"Tools of death" by Lucas Turks

How many times we have surprised to observe at the television a chimpanzee that broke a walnut using a stone or a sea otter that opened a shellfish beating it with vigor on a stone set in the hollow of its abdomen. “They seems men!” we could have exclaimed. Here that we have delineated a characteristic that is proper of the human being: to use tools to complete tasks that otherwise they would be expensive in terms of energy or straight impossible.

Since the origin of what is defined human prehistory, the recovered utensils are for the largest part weapons or fishing and hunting objects and this doesn't have to appear us strange. In fact, the hominids, from which it is thought comes down the Homo sapiens sapiens, didn't have any physical characteristics that granted some advantages to them in a decidedly unfavorable nature. They were monkeys that had gone down from the trees in the savannas. They walked on two legs or sometimes they could trot in awkward way on four in case of danger. Besides, they were omnivorous and the hunted animals were often larger and more dangerous than what they were. It is not given to know if the weapons that were built at the beginning, they were for defense or for offense, but it is sure that our ancient parents discovered well soon their destructive potentialities towards their own fellow-men. The fact that the ritual cannibalism was very diffused, according to the paleontological testimonies, between the primitive tribes it owes to have influenced not few the attitude of our ancestors in devoting to the war. Another reason was probably the necessity to get slaves for the land job, fact that happened in a second time only, when the man transformed himself from nomadic hunter in permanent agriculturist.

Returning to the war weapons, for different thousand of years two separate typologies of death's tools cohabited, those "of contact" (cudgel, dagger, sword, etc) and those "of throwing" (arrows, slingshots, boomerang) besides a hybrid category that was composed by all the derivations of the lance. Until 1500 of the Christian era, the weapons of the first category were predominant. The fulcrum of every battle was resolved in an infighting that made born the myth of the warrior and the courage. Every polytheistic culture preserved in its own personal Pantheon a divinity of the war. We can find the good-natured but severe Odino in the Viking mythology, the Greek Ares, the Roman Mars, the Assyrian Achour, the Indian Indras, Mitra and Varuna up to the most terrible and bloodthirsty of all, the Aztec Huitzilopochtli that pretended from his own followers the blood and the heart of the defeated enemies. Only the introduction of the aboriginal Christian message served for a brief period to estrange the man from the weapons.

Well soon, the word of Christ will be distorted also to allow the theoretical formulation of "right" wars. Saint Augustine justified them this way: “If God, with a special order, commands to kill, the homicide becomes a virtue”. Following this small theology that had served for justifying the dawning feudal wars, the Crusades were considered holy. Here is what a reporter that was in the army of Godfrey of Buglione during the first Crusade tells us about the conquest of Jerusalem: “Entered the city, our pilgrims pursued and massacred the Saracens up to the temple of Salomon where those had assembled [...] Finally, after having defeated the infidels, ours took in the temple a lot of men and women and they killed them and they left alive who seemed worthier. [...] It was also ordered to throw out the walls the dead Saracens, because of the excessive stench, since the city was almost entirely flood of dead bodies. The Saracens alive dragged the corpses out of the boundaries, in front of the gates and they did heaps tall as houses. [...] Fires were prepared as boundary-stones and nobody except God, knew their number.” (Histoire by Guillaume de Tyr in Mémoires de Europe, Paris, Laffont 1970). And an anonymous witness still tells us: “[...] all the defenders of the city were dispersed through its streets running away from the boundaries and ours pursued them and they chased them, killing them and hurting them with the sabre, up to the temple of Salomon where there was such slaughter that ours walked in the blood up to the ankles”. (L'Histoire anonyme de la Prémiere Croisade) Now, read these few lines it doesn't appear exaggerated the cruelty shown by the Arabs in the following Jihad (holy war) that it will bring to the regaining of Palestine.

Affirming as Taine said that man is a lascivious and fierce gorilla, it appears an exaggeration, but introduces some aspects that graze truth. Weapons, war and man have constituted for a long time an inseparable trinomial also with a religious and spiritual justification of the war. The evolution of the technique surely didn't bring any amelioration. Although some authors (Bouthoul) affirms that it has saved western culture straight (with the use of the cannon in 1683 against the advance of the Turkish army in Austria), it is unequivocal that the amelioration in the efficiency of the weapons has brought more often to negative and destructive effects. Evident example is the fall of the Roman empire that didn't know to oppose to the cavalry armored of the Barbarians nothing more than the traditional legion that was not enough to halt their advance. A superior culture had to bend to a subordinate one only for lack of suitable weapons. Same result was gotten in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople from the Turks. Until that the Byzantines preserved a technologically superior weapon (the Greek Fire, an oily substance that also burned to contact with the water), they could defend the city from the horde of invaders. In the same moment in which the mechanism of operation was understood, every advantage was lost. Certainly it could be sustained, that in both cases the changes brought to the elimination of stagnant and dying civilization. Straight for that that it concerns the second event, intellectuals' Diaspora toward the west allowed consolidating the Renaissance. However, the obscurantism that the Barbarians brought in the Roman Empire owes to make us deeply reflecting about the goodness of these traumatic changes.

