Chapter 2
A Brief History of War.
The inchoative sine qua non of warfare lies in Ned Neanderthal's observation that "sticks and stones have broke my bones". Unfortunately for the historical record, language had not been invented yet. The first recorded application of the maxim occurred in the battlefield reports of the Elamitic King Chedorlamer's defeat of the five kings of Sodom. Most scholars believe that biblical reporters added the term "but words will never hurt me" in order to comply with local religious language regulations. Subsequent to Ned's demise, the evolution of war followed the proscribed ontogenetic growth pattern: the spear, javelin, handaxe, adzes, sling, bow and arrow, catapult, metal weapons, gun powder, rifle, machine-gun, flamethrower, hand-grenade, canon, torpedo, rocket, and bomb. Initially there were little bombs, then middle sized bombs, then big bombs, then great big bombs, and finally the evolutionary pinnacle of war, the omniscient hydrogen bomb. Having come full cycle, war then became extinct.
At first, no one seems to have noticed that war had died. Finally Ronald Reagan and Mikel Gorbachev concluded that mutual nuclear capability meant that mutual destruction would be the only possible outcome of World War III, and they wisely decided that war without the possibility of a victory parade was pointless, so they started backing off a bit. As they say "old habits die hard" so in recent times folks occasionally try to see how many other folks they can kill without actually triggering an all out war. The formal term for these conflicts originated in the former Soviet Union, and is known as "Russian Roulette".
Rumors persist that World War III is still a possibility, but even the most optimistic believers understand that World War IV would then have to be fought between the radioactive Virusets and Bacterionians.
[September 1, 2004]
' Been dealing with a loved one's illness; here now. Anyway it's back up and reassess time. Many of my thoughts on the state of the world-- lean to one degree or another on some of the basic concepts of chaos theory. Rather than hint around at stuff, I will digress, and write my thoughts on the way chaos theory can and should impact our thinking processes. Serious mathematicians are cautioned to skip the next chapter lest you injure yourselves rolling around on the floor. Where I am going with this is that what we call terrorism is in reality the next evolutionary stage of what we formally called war; that we and our leaders are dead wrong when we depend too much on yesterday to help plan for tomorrow. At the risk of being sued for copyright infringement by a stupid TV show, let's bust a myth about history. He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it. Nonsense. For now, I will turn the mike over to Brother Dave Gardner, a 50's southern comedian way ahead of his time. "Somebody said 'do that again'--- I can't do it again, I can do something similar".
Before I get to that I want to toss in a couple of chapterettes related to war.
Ette 1
If you would like a little background on this idea, I heartily recommend that you read the Treatise on Leftovers. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
One of the strangest things about the evolution of war is how some things got completely reversed unawares, which is the standard operating procedure of chaos. For example, he said, giving up on his search for a catchier lead in-- It had become the custom (now dormant) that whenever one nation defeated another they would help them get back on their feet (for a stiff fee of course). And so after WWII we put the Marshall plan into effect to repair the infrastructure we had blown up--- rebuild bridges, destroy unexploded ordinance etc.. But one thing was very, very different. In terms of damaged real estate, WWII became the first time the greater damage occurred to the land of the winner, not the loser. The epicenter of the blast sites over Hiroshima and Nagasaki became safe to fly around in soon after the blast. Within a few years most of the damage had been repaired. Even the radiation disease damage seems to have not affected the second generation noticeably. Perfectly safe there. But the places where the weapons were built, the tools and components that were used to build them, remain corrosive wastelands. The radioactive leftovers will be deadly, for all practical purposes, forever. As I understand it, much of this material has a half life of 10,000 years. That is, if one could walk up to 100 feet of a pile of it today before receiving a fatal dose of radiation, in a mere ten thousand years one could approach the same pile all the way up to 50 feet without dying. Now we have hundreds of tons of the deadly stuff that we can't throw away and we can't leave where it is. And somewhere an oriental looking celestial being is sadly shaking his said and saying "I told you so". It is not just radioactive materials laying about. We also have thousands of ready to go missiles with warheads loaded with deadly gases. They were designed to be fired at the enemy, causing massive casualties when they exploded. Apparently no one heard the lonesome technician who said "Hey, what if we don't use these things, how are we going to unload them"?
