Peak Thomas - Westphalia From Below: Humanitarian Intervention and the Myth of 1648

WESTPHALIA FROM BELOW

THOMAS PEAK

Westphalia From
Below

Humanitarian Intervention and the
Myth of 1648

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by

C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

83 Torbay Road, London, NW6 7DT

Copyright Thomas Peak, 2021

All rights reserved.

The right of Thomas Peak to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781787383920

www.hurstpublishers.com

Epigraph by Lszl Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, from Seiobo There Below, copyright 2008 by Lszl Krasznahorkai. Copyright 2010 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2010. Translation copyright 2013 by Ottilie Mulzet. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Human Misery and All is Vanity, translated by Scott Horton.

Copyright 2007 Harpers Magazine.

https://harpers.org/2007/08/two-poems-by-andreas-gryphius/ August 11, 2007

All Rights reserved. Reproduced by special permission.

To Ieva and Ema

To my parents
To my brothers, Matthew and Andrew
To Tiffany, Abbie, James, and their new baby brother, Alexander

CONTENTS

Fig. 1a: Choeung Ek mass grave exhumation site in 1980. (Photograph by Ben Kiernan, 26 September 1980.)

Figs 1b, 1c and 1d: The faces of Vinh Thi Ngoc, Lay May, and Sok Sokhum following arrival at prison S-21, before they were tortured and murdered. (Reproduced with permission of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.)

Fig. 2: Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, Plundering a Large Farmhouse.

Fig. 3: The horsemans end. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Fig. 4: Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, The Strappado.

Fig. 5: A soldier gazes out at us. Detail from Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, The Strappado.

Fig. 6: A soldier directs us to the horror. Detail from Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, The Stake.

Fig. 7: Three soldiers quarrelling. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Fig. 8: Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, Enrolling the Troops.

Fig. 9: Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, Distribution of Rewards.

Fig. 10: A soldier attacking fleeing peasants. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Fig. 11: Soldiers attacking women in a village. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Fig. 12: Soldiers pillaging a village. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first and greatest debt is to Michael Merlingen. Without his insight, support, and generosity over those long and largely unrewarding years spent as my PhD supervisor, this project would not have been completed. Thank you, Michael.

For many and varied kindnesses, I also thank Felix Bender, Tom Buchanan, dm Budai, Sergiu Delcea, Seamus Flaherty, Luke Glanville, Christine Jackson, Jnos Kis, Lszl Kontler, Andrs Moles, Paul Roe, Alfredo Hernndez Snchez, Brendan Simms, Gyrgy Tatr, and Sarah Wing, among many others too numerous to name.

I am also grateful to the Central European University for its warm intellectual atmosphere.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Choeung Ek mass grave exhumation site in 1980. (Photograph by Ben Kiernan, 26 September 1980.)

1c and 1d: The faces of Vinh Thi Ngoc, Lay May, and Sok Sokhum following arrival at prison S-21, before they were tortured and murdered. (Reproduced with permission of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.)

Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, Plundering a Large Farmhouse.

The horsemans end. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, The Strappado.

A soldier gazes out at us. Detail from Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, The Strappado.

A soldier directs us to the horror. Detail from Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, The Stake.

Three soldiers quarrelling. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, Enrolling the Troops.

Jacques Callot, Miseries of War, Distribution of Rewards.

A soldier attacking fleeing peasants. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Soldiers attacking women in a village. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

Soldiers pillaging a village. From Hans Ulrich Franck, Scenes of War. ( The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

A PRELUDE

FACING HELL

In Sierra Leonxe

Throughout the 1990s, a brutal civil war ravaged the small West African state of Sierra Leone: a country founded in 1787, ironically enough, as a haven for rescued slaves. It was a terrible war. A 1991 invasion by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), sponsored by Liberian warlord Charles Taylorostensibly to topple the autocratic single-party rulesoon turned nasty. Distracted by diamonds and too angry at the society it would need to mobilise, the RUF terrorised the populace instead.was a term referring to elements of the SLA who colluded with the RUF to keep the war going.