The roots of ancient Rome's gladiator fights
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How can people be so blood-thirsty that it's ok to sacrifice over 600 men for nothing more than a "spectacle"? It's really difficult to understand how a highly civilized society for the time could have almost no respect for human life.
They were a slave society and were particularly harsh on slaves, and particularly rebellious slaves. The cruelty of a society where crucifixion (scaleable, low labour cost, torturing to death) was a standard punishment is mind boggling.
Then there was all the rape (of slaves, it was fine, even children) and other cruelties.
Civilized does not necessarily mean nice.
From Tacitus:
It was subsequently decided that Sejanus’ remaining children should be executed, though the mass anger had abated and the majority had been placated by the previous deaths. They were therefore carried off to prison, the boy (Capito Aelianus) aware of his fate, the girl (Junilla) so innocent that she kept asking what she had done wrong and where they were taking her, that she would not do it again and surely could be punished with a trivial beating. Historians of the time say that as it was thought to be unheard-of for capital punishment to be inflicted on a virgin, she was violated by the executioner, the noose beside her; both children were then strangled and their young bodies thrown down the Gemonian Stairs.
The rape by executioners was a uniquely Roman twist AFAIK, but executing children to punish parents was not. For example, it was done to a traitor's family in 19th century Sri Lanka (repugnance at this helped the British overthrow the last remaining independent kingdom on the island). Probably many other places did the same.
> He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death." In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband." "I regret that, even though the marriages were legal," he said. Why the regret, if the marriages were "legal?" "Because," he went on, "I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning.
https://m.jpost.com/iranian-threat/news/i-wed-iranian-girls-...
Records from other groups are pretty rare and largely coloured by those later ones who came after them and can put lot of blame on them. While very well scrubbing their own wrong doings.
Fast forward more than a thousand years to the multiple crusades.
Today we can say that Christianity has mostly calmed down, but it took basically 2000 years.
For example, the crusades are often presented as an unprovoked war, but started in response to an appeal for help to hold back the expanding Turkish empire, and aimed to conquer (arguably liberate) lands that had been subject to fairly recent invasion by the Arab and Turkish Empires and still had large (maybe majority?) Christian populations.
It took place in the context of Arab occupation of large chunks of Europe (most of Spain, Mediterranean islands including Sicily) and invasion of more (southern France, southern Italy).
I would say that in many ways Christianity has done the opposite of "calm down" in the last few hundred years. The adoption of the (originally Arab Muslim) argument of "the curse of Ham" to justify racism (and slavery) in early modern times (mostly by people with a financial incentive to believe it) was one nasty development, and the(still continuing) rise of Biblical literalism in the last two hundred years or so is another disaster.
If you are interested in a real history of Christianity in the West then Dominion by Tom Holland is excellent.
And I guess it's unfair to pick on the US for that - that kind of trait is pretty much universal. All you have to do is to see the other side as less than human.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way#The_crucifixion_of_...
We all have good and bad in us, we are biologically the same as those Romans, and as all the people who do good things. We can choose, and we can bring out the good (or bad) in each other. Look at the society we've built, where such things are unthinkable.
We are Neolithic animals with miraculous technology and far too little time to evolve at the same pace.
Homo homini lupus.
This was more like a fancy UFC fight. They could end in death and the Romans held public executions in the stadium, but people weren’t THAT bloodthirsty.
If people want to see randos fighting they might as well go outside tavern or bar after closing time...
As in, soldiers draw lots, one in ten get the short straw, and the ”lucky” nine-tenths beat the unlucky one-tenth of the regiment to death by hand.
Not a great time in our history.
https://www.amazon.com/Defeat-East-Juergen-Thorwald/dp/05531...
People are still the same. We're called "murder apes" for a reason.
Jürgen Thorwald was a real former Nazi propagandist.
The German version of Defeat in the East was written only 10 years after another of his books has been published with a foreword of Hermann Göring in it. It is interesting as a contemporary document and Thorwald changed his public attitude after the defeat of the Reich - but it is by no means a reliable account of the war.
A modern work like Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands shows human cruelty in the same impactful way while being far more accurate. Again, my intention is not to put any agenda in your mouth but to give some (in my opinion very important) context regarding your recommendation.
The Wild Frontier, by William Osborn
Gruesome Harvest, by Ralph Keeling
Andersonville, by Makinlay Kantor
I did not get very far reading them. I don't want those images in my mind. I'll look into the book you suggested.
1. Slaves were thought to be sub-human, and people largely didn't care about a handful of them dying. You don't have to go back all the way to ancient Rome to find that attitude among the general public. Many highly civilized societies as recently as 1800-1900 felt the same way.
