Revenge by Stephen Fineman

Author:Stephen Fineman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Reaktion Books

SEVEN

VENGEANCE IN WAR

‘Righteous revenge’ is potent rhetoric for going to war. It is also unremittingly self-reinforcing. France entered the First World War partly to avenge its defeat and land-grab by Germany during the Franco-Prussian War. Twenty-six years later Hitler reversed the position once more with his occupation of Paris, delivering on his promise to the German people to avenge their humiliation in the First World War. The shock following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 prompted President Roosevelt to proclaim it ‘a date which will live in infamy’ and he instructed a revenge attack on Tokyo. Meanwhile Hitler was preparing his V-1 missiles (‘V’ for Vergeltungswaffen, ‘retaliatory weapons’) for attacks on London, which triggered retaliatory carpet-bombing of German cities. More recently Al-Qaeda declared the destruction of the World Trade Center as revenge against the U.S. and the West in defence of Islam, which in turn inspired the American-led ‘war on terror’ that would, according to President George W. Bush in 2001, ‘bring justice to our enemies’. Attacks and counter-attacks continue to this day.

Civil wars can unleash historic feuds, straining a nation’s capacity to contain deadly score-settling. For example, early in Rwanda’s history the Tutsis were considered an elite minority of cattle herders compared to the lower status Hutus who farmed the land. It set the seal on a long and unequal division of power between them. ‘Smarter’ Tutsis were favoured by Rwanda’s German colonizers in the nineteenth century, a difference perpetuated by the Belgian colonizers who followed them, who enforced a divide-and-rule policy. In the 1950s the Hutus began to resist the decades of oppression and Tutsi dominance, leading to sporadic armed attacks, counterattacks and vendettas. The tension exploded in the 1990s in one of the fastest and most efficient killings in history: 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered in just one hundred days. There were parallels in Nigeria. In the 1960s a bloody civil war broke out in Nigeria’s southern provinces between rival tribal communities, divided by values, customs and political systems. Coup and counter-coup marked the vicious conflict for control, with widespread reprisals unleashed on the Igbo tribe in particular. It is estimated that some two million civilians died of starvation along with 100,000 military casualties.

Vengeance often peaks in the final throes of a conflict. In ancient times, before war crimes were thought of, pillaging a besieged town or city and slaughtering its citizens was no less than what a conquered people deserved. The Vandals were of this mindset when they plundered Rome, the Crusaders when they ransacked Jerusalem and the Ottoman Turks when they looted Constantinople – a ‘harrowing and terrible’ time, according to a contemporary chronicler: ‘Enraged Turkish soldiers . . . gave no quarter . . . they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions.’1 Eight hundred years later this practice has resurfaced in Isis’s torture, beheading, crucifixion or enslavement of the ‘enemies of Islam’ in territories it has forcefully occupied.

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