Dan Snow's History Hit - War with Margaret MacMillan

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

Margaret MacMillan joined me on the podcast to discuss the ways in which war has influenced human society. We discussed how, in turn, changes in political organisation, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. I'm in a dark and echoey room here in a historic site which you'll be hearing about more in the near future. But this podcast has nothing to do with this dark and echoey site that I'm in. This podcast is featuring the brilliant Professor Margaret Macmillan, Professor at the University of Toronto and Oxford University. Also my aunt, she's been on the podcast many times before. she's the person that gave me my great passion for history she is one of the world's best historians won the Samuel Johnson prize 20 years ago for her magisterial book on the Treaty of Versailles and has written many other books since including the outbreak of the First World War you can see programs that she's made on History Hit TV you can listen to all the back episodes of the podcast on there as well. Don't forget, if you use the code POD1,

P-O-D-1, you get a month for free and your second month for just one pound, euro or dollar. You can go and get your fill of Margaret Macmillan. But this episode of the podcast, she's talking about her new book that's out. She just recently in the UK presented the BBC Reith Lectures, where they invite one intellectual to talk about a subject of their choice. She decided to talk about war, its effect on society, how it shaped us, how it's changed. We talked about it on the History Hit Live podcast record. If you become a subscriber to History Hit, you get to join our weekly live Zooms with some of the world's best historians. So thank you to everyone who joined. And now, enjoy Margaret Macmillan talking about war.

Margaret, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Very, very good of you. You've written books about military history before. You've written about the First World War, the beginning and end of the First World War. You've written about the British in India. But this book is huge. This is a book about war itself. It's quite an intimidating subject.

Where do you start? Well, it's a terrifying subject because it's so enormous and so many people, often very great historians and novelists and others, have written about it. And I was asked to do the BBC Reith Lectures, and it gave me a chance to think about a subject which I've thought about on and off for years, and of course, talked to you and others about. And I thought, I won't try and do the whole history of war. That's impossible. It would mean volumes and volumes. What I'll try and do is just pick out themes of war which interest me and which might interest other people. And so why do we fight? How do we fight? What does technology mean? How do we try and stop war? Those sorts of subjects. So it's really, it's a series of explorations, I suppose, of different aspects of war. It's by no means the complete history of war. Did you go into the argument whether we are by nature warlike? And

where did you sort of end up on that? I went into it because I thought it's very important. And it's still something that we're much preoccupied with. And I think I came down perhaps typically in the middle. And I thought, you know, we do have things that biologically are part of us, we have certain emotions, we have certain ways of reacting. I mean, I think the old flight or fear, emotion reaction is a very strong one. I mean, I think we've been programmed for centuries to look out for threats and to try and avoid them or to try and fight back if we can't avoid them. But I don't think biology is the whole explanation about why we have war.

I mean, we may have certain instincts and impulses, but war is highly organized and it's purposive. People are doing it because they want to do something and they want to achieve something with it. And it takes a tremendous amount of organization. And so I came down sort of in the middle saying, yes, we may have certain impulses that make us able to fight,

but the fact that we fight is very much conditioned by our culture and by our rational side. We think about war and we plan for war and we make war. But I do think if we look back through history and archaeologists and others are now pushing back what we know about the human race, which of course was around for a very long time before we started recording anything about ourselves, I think we do know that violence is part of most societies. I don't buy the view of pastoralists living peaceably with each other. And there's more and more evidence that they were just every bit as violent as we were and could be as violent as us. How important do you think, therefore, war has been in shaping society? I mean, has it been one of the prime motors of our development of the

place we're at today with our nation states and our technology? I mean, do you see war as essential to our story? I do. I think it's very difficult to actually separate the development of society and our institutions and our ideas from war itself. And I don't think one precedes the other. And I don't think one dominates the other. I think both interact with each other. And so a lot of our social development and the development of some of the things we see as institutions have been very much, has been very much affected by war. And in turn, the ways in which we organise our societies and think about ourselves affect the sorts of wars we fight. And so, if anything, it's like two things that grow together and influence each other as they grow. But I don't think one comes before the other or dominates the other.

What were you very struck by in terms of how different societies have organised themselves in order to meet that military challenge? I was very struck by the societies which had a very strong warrior ethos. Again, I think cultural factors are huge. I mean, if you think of Sparta, for example, where the young Spartans of free families, the boys were brought up to be soldiers, and it was shame if they didn't

behave bravely in battle. And you know, the famous thing the Spartan mother said to their sons as they went off to battle, come home with your shield, because losing your shield was a great disgrace, or come home carried on it. But you know, one or the other death or dishonor was something that you wanted to avoid at all costs. And so that struck me the ways in which certain societies train their young, particularly their men, almost predominantly their men, to fight and organize themselves around fighting. And other societies didn't. And of course, what also happens is societies change. Sweden was a highly militarized society in the 17th and 18th centuries, and their

soldiers were known all over Europe for being ferocious, ruthless, dreadful. You got out of the way when you heard that the Swedes were coming. And Sweden today is a very peaceable country, dedicated to peacekeeping, dedicated to finding ways of settling disputes without fighting. And so I think there's always change possible. But I was fascinated by the way in which certain societies seem to have primed themselves to fight effectively and primed their young to fight effectively. Given that all societies have faced military challenges, why don't we all, at the risk of sounding a bit like a Darwinist, but why don't we all become like Sparta?

Given that war tested all of these societies, didn't everyone just go, well, let's just become like an armed camp like Sparta? I think other values were important. You know, how do we think about ourselves? How do we try and live with others? How do we try and build? As many of the Greek city-states did, they built leagues where they worked with each other and they worked out laws of war to try and mitigate the effects of war. And I think there are always these contradictory impulses. And fighting is, inside the views of some people, glorious, but it's also tremendously

costly. And it drains the resources of society, or can drain the resources of society, can drain the talents, the lives of those who fight it. And so I think we've always seen this tension between those who think fighting is a good thing and the most noble thing that human beings can do, and those who think it's a waste and it's folly. And almost as early as war, you begin to get attempts to deal with it, to think about it, and to try and see it as something that needs to be controlled and ideally outlawed. And so some of the great early thinkers, St. Augustine, for example, thought about ways in which war could be prevented or mitigated. And I think these are contradictory impulses, which are often intention. And I think you're quite right. I mean, societies

are not one or the other. And often, I think, in democracies, you will get people who don't particularly like fighting reaching a point where they feel we have to. I mean, the British public did not want another war after the First World War. But the behavior of the Nazis, the constant breaking of promises by Hitler, particularly, I think, the takeover of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in 1939, simply persuaded a lot of British people that they didn't like, much as they didn't like fighting, they were going to have to do it because it was a matter of survival. And it was a matter of dealing with an enemy that was not going to stop. Speaking of Hitler and the Second World War, why has war proved so alluring? Well, I know it is a mystery, I think. But when you also think of

the cost of war, not just those who fight, but the innocent bystanders, the civilians who get caught up in war and often get killed or held hostage or made into slaves. I think policymakers have tended to think often that war is a weapon they can use to achieve a particular end. There's a lot of talk about controlled wars. And we see this even today, you know, when the occupation forces, the invasion and occupation forces went into Iraq in the second Iraq war, I think they thought they could topple Saddam Hussein and solve all problems. And so I think there is a temptation to think, you know, if we just apply force in the right way, scientifically, I mean, I hate that term surgical strike. The idea that you can somehow use violence to achieve a very neat and tidy end is a very alluring one. I think the other thing about war is that it does have an attraction.