2. A lot of gladiators were willing professionals, and had chosen the career with the risks in mind.
If that's how they treated their own soldiers, imagine slaves.
Not an excuse but decimation wasn’t a light punishment.
EDIT: the cases subcomments mention fall under the banner of "desertion" and/or refusal to follow orders (essentially rebellion), which, even in modern armies, carries a stiff penalty. Not quite decimation but its a serious crime.
While it's open rebellion, that's not at all the same as them attacking Rome. To me, it sounds more in line with Muhammad Ali refusing to fight the Vietnam war.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4v1ftx/how_w...
That said, it was 320 pairs of gladiators, so you'd assume 320 deaths or fewer, rather than "over 600".
Trauma medicine and medicine in general was non-existent compared to today. So any open cuts or large amount of bleeding can easily kill person.
> How can people be so blood-thirsty that it's ok to sacrifice over 600 men for nothing more than a "spectacle"?
Isn't the world today largely standing by and watching the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of mostly women and children? That has not valid military purpose.. It's just retribution, ethnic displacement and genocide.
Example: the Sderot night cinema [1]. No matter your position on the conflict, these are people who are treating the mass bomardment and death of civilians as popcorn-worthy entertainment.
Genetic heritage of the survivors of the transatlantic slave trade show a dark history of mass rape of enslaved women [2].
The occupation of Germany at the end of WW2 came with rape on a massive scale [3].
My point is that we, as people, stand by and let atrocities happen routinely so how are Roman atrocities really that different?
Oh, and 600 gladiators is really nothing. When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, of the ~!3 million people, ~1 million were killed and another ~1 million were enslaved. The former province of Dacia ceased to exist. It is now modern day Romania. "Rome" is the root word there. The Dacians were literally wiped out.
[1]: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/13/israel-sderot-ga...
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/26/us/dna-transatlantic-slave-tr...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...
I think that it can be a bit difficult to differentiate pro-forma traditions from what actually occurred. E.g. roman mores were quite different from ours but I'm not sure that marriage at 12 was much aside from an engagement. For exampl with later european marriages might have happened at similar ages but weren't actually consummated until the spouses where in their late teens or older. From a practical standpoint, if you marry someone to cement an alliance, it isn't a good look if you get them pregnant at 12 and they die in childbirth because they are too young to successfully deliver a baby.
Even terminology can be misleading as Naomi Wolfe famously found out when writing about homosexuality in Victorian Britain. She wrote about homosexuals being given the death penalty but was embarassed when an interviewer pointed out that one of the men she wrote about was tried and apparently given the death penalty multiple times over several years. Turns out when someone was tried and an entry of "death recorded" was made, it actually meant that their sentence was commuted to jail time or they were pardoned.
Is sacrificing 100,000 innocent civilians in hiroshima for spectacle any better?
> It's really difficult to understand how a highly civilized society for the time could have almost no respect for human life.
Ever read the Iliad? Or the hebrew bible? Besides, you become 'highly civilized' by killing everyone who disagrees with you and proclaiming yourself 'highly civilized'.
It's always been this way. Rome wasn't civilized. It was genocidal and brutal. The most genocidal and brutal of its time.
And if you think caesar was bad, augustus was far more brutal. But his savagery saved the 'civilized' roman empire.
Hiroshima both in scale and barbarity is orders of magnitude worse than what the romans did. But then again, we model ourselves after the romans...
Your comment and the downvote proves my point. Though we think we are civilized today, we are just as evil and barbaric as ever. We rationalize our barbarity just like the romans and everyone else does. No civilized person or people would even dream of rationalizing something as evil as nuking innocent and defenseless civilians.
To make it brief, every single landmass occupied by Japanese forces and civilians offered fierce resistance/guerilla warfare to invading/liberating forces. Additionally, as another commenter has noted, the Japanese military had significantly increased their numbers to a staggering 6 million troops towards the end. The death toll projections, based on the above, for a mass land invasion of Japan were many factors greater than the life cost of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined - many, many factors greater.
The Japanese government did not just refuse to surrender, but continued to wage war. This meant either a land invasion, or some alternative were necessary to compel the government into surrender.
Dropping the second nuclear bomb accomplished this goal - particularly when accompanied by the (empty) threat of dropping many more until surrender.
It also should be noted both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were central to the Japanese war economy/machine and were not simply civilian population centers. Regardless, the loss of life directly from the bombings and indirectly from the aftermath is still calculated to have been significantly less than the loss of life had a ground invasion been waged.
