Why a Great War?

A campfire can keep you warm and a wildfire can kill you. In a similar way, smaller conflicts are often manipulated by interested greater powers - within which is still great suffering - but broader changes and the exposure of the general population to those conflicts may be able to be staved off and insulated and even directed, whereas great wars are globally transformative phenomena that draw everyone in at once and transform everything simultaneously and rapidly. Their historical record affords clearer contrasts and changes, affording in turn further analysis and insight, despite all of the horror of their nature.  

Wildfire Conditions

Another important element that needs to be acknowledged is the general state of affairs leading up to the World Wars. You had a collection of very powerful industrial (and industrializing) empires who were all competing for their respective control of global affairs, and which were beset with a whole series of systemic issues and which were simultaneously decaying: the last generations who had experienced and navigated total war were dead or dying off, and many of the current leaders were described as mediocre and muddling, and the series of escalations leading up to WWI are understood primarily as a series of missteps and miscommunications and miscalculations, and so a whole gaggle of insecure powers were looking to shore up their own projections of power and became locked into a conflict only dimly understood initially, an understanding that would only begin to deepen with time and experience and as things were already rapidly unfolding.

The ferocity of total war was in large part the consequence of the interactions between huge and powerful industrial empires moving huge amounts of material and energy and making huge and terrible mistakes and judgements in total desperation. In warfare, a romantic premodern ideology and perception had to be smashed  through with the sheer weight of a terrible and bloody industrial juggernaut with effects and dynamics that wouldn't be fully understood until a great industrial war was already underway. Such a fire couldn't have burned without the right conditions. 

Unforeseen Consequences

The circumstances of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination are so strange and unlikely that it is still hard to get one's head around the nature of that spark which would set such a profound set of forces in motion. But then surveying the dynamic forces and their unfolding wreckage, it was probably the case that any sort of spark in a number of places would have done just fine. 

With the entangling alliance system holding everyone together in a mutualized threat of destruction for the sake of peace, it would then draw its members swiftly into conflict as they began to jerk and thrash under growing geopolitical pressures, while of course yoked together. 

At risk of oversimplifying this mess, Austria-Hungary was ready to declare war on Serbia over the assassination and the implied Serbian threat to their empire, and then Russia backing Serbia and fearing Germany became drawn in, and Germany fearing Russia and being allied with Austria-Hungary became drawn in as well. For all of these powers, time was of the essence, and created a driving pressure of its own as adversaries gamed out the likely behaviors of their enemies over periods of passing time. 

Germany especially had a unique geographical dilemma: it was sandwiched between Russia and France. Fearing France would get drawn in as well, Germany decided that instead of waging a two front war, it would make a blitz to the west and smash France as quickly as it could, and then pivot back and take on Russia in turn. The problem with this is that the large democratic armies from the Napoleon era coupled with industrialized arms production and technology would make this impossible. The war intensified and generalized and more and more powers were drawn in until much of the globe was enveloped, and then the rest was history. 

Now, the loss of control was total and sustained; it was not just limited locally and temporally to the build-up to the war. Millions of people would be sucked into this thing - like cold air drawn into a raging fire and then catapulted up - and what they would find inside the tempest was unlike anything found in their romantic conceptions. 

For all the horrors of war, the modes of violence themselves and the meanings behind those modes do matter. What the industrialized aspect of warfare did was depersonalize much of the killing, removing the human element of the struggle and rendering it almost meaningless. Instead of being bested by a human adversary, for example, or being cut down while gaining ground for one's comrades, people were being literally mowed down by walls of steel and lead pouring forth from the machine gun emplacements, oftentimes for no gain or loss. 

This aspect too was initially unforeseen, and officers and generals - running with older conceptions of carefully organized and gentlemanly columns -  would send wave after wave of outfits out to be mowed down senselessly and for nothing. The artillery, which had progressed technologically from the cannon to become a fearsome force of destruction that could deliver sustained waves of shelling, would be especially feared and hated. With the understanding of all the horrors that a soldier could face, first hand accounts of the unique terror of an artillery barrage are striking. 