And if you go to any bookshop, you'll see literally rows of books on war and very few rows on peace. I mean, it's just not a subject that people find as exciting. And there've always been those who thought that war brings out the noblest side of people, that you are prepared to work with others, die for others. And so I think there is that allure of war. And I think it still is there a bit in societies that war is somehow something noble. And so I think we get a number of reasons why people want to fight and why societies think that war can be useful. I think, you know, the rational thing for me is to try and avoid war if you possibly can. But as the British discovered in 1939, you can't always avoid it. Is there confirmation bias? Do you think policymakers, politicians look at Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and think, yeah, I'm definitely like those guys,

not like Napoleon III or Adolf Hitler or the far, far greater number of people that have sought to roll the iron dice and have paid for it with their life and the destruction of all they hold dear? I like the phrase confirmation bias because I think we all do this. We all look for examples which suit us. And history, of course, has hundreds, thousands of examples. And you can search through history and find an example to prove almost anything you want. And I think those who have power or aspire to power often like to think that they are like the great figures of the past, that they can do great deeds. You know, Napoleon was impressed by Alexander the Great. He wanted to be like Alexander the Great. And then others

came along and wanted to be like Napoleon. And of course, what we tend to forget, if we're only looking for the great heroes of history, is all those who came a cropper, who did not succeed, who damaged their own societies. And I think actually, when you look at Napoleon, I don't buy the great adulation of Napoleon. He left France in a mess. He wasted hundreds of thousands of lives. He destroyed other cities and places in Europe. But I do think we tend, you know, if those who want to be powerful look at the past and say, ah, you know, that's a very good example. I can be like that. And perhaps they should remember those who didn't succeed. You mentioned earlier the allure. Does it show humans in our widest

possible sense? I think it shows us, yes, I do. I think it shows us at our best and our worst. It can bring out the bestial, and we all know that dreadful things can happen in wars. I mean, one of the real problems in a war is you train people to kill, but then you need to keep them under control. And it's trying to keep under control people you have turned into, if you succeed, into efficient killers. I think that in a war, we also get things like comradeship, people willing to die for each other. We don't get an ordinary civilian life and we're not usually put to that test. And what comes out so often to me in the war memoirs and the novels about war is this sense that we have never known such comradeship before as we do when we're fighting together and we'll never know it again because you're simply in a different set of circumstances. And I suppose for a lot of us, I grew up in a peaceful world. I grew up since the Second World War. And I suppose we often wonder is what would we be like?

Could we do it? Could we be as brave and as noble and look out for others as people will do in war? So no, war is, I think, in many ways a mystery. And I think it's very hard to explain. And I think it does encompass great varieties of human experience, from the best to the worst. Land a Viking longship on island shores.

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Let's talk about some of the ways it's shaped our culture and technology. How has it shaped us today? Well, something you mentioned earlier, and that is the growth of strong central governments. You know, that in order to fight a war, you need the capacity to organize. You need, at the very basic, most basic level, you need to count how many people you have. You need to find the soldiers. You need to train them.

You need to find the equipment for them. You need to make sure they have enough to eat, you need to make sure they're properly led and they're sent off in the right direction to do whatever it is they're meant to do. And that requires a degree of organization. And the more you get good at organizing, the more likely you are to be successful when you send your forces into battle, and the more likely you are to become more powerful. And the more powerful governments become, therefore, the more control they can have over society. So again, the two things really go side by side. The capacity to wage and make war and the growth of strong central government tend to go along with each other. And I found that absolutely fascinating.

I also found the ways in which wars had unintended consequences interesting, that we have seen as a result of great wars, the great wars of the 20th century, in some societies a real levelling, a closing of the gap between the great wars of the 20th century, in some societies, a real levelling, a closing of the gap between the very rich and the very poor. British society came out of the Second World War a much more equal society than it had been when it went in. And the same thing was true of American society, of Japanese society. And I think that's something which, of course, we wouldn't make a war to make societies more equal and to give help and support to those at the lower levels of society. But that is something that war does. And war also can bring great social change and changes in the position of women.