If you are willing to see the narrative from another perspective here are some links:
Firebombings of Tokyo: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/asia/japan-tokyo-fire-raids-o...
Court ruling about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (deemed unlawful acts of war = war crime) https://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/53/Shimoda-...
The Battle of Okinawa alone had nearly 200,000 military casualties and another 150,000 civilian deaths.[1]
People asserting dropping of the bombs was wrong in any way are divorced from reality. Their position is devoid of all facts.
To be blunt. Dropping of the atomic bombs was not just the right decision, it was the most humane decision.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa#:~:text=Th....
From an official US atomic historian, a survey of the breadth of opinion on the use of the atomic weapons, from just after until more recently: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...
There are many entries there on many aspects of atomic weapons and a wealth of declassified contemporary material.
As you can see you're largely repeating one position of a broad field as if it were gospel and there were no other positions and no evolution of the debate.
Many of your points are those that came into being after the use of the bomb, back fitted proto Cold War era justifications.
There was relatively little thought put into using the weapons at the time other than a sense of urgency to field test two distinct designs resulting from the most expensive weapons development program in histrory that didn't produce anything useful until after the Germans surrended.
Hiroshimo & Nagasaki were to be bombed regardless, they were way down the punch list and followed on from 72 other Japanese cities destroyed via firebombing and conventional high explosives.
They were selected not for their importance (they were much further down the last than mid 70's) but because they were relatively untouched and made for good test sites for "just the atomic bomb damage".
There is no "arguing further on this topic", that was my only contribution, and I reiterate it.
Circle back to the original material and the historic commentary on that material, it's not clear whether you have read any of it let alone grasped the breadth of it.
The question here is if japan would have surrendered without the Atomic bombs. There is not enough evidence for it being True or False.
Many modern historians claim that japan would have surrendered anyway because its military was in shambles. They hoped for a conditional surrender. The bombs were frightening, but didnt create more damage than the previous firebombings. The fact that the Soviet Union joined the was on the western flank of japan was probably the straw. It blocked all future possibilities of diplomatic conditional surrender by pleading with the Russians. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bomb test sites and at least a hundred thousand innocent people died just to see the end-product of the most expensive weapons program ever. If Germany would have done it, all the people in the chain of command would have probably been hanged for war crimes.
Because we got to 350k casualties from just the US with the bomb.
I have. Beyond the propaganda and all the nonsense. But you don't need to read deeper to understand evil is evil. Nothing justifies acts of genocide like nuking civilians.
> If anyone sacrificed the people of Hiroshima, it was the Japanese Imperialist Government that refused to surrender despite the obvious obliteration of their conventional forces.
The japanese government had been suing for peace for more than a year prior to hiroshima. But even if they didn't, it still doesn't justify nuking civilians. Just because a government doesn't act in a manner you want doesn't justify murdering civilians. That's the logic of terrorists. Killing civilians to hurt the government. If your morality aligns with terrorists, you really should reassess your moral foundations.
> To make it brief...
You just spouted off propaganda that we all are spoonfed via media and school system. I'm surprised you didn't include the nonsense about purple hearts.
> It also should be noted both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were central to the Japanese war economy/machine and were not simply civilian population centers
More terrorist logic. Just because Manhattan is the center of the US economy doesn't justify 9/11.
That you are trying to justify hiroshima and the nuking of civilians just proves my point. Evil and barbaric. There is no justification for genocide. Period.
Citation needed. That's just war: don't like being >insert atrocity here'd< then don't lose.
WW2 was fought under the doctrine of "total war". All of a society's resources; including civilians and industry, were part of your war effort. That in turn meant that civilians and industry were considered legitimate military targets. Under that doctrine, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate targets. If the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, then the alternative was not that those cities stayed standing. The alternative was that the cities would be carpet bombed.
Personally, I think that the lesson that we should take away is not so much that dropping the atomic bombs was wrong; rather it's that the doctrine of total war that made dropping the atomic bombs permissible was wrong.
No. The US started the war with economic sanctions. This is a historical fact.
> They could have issued an unconditional surrender and the fighting would have stopped within hours.
They could have. Or the US could have accepted japan's conditional surrender. Just because a government refuses to surrender doesn't justify murdering innocent civilians. Do you think if a criminal refuses to surrender, the cops are justified in murdering the criminal's wife and children?
> All of the deaths in Hiroshima were entirely their responsibility.
No. The responsibility lies on the people who dropped the nukes.
What you and your ilk are doing is using terrorist logic to justify murdering civilians. Murdering civilians because you don't like the actions of a government is terrorist logic. When you share the morality of terrorists, you should reevaluate your moral foundation.
