Tag: Barbara Ehrenreich

Atavistic War

W.J. Astore

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?

The Predatory Nature of War

A predatory war bird: The A-10 Warthog
A predatory war bird: The A-10 Warthog

W.J. Astore

Are we fighting a war on terror, or a war against predators? Surely the latter is more accurate. We see terrorists as predators. We fear them as such. They’re hiding in the weeds, morphing into the background, only to emerge to kill innocents with seemingly arbitrary (and thus very scary) rapacity. Therefore, following Barbara Ehrenreich’s amazing book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), “vulnerable” Americans believe they must band together to kill or cage these predators. It’s the way we control our instinctive fear of being prey — we’d much rather be the hunter than the hunted.

When you see the enemy as murderous predators with no soul but that of a demon with a hunger to kill, why bother trying to understand them? Just go ahead and torture them.  They’re soulless predators bent on killing your loved ones. Or go ahead and kill them, perhaps from the skies with drones: death by aerial sniper. Torture or death: it simply doesn’t matter when you’re dealing with mindless predators.

But, and here’s the rub, who are the real predators? Are we not predators too? We sure pose as such. Look at our heavily armed drones and their names: Predator, Reaper. Look at our war birds and their names and nose art: eagles and falcons and raptors and warthogs with shark’s teeth painted around the 30mm Gatling gun of the A-10 Warthog. Are we not predatory as well?

We reap what we sow. In the name of extinguishing predators, we become that which we wish to extinguish. In the name of saving lives, we kill. We fortify everything. We even spy on our closest allies because you just never know — they might be predators too.

President Obama says his number one priority is keeping America safe, and we applaud. But his number one priority should be upholding our Constitution. It’s our communal laws and system of justice — our Constitutional safeguards — that ultimately keep us safe, not our predatory actions.

Our quest to destroy the world’s predators is inuring us to our own predatory nature.  The wild passions of war rule; endless cycles of violence are the result.

Surely the war on terror is the ultimate oxymoron, since war itself produces terror.  War feasts on terror. Indeed, war is the ultimate predator.  The more we wage it in the name of eliminating the predators among us, the more we ensure its predations will continue.

Such is the paradox of war.