At the end, even before the First World War ended, the British government brought in a bill to give the vote to women over the age of 30. And that was, I think, very largely in recognition of the part they had played in the war effort. It's impossible to separate out, I suppose, war. We're talking a lot about disease, of course, and you look at the growth of the modern state in northern Italy as a response to plague. People are talking about that at the moment. But also technology, because so often technology was so combined with war, you know, the same steam engines that could drive textile looms could also create better munitions and armament. No, well, I hadn't realised until I started doing some work for this book that some of the best early cannon were produced in Europe by people who'd been making church bells,

because they'd learned how to make strong metals that would not collapse when they were banged. And so often technology will be driven by war, and often things that are too expensive in peacetime will become necessary and possible in wartime. Very near where I live in Oxford, there's a sign on the wall of what used to be the Radcliffe Hospital, which says here the first successful use of penicillin took place in 1941. And penicillin was discovered before the Second World War, but it was considered too expensive to produce. And then the war came and it was, of course, important to be able to treat people on battlefields. And suddenly penicillin was produced. And it has saved, of course, millions of lives ever since the war ended and during the war itself.

And so often wars will push ahead kinds of technology. And then, of course, often again, it's always a two-way thing in my view. You'll get technology changing war. And so the introduction of gunpowder was going to make a huge difference to war. It suddenly became possible to hit the enemy without having to grapple. And you still had to be close, but you didn't have to actually run them through with a sword the invention of the crossbow and the long the development of the longbow really i think spelt the doom of the knights in armor on their horses because it was now possible to pick them off by people step people standing on the ground could pick them off and so often technology will

change the ways in which war is fought and make a real difference i mean those who learned to use gunpowder successfully were going to have an advantage over those who couldn't use it. We had someone on the podcast about drones, and they were saying the lesson from fighting in Syria is however many drones you've got, you need 10 times that number. So clearly technology is going to have a huge impact. Do you think much about present and future war as well? I do. And of course, it's something historians don't like to do. We don't like to speculate on the future. And we have enough trouble dealing with the past, so we try and stay away from the present and the future. But I do wonder about it.

I mean, my thought is that on the one hand, it's developing this extraordinary technology. You mentioned drones and the capacity to send these things, often very big, but often very small, to do damage to targets, often quite far away. Cyber war, war in space, development of all sorts of new technology, development of artificial intelligence. I mean, we're seeing war move into new areas that we hadn't even imagined it would move into about 10 years ago. But we're still seeing the old sorts of wars, the sorts of wars where people get up close and hack each other to death. A lot of the deaths in war these days are not from the high-tech end. They're not coming from the high-tech weapons. What they're coming from is machetes and hoes and very simple rifles and very simple guns.

The majority of the deaths in some of the wars that go on in places like Yemen, Somalia, Libya, are not from highly sophisticated weaponry. They're from things that would be familiar to people fighting 100 years ago. And I suspect we're going to see a sort of bifurcation of war on the one extreme, this extraordinary sort of space-age stuff that looks like something that's come out of movies. And at the other end, a sort of miserable grinding war, which will continue to cause huge numbers of deaths and continue to cause real misery to civilians who are caught up in it. Do you think that we have learned, finally, the lessons that quite a few policymakers in the 19th and early 20th century

didn't make which is war is now so unbearably destructive that it's almost useless as a tool of statecraft particularly between nuclear powers well it does worry me i mean before the second world war there were a lot who said the power of the aircraft and aerial bombing is now so deadly that no nations were willing to go to war because of the destruction that will be wrought. Before the First World War, you got people saying the capacities of the European countries on both sides are now so evenly balanced that the potential for stalemate is huge, and so no countries willingly will go to war. And we did have an uneasy peace, of course, during the Cold War, kept partly by nuclear weapons, by the prospects that both sides could, if they started a war, would end up with mutually assured destruction. But what worries me is that people will still think