But you prove my point. Evil is alive and well. Justifying genocide and nuking of civilians is evil.
Like Ukraine started a war with Russia by economic alignment with the western powers, or Poland starting a war with Germany in WW II for their offenses against German citizens.
> This is a historical fact.
It's very poor form to introduce a not only controversial opinion but a wholly subjective one, then claim that opinion to be a fact. It erases any credibility you might think you have.
The ukraine war started when the US and Russia agreed to partition ukraine. Like the germans and soviets did to poland in ww2. Ukraine has no say in the matter. No more than poland did in the 1930s. Ukraine didn't start anything. Ukraine can't stop anything.
> or Poland starting a war with Germany in WW II for their offenses against German citizens.
No. The war in poland started when the Germans and the Soviets decided to divided poland up. Sound familiar?
> It's very poor form to introduce a not only controversial opinion but a wholly subjective one
It's not controversial. It's a fact. Sanctions are an act of war. Blocking trade is an act of war. You blockade 90+% of oil to a country, it's a declaration of war. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why pearl harbor happened.
Sanctions started to be imposed in 1938. But Japan invaded Manchuria in 1933 and by 1937 invaded China and had already perpetrated the Nanking Massacre. The sanctions were in part a response to the invasion of China and Japanese atrocities against China.
And? You realize that 1938 is before 1941?
> But Japan invaded Manchuria in 1933 and by 1937 invaded China and had already perpetrated the Nanking Massacre.
The US ( and much of europe ) invaded china in the 1800s and by 1937 had committed hundreds of massacres. What's your point? Why was Nanking so important? Oh that's right, it was the center of american and european colonization of china.
> The sanctions were in part a response to the invasion of China and Japanese atrocities against China.
No. The sanctions were in response to japan taking american and european possessions in china. Had nothing to do with atrocities in china.
If the US cared about atrocities against china, we would have sanctioned the british, germans, russians, italians, french, etc long before we sanctioned the japanese. Heck we would have sanctioned ourselves long before we sanctioned japan for committing atrocities against japan.
BTW, the only nationality explicitly banned from the US was the chinese with the Chinese Exclusion Act. The idea that the US cared about chinese lives is laughable.
If you stand back and look at the garbage propaganda you are regurgitating, youd' realize how silly it all is.
"We dropped the nuke to save japanese lives". "We sanctioned japan to save chinese lives". Amazing how racist white supremacists cared so much about asian lives.
Sanctions were imposed in response to Japan invading China among other things. Japan was clearly the aggressor in Asia before 1938. Sanctions weren't the reason for Japan attacking, it was already on the path to do so before 1938.
> The US ( and much of europe ) invaded china in the 1800s and by 1937 had committed hundreds of massacres. What's your point?
The bad behavior of other countries didn't give Japan the license to invade China and engage in the same behaviors.
>Why was Nanking so important? Oh that's right, it was the center of american and european colonization of china.
No, Nanking is probably the most widely publicized and documented of Japan's atrocities against Chinese civilian populations.
> BTW, the only nationality explicitly banned from the US was the chinese with the Chinese Exclusion Act. The idea that the US cared about chinese lives is laughable.
Although the Chinese were initially targeted in the Chinese exclusion act, the bans there were expanded to include southern europeans and all of asia (e.g. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923).
> No. The US started the war with economic sanctions. This is a historical fact.
Ah, you are the kind of person who consider the US the aggressor of the Pacific War. You could have started your argument with that; it would've saved time for everyone.
You mean the country that colonized japan ( twice ), philippines, korea, china, vietnam, not to mention stole hawaii and a bunch of pacific islands? Yes. We have been aggressors in the pacific for centuries.
But if you are talking about US-Japan war, it is historical fact that US sanctions ( an act of war ) was the beginning of US-Japan war.
If you are talking about the overall Pacific War, then it's complicated. European and american invasion and colonization of almost all of asia spurred japan militarization and eventual war.
But regardless, doesn't matter who the aggressor was. Nuking innocent civilians is evil. Period.
It was in every sense of the word.
> I guess the first event you're referring to is Perry's gunboat diplomacy that brought an end to the Tokugawa isolationism
Not isolationism. Japan didn't isolate itself. It maintained contacts with their 'civilized' neighbors china, korea, etc. Japan simply banned imperial european nations because imperial european nations were behaving badly in japan. Heck even then, they still had european contacts.
The gunboat diplomacy didn't bring an end to isolationism. It ended japan's sovereignty and japan's pathetic attempt to keep european colonizers at bay. It was the start of american/european exploitation and colonization of japan.
> the second is the occupation post WWII.
