Atavistic War
The Future Meets the Past as War and Militarism Thrive in America
Barbara Ehrenreich was a remarkable writer and thinker. Her book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), is one of the most original and thoughtful studies of war and its nature. She traced humanity’s affinity to war, our predilection for it, not to our vaunted status as predators but to our vulnerable status as prey to other predators in the wild. Our early human ancestors were fearful creatures, and for good reason. Humans learned to band together as a way of conquering other predators and controlling their fear; once those predators were mostly banished to fleeting memories and occasional nightmares, we could turn on each other, becoming predators (and prey) to ourselves.
If you haven’t read her book, I urge you to check it out. Stimulating it is. And so too is an afterword she wrote to the paperback edition of the book, available at TomDispatch and which I read last night. Once again, Ehrenreich doesn’t disappoint.
While she wrote about the possibility of robot war in the future, a war largely devoid of human “boots on the ground,” she also made mention of atavistic war. By atavistic war, she meant a return to the past, to the primitive, to the reassuring (reassuring to America's conventional big-battalion military, that is). Thus the U.S. suffers a major terrorist strike launched by a relatively small band of non-state actors, and the response of the war department in Washington was to launch invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq while talking about re-creating both countries with quasi-Marshall Plans, as if we had returned to the 1940s.
Even as America today pursues AI and increasingly sophisticated robot drones and the like, there’s a desire, a yen, to return to older models as certainties. Already in Ukraine, we’re witnessing a return to the trench warfare of Word War I as the New York Times reports that Ukraine and Russia have suffered half a million killed and wounded over the last 18 months. At the same time, the U.S. and NATO seem to believe that with weaponry like tanks and fighter jets and better training, Ukraine can break through Russian defenses in a quasi-Blitzkrieg like World War II, defeating Russian forces and forcing their leader to beg for peace. Erwin Rommel’s rapid advances in France in 1940 and North Africa in 1942 might serve as models for a decisive Ukrainian counteroffensive, a friend suggested to me, despite the costly slog and disappointing results of this year’s “spring” offensive.
Speaking of atavism, U.S. leaders of the military-industrial-congressional complex have a hankering for a new Cold War, not only with Russia but with China too. It includes the re-nuclearization of America, with new ICBMs, bombers, and submarines at a cost of $2 trillion over the next thirty years. Perhaps we’ll even see new bomb shelters, new "duck and cover" drills, maybe even a new nuclear crisis akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The one future America’s self-styled warriors can't seem to imagine is one largely free of war. We Americans remain prey, this time to our “leaders” and their passions and pursuit of profit and power through violent dominance.
Ehrenreich would understand. Our very own “blood rites” remain very much in force in our lives. The prey—that’s us—remain predators that are prey to the passions of war with all its fear, destruction, and death.
Something tells me the robots and robotic war will not free us from our blood rites. For how can creations liberate their creators?
Nothing about it makes sense unless you understand that top politicians, think Biden in this case, no matter how dire the intelligence reports they get, still do not want to have the label of "Loser" emblazoned on them. They must win at all costs, to the last Ukrainian, if necessary. The same thing happened with LBJ and Nixon during the Vietnam war. A loss would have been catastrophic politically, so despite copious amounts of intelligence and analysis that said the war was unwinnable, they wanted to stave off defeat as long as possible, for political reasons. That is what is happening now.
It is quite bizarre what the US and NATO are doing now, truly unhinged. Their final phase of the insanity seems to be that they want to test F-16s and Abrams against the Russian army, now that the rest of the NATO arsenal has failed the test. Russia understands that they are being tested by the west, and therefore has even more incentive to pass with flying colors. But Biden is certain about one thing, he does not want to lose before the upcoming election, just like LBJ and Nixon. Maybe we will get lucky again, and Biden will be forced from office for his corrupt business dealings with Hunter like Nixon did for the Watergate coverup.
I am not so sure that the power elites want war (they would likely be happy to get what they want without violence), but they are willing to commit horrific acts of violent depredations upon other human beings to get what they do want; power, monetary wealth, glory, etc. The US empire is no worse in this regard than other empires of history, but contra to the chest thumpers, the US is certainly no better.
As for robot war, it can only go so far. To gain the kind of control imperialists desire you have to in some fashion kill and conquer the other side, and vice versa. This means continued shedding of copious amounts of human blood.