On Gorgon and Furies
Civilization and its discontents.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
October 3, 2001 8:45 a.m.

addam once pledged to wage "the mother of all battles" and to leave "thousands of Americans dead in the sand." Even a few American pundits believed him — before his army was annihilated in four days. The terrorists in the Middle East and their Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan now promise to do all sorts of horrible things to us — from an unending jihad of terror, to murdering Americans on sight worldwide, to hints of gassing us in our schools and offices. We are told to be aware that our "new" enemies will be disguised, untraceable, unpredictable, and therefore nearly unstoppable.

This mythology of horror is hardly new and perhaps dates from the dawn of the Greek city-state. Classical folklore, both in art and literature, is full of brutal, terror-inducing creatures that practice every evil art of destruction.

Sirens — in the manner advised in the hijackers' manuals — masked their evil with sweet voices and smiles. Proteus, like bin Laden, appeared suddenly — but never in the same guise. Beastly Cyclopes and Amazons — just like the fundamentalists — did not build cities, write literature, or create technology. They instead preferred to murder against civilization.

What was the purpose of these scary creatures in the Greek mind?

The early myths conveyed to the city-state that civilization's struggle against wild hatred and fury — like our own against the present terrorists and their hosts — was a constant and always frightening one. Stymphalean Birds, like hijackers, dove out of nowhere. The many-necked Hydra shot out another ghastly head each time one was cut off. Foul, hit-and-run Harpies fed like parasites on their hosts. And the nearly invincible Nemean Lion was reputed to be impenetrable to the tools of conventional weaponry.

All these opponents — who symbolized the age-old evil that we once again see arrayed against us — played on the innate fears of comfortable citizens that there were primeval forces in the world that enjoyed chaos and killing, and that did not fight like the good hoplite soldiers of the polis. Disguise, stealth, bloody rhetoric, hideous new ways of murder, attacks on the innocent and unprepared, threats to use unspeakable methods of mass destruction can all, if we are not careful, turn us to stone in fear.

But arrayed against the pre-civilized Scylla, Echidna, and Charybdis, of course, are the fearless heroes of myth — Odysseus, Theseus, Perseus, Heracles, and others — who in art and literature reminded the new civilization of the city-state that culture could always defeat the untamed. Such figures as Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, were enshrined as protectors of order through the tools of civilization — law, justice, reason, and technology. The Furies, Gorgons, and Cyclopes were hideous to behold, and their howls and shrieks worse to hear, but they were all eventually blinded, decapitated, or driven back into the dank through learning and courage. Perseus did not have to see Medusa to cut off her head.

There is also a rhetoric of war that can be as frightening as it is empty. Epaminondas, the Theban liberator, was lectured endlessly about the impossibility of marching into the heart of Sparta to free the helots — in a land that had boasted of no invasion for "seven hundred years." In such a strong confine, "No Spartan woman would ever see the smoke of an enemy campfire," King Agesilaus bragged — shortly before his entire countryside went up in flames. "Oh, the ambitious man," the King later stammered of Epaminondas as he watched his own once-vaunted army of professional killers, in their horrific dreadlocks and scarlet cloaks, cower inside the city.

On the eve of Normandy, Hitler and his generals boasted of the Waffen SS that such a singular division would push the "cowboys" into the sea — the same feared division that in a few weeks' time was incinerated by American GIs in the Falaise Gap. To paraphrase Churchill, "some cowboys." The sea of death, as it turned out, was not of water, but of flames.

I think some Americans are now fearful of the ordeal ahead, and not out of ideological concerns. How, after all, can progressives stomach mass murderers who treat women like animals, urge the killing of Jews on sight, behead innocents, and forbid religious or political tolerance? While the Vatican, the Harvard library, and the United Nations have not yet been blown apart, there is clearly no reason to believe that any of them are immune from these fundamentalists' hatred of non-Muslims, the Western rational tradition, or liberal internationalism.

Nor are those protesting really pacifists: Even the most smugly "moral" now realize that ignoring evil — whether in Bosnia, Iraq, or Afghanistan — only gets women and children killed. The Vietnam-era cry of resistance that 'they are not attacking us here at home' is now irrelevant; and past restraint in confronting terrorism has only invited this disaster. Even the professedly peace-loving realize that the 7,000 may be only a beginning, and that self-proclaimed nonresistance only fuels the arrogance of these killers — who act on the conviction that Americans are either cowardly or impotent.

And even critics of military action do not believe that our dead are a result of America's politics. They — and the world — know well that no country has saved more Muslims in the last 20 years — whether the Kuwaiti, Shiite, or Kurdish victims of Saddam; the Afghani enemies of Soviet Communism; the starving in Somalia; or the targeted in Bosnia and Kosovo. Make Israel or America disappear tomorrow, and the terrorists would only turn to murdering Westerners in Europe or Japan. India and Russia, both targets of these madmen, are not always strong American allies or sympathetic to our foreign policies.

Rather, many in America are hesitant because they are fearful of Gorgons and Harpies — in dread of a long, bitter struggle against the shrieking and beastly which will interrupt our daily routines, cost us more lives, and earn us more hatred. Fear — not the usual coffee-house ideology, the smug morality of the faculty lounge, or the easy five-minute guilt of the suburban affluent — is the real fuel of their protests.

This is understandable in a democracy, which as the historian Thucydides tells us, is at first fickle and prone to self-doubt. Yet — as he also reminds us, of both classical Athens and Syracuse — democracies eventually prove the most resourceful and resolved in war, as they slowly marshal their enormous arsenal against the unfamiliar, and answer the mythology of terror with the reality of power.

In the trying months ahead, we should not listen to what the fundamentalist terrorists say, but instead watch what we do. Like all enemies of civilization, the primordial Taliban and the beastly supporters of bin Laden will soon fall. And perhaps best of all, at last — like Medusa and the Hydra — they too will grow mute.