Destruction of the Athenian army at Syracuse – illustration from John Steeple Davis, The story of the greatest nations, from the dawn of history to the twentieth century, published 1900 (public domain image used in Wkipedia – “Pelopponesian War”)

(8) PELOPONNESIAN WAR (431-404 BC)

Greek against Greek – Athens vs Sparta.

There was a point when I cracked during the film 300. It was when Leonidas spoke about the necessity of Sparta fighting Persia because even “those boy-loving philosophers” in Athens were fighting Persia. “Screw you, Leonidas”, I yelled “the Peloponnesian War isn’t over!” And after the ushers bounced me from the cinema, I ruminated on this slur on the Athenians. There was of course the fact that they were the true Greek heroes of the Persian Wars.

But there was also, you know, the Peloponnesian War of Athens against Sparta (or Peloponnesian Wars, as there was first and second war with a brief peace between them).

And we’re still fighting it, in that the war between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta underlies the grand ideological conflict in Western civilization. Few things may actually have an ideal Platonic form, but Sparta did – Plato’s Republic, with its philosopher-kings or guardians who perceive the Forms of the true reality, trained from childhood to govern in the interests of the polity (by physical and moral regimen) and bound by stricter rules than the rest of the populace.

It has been argued that Plato’s Republic was a dystopian satire rather than a utopian ideal, but it is difficult not to see it intended as the latter – or worse, as Plato’s distaste for his own democratic Athens (which after all, executed his beloved teacher and philosophical mouthpiece Socrates) and idealization of a philosophical version of Athens rival, Sparta, although he and his ideas didn’t do too well when put into practice with attempts at a philosopher-king in Syracuse.

And so we are still fighting the Peloponnesian War against Plato’s mystical fascism or totalitarian Spartanism as it has recurred throughout Western political ideology – the General Will of Rousseau, the dictatorship of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard in Marxism or communism, the Fuhrerprinzip of fascism or Nazism, and so on.

Of course, I know this is mostly my projection. I’m not sure if Western political ideology has actually been influenced by Sparta or even Plato and his Republic to that extent (or how much Sparta and Plato influenced each other for that matter). But I’m not the only one to see such parallels and I’m sticking with it – it has a certain mythic resonance. Hence its god-tier special mention entry second to the Trojan War, which might otherwise seem extravagant for a war between Greek city-states.

And what about, you know, the historical Peloponnesian War, you ask? To paraphrase Martin Prince’s sneer from The Simpsons, I’m aware of its work – namely, that Sparta won, with a little help from their Persian friends, albeit to be humbled later by Thebes, before the Macedonians and Romans swept over all the Greek city states.

And that Athenian political ideas didn’t work too well in Syracuse either, with the disastrous Athenian Syracuse Expedition sometimes likened to the American experience in Vietnam, only a lot worse for the ultimate defeat of Athens in their not so cold war against Sparta.

As I said previously, Plato’s ideas – and Plato himself – didn’t fare too well in Syracuse, when he came closest to implementing his Republic and its philosopher-kings in practical reality through Syracuse and its tyrant. Closest that is, as in not at all, founding the time-honored tradition of how intellectuals fare when courting people in power or political tyranny – running afoul of tyrants and narrowly avoiding execution or literal slavery and imprisonment.

Of course, history is a lot messier than our black and white projections of it. Lest we think of the Spartans too much as the bad guys, while their allies wanted Athens destroyed and its population enslaved after its defeat, it was the Spartans with their warrior code of honor who declined to do so – particularly as they regarded that all of Greece owed Athens a debt of honor for its role in the Persian War. And screw you, Thebes and Corinth! I’ve got a letter for the Corinthians and this time there’s no love in it. I’m an Athenian fan.

And for that matter, even the Spartanism or mystical fascism of Plato in my projection may be more nuanced than that, given it has a recurring appeal to or arguments for it. Even I’m a fan of one of the many pop culture versions of Plato’s Republic – Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One. Mega-City One is essentially Plato’s Republic in twenty-second century America, with the Judges as its philosopher-kings or guardians and the Law as its Forms. Judge Dredd – he is the Forms!

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Sea Peoples in their ships during battle with the Egyptians – relief from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu (public domain image – Wikipedia “Late Bronze Age Collapse”and “Sea Peoples”)

(7) BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE

Styled as World War Zero by some historians.

The Bronze Age Collapse – or more precisely Late Bronze Age Collapse – was the widespread societal collapse of Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization in the 12th century BC, argued to be worse than the collapse of the western Roman Empire or even the worst case of societal collapse in human history.

Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece – the Greeks of the Trojan War – were among the most famous casualties, ushering in the Greek Dark Ages for a few centuries.

However, they are among about a dozen ancient civilizations that collapsed or declined – foremost among them the Hittite Empire that collapsed in Anatolia, while Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Assyrians clung on by the skin of their teeth, in decline or weakened. “Almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

I don’t know much about the finer details of the Bronze Age Collapse, but then neither does anyone else ultimately, as it remains the subject of argument and theory.

However, war is often cited as the main culprit, typically at the hands of the mysterious and to some extent still hypothetical “Sea Peoples”, seaborne raiders to rival the more usual horse blitzkrieg of nomadic herding tribes in civilization-crushing effect.

I certainly think war played a major part, hence this special mention, although am less clear whether it was the cause of the collapse or an effect – with the latter involving the Sea Peoples and others effectively moving into the void left by collapsing civilizations.