Yes. The only difference being that the former colonization didn't involved war while the latter did.
> Neither of these involved the economic exploitation and imposition of total hegemony that typify imperialistic colonization
Perry went to japan precisely for economic reasons. To expand US whaling to the other side of the pacific since we wiped out all our whales along our shores. And post ww2 colonization is predominantly about economic exploitation. We literally forced japan to tank their economy in the 80s to enrich ourselves.
> After all, we don't generally say that the US colonized West Germany after the war.
But we say that about the soviet union and east germany... Welcome to the wonderful world of propaganda. Where we have allies whom we firebombed and nuked. While the enemy has 'vassals and colonies and satellites'.
Japan is the most poignant example of american economic colonization. It's the longest lasting and most brutal example of it. We just don't see the obvious because we are programmed by propaganda. Just look at all the propaganda in response to my original comment. If china or russia nuked japan and took it over. It would be obvious because the propaganda would tell us so.
Also to say it was just some barbaric test sort of ignores the fact that Japan did not surrender after the first bomb was dropped, they weren't some innocent bystander, they were actively running offensive military campaigns through 1944, and their intention was to continue fighting the war - until the US proved that they had the resources to do it a second time (and therefore unknowably many times, as far as Japan knew).
There's also a credible argument to be made that the US dropping nuclear bombs on Japan might've had a net positive effect on total lives lost if the war continued another 6 months. You can absolutely debate which lives were lost versus saved, and the ethics of either route - but to just pass it off as some "barbaric human experiment" seems a little disingenuous.
Yes. A bunch of elderly and young boys 'armed' with broomsticks. That you have to resort this level of nonsense should tell you something...
> they were actively running offensive military campaigns through 1944
You do know that hiroshima occurred in the latter half of 1945 right?
> There's also a credible argument to be made that the US dropping nuclear bombs on Japan might've had a net positive effect on total lives lost if the war continued another 6 months.
There is no credible argument. Just propaganda.
There is no defense of genocide and war crimes period. Doesn't stop evil people who rationalize the genocide of the native americans, hiroshima/nagasaki, holocaust, etc. But then again the genocide of the native americans, hiroshima, nagasaki, etc happens because of evil people in 'civilized' nations.
It's amazing that you fail to realize that you are proving me correct. Evil and barbarity is alive and well today. Just like in ww2. Just like in the days of caesar and augustus.
You are correct that the Japanese government had lost at least much of it's will to fight. However, the US believed that the military was likely to stage a coup if the government attempted to surrender.
If the Allies had to engage in an island hopping campaign, then the lives lost likely would have outnumbered those lost to the atomic bombs.
The US wanted to end the war before the Soviet Union had time to get involved and start gaining territory; which they would likely have annexed. In the long term, it has probably been a good thing for Japan that they did not get that chance.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate targets under the then accepted doctrine of total war.
Sure. If you are new to the discussion. But I'm not. I've come across all the rationalizations and of course the propaganda all my life. It's always the people peddling debunked propaganda who demand that propaganda be taken seriously.
> The dropping of the atomic bomb was significantly more nuanced that what you are suggesting.
Who cares? It's genocide. It's a war crime. It is pure evil. No excuse for it.
> If the Allies had to engage in an island hopping campaign, then the lives lost likely would have outnumbered those lost to the atomic bombs.
Are you seriously arguing the most racist nation on earth ( US ) cared about a bunch of non-white japanese lives? You do realize that the US had banned japanese immigration decades earlier because the japanese were inferior asians right? The genocidal firebombings of much of japan and hiroshima/nagasaki prove that the US did care about japanese lives.
> The US wanted to end the war before the Soviet Union had time to get involved and start gaining territory;
If so, the US would have accept japan's surrender in 1944 when japan start offering peace terms.
> Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate targets under the then accepted doctrine of total war.
No they weren't. If japan or germany had nuked the US, those involved would have been tried and executed for war crimes/crimes against humanity.
You are just regurgitating debunked and pathetic propaganda I've heard many times. All one has to do is think to see through the nonsense.
How pathetic do you have to be to believe a white supremacist nation/government cared about saving japanese lives? The rationalization of evil. It's always evil that rationalizes the most. You sound more ridiculous than nazis who claim hitler tried to save the jews from the soviet communists. Imagine believing we nuked the japanese civilians to save japanese lives. That's beyond dumb and evil.
You should. Being able to understand that the world is nuanced, entertain positions that you disagree with, and consider different views is an important life skill; both when forming one's worldview and in normal social interactions. Ironically, it's precisely those sorts of skills that we need to prevent an atomic bomb from ever being dropped in the future.