WALLS: A History of Civilisation in Blood and Brick
DAVID FRYE, Faber & Faber, 2018, 292 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
In 376 AD, writes David Frye, history professor, thousands of Goths “arrived at the Danube River, pleading admittance to the Roman Empire as refugees”. The Goths had been on the losing end of a particularly nasty bit of inter-barbarian fighting with the Huns and needed to regroup. The Romans saw their supplicants, their old foes, as ideal new recruits for guarding the empire’s border walls, doing the jobs the soft, poetry-reciting, lyre-plucking Romans just wouldn’t do, coddled as they were behind the empire’s defensive border walls.
The illiterate, savage Goths may not have been able to tell their dative from their ablative, but they were socialised from birth to the warrior life and would make a cheap, fearsome wall security service, thought the Roman army officers. Thus were the Goths transported by the Romans across the river and invited inside the empire’s gates.
Not every Roman was impressed - Ammianus, a later historian, said that ‘Rome had just admitted its own ruin’, as the Goths predictably turned on their hosts and precipitated the fall of the Roman empire. Frye concurs - “the refugees had become invaders”. It was a “bad miscalculation in allowing the Goths to immigrate”, concludes Frye of this episode of civilisation’s many near-death-experience at the hands of uncivilised barbarians.
Since at least 10,000 BC, the human world had bifurcated into those peoples who would rather fight and rob (the nomadic warriors) and those who would rather work and create, the creators of cities and agriculture, writing and astronomy, science and art, mathematics and philosophy, aqueducts and Baths, schools and theatres, roads and bridges - in short, the builders of civilisation – and walls.
Throughout human history, argues Frye, there has been a “nearly universal correlation between civilisation and walls” (or other defensive barriers), whilst outside the walls there were but only primitive warrior societies who viewed civilisations as simply a “ready source of loot, land, animals or women” and a proving ground for appallingly violent massacres.
Every ancient civilisation – Mesopotamia, Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Russia, China - had had to wall itself off from the warriors – the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Gauls, Franks, Huns, Mongols, Scythians, Turks, Bedouins, Saracens, Tartars, etc. whose brutal invading hordes attacked to steal the fruits of the urban civilisers, by robbery with extreme violence or by extortion of heavy tribute in return for (temporarily) leaving the city-dwellers alone. Warfare defined the barbarians. It was all that their young boys were ever taught - they learnt no other skills.
Defensive barriers against them were the essential precondition to cultural evolution, from late prehistory when rudimentary defences such as earthen mounds, ditches and timber palisades were constructed, to more technologically advanced stone and brick walls with watchtowers and forts. For as long as these defences held, so did civilisation – Frye efficiently debunks the politically fashionable myth that the great walls of history were ineffective. If well-constructed and well manned, they worked.
Leaping ahead to the 21st century with its renewed building of hi-tech walls and fences, Frye sees the same dynamic. There are six dozen or so national walls or fences in the world today, combating drug cartels, Islamic terrorism and mass illegal immigration. Yet, says Frye, there is only one wall, one which has not yet even made it to an engineering blueprint, which attracts any attention - Donald Trump’s ‘impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall’, in his glorious rallying words. All of the attention attracted is, of course, negative because, well, it’s literally-Hitler-himself saying it.
It seems like walls are only xenophobic and evil if built by a white Republican populist but not so bad if they are built by liberals. As Frye reminds us, it was President Obama (who called border walls ‘wacky’ during the 2016 election) who funded a Tunisia/Libya wall and a Jordan/Syria wall (the latter built by an Obama-approved American building contractor).
Fencing off Mexico (with porous, pretend walls) is also acceptable if done by liberals. President Clinton was verbally muscular with his Operations Blockade, Hold the Line, Gatekeeper and Safeguard, whilst his Secure Fence Act (whose supporters included the then senators, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) was used to extend the Mexico fencing by hundreds of miles by subsequent immigration-orthodox presidents Obama and G.W. Bush, to no liberal censure.
Israel’s walls on the borders with all its contiguous Arab Muslim neighbours (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan), which, says Frye, have virtually eliminated illegal immigration and brought about a drastic decline in terrorism, have, like Trump’s mooted wall, attracted liberal opprobrium. So, too, has liberal ire been directed at the highly effective physical barriers erected, in a “furious game of whack-a-mole”, says Frye, against the shifting routes of the mass immigration-invasion of Europe - fences erected between Greece and Turkey, Bulgaria/Turkey, Hungary/Serbia, Austria/Slovenia, Austria/Italy, Slovenia/Croatia, Macedonia/Greece, and (at the Chunnel at Calais) England/France.
Some walls, however, viz. those which pit ‘Other’ against ‘Other’, escape liberal censure or even notice – the walls between Saudi Arabia/Yemen, Saudi Arabia/Iraq, Kuwait/Iraq (UN-approved), the UAE/Oman, Egypt/Gaza, Turkey/Syria, Turkey/Iran, Turkey/Iraq, Morocco/Algeria, India/Pakistan, India/Bangladesh, Thailand/Malaysia, Kenya/Somalia, and Ecuador/Peru.
It must be the white against brown thing which triggers liberal finger-wagging over walls. Frye’s book provides evidence for the tendency of a liberal elite to side with the ‘excluded’ against the wall-builder. An influential strand within the ancient Roman aristocracy, says Frye, “safe in a walled capital deep in the heartland of a civilised empire”, romanticised the primitive outsider as virtuous, uncorrupted and pacifist, a view which has been reproduced down the centuries from Tolstoy to Borodin, from Lord Byron to Victor Hugo.
The myth of the nomadic warrior as peaceful ‘noble savage’, says Frye, has been nowhere so tenacious as when applied to the Native American Indian warrior tribes. The Elizabethan poets, Restoration playwrights, Enlightenment philosophers, early American political philosophers, and the 18th century novelists, essayists and travel writers, who put purple pen to paper to express their ‘regret’ at the Indians’ passing at the hand of Western civilisation, all glossed over the warlike values the Indians shared with their savage cousins like the Hun and the Mongol. So rosy-coloured are the glasses of the primitivist romantic that “even Native Americans who seek to take pride in their warlike heritage have been largely ignored” as an awkward embarrassment to the narrative of the ‘noble savage’ as the genocidal victim of White supremacy.
The Manichean view of evil walls and blameless primitives, says Frye, derives more from political ideology than from historical fact. Voltaire, who was an enthusiastic drum-beater for “Western self-loathing”, says Frye, has been one of many who have declared the Great Wall of China to be futile and a ‘monument to fear’. It has also been voguish to decry ancient China’s big wall as “wrongheaded isolationism”, inimical to “open borders and free trade”, notes Frye.
It is an elite liberal prejudice against Western civilisation (too male, too white, too European, too Christian!) that leads contemporary liberals, including those in the academies of (allegedly) higher learning, to sacralise the ‘Diverse’ Other and repudiate the border wall as a hateful symbol of Western xenophobia.
Frye’s riposte is to ironically note that many liberal, open-borders advocates (both of the corporate money-maker and anti-capitalist social justice activist kind) “write their pious homilies on immigration and border policy from behind the confines of their gated communities”.
There is little to be gleaned from Frye’s book for mass immigration enthusiasts and opponents of border walls. Open Borders cult members may take some solace from the fact that most ancient wall builders (with the partial exception of semi-democratic classical Athens) were undeniably “despots” (‘just like Trump!, as his critics would reflexively crow) but this really won’t do – it’s a pretty poor sort of despot who can’t even get his wall started two years into his ‘authoritarian populist’, ‘immigrant-demonising’ regime.
Trump has made halting progress on building a political wall against modern liberal social justice warriors who take pity on poor ‘refugees’ down on their luck, and against the corporate profit-makers who would wave in the modern-day Goths as a cheap workforce, but a bricks and mortar wall would work wonders in the defence of civilised norms and values from invasion by illiterate, criminal, welfare-thieving, job-stealing illegal aliens.