A World History of War Crimes

From Antiquity to the Present

Michael S. Bryant

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350106598
• eBook ISBN: 9781350106628
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The greatly expanded and enhanced 2nd edition of A World History of War Crimes provides an authoritative and accessible introduction to the global history of war crimes and the laws of war. Tracing human efforts to limit warfare, from codes of war in antiquity designed to maintain a religiously conceived cosmic order to the gradual use in the modern age of the criminal trial as a means of enforcing universal humanitarian norms, Michael S. Bryant's book is a masterful one-volume account of the subject.

This new edition includes, for the first time:

* Two chapters providing extensive coverage of the Americas, Africa and the Middle East
* Strengthened chronological boundaries – a new chapter on the Incas, Aztecs, Mayan, and North American Indian tribes, as well as more material across all regions in ancient times; discussion of contemporary war crimes committed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar and Syria
* A historiographical essay to broaden your understanding of the field
* An added final chapter focusing on the social, cultural and psychological aspects of the subject

A World History of War Crimes is vital reading for anyone needing to understand the history of war in one of its most significant contexts.

CHAPTER 1

THE ROOTS OF THE LAW OF WAR
IN WORLD HISTORY

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Stone Age warfare

On August 11, 1880, William Tecumseh Sherman, the commanding general of the United States Army and former Civil War general, stood before a cheering crowd of five thousand veterans in Columbus, Ohio. The gales of applause that greeted Sherman were ill-matched to the somber message he would offer his listeners—particularly the youths among them—in his impromptu speech. “There is many a boy here today,” Sherman cautioned, “who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. I look upon war with horror, but if it has to come I am here.”¹ Sherman, who had spent the last two years of the war burning much of Georgia between Atlanta and Savannah to the ground, had not converted to pacifism. Yet, the old general expressed a view of war echoed in the assessments of countless other military men through the ages—a view that takes the full measure of war as a cruel, dehumanizing, and murderous affair coldly indifferent to human values, an activity inimical to all touched by it and ready at any moment to debase everyone and destroy everything connected with it.

Well before history’s first world empire arose in Mesopotamia, the soldiers of hostile armies were butchering each other with frightful effectiveness. Although we tend to associate war with states, Stone Age societies were by no means strangers to indiscriminate violence, as the archaeological record convincingly shows. Stone Age massacre victims, however, rarely numbered above several dozen. Excavation of graves at Djebel Sahaba in Sudan dating to the Upper Paleolithic (12,000–10,000 BCE) have yielded the remains of fifty-nine men, women, and children bearing the marks of traumatic injury from blunt objects and projectiles—victims who appear to have perished in a Stone Age massacre.² A later killing site was excavated in the 1980s in Talheim (Baden-Württemberg, Germany). It consists of a mass grave of thirty-four victims—eighteen adults and sixteen children—dispatched from behind with both thin- and thick-bladed stone axes.³ As David L. Smith has observed about such Stone Age atrocities, the lack of concentrated population centers tended to check the scale of the carnage. However, with the onset of the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago, which gradually transformed hunter-gatherers into farmers and pastoralists and thereby laid the foundation for sedentary and growing populations, the lethality of military conflict swelled.⁴ This development was the essential precondition to the martial holocausts of late antiquity. John Keegan describes the role of the agricultural revolution in the history of warfare:

Hunters and gatherers may have “territory”; pastoralists have grazing and watering-places; agriculturalists have land. Once man invests expectations of a regular return on his seasonal efforts in a particular place … he rapidly develops the sense of rights and ownership. Toward those who trespass on the places where he invests his time and effort he must equally rapidly develop the hostility of the user and occupier for the usurper and interloper Pastoralism, and agriculture even more so, make for war.⁵

As Neolithic populations increased, they converted the weapons used by their Paleolithic forbears to hunt game into deadly military arms. By 8000 BCE, a revolution in military technology had emerged alongside the revolution in agriculture. At this time, Neolithic peoples invented the sling, dagger, mace, and—most importantly—the bow, a weapon unknown to Old Stone Age hunters. Converting human muscle into mechanical power, the bow enabled its Neolithic users to fell speedy animals as they roamed over regions opened by the retreating glaciers. It also became a formidable weapon for use in Neolithic battles between the new agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers covetous of their land. Keegan, in fact, interprets Site 117 at Djebel Sahaba as the outcome of a clash between farmer-pastoralists and nomadic hunters. Archaeological excavations at Jericho (Jordan) have revealed the existence of an agricultural community of 2,000 to 3,000 residents as long ago as 9000 BCE. Encircled by a ten-foot-thick, thirteen-foot-high wall crenelated with towers and girdled with a moat, Jericho was clearly built to withstand military assault, proving that warfare did not originate during the creation and expansion of Near Eastern empires but already conditioned settlement patterns at the dawn of agriculture 11,000 years ago.⁶