Ette 2
Before we get to the reorganizing of the elements that made up the former entity of war, let's make an interesting little side trip back in time. Some of the anthropological folks have developed a hypothesis that war is intrinsic to the human condition. That is that the need to kill one another is built into our genes and in fact, was a necessary component in the coming together of bands of wanderers to form cities. They searched diligently for the ruins of the "mother city", the earliest batch of buildings that served community functions. Most of these searches took place in the eastern half of the world. There was general agreement that the birth of civilization, the development of cities, would be found in the east. Based primarily on the Inca and Aztec ruins in South America, scholars surmised that the western world developed after the early eastern civilizations, so the primary research focused on finding the migration patterns that brought eastern folks to the west.
Worldwide, in every archeological site they excavated, they found evidence of war, sometimes mixed in with evidence of human sacrifice and even cannibalism. But they could not find the original site of ruins that could be called the first city. If they could discover the ruins of the very first city, they could study the artifacts to see if signs of war existed, and perhaps clues to what might have prompted the development of communal facilities. Problem was that early human communities had no real sense of anthropological methodology, as a result whenever one city conquered another, they would simply build on top of it without preserving an undiluted sample of the former folks lifestyle.
For at least the last 100 years, scientists have known of promising archeological sites in South America, most notably in Peru, but these sites did not gender much excitement in the research centers, and even less from the local governments. Things took a dramatic turn in 1994. Dr. Ruth Shady from the Peruvian University of San Marcos was the first scientist to become excited over the potential of a site on a scarp overlooking a valley in the Andean foothills, about 14 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 125 miles north of Lima. She and a small group of ill-funded assistants began excavation on what turned out to be the oldest known city in the Americas, and quite possibly the fabled "mother city". Carbon dating from relics at the location have been dated as early as 2627 BC, almost a century before the Egyptians erected the Great Pyramid at Giza. Excavations reveal that the site originally covered 160 acres and its centerpiece was a pyramid 60 feet high and over 500 feet long. The picture the scientists are developing indicates that the city, named Caral, originated as a trading center. Rather than corn, the major crop turned out to be cotton, which, they speculate, was used to make nets and other cloth items that were traded with the fishermen on the sea shore and the natives of the jungles far inland. But for our purposes, Caral hints at an even more curious development. Throughout the ruins, and even on the strategic hills nearby, they have uncovered not a single weapon of war, no militaristic war carvings or sacrificial alters. Nor is there any indication of defensive construction, not even a rock wall surrounding the location. And the only human remains they found were that of a baby that showed no signs of sacrifice or traumatic injury, but rather was carefully wrapped in several layers of decorative cloth and buried in the corner of a dwelling. Needless to say, these discoveries sent the war is natural folks scrambling back to the drawing board. But that ain't all.
There are some indications that the people who lived in Caral may have been up to some other pretty strange stuff. The city might have been the origin of the phrase "make love, not war", maybe it was even the Haight-Ashbury of the ancient Americas. Researchers found beautifully carved flutes made from the bones of condors, they unearthed "fragments of the fruit of something called the achiote plant. Even today, it's used by rainforest tribes as body paint and food colouring, but it has one other use: to enhance sexual performance. They also found the shells of a creature called the megabolinus snail. These were used as ornaments for necklaces and inside one of them they spotted traces of a mysterious white powder. It was lime. The team also found seeds from the coca plant at Caral and that meant drugs. The lime when mixed with the coca enhances the effects of the cocaine in the coca plant".
Now mind you folks, I ain't advocating nothing, I am just reporting the facts. A well known school of philosophy holds that some systems or processes are so pure they can never pass away, but constantly reinsert themselves as opportunities for later generations. Unfortunately, sometimes these "universal truths" are misunderstood because of simple translation errors. For example, consider this
Put de lime in de coconut, mix 'em bot' togeder
Put de lime in de coconut, den you feel better
Put de lime in de coconut, drink 'em bot' down
Put de lime in de coconut an call me in the mo-o-o-ornin!
Was Harry Nillson attempting to pass along a sacred ritual which he had
mistranslated, or was this a simple coincidence?
(Sounds of Twilight Zone theme in background. Fade to black.)