The introduction of the musket and the cannon marks the beginning of the slow sunset of the supremacy of contact weapons. Despite the superior precision and mortality of these new devices, the number of the deaths began slowly lowering. This was caused by the necessary specialization that a soldier had to have to use a musket. The big masses of infantry composed by farmers enlisted by the feudal gentlemen had been replaced from an elite of professional soldiers paid by the sovereigns of the national states that were grown in the meantime. The wars became circumscribed and the destruction that they provoked were caused from the continuous looting necessary to maintain an army during the war campaigns and not from the direct damages of the battles. The concentration in few units of all the fighters created a spirit of comradeship that will become fundamental in the Napoleonic period. Republican France, encircled by every side from enemies that wanted its destruction, could not entirely found the hopes of survival upon the select troops of the Ancien Régime. It needed an army constituted by hundreds of thousand of individuals and to do this the only possible way was the obligatory conscription. The troop so gotten was framed in regiments in which were diluted the few veterans of the preceding wars. It followed the formation of one of the most powerful war machine that the history has ever known.

The new widening of the base of the fighters added to the employment of the repetition rifle would have brought in the summer months of 1914 to the presence on the European battlegrounds of million infantrymen, armed with rifle and bayonet, trained to kill. To a distracted observer, it could seem that such situation was not very different from that present in the oplitic phalanxes or in the Roman legions, already two thousand years before. The elements that differentiate the 1900 infantrymen from their predecessors are fundamentally two. Firstly, only a least part of them were professional soldiers, secondarily they fought for the nation and for the ideal. In conclusion the French example had had success. The governments busied in the first world conflict finally paid attention to the ideological indoctrination of their own troops. They tried to represent the enemy as the evil. An absolute evil that, however it had to be easily comprehensible to an infantry composed by 70% from exponents of the agricultural class. A German Kaiser that stole the wheat from the French or Italian farmer's hands was able to show in a good way such absoluteness for a youth of the Loire or for a boy of the Po Lowland. The fire of machine-guns (another technical evolution of the throwing weapons) would have demonstrated that the fear to lose some material benefits was not enough to face death.

The enormous increase of the schooling of the classes submitted to obligatory conscription in the period between the two wars would have brought to a complete revision of the strategic ideas of the modern war. The example of Revolutionary France returned of fashion. It was necessary that the fighter felt to fight for a “correct” cause. The new ideals were not different from those of the beginning of 19th century: liberty, brotherhood and equality. In World War 2 there was an opposition between the nations that supported this new vision (the Allies) and those remained anchored to a material justification of the war (the Axis that fought to obtain that famous “vital space” that was nothing else other than a widened economic market). To obviate to the fact that the new “idealists” soldiers were more refractory to the fight in comparison to their predecessors and that the families remained home looked with great attention to the wasting of human life to the front (element that is always present in every war, but that it assumes a supreme importance in the countries with democratically chosen governments), new impulse was given to the technical search for developing weapons that were able to strike at distance with small risk for the who used them. This way, we entered the era of the dominion of the aviation and then, at the to end if the war, the nuclear era. The passage between the stone launched by hand or with a slingshot and a missile with a nuclear warhead can appear enormous, but it is an evolution of the same evolutionary concept of the man: finding an effective and few risky system to make up for the lacks that the nature has left in our aboriginal organism.

An aspect remains to discuss and it concerns the mortality that the evolution of the weapons provokes. Since the times of the Lateran Council when the use of the crossbow was prohibited because it was too destructive and cruel, it is always thought that to every new improvement of the technique of the weapons it corresponded an increase of the number of the victims provoked by them. If this is surely true in absolute terms, because an atomic bomb can kill as much as 100.000 swords, the same concept cannot be repeated on the relative plan. In the history of the humanity nothing has ever been bloodier than the cold steel infighting either in the antiquity either in modern times (for instance in the assault with the bayonet). The relative incidence of these weapons of the past in comparison to the world population was enormously superior to the actual ratio. In the past, however, the man has never possessed a weapon that used in large quantity it could not only destroy the enemies, but also who had used it.

Here is the new challenge that we have to win. Will we know how to withstand temptation to use the ultimate weapon or will we self-destruct us not caring of the consequences? From the developments of the world politics of the last decade it would be said that the former solution has been chosen. Despite this, the evolution of the weapons has not stopped. New airplanes that can fly through the use of computer, missiles that intelligently intercepts other missiles, tanks that target and destroy the adversary with the same facility with which a button can be pressed. We would have to ask us what they serve these small improvements when it has been already invented the final weapon. Well, who guarantees us that the atomic bomb is the maximum development of the human destructive ability? The exponential technological progress to which we are assisting could deny us in the turn of few years and to bring new threats to the world peace. Then the correct question to do is: after the bomb atomic what else? I hope that the answer will be nothing.

Sources: “The wars” by Gaston Bouthoul, “The crusades” with presentation by Robert Delort

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