Death by Fire
I stood on the top of the Hebrew fortress of Masada wondering why families, men, women and children preferred to starve to death than surrender to the Roman army in 74 C.E. About 960 people died in their resistance to the occupation forces and the mountaintop fortress became a monumental part of Jewish and Israeli history.
From a rational point of view, surrender and physical survival seems like the best option in many circumstances and yet, over and over, people willingly or collectively choose death over submission. This happens regularly in wars and conflicts all over the world. Sometimes submission comes with near certain death and torture making surrender less appealing, but very often groups of individual prefer to die together the live alone. Humans are, after all, fundamentally social creatures – both in life and in death. Even our cemeteries are organized by religious groups.
When the Mongol warrior Genghis Khan united the tribes of Mongolia and rode across the plains to conquer the largest territory any single person has ever conquered – he brought ultimatums with him. Before attacking a city, the Khan would raise a camp within eyesight of the city and put up a white gher (traditional Mongolion tent). If the city surrendered, he would not kill the inhabitants. If the city did nothing for a few days after the white tent went up, they would change the gher for a red tent signalling impatience. If the city still refused to submit, a black tent went up indicating all would be killed. Despite widespread knowledge of this signalling mechanism, city after city refused to submit – leading to mass killings, rape and rampage. In some cases a city would submit to the Mongols, but once the marauding tribe had moved on to another place, they would revert to their previous masters and ways, forgetting to send tribute to the Mongols. This did not make Ghengis Khan happy. He would promptly return to the traitorous city and kill everyone.
Why do we so often choose stubbornness, pride, and ego over compromise and subjugation? This topic likely fills libraries of books and mountains of researchers, but still troubles me. In many ways, these social upheavals and wars feel like a slow moving train wreck and even when they are clearly crazy – Ukrainian War, Gaza, World War I, World War II, – actually nearly all wars – we are unable to stop the momentum. The emotional sunk cost of having lost loved ones or having been collectively insulted by another group of humans is enough to drive us to the most depraved and extreme forms of human action.
To survive as individuals and groups, we undoubtedly had to be stubborn and egotistical. When we were starving for food, travelling on foot, and subject to attacks by wild animals or equally starving neighbouring tribes, we had to stick together to the bitter end. To give up to a tribe living nearby often meant death or slavery, or both. It was once said that the the way humanists have managed to achieve progress over the thousands of years since we left the plains of Africa was by progressively, slowly and haltingly expanded the circle of what we consider to be fellow human beings with equal rights.
The Athenians considered anyone outside their walls sub-human, the Iroquois tribes considered the Algonquin nearly animals – the list goes on and on and on. The problem with breaking through these man-made walls that separate us is that there are actual genuine cultural differences between people. There is also long historical and sometimes legitimate (certainly perceived) reasons why one people distrusts and sometimes hates another people. I do not claim to have any form of a solution to this problem, but the great Gabor Maté gives a poignant response to a question about the current and ongoing Genocide in Gaza. His response, summarized, is that when one group hates another it often boils down to an ignorance of what the other group has gone through and why the conflict exists.
The point he makes and with which I agree with is that history is important. Working to overcome this ignorance of the lived experience of the other group is very often the first step to finding a solution that keeps the wolves of war at bay. It may not be sufficient, but if no effort is made to understand the history of a situation, the situation will only fester like an infected wound, potentially killing the entire organism.
In Canada, we recently created the Truth and Reconciliation civic holiday after having conducted a commission into the horrors of the residential school system. This residential school system, which existed from the 19th century to the late 20th century forcibly took children from their homes at the age of six, sent them to boarding schools run by the Church and tried to teach the Indian out of them. A very high percentage of children died in these under supervised and under resourced schools and many children left with life long trauma that carries through generations of native Canadians. Though I consider myself well read and smart enough to have my own blog, I knew very little of this political, social and governmental institution until only ten or fifteen years ago. I suspect this is true for nearly all Canadians and I would say, humbly, that I likely have spent more time trying to understand this past than most of my fellow Canadians who remain largely ignorant of what happened.
When facing a Mongolian horde, the most ferocious war machine the world had ever known, it may be unrealistic for the people in the enclaved cities to take the time to understand the centuries of trauma the Mongolians had suffered under the hands of the Chinese or other groups. Sitting down with Ghenghis Khan was not always possible as he was clearly a man on a mission with little patience for long winded diplomatic debates. So, that leaves us back where we started with one people unwilling to submit due to their legitimate fears of torture or rape, their egos and their collective social bonds that hold a series of families and communities together and another people on the other side of a wall, willing to attack and kill in vengeance or in a desire to take what the others have.
Peace is a fragile thing. It is a flickering flame that can be extinguished at any time if not taken care of. With more wars today in 2025 than in any recent past, we must actively work together to understand each other and find solutions that people can accept. In any good negotiation, no one is 100% happy, but everyone is better off than they were before. Being able to find an acceptable compromise based on a shared understanding of each other is the foundation of all happy relationships – from marriage to global war.
Published on October 1, 2025