A Brief History of War.
The inchoative sine qua non of warfare lies in Ned Neanderthal's observation that "sticks and stones have broke my bones". Unfortunately for the historical record, language had not been invented yet. The first recorded application of the maxim occurred in the battlefield reports of the Elamitic King Chedorlamer's defeat of the five kings of Sodom. Most scholars believe that biblical reporters added the term "but words will never hurt me" in order to comply with local religious language regulations. Subsequent to Ned's demise, the evolution of war followed the proscribed ontogenetic growth pattern: the spear, javelin, handaxe, adzes, sling, bow and arrow, catapult, metal weapons, gun powder, rifle, machine-gun, flamethrower, hand-grenade, canon, torpedo, rocket, and bomb. Initially there were little bombs, then middle sized bombs, then big bombs, then great big bombs, and finally the evolutionary pinnacle of war, the omniscient hydrogen bomb. Having come full cycle, war then became extinct.
At first, no one seems to have noticed that war had died. Finally Ronald Reagan and Mikel Gorbachev concluded that mutual nuclear capability meant that mutual destruction would be the only possible outcome of World War III, and they wisely decided that war without the possibility of a victory parade was pointless, so they started backing off a bit. As they say "old habits die hard" so in recent times folks occasionally try to see how many other folks they can kill without actually triggering an all out war. The formal term for these conflicts originated in the former Soviet Union, and is known as "Russian Roulette".
Rumors persist that World War III is still a possibility, but even the most optimistic believers understand that World War IV would then have to be fought between the radioactive Virusets and Bacterionians.
[September 1, 2004]
' Been dealing with a loved one's illness; here now. Anyway it's back up and reassess time. Many of my thoughts on the state of the world-- lean to one degree or another on some of the basic concepts of chaos theory. Rather than hint around at stuff, I will digress, and write my thoughts on the way chaos theory can and should impact our thinking processes. Serious mathematicians are cautioned to skip the next chapter lest you injure yourselves rolling around on the floor. Where I am going with this is that what we call terrorism is in reality the next evolutionary stage of what we formally called war; that we and our leaders are dead wrong when we depend too much on yesterday to help plan for tomorrow. At the risk of being sued for copyright infringement by a stupid TV show, let's bust a myth about history. He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it. Nonsense. For now, I will turn the mike over to Brother Dave Gardner, a 50's southern comedian way ahead of his time. "Somebody said 'do that again'--- I can't do it again, I can do something similar".
Before I get to that I want to toss in a couple of chapterettes related to war.
Ette 1
If you would like a little background on this idea, I heartily recommend that you read the Treatise on Leftovers. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
One of the strangest things about the evolution of war is how some things got completely reversed unawares, which is the standard operating procedure of chaos. For example, he said, giving up on his search for a catchier lead in-- It had become the custom (now dormant) that whenever one nation defeated another they would help them get back on their feet (for a stiff fee of course). And so after WWII we put the Marshall plan into effect to repair the infrastructure we had blown up--- rebuild bridges, destroy unexploded ordinance etc.. But one thing was very, very different. In terms of damaged real estate, WWII became the first time the greater damage occurred to the land of the winner, not the loser. The epicenter of the blast sites over Hiroshima and Nagasaki became safe to fly around in soon after the blast. Within a few years most of the damage had been repaired. Even the radiation disease damage seems to have not affected the second generation noticeably. Perfectly safe there. But the places where the weapons were built, the tools and components that were used to build them, remain corrosive wastelands. The radioactive leftovers will be deadly, for all practical purposes, forever. As I understand it, much of this material has a half life of 10,000 years. That is, if one could walk up to 100 feet of a pile of it today before receiving a fatal dose of radiation, in a mere ten thousand years one could approach the same pile all the way up to 50 feet without dying. Now we have hundreds of tons of the deadly stuff that we can't throw away and we can't leave where it is. And somewhere an oriental looking celestial being is sadly shaking his said and saying "I told you so". It is not just radioactive materials laying about. We also have thousands of ready to go missiles with warheads loaded with deadly gases. They were designed to be fired at the enemy, causing massive casualties when they exploded. Apparently no one heard the lonesome technician who said "Hey, what if we don't use these things, how are we going to unload them"?
