A few digests back, Nick Brooke speculated that the difference in our takes
on the KoW could be chalked up to his pessimism and my optimism (something I
am rarely accused of, so I found it most refreshing). So I am afraid to
report that my reaction to Sandy Petersen's presentation of the KoW's
Four-Week-Plan does nothing more than reveal my abject cynicism. While at
least not taking the path of the KoW-as-Orc-army approach, he appears instead
to have chosen to present the KoW as an army of hyper-disciplined broos
(though apparently lacking even the personality of their Sword-brethren in
Dorastor) led by renegades from the Tailhook Convention; not something I find
particularly frightening, just kind of..."gross". Rather than invoking any
particular fear or horror, his description of KoW tactics invoked a tawdry
sense of distate (the reasoning, I suppose, behind the mantra-like repetition
of the words "rape" and "orgy"), a certain degree of puzzlement (over the
repeated emphasis on the bisexuality of the KoW's "sociopathic" troops which,
though I have no particular objection to it on its face, seemed to be
designed to trigger some sort of Pavlovian homophobia), and ultimately a sad
and weary familiarity.
For indeed, Sandy's description of the KoW's supposed "culture" is little more than a somewhat more organized condensation of the taking-by-storm conventions of siege warfare that have existed since the virtual dawn of organized war, and he is too good a military historian not to know that; ultimately, it says nothing about what the KoW is. I could not help but be reminded of the following passage, which has historically inspired so many of the writers of the Laws of War on the "rights of the victor":
"When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it responds peacefully and lets you in, all the people present there shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not surrender to you, but would join battle with you, you shall lay siege to it; and when the LORD your God delivers it into your hands, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, the livestock, and everything in the town -- all its spoils -- and enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy, which the LORD your God gives you. "Thus you shall do with all towns that lie very far from you, towns that do not belong to nations hereabout. In the towns of the latter peoples, however, which the LORD your God is giving you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive."
Deuteronomy 20.10 - 16
(trans. J. Pelikan)
Is this then how Sandy wishes me to see the KoW, as the Ancient Israelites, though infinitesimally crueler in that they brook no surrender (or perhaps infinitesimally less cruel, because they do not slaughter their immediate neighbors to the last man, woman and child)? Or perhaps the Crusaders, putting infidel city to the sword and torch as Richard the Lionheart did at Acre, or raping nuns to death out of boredom (or, as the KoW is sociopathically bisexual, perhaps they are the Templars, riding two to a horse, or perhaps the Spartans)? The Black Prince at Limoges, ordering the cutting of 3000 throats? The Mongols at Alamut, or the Moslems at Antioch? Or perhaps Henry V, our darling Prince Harry, watching the outcasts of Rouen starve to death in the no-man's-land between the city's walls and his siege-lines, refusing when asked to let them through his lines, saying "who put them there?", or later throwing his prisoners into the Seine, tied into sacks with dogs? Perhaps the KoW is the Japanese at Nanking, the sociopathic handful at My Lai, or the Bosnian Serbs, organizing rapes and mass graves in the name of protecting Holy Mother Church, while their Serbian cousins and the West play "See No Evil"? Or perhaps the warriors of the KoW are the Modern Israelites? From today's New York Times, on the shaping of Yigal Amir by Rabin's own break-their-bones policy:
"The Golani Brigade was in the midst of [quelling the intifada]. One day reporters came upon some of them in a Palestinian village near Bethlehem, dragging youths into a bus packed with soldiers beating their clubs on the steel seat frames in unison and chanting wildly: 'We are Golani! We are insane!' And even in Golani, it seemed, few beat the Palestinians with the enthusiasm of Pvt. Yigal Amir, Company C, 13th Battalion."
To simply say that the KoW commits atrocities and that is all we need know of them strikes me as not enough -- Form without Substance -- for Atrocity goes hand in hand with War, and what gives Atrocity its special edge, its horror, is ultimately the Ideology in whose name it is perpetrated, the attempted rationalization of its justness: "My whole life has been studying the Talmud, and I have all the data."
Or perhaps the lesson of Sandy's KoW is that, however familiar in RW history it may be, in Glorantha it is somehow unique? Am I to understand, then, that Arkat's Liberators never took city by storm, or that Talor never slaughtered the heathen and took their women for his own, or that Lunars and Sartarites do not commit atrocity and counter-atrocity, or that Argrath's Forces of Ultimate Good do not rampage and pillage and slaughter? That everywhere else in Glorantha, when a town falls to storm, that the end result is somehow different?
Ah well. Rant mode off. I had pleaded for a KoW which was "beautiful and
terrible," to give its seduction some possibility; Sandy and I ultimately
seem to agree on what purpose the KoW should serve in a campaign, though I
see no "beauty" in his version to provide the draw. I've toyed with the idea
of writing some "What the War Lord Says" and "What My Captain Told Me"
pieces, despite Nick's repeated warnings not to do so, and I think that
Sandy's piece has pushed me over the edge and I'll try to post something soon
(something which will probably wind up triggering Peter's PoMo detector); on
the other hand, I might just wind up giving up.
Later,
Mark
Powered by hypermail