Saturday - July 10, 2004

Category Image 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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