Ette 2
Before we get to the reorganizing of the elements that made up the former entity of war, let's make an interesting little side trip back in time. Some of the anthropological folks have developed a hypothesis that war is intrinsic to the human condition. That is that the need to kill one another is built into our genes and in fact, was a necessary component in the coming together of bands of wanderers to form cities. They searched diligently for the ruins of the "mother city", the earliest batch of buildings that served community functions. Most of these searches took place in the eastern half of the world. There was general agreement that the birth of civilization, the development of cities, would be found in the east. Based primarily on the Inca and Aztec ruins in South America, scholars surmised that the western world developed after the early eastern civilizations, so the primary research focused on finding the migration patterns that brought eastern folks to the west.
Worldwide, in every archeological site they excavated, they found evidence of war, sometimes mixed in with evidence of human sacrifice and even cannibalism. But they could not find the original site of ruins that could be called the first city. If they could discover the ruins of the very first city, they could study the artifacts to see if signs of war existed, and perhaps clues to what might have prompted the development of communal facilities. Problem was that early human communities had no real sense of anthropological methodology, as a result whenever one city conquered another, they would simply build on top of it without preserving an undiluted sample of the former folks lifestyle.
For at least the last 100 years, scientists have known of promising archeological sites in South America, most notably in Peru, but these sites did not gender much excitement in the research centers, and even less from the local governments. Things took a dramatic turn in 1994. Dr. Ruth Shady from the Peruvian University of San Marcos was the first scientist to become excited over the potential of a site on a scarp overlooking a valley in the Andean foothills, about 14 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 125 miles north of Lima. She and a small group of ill-funded assistants began excavation on what turned out to be the oldest known city in the Americas, and quite possibly the fabled "mother city". Carbon dating from relics at the location have been dated as early as 2627 BC, almost a century before the Egyptians erected the Great Pyramid at Giza. Excavations reveal that the site originally covered 160 acres and its centerpiece was a pyramid 60 feet high and over 500 feet long. The picture the scientists are developing indicates that the city, named Caral, originated as a trading center. Rather than corn, the major crop turned out to be cotton, which, they speculate, was used to make nets and other cloth items that were traded with the fishermen on the sea shore and the natives of the jungles far inland. But for our purposes, Caral hints at an even more curious development. Throughout the ruins, and even on the strategic hills nearby, they have uncovered not a single weapon of war, no militaristic war carvings or sacrificial alters. Nor is there any indication of defensive construction, not even a rock wall surrounding the location. And the only human remains they found were that of a baby that showed no signs of sacrifice or traumatic injury, but rather was carefully wrapped in several layers of decorative cloth and buried in the corner of a dwelling. Needless to say, these discoveries sent the war is natural folks scrambling back to the drawing board. But that ain't all.
There are some indications that the people who lived in Caral may have been up to some other pretty strange stuff. The city might have been the origin of the phrase "make love, not war", maybe it was even the Haight-Ashbury of the ancient Americas. Researchers found beautifully carved flutes made from the bones of condors, they unearthed "fragments of the fruit of something called the achiote plant. Even today, it's used by rainforest tribes as body paint and food colouring, but it has one other use: to enhance sexual performance. They also found the shells of a creature called the megabolinus snail. These were used as ornaments for necklaces and inside one of them they spotted traces of a mysterious white powder. It was lime. The team also found seeds from the coca plant at Caral and that meant drugs. The lime when mixed with the coca enhances the effects of the cocaine in the coca plant".
Now mind you folks, I ain't advocating nothing, I am just reporting the facts. A well known school of philosophy holds that some systems or processes are so pure they can never pass away, but constantly reinsert themselves as opportunities for later generations. Unfortunately, sometimes these "universal truths" are misunderstood because of simple translation errors. For example, consider this
Put de lime in de coconut, mix 'em bot' togeder
Put de lime in de coconut, den you feel better
Put de lime in de coconut, drink 'em bot' down
Put de lime in de coconut an call me in the mo-o-o-ornin!
Was Harry Nillson attempting to pass along a sacred ritual which he had
mistranslated, or was this a simple coincidence?
(Sounds of Twilight Zone theme in background. Fade to black.)
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