Subjectively, it seemed that being shelled was one of the worst traumas on the battlefield: again the violence meted out was completely depersonalized and incomprehensible. One couldn't see it coming; one couldn't anticipate it, and the exploding shells would blow people apart. It is difficult enough to grieve the death of a companion's body that is intact, but the more the physical trauma...

Here it is apparent that the social and technological changes in warfare were changing the modes of violence themselves, which would ultimately affect mass perceptions of the violence and the meaning of that violence. All of these demoralized soldiers would eventually go home and bring their newly transformed perceptions and ideologies back to their societies, lending to the famous post-war "disillusionment" that would be so thoroughly written about. 

Not only that, but the mass armies and the industrial supply chains and associated modes of violence would lead to the famous stalemates of trench warfare, those meat grinders that would lead to incomprehensible levels of casualties for little gain, transforming the war into an extended war of attrition, which would require enormous flows of resources, drawing them away from the industrial societies own domestic production, emaciating those societies in turn, and so the desperation would only grow as time went on. 

There are many consequences that would flow from this, and we'll get to more of those in time. One famous example is an increasingly desperate Germany sending an exiled Lenin by train back to Russia, in the hopes of fomenting revolution and weakening that power, taking pressure off of that front, a decision - along with surrounding conditions of the war itself - that would help create the Soviet Union and perpetual bogeyman for much of the industrialized world. 

We see decisions like these being made after the war too, forming states of affairs that would dictate the shape of the next war and structure the post-war world after that. Take the breaking of Germany for example. 

In the greater scheme of things, Germany as a rising industrial power may have been acting in the war in accordance with its interests which any other power would do in its situation, and which was subject to the overriding geopolitical physics of the time, but it was viewed by the victors - especially France - as the pure aggressor and worthy of harsh punishment. That door that gets caught in the wind and strikes you in the back may be innocent given pure human intention, but it is still a "goddamned bastard" when you pick yourself up and dust yourself off and survey the situation.

And so Germany was punished harshly and it would take in that punishment and then mete it back out in the decades to come, becoming a heretofore unimaginable horror in the process.  

What we see here is that the powers were locked together in a sustained struggle and pounding the stuffing out of each other, transforming each other in the process and making desperate decisions with consequences that would reverberate for decades - and centuries - to come. 

What all of this says about our present state of affairs is only vaguely coming into relief. As there was great transformation during that period of time, there has been just as great a transformation in the period leading up to our present moment. It will take a lot more groundwork to paint a clearer picture, but we're getting there. More soon. 

Whoops

I have to apologize in advance for an underlying tone of irreverence in the coming pieces. In deference to Sherman's declaration that "war is hell," general war is indeed a terrible thing and the level of suffering of those closest to it can only be imagined in approximation. In some cases it even comes to be a sort of sacred thing, not to be spoken about. But the gallows humor does come out nevertheless, even in, and perhaps especially in, the outlooks of the afflicted themselves. 

The joking of soldiers in the trenches during WWI about the various recognizable parts of "Bill" flung about, for example, may arouse a sense of horror and bewilderment in many observers, but a little jogging of the imagination and one can picture those conditions: months on end living in muddy trenches, smelling the death and the human waste, watching one's compatriots blown senselessly to bits wave after wave, and that emerging tendency seems to make a little more sense. 

In our case, even though there was nothing peaceful about the last couple of decades, compared to the circumstances of a great war we could call it peacetime, and within that peacetime the tension has been growing to a level so palpable you could cut it with the proverbial knife. And there are number of knives waving about at the moment. At certain points it helps to take a deep breath and shrug some of it off - cue the gallows humor - to avoid losing it altogether. 

As usual I've been sitting on a few things, but current events in Eastern Europe have prompted me to get on with it. Current conditions are in quite an excited state and things are moving very fast. There have already been a number of surprises that others have analyzed in detail, which I won't get into, but I'll just say that things are getting pretty hot and a number of things could happen with the Ukrainian conflict. In the next couple of pieces, I'd like to move further out and explore some of the bordering issues, both historically and philosophically, and then see about working my way in. 

