The abnormality of war.(War: The Lethal Custom)(book )(Book Review)

War: The Lethal Custom, by Gwynne Dyer. Scribe Publications, 2005, $45.

IN THE MID-1980S Gwynne Dyer produced a seven-part television series entitled War for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The accompanying book and the series apparently sold to over forty-five countries. He has updated his War book to take into account the World Trade Center destruction as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At last a book that clearly defines how and why we humans insist on settling our disagreements with armed conflict? At last an "anatomy of war" which sets out why for the past 10,000 years we have done battles with vast armies of soldiers and why we have spent so much time and effort in inventing more ingenious and lethal weapons of mass killing and destruction? At last a book that clearly reveals why we, as a species, are so stupid? Unfortunately, War is not such a book.

Random House, the book's Canadian publisher, claims War is "one of the most compelling analyses of the history of armed conflict". Oh really? Strange that in a book about war history there is no reference to Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany or Joseph Stalin. Why? Because this is a book about group guilt--why we as a race (Westerners) are to blame, not why crazed individuals, or sensitive patriots, may have had a hand in the business of going to war.

War is a bit like a children's puzzle where you connect the numbered dots and suddenly the answer is revealed. Meat-eating chimps, aggressive baboons, hunter-gatherer societies (at peace), primitive farmer societies wanting to protect their grain (war-like), towns and cities, armies, bows and arrows, gunpowder, cannons, tanks, aircraft, nuclear bombs ... Perfidious America!

You know you are in for a beating when Gwynne hits you with:

 
   The implicit racism in the traditional Euro-centric 
   view of history has been rightly condemned and yet 
   any serious history of human civilisation, including 
   war, still has to concentrate on the doings of Middle 
   Eastern dawn civilisations and their Mediterranean, 
   European and "Western" heirs.