War Before Civilization Quotes

“Our common humanity, viewed realistically, can be as much a source of despair as hope.”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

“Most of the evils attributed to civilization and progress—such as social inequality and subordination, murder, theft, rape, vandalism, and conquest—are found concentrated in the conduct and effects of war. Therefore, in a neo-Rousseauian world view, war itself constitutes one of the principal products of Western progress, and the precivilized condition and the non-Western world before European expansion must have been idyllic and peaceful. As ever, when faith in the myth of progress declines, the myth of the golden age finds new adherents. THE”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“Primitive (and guerrilla) warfare consists of war stripped to its essentials: the murder of enemies; the theft or destruction of their sustenance, wealth, and essential resources; and the inducement in them of insecurity and terror. It conducts the basic business of war without recourse to ponderous formations or equipment, complicated maneuvers, strict chains of command, calculated strategies, time tables, or other civilized embellishments. When civilized soldiers meet adversaries so unencumbered, they too must shed a considerable weight of intellectual baggage and physical armor just to even the odds.”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“Cynics have observed that those who have benefited the most from “progress”—the citizens of the First World—are the people most inclined to disdain it. The privileged few who eat better, lead longer and more stimulating lives because of modern agriculture, medicine, education, mass communications, and travel, and are most cushioned from physical discomfort and inconvenience by industrial technology are the most nostalgic about the primitive world. This attitude is more difficult to find among the real “victims of progress” in the Third World except among members of these nations’ Western-educated elites.”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“Efficiency is a ratio, not an absolute.”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

“It was the concentration of resources and power in hierarchical political organizations, the millions of cannon-fodder citizens subject to their disposal, the galleon, compass and sextant, the ox-wagon, steam engine, railroads, and factory production, as well as smallpox, measles, and weeds, that allowed the nations of western Europe to gain ascendancy over the uncivilized world during the past half-millennium. It was not the much discussed and theatrical weaponry, discipline, and tactical techniques that gave soldiers their eventual triumphs, but their mastery of the rather pedestrian arcana of logistics. In modern guerrilla warfare, when superior primitive tactics are wedded to even very limited civilized logistics, more completely civilized adversaries are very commonly discomfited. Guerrilla warfare merely incorporates manpower and supply capacities on a civilized scale and uses more up-to-date weaponry. Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means. The”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“Military ferocity is not a fixed quality of any race or culture, but a temporary condition that usually bears the seeds of it own destruction. FRONTIERS”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“Except in geographical scale, tribal warfare could be and often was total war in every modern sense. Like states and empires, smaller societies can make a desolation and call it peace. TERRITORIAL”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“To a great extent, the superior transportation and agricultural technology of Europe and its efficient economic and logistic methods made possible its triumph over the primitive world, not its customary military techniques and advanced weapons. The”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“There is simply no proof that warfare in small-scale societies was a rarer or less serious undertaking than among civilized societies. In general, warfare in prestate societies was both frequent and important. If anything, peace was a scarcer commodity for members of bands, tribes, and chiefdoms than for the average citizen of a civilized state.”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization

“In intellectual and popular culture, war has come to be regarded by many as a peculiar psychosis of Western civilization. This atmosphere of Western self-reproach and neo-Rousseauian nostalgia is prevalent in the views espoused by many postwar anthropologists.”
― Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization