For students of history, especially those who have taken histories covering ancient Rome and Greece, many will fondly remember the case concerning the murder of Eratosthenes in Athens by Euphiletus, who found his victim engaging in an extramarital affair with his wife. Interestingly, the speech, written for the trial in question, offers wonderful insight into the public and private lives of men and women in ancient Athens.
The speech in question was composed, by a speech writer named Lysias, for the legal defense of Euphiletus, who was being charged with murder. One thing is clear throughout the speech: Euphiletus was hoping to justify his murder of Eratosthenes, making it abundantly clear he did nothing wrong, at least under Athenian law. Lysias’ speech was later studied as part of the great canon of oratory works. Lysias’ speech is still studied today by rhetoricians, historians, and classicists. What is most striking about Lysias’ speech for Euphiletus was the number of snapshots it offered of the oikos (home, private sphere) in Athenian society.
Seasoned professional and budding historians can examine Lysias’ speech beyond the legal defense offered by its author. In other words, much like the work of micro-historians and many social historians, this piece of oration allows us to examine the lives of those who are not often recorded within the history books. The voiceless, the quietened voices, are given some attention here, which is fantastic, even if it is difficult to tease out realities from this work.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China, in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
— Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, wars fought by the United States between 1775 and 1991 claimed some 650,000 American lives. More recent conflicts, especially with the ever-expanding, never-ending War on Terror, appear to be more ambiguous when it comes to military deaths in battle. The United States spends, as of 2019, some data suggest that military spending exceeds $1 trillion every year, despite official numbers hovering in the hundreds of billions of dollars. 1 trillion dollars support a military-industry complex unlike anything seen in human history, and a war machine that has seen little winding down, despite numerous setbacks overseas (think: Iraq and Afghanistan, generally speaking), plunging morale among the public and military servicemembers, and misappropriation of funds. The total military spending by the United States is purposely ambiguous, as are its military actions overseas. America’s total and ceaseless war machine is starting to erode American democratic-republican ideals, its national treasure, and the very organizations that are supposed to be committed to fighting endless warfare across the globe.
America’s war in Vietnam has been hailed as an American tragedy, a violent and expensive trauma endured by Americans and the Vietnamese for close to twenty years.
The war in Vietnam pushed the American people to question the motives of their government, their leaders, and their nation. The American war in Vietnam has become a catch-all for expensive and utterly hopeless armed conflicts. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, many saw parallels to Vietnam — a determined and cunning insurgency, a puppet government working at the behest of American interests, and heavy American and civilian casualties. The Vietnam War has stained the American psyche. It is the war that will not go away. It, like the boogeyman, taunts Americans just as much as it haunts them.
The Vietnam War also has another legacy, one often neglected, that is just as problematic. The American war in Vietnam was a technowar. In other words, the United States, with its post-WWII can-do-ism and unyielding belief in scientific and technological progress, brought the tools, weapons rather, of progress down on the heads of Vietnamese civilians and combatants alike. When the United States could not outright defeat the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese, the U.S. sought scientific and technological solutions to smoke out and kill enemy combatants. Vietnam turned into a testing ground for the U.S. military-industrial complex, a proving ground for new technologies. Some of these technologies were radical, some downright dangerous, and, others still, straight out of some science-fiction novel. America’s technowar in Vietnam did not bring an end to the conflict. Rather, it turned a little-known war into one of the most expensive military engagements in American history, with little to show for the expenses and body counts.
Karl Marx astutely recognized the power, heavy artillery–like force of capital, and the capitalist mode of production, and he predicted (somewhat) the era of globalization we are now familiar with in the twenty-first century.
The cheap price of its commodities is the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production: it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. –The Communist Manifesto (1848)[1]
Karl Marx astutely recognized the power, heavy artillery-like force of capital, and the capitalist mode of production, and he predicted (somewhat) the era of globalization we are now familiar with in the twenty-first century.
What Marx didn’t recognize, and failed to account for and articulate in his philosophical, political, and economic writings, was the enticing nature of capitalism, both in good times and in bad. He also failed to understand the rather adaptive nature of capitalism, especially among those regions of the world where it was a foreign transplant that developed deep roots and produced voracious varieties.