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A review by libra17
Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick by David Frye
5.0
I found Walls while browsing nonfiction in my local public library, and picked it up because the topic seemed both interesting relevant, especially during the Trump administration where several scuffles over funding for his proposed wall have already happened. David Frye's Walls is a book about how civilizations (traditionally understood to mean groups of people who put their efforts toward various types of specialized work, particularly agriculture) have tried - and always, inevitably, failed - to defend themselves against barbarians (understood to mean nomadic groups whose cultures all focused on war and constant preparation for war, and who constantly harassed, pillaged, and destroyed the communities built by those who lived behind walls) by using work to create barriers for protection. As can be surmised by my single sentence overview of the history of walls, those who built them, and those the walls were meant to defend against, walls have not been particularly good at this task. Chapter after chapter focusing on different time periods, different continents/regions, and different situations, all saw walls that the civilian population had depended on eventually fall. I learned a lot while reading this book, and the most important lessons are probably these:
For military usage, we cannot depend purely on physical barriers to defend a largely civilian populace. Modern warfare alone would prevent this from being an effective tactic, even ignoring the fact that this has been tried repeatedly throughout history and has, repeatedly, put ill-prepared citizen soldiers in hopeless battles where combatant and noncombatant alike have paid terrible prices. That being said, primitivism - veneration of the supposed 'noble savage' and 'warrior culture' - is a misplaced ideal built upon a false understanding of history. We would not want to live as a spartan, goth, or mongol nomad, and those cultures have no place for modern values of things like equality, education, or arts (to name a few of things) because - as cultures built around physical insecurity and anxiety - those cultures have no room for anything outside of war and constant preparation for war. As this is not a society that many hope to live in, we should instead choose to find other paths.
For nonmilitary uses (such as using border fences to stop immigration), physical barriers do not solve the problem; they merely shift it. As hardened barriers went up around the middle east, refugees fled to parts of europe. As those parts of europe put up fences and walls, refugees went around the barriers to unwalled borders or new, more easily accessed countries. As a new round of barriers have gone up, still more distant countries are expecting to see the desperate travel farther to reach their borders, going around the inaccessible points in bids to escape situations where circumstances make life a possibility only in theory. This should tell us that barriers will not do anything to help the world solve its problems; only be dealing with root of the issues - war, persecution, and other inherently dangerous and unstable circumstances - can we solve the world's 'migrant crisis.'
Overall, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick is an excellent book. I am happy to have read it, have purchased my own copy, and have recommended it to others. Its inherent lessons - left for the reader to surmise from history across time and location - carry messages that everyone needs to hear and understand.
For military usage, we cannot depend purely on physical barriers to defend a largely civilian populace. Modern warfare alone would prevent this from being an effective tactic, even ignoring the fact that this has been tried repeatedly throughout history and has, repeatedly, put ill-prepared citizen soldiers in hopeless battles where combatant and noncombatant alike have paid terrible prices. That being said, primitivism - veneration of the supposed 'noble savage' and 'warrior culture' - is a misplaced ideal built upon a false understanding of history. We would not want to live as a spartan, goth, or mongol nomad, and those cultures have no place for modern values of things like equality, education, or arts (to name a few of things) because - as cultures built around physical insecurity and anxiety - those cultures have no room for anything outside of war and constant preparation for war. As this is not a society that many hope to live in, we should instead choose to find other paths.
For nonmilitary uses (such as using border fences to stop immigration), physical barriers do not solve the problem; they merely shift it. As hardened barriers went up around the middle east, refugees fled to parts of europe. As those parts of europe put up fences and walls, refugees went around the barriers to unwalled borders or new, more easily accessed countries. As a new round of barriers have gone up, still more distant countries are expecting to see the desperate travel farther to reach their borders, going around the inaccessible points in bids to escape situations where circumstances make life a possibility only in theory. This should tell us that barriers will not do anything to help the world solve its problems; only be dealing with root of the issues - war, persecution, and other inherently dangerous and unstable circumstances - can we solve the world's 'migrant crisis.'
Overall, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick is an excellent book. I am happy to have read it, have purchased my own copy, and have recommended it to others. Its inherent lessons - left for the reader to surmise from history across time and location - carry messages that everyone needs to hear and understand.