History's last stands are especially popular thanks to how some people take the ideological side of the smaller force that held out as long as it could before being defeated by a comparatively enormous faction. The longer they resisted and the greater the size of the opposing army or empire, the more praise they are given, even when the person praising them has probably never thought about what the smaller group was supposed to be fighting for. A blind desire to show support, albeit centuries or millennia later, for the "underdog" faction has manifested itself across many people in different eras. The allure of retrospectively assuming that the last stand validates whatever cause the smaller group died for is too strong for some people to immediately see through such stupidity.
What might some historical examples be (though one would not need any examples to realize the error of the aforementioned approach to conflicts between small and great forces)? The Spartans and Persians at Thermopylae in the Second Persian Invasion of Greece in 480 BC, the last of the samurai and the Imperial Japanese at Shiroyama in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, and the Texians and Mexicans at the Alamo in the Texas Revolution (with the battle reportedly occurring in early 1836) are all examples of two groups that fought according to various historical evidences, with the former side being dramatically outnumbered by their opponents. Both sides might have had their moral hypocrisies, assumptions, and other kinds of irrationality, but the sides making a last stand have had theirs get almost totally forgotten or denied by the masses.
The Spartans targeted men in sexist ways, starting with the discarding of male babies with birth defects, brutally forcing them to train as soldiers, and then manipulating them into a life of militaristic arrogance in the name of Spartan glory. The last samurai were content to lead a rebellion over their increasing lack of relevance to then-contempory Japan and some of them engaged in acts of torture. The Texians of the Texas Revolution resisted Mexico's abolition of the kind of race-based slavery condemned by the Bible, with this literally being a factor in why they fought the Mexican army at the Alamo, and yet many American Christians probably would speak highly of them. Some of these acts are severe enough that the Bible openly calls for the execution of those who practice them--though, again, many Christians might praise the losing sides here for arbitrary reasons.
These last stands were the final actions of fools who thought their preferences mattered and legitimized their entire existence and various causes. What they would not be is a grand example of how to live for reason or anything else that transcends mere preferences and assumptions. While it is not automatically irrational to have the desire to extend support to a faction because it is extremely outnumbered, truth, certainty, and justice are not determined by the minority any more than they are not determined by the majority. The size of a group or the impact of its last stand are at best irrelevant to whether it is true that it deserved to exist in the first place, much less how it could be proven that it did.
It is rather easy for those who have never intentionally, holistically pursued truth and inspected their motives, beliefs, and the correspondence of those beliefs to reason to fall into the same random errors as others with the same philosophical shortcomings. Taking anyone's side without knowing what they believe or have done (or hope to do) is irrational by default, as is thinking that facing a stronger enemy somehow makes a person's ideology true and their behaviors just. Perhaps some moderners identify with those who made a last stand and hope they their own real or imagined last stands in life will unthinkingly be remembered positively. Perhaps they are content to make assumptions about history like they do about other things, rather than embrace rationalism. Whatever the reason, this idiotic bias remains pathetic.
No comments:
Post a Comment