OWN WORST ENEMIES
Decades after Hiroshima — and centuries after historic conquests — the greatest threat to humanity remains humans themselves
RECENTLY, some Russian political leaders and generals, an occasional Chinese Communist Party insider, Turkish President Recep Erdogan, unhinged North Korean Kim Jong-un and, of course, the Iranian theocracy, have threatened to annihilate their enemies. Sometimes the saber-rattlers boast of using nuclear weapons, surprise invasions, or rocket barrages, such as we saw against Israel last month.
Or as Erdogan recently warned Greece of Turkey’s new missile arsenal, “We can come down suddenly one night when the time comes.”
Taiwan is told it will be absorbed. North Korea warned recently it would “annihilate” South Korea. When we dismiss these lunatic threats, are we really assured they’re truly crazy?
The aim of wars, of course, is to defeat the enemy. But usually in history the victors do not annihilate the losers — wiping out their people, civilization, language and physical space.
Even the devastated powers of World War II, Germany, Japan and Italy, survived and rebooted their nations into responsible democracies. Modern democratic Israel is a testament to the courage and resilience of the postwar Jewish people.
Yet occasionally in the past war became existential and final, erasing permanently the defeated civilization, and under a variety of gruesome circumstances that offer important warnings today.
Alexander the Great in 335 B.C. besieged and wiped out the 1,000-year-old iconic city of Thebes. He slaughtered the adult males, enslaved the women and children and razed the fabled Greek city-state to the ground.
In just one day, Alexander finished off the mythical home of Cadmus, Oedipus and Antigone, and the great democratic liberator Epameinondas.
The empire of the North African city of Carthage once was larger than Rome. But after defeats in two Punic Wars, Carthage over a century was reduced to a coastal corridor in modernday Tunisia.
Yet by 149 B.C., the city was again thriving. It wished peace with Rome — at least until a huge Roman fleet unexpectedly arrived on African shores determined to obliterate their once powerful rival.
Cato the Elder, the aged archenemy of Carthage, finished each of his Roman senate harangues with “Carthago delenda est: Carthage must be destroyed!” That proved not just rhetoric.
Without cause, Rome prompted the Third Punic War (149-6 B.C.), more a siege than a real war. The
Romans finally annihilated the city of 500,000, killed all but an enslaved 50,000, and left the majestic metropolis a junk heap.
In 1453, the Ottomans finally overran the 1,100 year-old city of Constantinople, the hub of Hellenism, Christianity and the Byzantine Empire for over a millennium. They killed, enslaved, or relegated to inferior status the entire population, and turned the majestic Hagia Sophia cathedral into the mosque that it remains today. The conquerors appropriated the shell of the once greatest city in Christendom as their new capital of an Islamic Ottoman Empire.
So ended the ancient Christian Hellenic civilization of Asia.
In 1520, Hernán Cortés led a tiny army of about 1,500 conquistadors to attack the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. In less than two years, the Spanish destroyed the four-million-person Aztec empire with the help of indigenous allies who hated the mass sacrifices of the Aztecs.
What do these examples of annihilation have in common? The doomed are never really aware of the fate that awaits them.
Often their glorious past deludes them into assuming that their once formidable defenses — the seven gates of Thebes, the massive fortifications of Carthage, the 35
foot-high Theodosian walls of Constantinople and the vast lake surrounding Tenochtitlán would ensure their safety.
False hopes always arose that help was on the way. Surely allies — like the Athenians — will save Thebes. Or the enemies of Rome would rescue Carthage in its eleventh hour.
Would not the Western Europeans sail up the Dardanelles in time to break the Ottoman siege of Constantinople?
Would not the subjects of the Aztec Empire finally turn on the Spaniards?
As for the destroyers of entire civilizations, they prove not always just the stereotypical mass murderers of history like Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, or Genghis Khan.
Often the annihilators were the well-educated, such as Alexander the Great, student of Aristotle and companion of philosophers.
The annihilator of Carthage, Scipio Aemilianus, was an intellectual who befriended the brilliant historian Polybius and was a patron of literature. Mehmet II, who wiped away Christian Constantinople, was proud of his enormous library.
And the more such conquerors feigned no intention of erasing their enemies, the more they methodically did so — and in the aftermath shed crocodile tears over the extinction.
We live today with far easier tools of civilizational destruction — nuclear, bioweaponry, cyberwar and perhaps soon artificial intelligence. And from Israel to Greece to Taiwan, there are plenty of vulnerable peoples and nations threatened by their historically hostile neighbors.
It would be a grave mistake to assume in 2024 that such annihilation cannot happen again — even in our globalized and supposedly civilized world.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This piece has been adapted from his new book “The End of Everything. How Wars Descend Into Annihilation (Basic Books).”