Saturday - July 10, 2004
Those Dangerous Walls
The recent erection of walls around Palestine and
the subsequent calls to demolish it, this time from some self-important "world
court" calls to my mind the bizarre history of walled cities. I hope this is
short.
In ancient days, around 400 to 500BCE, most
cities were not walled. Only large and powerful cities had walls. It was
considered provocative to build walls around your city, as if to say that the
city wished to be immune from international law. A part of many treaties was
the demand that no walls be built, or that walls be torn down. When Athens
built the "Long Walls" to their port of Piraeus, Sparta was outraged. The
entire Peloponnesian War is filled with stories about people building walls and
shocking their neighbors.
Back then
walls were almost impregnable. Seige technology did not exist to overcome this
defense. Later, as seige technology improved, mostly by the Romans who were
masters at it, more and more cities began to build walls and fortifications. It
seems that the objection to walls ended only when the dominant militaries
learned how to destroy them. But before that time, any plans to build walls
were met with outrage.
In the Roman
Empire, during the Pax Romana, walls again fell out of favor simply because
cities were safe. Then they came back in fashion in the Dark
Ages.
Only recently, say the past 250
years or so, have walls again fallen out of favor. But look what's happening
again. As warfare retreats into terrible, murderous, low tech terrorism, walls
are again showing their utility. Israel is building walls to protect themselves
from bombers. In Iraq, the US used crude walls to isolate cities, and used
walls around their own buildings and camps for protection.
It's funny that now that walls are
useful again, that people again regard them as an offensive action.
The analogy can be extended to missile
defenses but I'm running out of time. Maybe more later.
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