To begin with, there has been a lot of talk about the circumstances and events leading up to WWI. That period serves as an archetypal cautionary tale in which a relative peacetime geopolitical environment spiraled out into a protracted state of total war. That process has been described as completely escaping beyond anyone's control and unwinding madly in a number of unpredictable directions. 

I want to explore some of the dynamics and consequences of that process, because part of what we call a "cautionary tale" implies some remaining level of control, but when big things start moving and they get to moving fast, that control evaporates very quickly and profound changes happen in very short amounts of time. 

Just ask anyone who has been in a car accident, or an industrial or farming accident for that matter, and you'll get some version of "it was all a blur and everything was over before I knew it." The physics and the external forces involved take over and become master, and the controller or manipulator is simply deposited to where the forces decide, regardless of the interest or intention of the individual. 

Now part of the issue with that is that those big things and those heavy forces didn't come out of nowhere. They formed and they gathered strength and then the individuals caught up in their pathways and movements then had to interact with them whatever their choices. One may "lose control" of a car for example but then what was it that got one into that car and moving on that road? Where did the car and the road come from? What interests and historical processes brought those things into being and into motion? What is chance and what is volition? 

There is so much to explore here, and I'll do what I can in time. 

Infinite Caveat

I should say that though as a predominantly military society,  Rome did not necessarily vacillate on questions of warfare as much as the early US (a predominantly economic society), especially after difficult and bloodying conflicts, it was still the case that early Rome did have its formative instabilities of collective identity, at one point going through a somewhat pacifist stage early on, and then thoroughly scrapping that idea to favor perpetual warfare and expansion. I think this illustrates well that idea that though we can capture certain dominant and ascendant aspects of a given identity with a delimiting concept, it is still the case that within that entity is always a multitude of contradictory and conflicting tendencies, just in differing amounts. And that if you dig enough, you'll find your exception. And then you can dig into that exception and find yet more exception.  

Sponge

Like a sponge, I'll take in various influences for quite some time, and before reaching saturation, I'll not have a whole lot to say. Even after saturation, it can take some time for the synthesis to complete. But then when it does, it usually does have to come out eventually, before I start to take things in again. 

Revisiting Return

The question of the sustainability of an empire's modes of violence, and the consequences of that violence for its constituents and those subjected to its wrath, gets much more complicated if one is looking at the movement of time and the effects on multiple societies on each other, when the violence circulates and then washes back upon those doling it out.

This is a difficult and complex subject, which I'd like to keep open for future treatments. For now anyway, a quick illustration could be helpful to introduce the moving parts and the complicating variables. 

One thing that history does well is afford a retrospective observation of more intangible forces like the social effects of violent struggle - forces which may be difficult to perceive on the ground - that pass through a society and between societies, which begin to show their form through the more visible systemic changes of social and historical development over a distinct period of time. 

This gets more complicated fast when you consider that a given age is populated with multiple powers that are behaving in accordance with a larger environmental, technological, and global logic that is in part derived from the respective characters of those interacting powers, characters which are developed in long historical movements. Further, those powers are growing and aging in their own unique ways, changing the movement and effects of those previously mentioned intangible forces. 

For example, the period of the Spanish-American War provides an interesting window into that process due to the very different back-to-back theaters in Cuba and the Philippines, and the ensuing change of public opinion throughout. 

A young American empire was certainly no stranger to violence: it was born in armed revolution and then underwent a calamitous formation of identity through a bloody civil war, but then in the run up to the Spanish-American war, there was a pronounced reticence in getting involved in colonial conflicts and expanding outward. This was due in part to a prevailing founding ideology which insisted the nation not get involved in foreign conflict, itself informed by bitter experience and prevailing culture besides. 

