Hi Sondra...
-> LP>'Primitive' warfare is more ritualized and kills far fewer people.
-> SB> It depends on who the "primitive* peoples are.  The *primitive*
-> Europeans, in the anciet Greek city staes, and in the Middle East,
-> were known to have totally eliminated defeated villages, killing
-> every man, woman, and child; and burning the villages.
The ancient Greek method of fighting was very destructive, as you say.
My source (John Keegan, A History of Warfare) doesn't categorize ancient
Greek warfare as primitive. He suggests that the Greeks' phalanx
method of fighting may be part of the origin of our own murderous form
of war:
'It was they [the ancient Greeks] who, in the fifth century BC, cut
loose from the constraints of the primitive style, with its respect
above all for ritual in war, and adopted the practice of the
face-to-face battle to the death.  This departure, confined initially
to warfare among the Greeks themselves, was deeply shocking to those
outside the Greek world who were first exposed to it.'
'The ethic of the battle to the death on foot...then made its way from
the Greek to the Roman world...The combination of the face-to-face style
- in which the ethic of personal honour was embedded - with that
ideological dimension then only awaited the addition of the
technological element to produce the final Western manner of warmaking.'
I'm not familiar with your other examples, but it would seem that if
warfare is highly murderous, then by Keegan's definition it's not
primitive. Also, primitive warfare turned into something much worse many
centuries ago in Western culture.  Other cultures (eg, Islam) show much
more restraint in war than does Western culture.
Keegan's examples of primitive warmakers are the Aztecs, the Maoris, the
Maring of New Guinea, and the Yanomamo of South America.  He thinks we
can learn from them and from Oriental ideas of war.  Otherwise we'll be
blowing ourselves off the planet.  Keegan has an excellent observation
about nuclear war:  'no military thinker has explained how nuclear
warfare might be a continuation of politics.'  :(
--- PCBoard 15.2
(1:134/10)
---------------