War And Ideology

Why do men resort to war to solve their socio-economic problems? That is the question that Eric Carlton asks, and attempts to answer, in this stimulating, readable study. Relating war to ideology, this book is based on the proposition that men act as they think, and think as they believe, and that belief - religious or otherwise - conditions attitudes toward the nature and conduct of war. Carlton argues that various constellations of values, often intellectualized as ideologies, not only constitute the rationalizations and justifications for war, but may also provide the actual imperatives for warfare itself. Carlton conducts his lively discussion in a historical and comparative setting, with case studies of war in eleven societies (ancient Egypt, Sparta, Athens, Carthage, Rome, early Israel, Crusader Knights, Mongols, Aztecs, Zulus, Maoists), in each of which the enemy is differently perceived. A final section, "War and the Problem of Values," draws together the threads of the arguments and reaffirms the relationship between war and ideological belief and commitment.

Ideology is so powerful it makes us believe that war is rational, despite both its brutal means and its devastating ends. The power of ideology comes from its intimate relation to language: ideology recruits all semiotic modalities, but language is its engine-room. Drawing on Halliday’s linguistic theory – in particular, his account of the “semiotic big-bang” - this book explains the latent semiotic machinery of language on which ideology depends. The book illustrates the ideological power of language through a study of perhaps the most significant and consequential of our ideologies: those that enable us to legitimate, celebrate, even venerate war, at the same time that we abhor, denounce and proscribe violence. To do so, it makes use of large multi-register corpora (including the British National Corpus), and the reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Australian, US, European, and Asian news sources. Combining detailed text analysis with corpus linguistic methods, it provides an empirical analysis showing the astonishing reach of our ideologies of war and their profoundly covert and coercive power.

Why do nations go to war? Is war an institutionalized outlet for our aggressive instincts? Or is it a cultural invention rather than a biological necessity? Originally published in 1990, Eric Carlton, looking across a number of societies investigates why men and women go to war, and how they are able to commit atrocities against their enemy. He believes that central to these issues is the perception of the enemy and the ways in which this is ‘converted’ – consciously or unconsciously – into an ideology of aggression. Military training and ideology are based upon the definition of the enemy as ‘the other’, and studies in the text reveal the importance of the stereotyped image of the enemy when soldiers carry out atrocities. Dr Carlton explores the underlying problem of how and why societies resort to war, by analysing the motivations, usually religious and ideological, which legitimize warlike policies and activities. Fascinating case studies consider the ways in which the enemy has been seen in various historical and comparative contexts: for instance, to ancient Egyptians the enemy were non-people, to Romans uncouth barbarians, to Maoists class antagonists. These studies underline the fact that perceptions of the adversary determine the nature of warfare more than any other single factor. The book is unique in its discussion of the idea of the enemy in warfare and military ideology, and in its use of an historical method to comment on situations which are still relevant to the modern world. Its historical and comparative perspective, and its extensive case studies, make it of great value and interest to students of history, sociology, and politics, as well as to those engaged in war studies.

This volume examines the cultural and ideological dimensions of the Cold War in Turkey. Departing from the conventional focus on diplomacy and military, the collection focuses on Cold War's impact on Turkish society and intellectuals. It includes chapters on media and propaganda, literature, sports, as well as foreign aid and assistance.

Jack Snyder's analysis of the attitudes of military planners in the years prior to the Great War offers new insight into the tragic miscalculations of that era and into their possible parallels in present-day war planning. By 1914, the European military powers had adopted offensive military strategies even though there was considerable evidence to support the notion that much greater advantage lay with defensive strategies. The author argues that organizational biases inherent in military strategists' attitudes make war more likely by encouraging offensive postures even when the motive is self-defense. Drawing on new historical evidence of the specific circumstances surrounding French, German, and Russian strategic policy, Snyder demonstrates that it is not only rational analysis that determines strategic doctrine, but also the attitudes of military planners. Snyder argues that the use of rational calculation often falls victim to the pursuit of organizational interests such as autonomy, prestige, growth, and wealth. Furthermore, efforts to justify the preferred policy bring biases into strategists' decisions—biases reflecting the influences of parochial interests and preconceptions, and those resulting from attempts to simplify unduly their analytical tasks. The frightening lesson here is that doctrines can be destabilizing even when weapons are not, because doctrine may be more responsive to the organizational needs of the military than to the implications of the prevailing weapons technology. By examining the historical failure of offensive doctrine, Jack Snyder makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the causes of war.

"Instead of proposing another theory of war, their goal is a more modest one of raising the theoretical consciousness of historians. Specifically, they argue that '1) ideology does influence theory, 2) historians do have ideologies as well as theories . . . about which they are not always conscious or consistent, and 3) we can better understand, compare, and evaluate what historians are saying when we comprehend their ideological and theoretical perspectives.' They attempt then, to classify historical interpretations of war according to their ideological/ theoretical orientations, however covert." --Perspective "Nelson and Olin .. . are concerned with enhancing history's social utility by advancing its capacity to produce generalizations that can explain or predict events and are subject to empirical testing. Their exploration of historical generalization focuses on an issue itself of the highest importance, the causes of war; but their aim is also to create a model for historical generalization applicable to other issues. They argue that to understand generalizations in history, one must recognize their roots in theory, and that historians' theories in turn proceed from their own ideologies. To demonstrate, they survey theories about the causes of war that have come out of conservative, liberal, and radical ideologies. . . . any historian will profit from this rigorous approach to the problem." --Choice "Learned and suggestive, this book clarifies much of what is already known, and points toward new ways of understanding."--Library Journal

This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War. The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms. With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

"Instead of proposing another theory of war, their goal is a more modest one of raising the theoretical consciousness of historians. Specifically, they argue that '1) ideology does influence theory, 2) historians do have ideologies as well as theories . . . about which they are not always conscious or consistent, and 3) we can better understand, compare, and evaluate what historians are saying when we comprehend their ideological and theoretical perspectives.' They attempt then, to classify historical interpretations of war according to their ideological/ theoretical orientations, however covert." --Perspective "Nelson and Olin .. . are concerned with enhancing history's social utility by advancing its capacity to produce generalizations that can explain or predict events and are subject to empirical testing. Their exploration of historical generalization focuses on an issue itself of the highest importance, the causes of war; but their aim is also to create a model for historical generalization applicable to other issues. They argue that to understand generalizations in history, one must recognize their roots in theory, and that historians' theories in turn proceed from their own ideologies. To demonstrate, they survey theories about the causes of war that have come out of conservative, liberal, and radical ideologies. . . . any historian will profit from this rigorous approach to the problem." --Choice "Learned and suggestive, this book clarifies much of what is already known, and points toward new ways of understanding."--Library Journal