lead to moral regression, as affluence and leisure corrode the character of individuals and nations, tempting destruction. That is the underlying message of the Hoover Institution classicist Victor Davis Hanson in his book, “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.”
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The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation
Mr. Hanson makes his point by telling the story of four states and civilizations that were completely obliterated by war and by their own hubris and naiveté: Greek Thebes, Punic Carthage, Orthodox Christian Byzantium and Aztec Tenochtitlán. In each case, few saw it coming. “It cannot happen here,” murmur the victims, moments before they are slaughtered. The most chilling word in this book is “erased,” which has many times been the fate of cultures no less exalted than our own. One thinks of Ozymandias, King of Kings, in Shelley’s poem, whose “colossal” works have vanished, replaced by “lone and level sands.”
“The End of Everything” focuses only on “man-made Armageddons,” not “lost civilizations” like those of the Mycenaeans (ca. 1200 B.C.) or Mayans (ca. A.D. 900), nor “smaller extinctions” such as the Athenian destruction of Melos (416 B.C.), made famous by Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue. There are no examples of internal decay or disappearances here. This book is about flourishing civilizations cut down in their prime, often with relatively little warning, with vast geopolitical consequences. Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C. essentially ended the city-state system in the Greek archipelago. Rome’s final destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. changed the Mediterranean from a bipolar world to a unipolar one. The Ottoman Turkish sack of Greek Constantinople in 1453 formally ended an Orthodox Christian imperium in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Spanish conquest in 1521 of Aztec Tenochtitlán ended the city-state system of Mesoamerica and led history north into the temperate latitudes of what would eventually become the United States. The equivalent today (the reader can’t help thinking about this) would be a nuclear war, the implosion of a great power, the military decimation of one great power by another, or, say, a war with China that goes global. As the author repeats, don’t say “it cannot happen to us,” because it can.
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Thebes, Mr. Hanson writes, “was the most hallowed of the city-states,” the mythical home of heroes and gods like Herakles and Dionysus, a place synonymous with the archetypes of Greek tragedy: Antigone, Oedipus, Teiresias. But that didn’t help it against the military innovations employed by the 21-year-old Macedonian Alexander, who together with his father, Philip II, had turned the Macedonian army from a rustic force into what the author calls “a symphony of killers.”
Mr. Hanson compares Alexander’s rout of the Theban phalanx, which had a formidable reputation, to the collapse of the French army in World War I. The Thebans, reputationally drunk on past conquests and a romantic conception of themselves, had expected a general uprising of allies throughout Greece; theirs is a story about how excessive pride and high ideals can get a whole people killed. In fact, the Thebans were defeated in just one day. Then began the sickening slaughter of men, women and children at the hands of Alexander’s Thracian mercenaries. War crimes are an old story in history, and the victims are always the weak and defenseless who have been stripped of the means of deterrence. Mr. Hanson makes all of this relevant to the modern reader by combining granularity with big-picture analysis and teasing out meaning from a mastery of details.
The story he tells of Rome’s destruction of Carthage is equally heart-rending. The erasure of Carthage had greater consequences than that of Thebes: Its population was 10 times as large, and the city was the center of a civilization that extended throughout the Mediterranean. The three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage from the mid-third century B.C. to the mid-second century B.C., each lasting years or decades, were in actuality world wars that engulfed the center of the Mediterranean basin.
By 149 B.C. Rome had already twice defeated Carthage, dramatically reducing its power and majesty, so that the North African empire was a mere remnant of its former self. Despite its allies and trading partners, it was no longer a threat to Rome and was complying with all of Rome’s demands. Yet human nature can be perverse, and Rome still loathed the civilization it had already laid low, nursing the painful memory of Hannibal’s scorched-earth rampage through Italy in the Second Punic War a half-century earlier.
So Rome not only defeated Carthage a third (and superfluous) time, it went on to massacre Carthage’s civilian population and to level its buildings down to the ground—an ancient version of Hiroshima. “The killing required the exhausted legionaries to work in shifts,” the author writes; the grotesque job of clearing away so many bodies with pickaxes and hatchets “delayed the final conquest.” The slaughter and destruction of Carthage was the high-water mark of the Roman Republic, as it afterward descended into decadence and transformed into an imperial juggernaut. But nothing good comes from the large-scale slaughter of noncombatants, and not even ancient writers justified Rome’s slaughter of the Carthaginians.
The Greeks of medieval Constantinople, much like the Thebans and Carthaginians, believed in their cultural destiny. They believed that the Orthodox Christian god evoked in the architectural and spiritual majesty of the great cathedral Hagia Sophia would save them. Perhaps never before in history had there been such a fusion of political power and mystical religion as in the Byzantine Empire, which by the time of the fateful Ottoman siege in 1453 had already lasted a thousand years longer than its western Roman predecessor.
There seemed to be something eternal about it. But not so eternal that it could overcome the poor state of its fortifications. Or the enormous siege cannons employed by the Ottomans. Dull facts on the ground like these defeated what was arguably, in terms of its arts and architecture, the greatest medieval civilization.
With the destruction of Constantinople came the end of virtually three millennia of sovereign Greek civilization in Asia Minor. The Muslim defeat of the Greeks in the east shook Western Christendom to the core. Suddenly, it seemed, there were Turks in the Balkans and Asia Minor who were turning their eyes west. European powers would survive partly by turning toward a New World across the Atlantic, to some degree driven by a newfound fear of the East.
The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’s “obliteration” of the Aztec city-state of Tenochtitlán in the early 16th century manifests, even more than these other destructions, an almost absurd imbalance of forces, showing how very little may be required to annihilate very much. It took some 1,500 Spanish soldiers, aided by superior weaponry and a smallpox epidemic, to defeat this inland-Venice with its fabulous canals and population of four million, in an empire that spread over central and southern Mexico. The Aztec leader Montezuma II, when he first greeted Cortés, could never in his worst nightmares have imagined such annihilation.
The scale of killing rivaled the 10 months of Verdun in 1916, Mr. Hanson writes, made worse by the “muscular fury” required to slaughter thousands in an age without modern technology. Like the Byzantines, who made frantic calls for help to Western Christendom, and the Thebans who thought their neighbors would rally to them, the Aztecs called on their supposed allies. But it was in vain, as the other indigenous Nahua sided—and in fact fought with—Cortés, seeing him as an opportunity to topple their murderous Aztec rivals. A great city-state in the heart of the New World was destroyed utterly. The Spanish would build magnificent churches atop its flattened pyramids, replacing a native culture of human sacrifice with that of a Christian god, whose defenders were cruel in their own way. One civilization would abruptly replace another.
Though the author of this profound book doesn’t mention it, what stands out in these four accounts is the working of time. We believe that what we have built is so magnificent it must go on forever. But then it is eradicated, and the world does not come to an end. Only our own world has done so. Another is built in its place and goes on endlessly into the future, so that we become the ancients. In this context, one has to think of the fate of the U.S. and the West, and how—and if—it will come to an end: whether by internal decay or by a sudden cataclysm. Rather than saying it can’t happen to us, for the sake of our own self-defense we should always contemplate that it very well might.
Mr. Kaplan holds the geopolitics chair at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is the author, most recently, of “The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China.”
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Appeared in the May 11, 2024, print edition as 'A History Of Vanished Histories'.