Interestingly, the Sea Peoples are proposed to include a number of ethnic groups – one of which is identified as the ancestors of the Philistines faced by the Israelites in the Bible. The Israelites themselves rose in the vaccuum left behind by the retreat or collapse of Hittites, Egyptians and Assyrians – so that the Bible itself has origins in the Bronze Age Collapse, as does that other landmark of western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Apart from Sea Peoples and war, other causes are proposed for the collapse – political fragmentation or rebellion within societies, drought or famine, natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruption, plagues, and the collapse of trade for manufacture of bronze (or the emergence of iron among adversaries).

Or a combination of all of these – “the civilizations could have endured any one disaster, but not multiple at the same time, especially not when they were feeding into one another”.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Chairman Mao Zedong proclaiming the People’s Republic of China on 1 October, 1949, colorized (public domain image)

(6) CHINESE REVOLUTION & CIVIL WAR (1911-1949)

That’s right – it’s the other definitive communist revolution, and arguably the true model of communist revolution or insurgency in the Global South.

The fourth of the four revolutions I rank as the god-tier revolutions of history and include in my special mentions for my top ten wars from sheer scale and impact – but also in this case as it was more civil war than revolution.

It naturally follows on from my special mention for the Russian Revolution and Civil War, not least because of the role Soviet assistance played in it but also because it replayed many of the same beats, albeit over a much more protracted period – in at least two phases, or three if you count the initial warlord period.

Of course, the original Chinese Revolution – of which both the two largest warring parties in the civil war, the Communists and the Nationalists or Kuomingtang (KMT) saw themselves as the true successors – the one led by Sun Yat-sen (or Sun Yuxian) that overthrew the Qing dynasty as China’s last imperial dynasty, was in 1911-1912 and hence preceded the Russian Revolution in 1917.

However, as was often the case with the collapse of central state authority in China (or the mandate of heaven), it devolved into the usual competing warlords or warring states from 1916-1927 – in an exotic multi-party battle royale that might be compared to the Russian Civil War at the height of all its chaotic glory.

It even had foreign intervention, albeit on a smaller scale than the Russian Civil War. The Soviets assisted the main warring party, the Nationalists seeking to reunify China under their Republic, as the Soviets saw them as the necessary prelude to socialism. Intriguingly, the Germans also assisted the Nationalists – and more intriguingly, that assistance continued from the warlord period to the first genuine phase of the Chinese Civil War, by both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

It is intriguing to ponder how world history might have turned out if Nazi Germany had continued to support Nationalist China, but they swapped to the foreign power that ominously loomed over China to exploit its weakness and ultimately was the one to intervene most decisively of all – Japan.

The warlord period is generally considered to have transitioned to the first phase of the Chinese Civil War proper from 1927 “when Chiang Kai-shek led the Socialist-Nationalist two thirds of the KMT’s military forces against Wang Jingwei’s Socialist-Communist/Internationalist third…the first time in the Republic’s history that two organisations with sufficient bases of popular support and military-economic power to potentially unify the country had fought one another”.

Wang Jingwei was subsequently eclipsed by the new Chinese communist leader who became virtually synonymous with the Chinese Civil War and for whom Chinese communist ideology was named – Mao.

However, the Chinese communists did not do too well in this first phase, with effective control of less than a twentieth of the population (compared to the third controlled by Chiang’s Nationalists) and were on the brink of complete extinction. “Their doom was, historians agree, imminent and inevitable” – until they were effectively saved by the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937.

The Japanese had already indirectly given the Chinese communists some much needed reprieve with their invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In an episode which also showed that some of the warlord period chaos lived on in the Nationalists, the Xian Incident, two of Chiang’s generals kidnapped him to force him to form a united front with the communists against the Japanese.

Chiang subsequently reneged on the united front with renewed hostilities against the communists but the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 forced his hand again to put those hostilities on hold for a second united front against Japan, even if both he and the communists increasingly paid lip service to it in preference to the inevitable renewal of civil war against each other.

Despite the united front, Chiang’s Nationalists bore the brunt of Japan’s war in China, which arguably dealt them their mortal wound in China’s civil war. In 1944, Japan launched its last major offensive, Operation Ichi-go – the last successful offensive by it or any Axis power towards the end of the Second World War and yet largely unknown outside specialist historians – which severely weakened Chiang’s forces (as well as an economy increasingly ravaged by hyper-inflation). In general, “the demands of fighting the war essentially destroyed the KMT’s capacity to function as an administration”.

The civil war resumed “as soon as it became apparent that Japanese defeat was imminent” (at the hands of the Americans) “with the communists gaining the upper hand in the second phase of the war from 1945 to 1949, generally referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution”.

This again saw foreign intervention along predictable Cold War lines – the Soviets on the side of the Communists and the Americans on the side of the Nationalists.

The Americans were notoriously cautious in their intervention – subsequently giving rise to accusations of “losing” China and communist infiltration of the American government. What is interesting is that the Soviets were equally cautious in their own intervention, perhaps from Stalin’s intuition that a united communist China would be their rival in the long term. Hence the Soviets consistently urged restraint on Mao to accept the north-south partition that was all the vogue in Cold War Asia – between a Communist north and a Nationalist south.

Mao ignored this and the Communists gained control of mainland China anyway, proclaiming the People’s Republic of China. However, the Communists ultimately had to accept a residual partition of a different kind with the Nationalists retreating to the island of Taiwan to proclaim their Republic of China there, as the Communists had no means to pursue them – particularly after the US gave their naval support to Taiwan. That partition of course continued even until today, remaining as a source of tension with no armistice or treaty signed between them.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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