But the hawk faction won out, thanks to internal aggressive agitation, pushing commercial interests, collective ambitions, external conditions and escalations, and the like. The idea was that an armed expansion would not only secure geopolitical and cultural interests, but that the violence itself, as a romantic struggle, would lend meaning to young men's lives, toughen them up, and provide camaraderie. 

And then the Cuban conflict, the "splendid little war" part of the conflict, did end up being short and rather successful. Aided by technical and tactical advances, and the efforts of the Cuban revolutionaries themselves, the US was able to smash the Spanish on that front. The fighting was relatively easy, and the romantic soldiers got their valiant charges and their camaraderie. Swift and confident success was splashed across the headlines. Public opinion was able to grow more warlike and jingoistic as a result, and many gazed enthusiastically up at a newly expanding young empire. 

A newly confident nation then made its way over to the Philippines, and then proceeded to become bogged down in protracted, difficult guerrilla warfare, for various geopolitical and environmental and military reasons among many. The fighting lingered, and grew more vicious, and news and photos of various atrocities circulated, and then in a short amount of time public opinion grew despondent and the isolationist impulse crept back in, where it would linger until the first World War. 

Here we could see the formation of a young empire, which was not even sure of what it wanted to be, or whether it was an empire at all, and within which various factions struggle over the direction and meaning of the application of geopolitical violence. And for public opinion to vacillate from one extreme to the other in such a short amount of time. 

For all of our professed similarities to the Romans, this particular dynamic was less pronounced in ancient Rome, even in its formative years; this was a society which was famous for its rabid tenacity even in the face of grinding struggle and terrible and calamitous military loss. The forces of violence moved and expressed very differently in an ancient world governed by a very different relationship to violent conflict, and within a society that, for all of its general similarities, also worked very differently. 

This is one series of illustrations, but as I said previously, we'll continue to explore these issues. 

Whither Warfare?

In recent months I've turned a fuller gaze onto warfare, not least because I think general war is ascending. Previously it was a fuller gaze on money and capital, and of course I'll get back to that subject in good time. After all, war and money are intimately connected. But ah, one thing at a time here. 

At a smaller scale there is always a war on somewhere, but then the great wars - like the great storms - are supposed to be rarer in that the conditions for their perpetuation must be just right and widespread in their rightness. 

We've had a hundred years or so to watch those conditions develop once again, just as the Europeans had a hundred years or so to watch conditions proceed towards the World Wars after the Napoleonic Wars. 

It seems difficult to imagine another great hot war given the deep interpenetration of the modern world and the prevailing division of labor, but then the Tom Friedmans of the late19th/early 20th century were assuring everyone that the great powers, given their elaborate trade arrangements and mutually destructive entangling alliances, would never jeopardize their collective golden egg-laying goose. 

We know now that they did in fact jeopardize the goose; indeed they went so far as to throw it in the meat grinder and then scatter the giblets all about Western Europe, to the unpleasant surprise and universal shock of everyone involved. That shit grows back I guess, as we know now as well, just taking a look around. 

But then the character of warfare had radically changed, attributable to that hard transition from the pre-modern to modern era, and it is easy enough to see that it has radically changed yet again going into the postmodern era, especially given MAD. 

Who knows what will happen? But one can speculate. I'll get a little more into some of this stuff soon. 

Playing the Fool

A contrived position of naivety may look a little strange, but it is often a useful stance for further analysis. Because analysis often involves isolating a smaller set of causal factors, or even a single causal factor, and to do that, you either have to assume the constancy and temporary irrelevancy of everything else, or else assume absolutely nothing and start from scratch, working from there with more fundamental questions before moving on. It does look a little silly, but it is an important part of the process. 

Return

One thing that late-stage imperial powers are really bad at is reckoning the consequences of their own mortality. This is more clearly illustrated when a power fails to plan several moves ahead and anticipate the geopolitical consequences of their own actions, actions which are already ill advised in the first place due to a decaying collective self-awareness. 