While wholesale changes wrought by farming, animal domestication, and technological innovation significantly enhanced the destructiveness of warfare, the rise of strong kings able to organize large armies and mobilize them against their enemies brought the science of mass killing to unprecedented levels. The success of these kings in seizing, consolidating, and expanding their vast power was itself made possible by the agricultural revolution and the surplus produced by farming populations, especially in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The human imagination and the quest for cosmic order

One of the main obstacles facing us as we try to understand constraints on warfare is our remoteness from the psychology and worldview of premodern peoples. The modern mind is an analyzer and fragmenter; it “disenchants”⁷ the world, stripping it of unity, cohesion, and purpose. In short, as the scholar of religion Mircea Eliade has written, modernity “desacralizes” nature. Negation of the sacred relegates everything to the realm of “profane existence,” in which “man feels no responsibility except to himself and to society.” Eliade continues:

For [modern man], the universe does not constitute a cosmos—that is, a living and articulated unity; it is simply the sum of the material reserves and physical energies of the planet … By contrast, the premodern person “always puts himself in a cosmic context.” His personal experience lacks neither genuineness nor depth; but the fact that it is expressed in a language unfamiliar to us makes it appear spurious or infantile to modern eyes.⁸

Unique in the animal kingdom, humans from the start possessed a fertile imagination, one that conjured meanings and invested the material world with them. Insofar as imagination and meaning-production are prelinguistic, it would seem that both are more basic to the human mind than language. To comprehend them, therefore, we cannot always rely on written texts for evidence, particularly in hunting/gathering cultures and early agrarian societies devoid of a written language. Hence we are thrown back onto the archaeological and anthropological record for traces of a given culture’s worldview.

Paleolithic material culture attests to a soaring human imagination expressive of a symbolic consciousness. Cave paintings at Lascaux, Trois Frères, Chauvet (France), and Alta Mira (Spain) reveal Old Stone Age artists affirming through their portrayals of wild animals a connection with these creatures and the higher, transhuman forces imbuing them. The near inaccessibility of the cave interiors chosen to display these paintings suggests that they were intended to serve a spiritual function.⁹ According to one view, parietal art was the work of shamans pursuing “vision quests” by torchlight in European caves.¹⁰ Stone Age cave art betokens, in the words of Dutch archaeologist Henri Frankfort, “man’s intimate and reciprocal relationship with the animals, and beyond these, with the divine.”¹¹ Prior to language, prior to writing, prior to the rise of agriculture, cities, and centralized rule, humans were religious beings who translated their spiritual yearnings into images daubed with ochre and charcoal onto the walls of rock shelters. Appearing in the fossil record before nearly every other form of culture (with the possible exception of tool-making), these impulses are fundamental to human beings at the earliest stages of their development.

The modern mind grapples to understand such religiosity. Eliade writes: “The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects.”¹² The world of ancient peoples was suffused with spiritual meaning. The closer their proximity to the sacred, the greater their experience of the real. In sharp contrast with later interpretations of the divine, archaic peoples did not wall off the sacred from everyday existence; rather, they lived the totality of their lives in its midst. By means of ritual the mundane world could be brought into contact with the divine. Long before Christian theologians preached the imitation of Christ (Imitatio Christi), archaic peoples sought to imitate their own gods through ceremonial acts operating as conduits of absolute reality. In their cultures the axis mundi—the “axis of the world” believed to support the earth, heaven, and the underworld—was reproduced by a sacred pole or pillar at the center of a building. The sacred pole was also likened to the “cosmic mountain” located at the world’s midpoint, linking the earth with heaven. In Harappa and Mohenjo Daro as well as ancient Mesopotamia, the ziggurat¹³ was a homology of the cosmic mountain.¹⁴

Figure 1 Charcoal images of four horses drawn on the wall of the Chauvet Cave in southern France, circa 30,500–35,500 years ago. © Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Because the gods were creators of the cosmos, archaic peoples could participate in the sacred by imitating their creative act. According to Eliade, “every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony [i.e., creation of the cosmos] as paradigmatic model. The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be.”¹⁵ Thus the Algonquin and Lakota Indians constructed their sacred lodge in imitation of the cosmos: the roof was the sky, the floor the earth, the four walls the points of the compass. Eliade observes that in building the sacred lodge to correspond with the spatial dimensions of the cosmos, native peoples were reenacting its creation. This “founding of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1 The Roots of the Law of War in World History
• 2 The Law of War in Pre-Columbian America
• 3 The Law of War in Rome, the Islamic World, and the European Middle Ages
• 4 Making Law in the Slaughterhouse of the World: Early Modernity and the Law of War
• 5 Colonialism and the Law of War: Ireland and the Americas
• 6 The Law of War in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Europe and the United States of America
• 7 The First World War and the Failure of the Law of War
• 8 The Second World War and the Triumph of the Law of War
• 9 Into the Twenty-First Century: War Crimes and their Treatment Since the Second World War
• 10 Singers of Songs of Experience: Trying to Explain War Crimes in World History
• Conclusion: The Future of the Law of War
• Notes
• 1
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright