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I read a fair number of books. Under the old system of posting ~3500 word essays (Posts? Diatribes? Jeremiads?) once a week, very few books made the cut for a discussion of that length. But now that my writing/posting is looser I’m thinking I’ll do more reviews. In fact I think I’m going to try to review all the books I read in this space. It will still be somewhat rare for a single book to get a post all to itself, I’m planning to toss most of them into an end of the month round-up. Also, I should mention that many years ago I came up with a book review format, which I quite liked, so I’ll be dusting it off and using it in this space. And while I just said that most books will not warrant an entry all to themselves, this one does:
Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick
By: David Frye
304 pages
Format: Audiobook with physical copy for reference
Rating
A-
Who should read this book?
If you like history, particularly sweeping thematic examinations of history which cover thousands of years all at once, you should definitely read this book.
You should also read this book if you want the entire backstory of the current debate over walls and border security. It may not change your mind, but you will end up with the deepest context possible for the issue.
Representative passage:
As Rome went, so went the provinces. For nearly three hundred years, Roman cities had given little thought to protecting their citizens, relying, just as Aristides said, on faraway troops and eventually border walls to hold the frontier against the warlike peoples massed outside. Some cities, mostly the older ones, had outgrown their ancient walls. Others had never had any walls at all.
In the whole of world history there had never been an experiment as grand as that of an empire composed mostly of unwalled cities. By leaving so many towns undefended, the Romans had adopted a comprehensive approach to local security—hundreds of miles of border walls and other barriers designed to create a massive impenetrable shield over all Western civilization. In the aftermath of the third-century invasions, that all changed: the emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305) implemented a program to fortify the suddenly insecure cities of the western provinces. It was the last great construction boom of a city-building empire, and it was an act that repudiated every Roman belief in what a city should be.
With due deliberation, the wall builders dismantled those splendid, open cities that their fathers had created in earlier more confident days. Buildings in the paths of the new walls were razed. Some were torn down simply to provide stone. In the rush to fortify the cities, the relentless chisels of the laborers broke apart tombs, temples, columns, baths, theaters, and amphitheaters. They tore friezes, relief sculptures, and capitals from their settings, using the bigger blocks for masonry and crushing the rest for rubble. Many an inscription, once intended to ensure immortal glory, was wrenched from its proper place to rest ingloriously among the bricks, masonry, and concrete of a rampart.
Thoughts
Everywhere I look I see examples of people who have essentially no historical knowledge, and what little they do “know” is worse than the ignorance, because it’s a complete misinterpretation of actual history. The chief value of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick is that it takes one specific subject where deep historical misinterpretation and ignorance exists and shows conclusively how it was misinterpreted and what the facts actually are. As you might guess from the title that subject is the building of walls.
One of the most common ways for history to be misinterpreted is to give far too much weight to recent history, and far too little to more ancient history. I’m sure that on some level this sort of ignorance has always existed, but I suspect that it’s much worse now than it’s ever been, particularly on the subject of walls. As you might imagine from a history book “Walls” starts with the very oldest wall (built around 2000 BC in Syria; no one knows much about it;) and moves forward to the present day. I’m going to take something of the opposite approach and start out by covering the modern views and misconceptions of walls, before going back to a (brief) discussion of historical walls.
It probably goes without saying that if you bring up the idea of a wall today, people’s minds immediately jump to Trump’s “big beautiful wall”, and given that association, people either hate the idea or love it. And it’s unfortunate that this is as far as most people get when considering the idea of a wall. But for those that do go farther they don’t go much farther. Mostly they journey to 1991 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I think it’s safe to say that the Berlin Wall has a horrible reputation. And for most of the people who do make it this far back in history, that’s enough. The Berlin Wall was bad and therefore all walls are bad. The point that there’s a world of difference between a country building a wall to keep people in and building a wall to keep people out gets brought up again and again, with, as far as I can tell, no discernible impact. Here’s what Frye had to say:
For the time being, however, the Wall…has firmly attached itself to our historical memory. In modern debates on walls, the Berlin Wall figures in almost every utterance. It is the universal example, perpetually at hand, perpetually tossed into discussions of barriers with which it had absolutely nothing in common.
…
The Wall shed its former role as a symbol of communist oppression and acquired an entirely new image in a foggy-minded popular imagination that remembered the Wall but couldn’t quite recall who’d built it or why.
The Berlin Wall had always had impeccable timing—making its grand appearance at the height of the Cold War and bowing out in spectacular fashion to bring the Cold War to its conclusion. It would now embark on its second career with similar timeliness, returning to the stage as a symbol of all border walls, just as they were about to make a reappearance around the world.
(Emphasis in the original)
As I’ve said the misinterpretation of the Berlin Wall is unfortunate, but if it had never existed, I’m not sure the current (low) opinion of walls would be very much different, because only a few decades before the Berlin Wall there was the Maginot Line. For those who might be unfamiliar with the Line. It was a series of fortified bunkers and gun emplacements (the French called them ouvrages) guarding the border between France and Germany. The Line was finished in 1939. Which would have been excellent timing if the Germans had not merely gone around it. Unfortunately, the French considered the Ardennes Forest to be “impassable” and they didn’t fortify their border with the Low Countries either. The Germans proved that the forest was eminently “passable” and beyond that they’ve never much cared about the sovereignty of the Low Countries.
The fall of France came swiftly, and it was with equal rapidity that the Maginot Line joined the Great Wall in that growing list of symbols that compose our mental shorthand when thinking about walls. For the next fifty years, at least, writers could speak of a “Maginot Line psychology” when dismissing some misplaced faith in the power of sanctuary. Historians applied the term retroactively. The great Persianist Richard Frye spoke of Sasanid Persia’s “Maginot Line mentality” when describing its system of walls. Arthur Waldron compared the Great Wall of China to the Maginot Line.
Perhaps, if the French had been wise enough to extend the Line (it’s possible they would have done just that had they been given more time) it’s story and place in history would be entirely different. As it turns out, when the Germans did decide destroy the Maginot Line, that despite being able to attack it from both sides, and using aerial bombardment and artillery, they were unable to destroy or capture a single ouvrage. The defenders eventually surrendered only when their food started getting low and when ordered to by the French commander in chief. A World War II where the Germans never made it across the borders of France would have been a very different war from the one we ended up with.
But, as you may have gathered from the quote, no discussion of walls would be complete without considering that zenith of historical wall-building, the Great Wall of China. It’s very fashionable these days to dismiss the Great Wall as a staggeringly expensive and deadly failure. And from there to go on to dismiss all walls, ever, but this may be the greatest misinterpretation of all.
To be clear there were a lot of negatives to the Great Wall of China and historical walls in general. They were deadly for the workers. They were horribly expensive. Unless they stretched the entire length of the border you could go around them. Also they were only as good as the men who guarded them. If a general could be bribed, (as one was in an oft-repeated story about the Great Wall) then it didn’t matter how secure they were. And yet in every region of the world (New and Old) and in every historical era walls kept getting built, despite all of these costs.
I don’t have the space to get into all of the numerous historical examples. To discuss the difference between the wall-less Spartans and the wall-building Athenians. To review all of the many Chinese walls which predate the Great Wall, stretching all the way back to 800 BC. For that you have to read the book. I will only offer up the falling observation. You have a choice between only two conclusions. One, that despite all of their weaknesses, and despite the enormous cost in blood and treasure, that walls provided a significant net benefit to the kingdoms and nations which constructed them. Or, two, that nearly all civilizations, throughout all of history were seized with the same irrational wall-building madness. Pursuing damaging and misguided policies again and again despite the evidence.
This takes us to the current misinterpretations plaguing the debate over walls. Apparently, there are a significant number of people who believe in conclusion two. In fact in the link I gave earlier about how the Great Wall was a staggeringly expensive and deadly failure, the author includes a quote from Arthur Waldron (the person who also compared the Great Wall to the Maginot Line) who suggested, “There was a cheaper solution, as it turns out, which was to simply do some trade with the Mongols.” I’m not sure the hundreds of thousands of people who died in the Sack of Baghdad would agree. In any event, whether they’ve actually adopted conclusion two, or if their historical thinking extends back no further than the Berlin Wall, in the West all the current talk is about building bridges not walls. (This is only in the West by the way, everywhere else a Second Age of Walls has begun. Lead by Saudi Arabia which has already built a wall longer than the one proposed by Trump.)
Frye had this to say on the subject of bridges:
“Good fences make good neighbors” experienced early retirement. In its place came the untested phrase “Build bridges not walls.” If nothing else, the new slogan seemed designed to give military historian fits. Throughout history, bridge building had been recognized as an act of aggression. Since at least the time of Xerxes bridging the Hellespont, Caesar the Rhine, or Trajan the Danube, bridge building had preceded invasions, enabling troop movements across natural barriers, and as late as the twentieth century, military uses had figured prominently in the thinking behind the bridges of Germany’s autobahn and the American interstate highway system. None of this was enough to slow the rise of a hot catchphrase. The slogan showed up on T-shirts, wristbands, and banners. It became a popular hashtag on Twitter. Protestors chanted it. Politicians invoked it. Even Pope Francis paraphrased the sentiment.
The arguments are fierce, and I think all sides could use the benefit of a historical perspective. “Walls” definitely provides it.
Criticisms
As I just mentioned Frye buttresses his argument that walls are still important by talking about all the walls which have recently been built. He points out, that in terms of length, there are more border walls than they have ever been. But what he doesn’t really talk about is how these walls have a significantly different purpose than past walls. They are not designed to keep out invading armies, they are designed to keep out immigrants. This is a big enough difference to have deserved more commentary than he gave it. While I basically agree with the points he made, the possibility certainly exists that modernity has changed things in a way that makes walls less useful. Of course the opposite is also possible, that technology has made them more useful, and while he does spend some time on that side of things, as a whole, the discussion of how modern walls might be different from ancient walls is lacking.
Beyond that my only other criticism is that he has this whole argument that one of the reasons people dislike walls is become of primitivism. That they have an idealized vision of a freer, more primitive state where there are no walls. As he points out this vision is entirely incorrect, but I’m not sure that it plays a very big role in current anti-wall sentiment, and although he didn’t spend that much time on it, the time he did spend could have better been spent elsewhere.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
How important have walls been in the history of civilization? Few civilized peoples have ever lived outside them.
If you enjoyed this review you know what would help me do more of them? More books. Can you guess how I get more books? More donations… And I really do promise I’ll spend it on books.
Vauban understood the principle that the longer the line you have to defend, the more difficult the defense. There are too many potential points of failure. As such, you should focus on really good defense of key structures and ignore the periphery. Perhaps the problem with modern States trying to build walls is that it doesn’t apply well when you have a long border.
Then again, the Western Front of WWI was effectively two very long walls both sides tried desperately to penetrate without success for years. So a concerted, heavy, time-limited effort can prevail against a determined foe.
Those two ideas don’t lend themselves well to the idea of a couple billion dollar border wall, but then large States have the resources for large projects like this. And proponents of a border wall in the USA are less concerned with keeping everyone out and more with reducing the total volume of illegal migration, which is an entirely different project than historical walls were tasked with. The idea of a continuous vigilant force of limited scope is not without precedent.
I still think it’s a dumb waste of money and will not ultimately be very effective. Especially since it’s really targeted at the idea of losing jobs to immigrants, which is hacking at the leaves of a problem not its roots. Hopefully with the changing economic situation this issue will disappear on its own in the next election.
My comment last week disappeared. Basically I said I don’t think Trump cares about the immigration issue personally and won’t push it in the general election unless his base wants it. If economics remains stable (big if) the Left won’t have to worry about the issue.
Sorry about the missing comment, I was starting to get a fair amount of spam so I installed Akismet, and I’m guessing it ate your comment.
I had planned on mentioning the effectiveness and length of the WWI walls, but there was never a good place to put it.
As far as the specific issue of the US border wall. As I mentioned Saudi Arabia, which has already built a wall, longer than the one proposed by trump, so it’s not that hard to imagine that the US could do it. And while I agree with you that people are overly fixated on the effectiveness, the Israeli wall is nearly 100% effective, and I think most wall supporters would be happy with a number less than that.
But speaking of support for the wall, I think it’s multifaceted, but I think a lot of people who don’t mind letting people in, they just want the ability to impose a standard on who get’s in, which we currently appear unable to do. (And I understand overstaying visas is a much bigger problem).
I don’t know much the Saudi wall, but the Israeli wall is clearly a case of old-fashioned anti-invasion wall building. Given they’ve been invaded by each of their neighbors, sometimes I’m coordination, that makes sense from a basic national defense perspective. I’m sure it also has some impact on illegal immigration, but the primary purpose of the wall is qualitatively distinct from the US case.
I’m not arguing that those who favor a wall for immigration restriction purposes have illegitimate concerns. I’m just saying I don’t think a wall will do much to address those concerns in the US system. It’s a great way to win votes, and given how the economy recovered (despite Trump’s insistence on a trade war) it was a lucky gamble that the current administration is likely not going to have to pay for.
But that doesn’t mean anyone’s real underlying concern was ever represented, let alone resolved. The wall is just a way to paper over a deep systemic problem.
I suspect Germany could have pierced the French line. I suggest the two recent HBO episodes from Game of Thrones, the ‘wall of fire’ in The Long Night and the Walls around Kings Landing in The Bells. It’s worth watching even if you haven’t followed GOT to this point. Tolkein style fantasy worlds always have an endless amount of history from before the story so whereever you jump on board there’s always going to be catching up.
Not sure I agree with your take on the Berlin Wall was only about keeping people in. It was also about keeping people out. North Korea, the ‘Iron Curtain’, East/West Germany, Israel-Palestine are all cases of extreme border control and security. These are a bit different than ancient siege walls meant to protect a city from an invading army or the French line. With that in mind what did Stalin do with soldiers who returned from the Spanish Revolution? The ‘walls’ the communists drew up on the surface ‘kept people in’ but I would say were more about keeping ideas out….the most important idea in Berlin’s case being that a person could be more successful and happier in West than East Berlin. I would say that was the idea that was more troubling to the East than the population drain of simply letting people leave.
Hence we get to Trump’s Wall which seems to fall more in line with this than not. Of course in the day of the Internet you can’t keep Spanish culture out by building a wall, but then the wall doesn’t keep illegal immigrants out either and they aren’t really the problem (if they are why does Trump hire them to work his country clubs?). Trump’s Wall is more akin to a grand monument. T I recall reading Saddam Hussein had a type of monument about the Iran-Iraq War. It was a series of large statues of Saddam pointing angrily over the border at Iran…message “they are the enemy” but, of course, it doesn’t actually do anything to stop an invading Iranian military.
Of course the need to make Iran the enemy in Iraq was from a Sunni dictator running a Shia majority country with a Shia dominated country next door. Saddam built a ‘wall of war’ to keep Iranian ideas out….actually less about keeping actual ideas from actual Iranians out but keeping ideas from Iraqis themselves bottled up.
It seems fitting then that the first alt-right President invests so much of his capital in what is more of a virtual monument meant to law down some type of victory in a cultural debate in the US while actually accomplishing very little. There’s an air of desperation to the whole affair of ‘culture warriors’ who have more or less given up on trying to get people to go along with their view of culture and instead think they can somehow ‘lock it in’ with stone. Seems to me this has more to do with the overproduction and overprotection of Confederate War monuments than it does to analogies to historical walls around medieval cities.
I’m still kind of mad about GoT. I feel like GRRM broke the ancient pact. In all previous times and places, people who read the book could be ahead of and superior to those who watched the movie (or TV show) but by allowing the show to pass him, he broke the ancient covenant.
As far as the Berlin Wall keeping people out, I assume maybe it kept out some US intelligence agents, but do you have any examples of a non-governmental individual trying to break into East Germany? And not for the LULZ either, but someone who genuinely wanted to live there?
As far as you’re comparing Trump’s wall to Confederate war monuments, I guess I see where you’re headed, but I don’t agree with it at all. For one there are probably easier ways to make a mark, also you can argue about the utility of the wall, but you can’t argue that illegal immigrants don’t exist, and that people don’t feel threatened by them (justified or not).
Are the Saudi and Israeli and Hungarian walls similarly just monuments? Or is it for some reason only Trump?
“but do you have any examples of a non-governmental individual trying to break into East Germany? And not for the LULZ either, but someone who genuinely wanted to live there?”
The idea being kept out by the wall was that life was better in the West than East. Little could be done about Western media but to dismiss it as propaganda but nothing could stop such an idea if large numbers of people had family who made the crossing and reported back that things were great.
“As far as you’re comparing Trump’s wall to Confederate war monuments, I guess I see where you’re headed, but I don’t agree with it at all. For one there are probably easier ways to make a mark, also you can argue about the utility of the wall, but you can’t argue that illegal immigrants don’t exist, and that people don’t feel threatened by them (justified or not).”
Of course they exist, so what? Note that support for the wall almost always veers up when you have fewer rather than more immigrants in a community. Those holding ‘unjustified beliefs’ are just a long winded way of saying they are in it for some type of symbolic high. If you think they aren’t then just tell them the illegal problem has been solved. Since as you say they aren’t moored well to reality then no need to fact check what is said to them.
“Are the Saudi and Israeli and Hungarian walls similarly just monuments? Or is it for some reason only Trump?”
Don’t know, no, probably yes.
Regarding the first, it is interesting that Saudi Arabia has a huge young population and ideas let’s say that are very tough to square with the modern world. Is physical security really the biggest problem you’d see for the regime?
Of course not all walls are monuments. Never said it was.
Perhaps, though, history should be something we try to learn from in this area.
The Wall for Immigration model I think you’re trying to find sympathy for would be a case where people had something really good and felt the need to build a big wall to keep others from ruining it by over using it. An example might be a relatively rich guy with a big yard who puts a fence around it because he doesn’t want people walking through it and tromping down the grass he spends a lot of time and money getting just so right. On a larger level, though, it’s harder to imagine cases that fit this.
But the medieval examples you review don’t follow that model. There the fear was mass looting and pillaging as well as the ability to tax trade (if there was only one gate in town, the lord could park some tax collectors there obviously). But then that’s not the case here. Can you name one actual nation that exist but ‘walled’ itself to protect its riches? One example, the African nation of Wakanda. Problem, that’s an imaginary country.
If a historical survey of ‘walls’ provides no example where this has worked it seems to me your not quite full attempt lean in to find some sympathy for Trump should now be viewed with even more skepticism and derision.
I’m not sure what the difference is between building a wall to prevent pillaging and building a wall to protect your riches. Isn’t this a semantic distinction only? Indeed, why build a wall if not to protect the stuff inside it? (Except for the Berlin wall, which did attempt to prevent emigration; they also wanted to limit intellectual contagion as you suggested above.)
The question of whether a physical wall will work along the US border does not hinge on historical examples of whether a specific wall ‘worked’ or not. Indeed, I think looking to history here can be misleading. The Great Wall of China eventually fell to invaders, but how long did it stand – preventing invasions – before it fell? A few hundred years of history doesn’t sound like a lot until you try living through it.
I don’t think it’s a matter of whether we can build a wall that will prevent people from coming over the border. Certainly a large physical barrier will do just that. It won’t prevent everyone, but it will prevent some. The question is whether we actually want to build, man, and maintain the stupid thing given we’re not interested in reforming the rest of immigration law and policy in the US. That’s like fixing the landing gear when the plane has no engine and the wings are bent. Great job, but you’re missing all the important parts that would make the fix meaningful.
