Summary of Samuel Moyn's Humane

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Samuel Moyn's Humane in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781669342069

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Samuel Moyn's Humane

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Crimean War, which pitted Russia against the European powers, would change the young Tolstoy’s views on war. He was a firm believer in the laws of war, but after six months of siege, he became critical of them.

#2

During the Crimean War, the British and French agreed to a truce so that they could care for their wounded soldiers. The truce was short lived and ended when the two countries went back to fighting, but it was a start in the right direction.

#3

The first peace movements in history were started in the United States in the early 1800s, and had Christian roots.

#4

The first half of the 1800s saw a rise in eschatological thinking, which led to the abolition of war. But it was not until the second half that the movement for humanizing war began to pick up steam.

#5

The first international agreement to make war less barbaric was the Geneva Convention, which was signed in 1864. It was largely inspired by the work of Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman who had traveled to the Battle of Solferino in Italy in 1859, where he witnessed the terrible conditions soldiers were forced to live under.

#6

In 1860, a French lawyer named Auguste Chapuis published a book detailing the atrocities committed by Napoleon’s army in Russia. The book was an instant bestseller and became a rallying cry for those opposed to warfare.

#7

The Red Cross sought to end unnecessary suffering during wartime, which led to the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions protected medical units and caregivers as neutrals in future conflicts.

#8

War is meant to be a violent means to an end, and the most violent era of war was the Napoleonic wars. The Prussian nobleman Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the dominance of the destructive principle.

#9

The first code of laws for warfare was the Lieber Code, which was created by Franz Lieber, a German professor and government consultant for the Union during the American Civil War. The Lieber Code allowed