The Search for the Good War

You should have eyes that always seek an enemy — your enemy. And some of you hate at first sight.
-Nietzsche
When I was in the Marine Corps, we ironically referred to catalogs of tactical gear — holsters, magazine pouches, body armor, and the like — as “nylon porn,” a term which both captures the glamour of modern military kit and recognizes our fetishization of it. Special operations chic is a common image from movies, video games, and, of course, media coverage of sixteen years of war; even ISIS recruiting and propaganda videos pay homage to modern military fashion rather than emphasizing traditional garb that would seem to align better with their message.
During unrest in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere, police have donned military surplus uniforms and equipment (although surplus air conditioners may have the greatest impact on crime). Presenting a militaristic image is a deliberate tactical decision: when interacting with the populace in Afghanistan and Iraq, I would have my marines remove helmets, ballistic glasses, and sometimes body armor, assuming greater risk to their lives in the interest of public relations — but I would also designate certain marines to keep their helmets and sunglasses on and to remain stonily silent and intimidating, sending the message that we were, as then-General Mattis formulated it, “no better friend, no worse enemy.” The danger of civilian police wearing military kit is that when you dress like a soldier you are liable to start thinking you are a soldier; police have a delicate job of serving and protecting their community, where soldiers have a mission of delivering overwhelming violence against an enemy.
The armed neo-Nazi militia members in Charlottesville, Virginia, have evidently spent a lot of money on sexy weapons and nylon porn.
Some of the armed militia members with the neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, have evidently spent a lot of money on sexy weapons and nylon porn. It is easy to understand this simply as racist goons seeking to intimidate their opponents with the threat of violence — which it certainly is. But commentators, particularly those repulsed by gun culture or ambivalent about the military, may miss the significant glamour of the militia pose, and what it means to those playing soldier.
In her book The Power of Glamour, Virginia Postrel called glamour “an illusion…which focuses and intensifies a pre-existing but previously inchoate yearning.” There has been much analysis of the motives of the white-supremacist alt-right movement. Some see the movement as a calculated response to economic concerns on the part of those left behind by globalization and deindustrialization. Others find the alt-right motivated primarily by racial hatred; some would even argue that the tiki-torch-wielding “angry white boys” in Charlottesville were themselves seeking an identity in a landscape driven by identity politics.
While all of these analyses capture some of the truth, the motivation of the individual members of the alt-right may be found less in clear goals and desired endstates than in the notion of conflict itself, and an important key to undermining it found not in the struggle for the sake of group identity advanced by some alt-right figures, but in a primal yearning of individuals to see themselves heroes.
There is a strong parallel with the recent fascination with Armageddon narratives. Some see the doomsday-preppers and zombie-apocalypse-fantasists seeking a fresh start, a slate wiped clean of the chaos of the modern world. Others find today’s humans recognizing themselves as cogs in a machine they can no longer control, thereby feeling that the apocalypse is already afoot. But it is telling that appealing doomsday narratives invariably feature struggle against an adversary. We are not interested in the aftermath of a disease outbreak that leaves the survivors free to build an ideal society: we are interested in the fight for survival against raging hordes of implacable foes. The successful Left Behind series is not about those elevated to paradise in the rapture, it is about those who remain on Earth to oppose an evil enemy. Popular dystopian fiction is about the victorious fight against dystopia. The “Lost Cause” myth of the Civil War as a fight of noble soldiers against an industrial Leviathan is the same narrative. So is the The Turner Diaries.
“The implicit promise of a life devoid of mediocrity”
The call to be a hero, a champion — not the lure of danger as such, but what Alicia Drake called “the implicit promise of a life devoid of mediocrity” — is what led some military veterans I know to go back overseas as mercenaries — or led them on to nobler quests, like fighting poverty, or working as journalists. It is a human yearning that is not restricted to the right, although there is certainly a difference in style when it comes to political violence. Political violence on the left is probably limited in America less by the sympathy of the oppressed — many oppressed people throughout history have turned to violence — than by the historical repudiation of the military by the left in protests against the Vietnam War, and so the Antifa take up rocks and Molotov cocktails rather than guns. When I was growing up outside Philadelphia, the racist skinheads primarily did battle with the anti-racist skinheads. Their despicable white power agenda was secondary to conflict for the sake of conflict.
Whatever the calculations of alt-right strategists, who explicitly seek to mobilize racist identity to pursue political goals, they must appeal to individuals, and understanding that appeal is important in dampening it. The Antifa, in this regard, play right into the hands of the neo-Nazis by reinforcing the narrative that racism and those who oppose it are somehow morally equal, that Black Lives Matter, demanding fair treatment for all, is no different than white supremacists who deny the rights of Americans. As odious as people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter are, violently denying them the opportunity to speak lends credence to their narrative, and animates their followers.
Instead, we should continue to unmask the evil of that narrative and make it unpalatable rather than glamourous. We can start by calling neo-Nazis what they are; the flags and other iconography on display at the alt-right demonstration in Charlottesville, and the statements of the groups organizing and taking part in it, are unequivocally Nazi. But the more subtle narratives, the ones that disavow overt racism but glamorize a struggle with a racist subtext, are the most challenging.
Alt-right strategists are bad readers of Nietzsche
Alt-right strategists are bad readers of Nietzsche and like to snip inspirational quotes out of context — like the one I began with, which addresses intellectual struggle rather than war or physical violence. What follows is: “…And if your thought be vanquished, then your honesty should still find cause for triumph in that.” I once had a fellow officer insist, during a staff ride to a Civil War battlefield, that the Civil War had been about states’ rights and not about slavery. “No,” I said. “There is no ‘state right’ to make it legal for one human being to own another.” He sat down: I may not have changed his mind, but I made it harder for him to consider himself a hero.
Originally published at Zachary Martin.
