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Carthaginian peace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carthaginian Peace refers to a peace brought about through the total destruction of the enemy.
The term refers to the end of a series of wars between Rome and the Phoenician city of Carthage, known as the Punic Wars. The two empires fought three separate wars against each other, beginning in 264 BC and ending in 146 BC.
At the end of the Third Punic War, the Romans laid siege to Carthage. When they took the city they killed most of the inhabitants, sold the rest into slavery, destroyed the entire city, and sowed the ground with salt so that nothing could ever grow there again. These final acts by the Romans are what gave origin to the phrase "Carthaginian Peace."
Though not applied to this war, the famous quote from Tacitus, "they make a wasteland and call it peace," summarizes the attitude.
The term can refer to any brutal peace treaty demanding total subjugation of the defeated side.
Modern use of the term is often extended to any peace settlement in which the peace terms are overly harsh and designed to perpetuate the inferiority of the loser. Thus many (the economist John Maynard Keynes among them) deemed the Versailles Treaty to be a "Carthaginian Peace."
The Morgenthau Plan, which was dropped in favour of the Marshall Plan, advocated the 'pastoralization' (de-industrialization) of Germany following World War II, which might be described in Carthaginian terms. Also, some critics of the Second Iraq War have based their criticisms partially on the belief that Iraq will be saddled with a Carthaginian Peace.
