In 146 BC, i.e. in the second half of the Greco-Roman
modernity, the Romans destroyed Carthage, caused the death of most of it’s inhabitants
and sold the rest as slaves. This was the so-called Third Punic War, but in reality
just a brutal slaughter of a city which for decades had been completely pacified.
In the same year the famous Greek city of Corinth suffered the same fate. Both attacks
hit cities populated with highly civilized people and aroused shock and horror.
Later as Rome controlled most of the Mediterranean world the series of shocking
events continued internally with political killings and proscriptions.
Corresponding events took place during the horrible wars for
hegemony of the Warring States period in China which lasted from ca. 500 to 221
BC. In the year 260 BC in the battle of Changping the state Qin buried several hundred
thousand defeated soldiers from the state Zhao alive. The historian Sima Qian reports
that Qin in the same period raided a neighbouring country simply to kill men
which could otherwise serve as soldiers. Like the crimes of the Romans these
ones by Qin also affected highly civilized people and caused great horror. Of
course this was part of the purpose; deter peoples and governments from resistance
in the ongoing end fight for hegemony.
The Germans have coined the term Zivilisationsbruch, in
English civilizational rupture, to denote deliberate events and acts which grossly
defy all ideas and ideals about humanity built up over centuries of civilising
culture. The mentioned acts by Rome and Qin are examples of such civilizational
ruptures in those civilizations. Many civilizations experience such shocking
events during their modernity.
In a given modernity civilizational ruptures may come in
more than one wave. In our Western civilization the Nazis and World War II represented
a first brutal wave. The Holocaust was the archetypical Zivilisationsbruch.
Exactly the extreme shock caused by the concentration camps and the World War was
part of what triggered the great efforts of our mature modernity having the
purpose of securing peace and wellbeing for as many people as possible.
Drawing on historical precedents this period could be
predicted to end in another wave of civilizational ruptures, that is if we
refused to learn and therefore made the wrong decisions. The Russian war
against Ukraine is a major civilizational rupture and marks the second wave. Obviously,
despite understandable comparisons with the Nazis by angry Ukrainian
politicians and corresponding politicising comparisons by some in the West, the
scale of the Russian acts till now is smaller than that of the Nazis. But
seeing towns full of people like you and I being bombed to rubble while the inhabitants
try to hide in the metro is indeed shocking. And reports of deliberate killing
of civilians just reinforce a picture of utter barbarism raining down on
innocent civilized civilians.
Of course it does make a difference where in the world we are,
and this is not automatically an expression of racism. All civilizations consist
of a central thoroughly civilized area plus less civilized fringe areas. The
peoples and countries in the fringe areas typically have a history more continuously
filled with wars and violence. Therefore a sudden appearance of such violence
in the central civilized countries must cause shock and horror. The old Chinese
talked about “The Civilized World” or Tianxia. This did not encompass all
under heaven, but exactly only the mostly civilized areas. This concept can be
generalized to other civilisations. Typically the size of these central areas
grow during the history of a civilization. In our case Tianxia is now North
America, Europe, Russia, China and Japan plus a few further countries. Since WW
II brutal military confrontations in these areas are
or were perceived as impossible. Therefore they shock if and when they do happen.
In other words, a civilizational rupture is a deliberate act
which breaks the norms of humanity within The Civilized World, Tianxia.
To stay in the Chinese examples, the sudden onslaught of the
Mongols in the 13. century was one of history’s most extreme examples of a civilizational
rupture. The Mongols not only Killed the soldiers of the countries they
invaded. More often than not all civilians were slaughtered in cities and rural
areas where troops had offered resistance. China consisted of two big countries,
Jin in the north and the greater Song in the south. These were The Civilized
World. In this case “civilized” was a very precise term. Notably Song was
history’s first modern society and the only modern society before our own.
Internally and externally tolerant and peaceful, wealthy, partly industrialised, using paper
money and having a fully fledged continuous public debate. The Mongol invasions
put an end to this. Tens of millions were deliberately massacred, and many others
starved to death. In the end the Chinese population was halved, and we no
longer can talk about a modern society. This was indeed a civilizational
rupture. Modern cities with people living and thinking very much like you and I
were besieged, and then after surrender you could watch your fellow citizens being
slaughtered one by one knowing that it would soon be you.
The massacres continued in Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia
and East Europe. A racist myth claims that the Russians of today are political
or even ethnic descendants of these invading Mongols, and that they therefore are
barbaric. Obviously this is nonsense, but unfortunately the invasion in Ukraine
strengthens such racist narratives.
Wars in The Civilized World, our Tianxia, our common house
should continue to be unthinkable and forbidden. But in the worst case the
Russian war against Ukraine can create precedence by lowering the threshold for
use of violence in the future. A return of Trump or the like will lower it further.
Djengis Khan and his successors were committing some of the worst
atrocities in history. But had it not been for the moderating influence from the
wise Confucian counsellor Ila Chucai even more people would have been killed. This
man saved millions from being massacred. We need politicians of this type to help
us through the next perhaps seven troubled decades.
NOTES
• The wars in Ex-Yugoslavia in the nineties were also a
shocking rupture, but they were geographically limited and were perceived more as
a local anomaly.
• Obviously wars outside The Civilized World are just as terrible.
We should export peace from the centre to the fringes, not import wars to the
centre.
