It’s a truism of pop history that wealthy “civilised” states are always at a disadvantage, when fighting against poorer but tougher adversaries, whether those enemies are steppe horsemen, desert tribes, guerillas, or religious fanatics.  In more modern times, the weakness of democratic nations (attempting as they do, to adhere to the Law of Armed Conflict, and being wary of heavy casualties), is contrasted the strength of dictatorships (who don’t need to worry about such things).

There is a belief that people who live in harsh conditions, which is usually the case in autocratic states, are somehow tougher, morally purer, more willing to endure hardship, than the supposedly effete, weak, and over-educated peoples who live in wealthier countries.  This is a very ancient idea,  and likely originates with Herodotus.  In his eyes, the Persians rose to power, as a tough, martial, people whose nobles were taught to “ride a horse, bend a bow, and tell the truth.”  By the time of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, however, the Persians had become softened by luxury, which the founder of Persian imperial power, Cyrus, had warned them against.  When one of his generals suggests conquering lands other than Media, he replies:

Go ahead and do this, but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors do not grow from the same soil.

By contrast, the Spartans, tough, unpolluted by luxury, virtuous, lead the Greek resistance, which eventually prevails.  They are a true master race, a tiny minority who train only for war, whilst holding down a vastly more numerous population, as slaves.  They subject their boys to a ferociously brutal training regime, as well as compulsory buggery by older warriors, and throw deformed babies into a ravine.  Theirs is a badass system, which produces badasses.

Tacitus writes similarly, in his Germania and Agricola.  The Rome of his time was not  a democracy, but nevertheless, in his eyes, it was decadent, its elites prone to every manner of vice.  The Germans, by contrast, were tough, virtuous, brave men, who drowned homosexuals in bogs, and lived simple, manly, lives, very much like the idealised soldier-farmers of the early Roman Republic. In his biography of his father in law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, he makes the point that the Britons were corrupted, and rendered subservient, by being introduced to wine, baths, and the pleasures of civilisation.  Any number of subsequent writers have attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to its growing decadence and effeminacy, exemplified by emperors such as Nero and  Elagalabus, both of whom married their boyfriends, and in the case of the latter, preferred to be treated as a woman than as a man.

Frank Herbert in the novel Dune, makes great use of this trope.  The Emperor’s elite soldiers, the Sardaukar, are trained and winnowed out, in a harsh prison planet.  That makes them into almost unbeatable soldiers, but after centuries of victory, they are starting to go soft.  The Fremen, the people of the Arrakis desert, are by contrast, completely uncorrupted by civilisation, and all that they require is to be manipulated, and organised into an army, by the Atreides family.  Once they accept Paul as both a god, and a military leader, they become an unbeatable army, despite their small numbers, eventually killing sixty one billion people, across the universe.  The original novel ends with Paul triumphant as the new emperor, the Fremen jihad about to be launched, but at the same time concerned, that if Arrakis becomes a paradise, the Fremen in turn will grow soft.

On close examination, Fremen society is far too violent to survive (duelling to the death is endemic among them).  Their tiny numbers would make universal planetary conquest impossible, and there is no society where every man is a warrior (and the women and children are almost as good as the men as warriors), as this would cause economic collapse.  In practice, the Fremen warriors, like the Spartans, would have to be supported by an immense servile population, which would ultimately revolt, as Sparta’s slaves did.

This is supported by real history.  Despite its defeat in Greece, Persia remained a superpower, ruling over huge numbers of Greeks in its domains, and defeating a subsequent Athenian invasion of Egypt.  Seventy years after Herodotus wrote, Sparta suffered crushing military defeat, the loss of most of their slaves, and they would decline to the status of a tourist attraction for rich Romans.  Rome remained a superpower for centuries after Tacitus.

Professor Bret Devereaux calls these beliefs “The Fremen Mirage”, a popular view of history, summed up by the aphorism, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times”, which actually has very little grounding in reality. https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-fremen-mirage/  but which continues to endure.  “Civilised” democracies are in fact, quite capable of crushing expansionist dictatorships on the battlefield, something demonstrated by the outcomes of World War II, the Yugoslav civil war, and both Gulf Wars. 

However, the persistence of the Fremen Mirage colours perceptions of the conflict in Ukraine.  Ukraine is an imperfect democracy, supported by other democracies, facing an invasion from a dictatorship.    Russian soldiers are generally far readier to commit war crimes, and to wilfully target civilians, than are their Ukrainian counterparts, and quite plainly, Russian leaders are willing to sacrifice men and munitions at a rate that would almost certainly lead to the downfall of any government in a rich world democracy, which did the same.  In the eyes of men like Donald Trump, JD Vance, Douglas McKinnon, this all proves that a final Russian victory is inevitable, and Ukraine should settle for whatever terms it can get, while terms are still being offered.  This is nonsense on stilts.

The Special Military Operation has now been ongoing for almost four years.  Russia has suffered in excess of one million casualties.  They control less of Ukraine now than they did in the Summer of 2022.  They have advanced about twenty miles into the Donbas over that period, capturing a number of mid-sized towns that have been reduced to rubble, at horrendous cost. Russia has sacrificed thousands of tanks, guns, armoured vehicles, hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves, and is seeing its oil industry (its main source of revenue), being steadily destroyed by Ukrainian missiles.  By way of comparison, at a similar point after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army was crossing the River Oder.

A willingness to commit war crimes does not denote an army that is more effective, but rather, an army that lacks discipline.  It is horrible for Ukrainian civilians to have to endure random attacks, from Russian missiles, drones, and glide bombs, and to face casual murder and rape, but such behaviour does not in any way assist Russia to win this war.  It would make more sense, in addition to being more ethical, if Russia were to focus its attacks on military targets, rather than practising deliberate terror.  Nor does the willingness of Russia’s government to endure heavy losses prove military superiority in any way.  Russia is a county that faces an acute demographic crisis, and throwing away the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men (and inducing many more to flee the country), in support of a needless war of choice, is evidence only of extreme stupidity and cruelty.

The war has reached a crisis point, with a United States government which plainly feels it has more in common with the world’s autocracies, than with its democratic former allies.  Hanging tough, and giving Ukraine the support it needs to continue fighting, is a necessity on the part of this country, Canada, and our European allies.  As Kissinger put it, “In crises, the most daring course is often safest.”

Sean F