they can use it and they'll think they can control it. I mean, during the Cold War, there were all these sort of, in retrospect, very odd theories about controlled escalation. You know, we will drop one nuclear bomb and they'll drop two and then we'll drop three, but at some point we'll stop. And one thing we know, I think, is that war is unpredictable and uncontrollable. And once you start it, as policymakers and generals have found out down through the centuries, you can't always bring it to an end when you want and you can't always say where it's going to go. And what also worries me at the moment is the capacity of powers, and I'm thinking,

for example, of the United States and China or China and India, to get themselves into positions where backing down is difficult. You know, national pride gets involved. And I'm always aware of the potential for an accident. You know, something happens, someone gets shot down, a plane gets shot down. An Armenian plane, I think it was, was shot down today. That has the potential, such incidents, to let things escalate and get out of hand. And that worries me. So I'd like to think we're too rational to engage in an all-out war. But we know that accidents can happen and people can find themselves in positions where it's very difficult to back down. War is predominantly seen as a masking activity. How have you found women have related

to war? Are the differences important? It's a big question, and I'll try and answer it briefly. It's a fascinating one. There's a long, long debate about whether there is a real gender difference, whether men are fitted by biology. They tend to be on the stronger spectrum, end of the spectrum of strength. Are they more aggressive? They tend to have more testosterone. Does that mean that men are fitted better for being warriors and women are not? And I'm not sure the evidence is at all clear. And I think culture is so important in shaping those who become fighters. Not all men become fighters, not all men want to become fighters. And again, I think it depends very much on their training,

how they're brought up, the values of their societies. And there are examples of women fighters down through history. We now know that there really were probably the Amazons or at least the people who gave rise to the Amazon legend. They have found, archaeologists have found burial sites around the Black Sea of women warriors who are buried with their full armour and their skeletons show the marks of having been hit and damaged probably in battle.

And certainly a lot of military today are having women come into the military. And so I suspect the reason women haven't fought probably is more cultural than biological. It's really because women were never expected to fight. And on the occasions when they have fought, they have tended to fight much as men do. There's a very interesting book by Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for literature about Soviet women in the Second World War. And they were fighter pilots, and they fired artillery, and they were guerrilla fighters, and they seem to have done every bit as well as men.

Margaret, what about peace? What did you end up thinking about peace? Is peace an absence of war? Is peace something that you can strive for in the same way that people seek military advantage? I think peace is not just an absence of war. I mean, peace is something that needs to be maintained and supported and worked for. And what it involves, I think, is good leadership, those who are willing to work with the other side and try and find compromise. And I think increasingly in our age, what peace movements, peace organizations. And again, after the First World War, I think before the Second World War, there was tremendous support for the League of Nations. And so I think we should, and we have done this throughout our history, be looking for ways to avert conflict, to try and find peaceful ways of settling disputes, arbitration, for example, and to look for ways to deter or punish aggressors. And we haven't perfected it, but it seems to me we have gone a long way

in developing international organisations and international law. And I think this is something that you can't just expect it to happen. You have to keep promoting it and working for it and strengthening the institutions and the laws that at least have some possibility of preventing war and mitigating war. You don't seem optimistic about an end to war. I mean, I remember in the 1990s, we all thought that history had come to an end and it was all wonderful and there would be no more wars and things. That sort of optimism has disappeared. We have not seen an end to war.

I don't think we have. I mean, at the end of the Cold War, there was this brief hopeful period when we were going to get peace around the world. Everyone was going to become democratic. National barriers were not going to matter so much. I remember a friend of mine saying, you know, the world is changing. He said, everyone in the world is listening to Michael Jackson. Well, we all know how Michael Jackson fared. And, you know, he disappeared from the scene, leaving behind a rather bad reputation. And there was talk of a peace dividend, all the money that could be spent on peace.

And then Yugoslavia fell to pieces and other things began to happen. And we see, I think, around the world since 1990, there have been wars pretty much every year. And there are wars today which don't show any signs of ending anytime soon. So no, we haven't got away from war, unfortunately. Well, thank you very much for coming on this podcast. Your book is called? War. It does have a side title. It's called How Conflict Shaped Us. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself.

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