“I’m not sure what the difference is between building a wall to prevent pillaging and building a wall to protect your riches. Isn’t this a semantic distinction only? ”
No it isn’t. Here’s the difference.
You have a nice big TV that you watch Game of Thrones on. You don’t want anyone taking your TV or your show so your house is locked and you don’t give away your password to HBO. It’s nice to live in a place where you have a big TV and good shows to watch on it.
Someone else works at a fast food place and he takes his funds and buys a prepaid phone. Maybe he also watches Game of Thrones on it.
If you said a horde of people wanted to storm in and take the TV’s and carry them back to their homes, you are in the medieval mindset and that type of wall makes sense. If you are saying the way to keep having the ability to buy big TV’s and have HBO is to limit the number of people around you, well that’ doesn’t really make sense and I bet you don’t have a single example in all of history where that worked. Whereever prosperity increased so has population. Even a country like Saudi Arabia, where you’d think since the wealth is essentially fixed by their stock of oil the best strategy would be to limit the population to divide a fixed pie into bigger pieces, doesn’t seem to work like that.
“The Great Wall of China eventually fell to invaders, but how long did it stand – preventing invasions – before it fell? A few hundred years of history doesn’t sound like a lot until you try living through it.”
Indeed, so we’d say there are historical analogies where walls for military purposes work. Then we move on to ask do those analogies apply? The Moguls didn’t have horses that could jump hundreds of feet. Wall might have worked for a while. Do walls make sense in terms of modern weapons?
“That’s like fixing the landing gear when the plane has no engine and the wings are bent. Great job, but you’re missing all the important parts that would make the fix meaningful.”
Usually ‘fix’ has some obvious purpose. After WWII the armed forces argued that air power had become much more essential to modern warfare therefore the air force merited being a separate armed service rather than simply a sub-division of the army or navy. That identified a problem and identified a fix which can be judged good and bad. Given that we have been a nation for a while now and never had a wall type border with either Canada or Mexico, what has changed that now identifies something to fix? I’ll give you a hint, it isn’t that ‘laws are being broken’. Laws are broken all the time, every time your speed or your kid makes $20 selling lemonade laws have been broken. That in itself may or may not be a problem and if we decide the ‘fix’ is minor incidents of speeding or child run businesses that are only briefly open will simply be ignored, that isn’t some broken airplane but actually a sensible way to conduct one’s affairs.
China severely limited its population concurrently with a massive improvement to their standard of living. It’s not a law of economics that more people=prosperity, or that more people are required for prosperity.
By ‘fix’ I mean I perceive it’s a problem that we have a semi-permanent underclass of people in the US who live in fear outside the law and are often exploited because of that. I mean it’s a problem that masses of people die in the desert every year. I mean that the Mexican government doesn’t have to be responsive to the worst come against their people because there’s an implicit agreement that if things get bad enough you’ll leave and let everyone left behind get exploited a little more while you send token remittances back to make life tolerable. I mean how we’ve unwittingly perpetuated one of the more unequal borders on history.
I’m not saying either side has a good proposal to fix anything. Yes, I think there’s a problem here. A system that permanently exploits a whole class of people just because ‘they’re cool with it’ is still a problem. We can argue about solutions (although we both appear to agree a wall isn’t one of them) but if we can’t agree there’s a problem this isn’t going anywhere.
China’s population controls seems like a possible analogy here but there are some problems with it. Let’s say you have a community that is in decline. I could imagine an incentive where individuals have more kids to try to catch a bigger share of the shrinking pie rather than fewer (of course such a society would probably be an agricultural one. Of course in that type of society you wouldn’t have much immigration because why would someone leave their boat for a sinking one? Just maybe your model may work, although China grew a lot and expanded its population. It even had a type of ‘forced’ immigration…see Tibet and related groups.
I sympathize with your view about exploitation, but is that a viable explanation for wall advocates? Well let’s see, consider the dreamers. Clearly the easiest way to avoid exploitation for them is a citizenship option or legal resident status. Whats the typical view of Trump supporters there?