To explore one aspect of this, human nature is such that oftentimes one's enemies will attempt to do to oneself what was previously done to them. For example, the Assyrian tactic of targeted terror might have worked for a while to secure their empire: it could be that if one defeated one's enemies in the most horrific and brutal way possible, and then subsequently put down any further rebellions with the same heavy-handedness, then it was possible that this had a dampening effect on further resistance, actually lowering certain forms of violence and truncating possible wars. 

This shorter term and more localized solution might have presented ostensibly promising results at a time when such a tactic hadn't yet been attempted over larger scales and time frames, but then over longer periods of time and at greater scale, there was that lingering problem that these transgressions would be stored in the memory of the oppressed, and as soon as there was a sign of weakness, say in the form of a faltering empire, then the conquered would return the favor in kind as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And so the Assyrian empire seemed to have unraveled in a reverse direction of its rise through retributive violence and disintegration: the empire seemed constantly ready to jump out of its skin, with building pressures of rebellion spreading throughout. 

To use a simpler and more general metaphor, anyone who has set a mouse trap knows that the same amount of strength it took to set it would come back down in kind as it was released. The problem arises when, due to a mix of overreliance and growing senility, there are now so many traps set about and one begins to forget where they were or even what they are and how they work. The trap becomes another inherent hazard, as opposed to an asset. 

The same general problem could be applied to any empire in a general sense, whether its tactics are softer or more heavy-handed, because an empire is typified by an overriding interest in the centralization of control and the related uneven distribution of resource, and the progressively more intense subjugation of those people further outside its circles of affinity and familiarity. 

There are plenty of tendencies of following in human societies, with many all too willing to demure to what is perceived as a greater power that will serve their interests. But this relationship gets harder to sell when that greater power is at a greater remove, whether it be spatially or culturally or historically or what have you. Doubly more difficult the more obvious the disdain there is for diverse interests not shared by that power. 

This is less meant to be a judgment than an observation. It is less apparent that a society's character is consciously and deliberately arrived at, and whatever is conscious and intentional is more often arrived at after the fact than not, though it is not an insignificant force. Further the necessities imposed by long-running historical forces external to any given society can be tremendous indeed. 

To continue on with the proud tradition of muddying the waters, I'll come back to this soon with some complicating examples, as this pattern is less simple and more difficult to discern for those living the history. 

Social Evolution

Given the complexity of social systems, they are often only imperfectly understood - if they are perceived to be distinct entities at all - and are only more thoroughly analyzed after the fact, taking further form after perceived shortcomings, mistakes, and failures. 

Body Metaphor

There is a lot of weariness around the body metaphor, and for good reason. For hundreds of years and probably much further, the body metaphor has been rolled out to normalize exploitative relations: the head needs the hands and so on. But what the metaphor does accomplish is illustrating the nature and, more importantly, the consequences of deep interconnection. 

For better or for worse, the body's many constituent parts work together to maintain their own mutual integrity, each playing an essential part but at the same time being completely dependent on each other. And then a given body as a unity with a certain ascendant character, could very well be destructive to its own self and its continuity, which itself is a relation in terms of other bodies within a greater organizing body like a society. Hence the fool and villain/criminal archetypes. 

Touching Down

There's something to George Clinton's misty pronouncement that "you meet in life the exact reproductions of your own thoughts." Well, maybe not in that mushy and sanguine The Secret sense, but in a more general energetic sense. As for me, I look and see something out on the horizon and think, "oh that looks kinda bad," and then soon enough it finds me. Omicron in particular is kind of like that vampire scratching on the window, only that it just lets itself in anyway and then proceeds to trash the place, leaving behind a foggy confusion after it has left with its pound of flesh. Of course given the variant's contagiousness, the chances of getting it are much higher now. 

I'm fine enough, in the sense that I've gotten used to feeling trashed and foggy and run down. But I had a whole lot of work to do before it hit me. Fortunately I've recovered as much as can be expected, and am now house sitting in a trailer in the middle of the foothills of southwestern Idaho, where the outside temperature during the winter wanders from highs of just above freezing to lows of below freezing, so needless to say I'll have plenty of quiet time to catch up on some of these pieces I've been noodling on. More to come.