The Blood-soaked Soil #1 - Preface
Understanding what each drop of blood means
There’s a field of study that’s called conflict or security studies, it’s sometimes designated as its own discipline but sometimes incorporated into International Relations. As you can probably guess, the discipline tries to understand the different aspects of conflict and conflict resolution. One of its most basic endeavors is determining why conflict exists in the world at all.
The foundational basis of society is, though often forgotten, the individual. If you wish to understand a machine you need to understand the parts; it makes sense then that to understand nations you need to understand individuals. To understand why nations wage war you need to understand why people wage war. However, like all machines, the natures of the parts don’t reflect the nature of the machine. An automobile contains thousands of individual parts, but no part on its own is representative of the vehicle in its entirety. Yet this is a common mistake made by academics and other pseudo-intellectuals when they try to assess the personal level of conflict; the character of rationality found in states and institutions is incorrectly imposed on the individual.
However, it doesn’t take a room of sociologist and peer-reviewed studies to know that humans often act irrationally and often ignore what may objectively be materially best for them. Furthermore, academics being quintessential midwits are naturally predisposed to “critical” theories, critical theories are to academics what helmets are to special-needs kids. We’ve all noticed the helmets getting tighter and cutting off the blood flow.
My point is that attempts to discern motivation through critical perspectives are doomed to fulfill a sort of confirmation bias; a feminist perspective will unsurprisingly determine that socially constructed gender roles are why men fight. A biological perspective will conclude that conflict is an evolutionary mechanism. Yet, even these critical perspectives ultimately do the same thing as the conventional realist and liberal approaches which are to create a list of rational preferences for actors. Almost all conflict resolution theory is premised on the satisfaction of preferences. If you really want to understand conflict and war you really can’t rely on those nerds.
A quick review of the available literature will show that social scientists are extremely inept and incompetent, not that a review of the literature is needed to know that. “Intellectuals” can’t seem to understand why men go to war. And why would they? Most theorists are computer-brained goofs. Thankfully, in the past decade most theorists have moved beyond their previous obsession of trying to discern which level of conflict provides the greatest conceptual value, if only they would leave the field altogether.
International Relations and war are still generally thought of as a sequence of choices. This ideology has long been common quantitative literature, what else could statistics possibly be? Unfortunately, technical thinking has poisoned qualitative literature as well. If anything, this demonstrates how even so-called “qualitative approaches” aren’t as qualitative as they should be when done by modern academics. Modern Social Scientists have almost fully bought into the modern paradigm of the discipline which is chiefly a paradigm of statistics (technique) that they’ve ceased to think of IR and conflict in the same way Thucydides and Herodotus would.
I say all this is to suggest that when answering a question as foundational to human nature as “why do people fight?” it’s necessary for theories to be extremely human, philosophical, and slightly esoteric. It’s necessary to understand the nonmaterial aspects of ideology and an internal human spirit, most importantly the metaphysics and metapolitics of human interaction. This issue must be better studied, to understand why a man faces every bullet and tolerates every cold night in the open is to understand man itself.
I first began thinking about this subject years ago when I came across a beautiful poem, which I have written about, called “Die Baltifahne” by Karl Freiherr von Manteuffel-Katzdangen. It’s a beautiful poem about love and loss felt by German forces in Baltics at the end of the Great War. That poem started an obsession about the interwar Baltics for me, particularly from the German perspective. As my interest grew I learned that the quality and quantity of research on this period is extremely lacking. I was really disappointed by this, as I kept looking for answers I ran into dead ends. This chapter of history, which is contextually less than a decade long, reveals more about humanity and civilization than most centuries, and it deserves to be expanded upon.
In 1919 the German empire had lost control of the Baltics which meant they were unable to support the ethnically German population of the region. Despite losing nearly all support from the empire, many Germans refused to leave the region and decided to fight by creating volunteer forces which were known as Freikorps. In all ways, these forces were at every disadvantage and under constant threat from famously formidable opponents. I want to share with you why I think this particular point in history is so beautiful and what it shows about passions and the best way to do this is by reading a few quotes from men who walked across the blood drenched fields of Riga. The fact that participation in the Freikorps was voluntarily allows us to ignore the variable of state coercion which makes modern wars so fake and illegitimate; in fact, irregular forces often operate at odds with the states. If you were fighting in the Baltics, you wanted to be fighting in the Baltics. The Baltic Freikorps let’s us see man isolated from other variables as the Baltics were truly lawless at that time.
This is the introduction to a multi-part essay series about the Baltic Freikorps and what the bloody fields of Riga reveal to us. Subscribe to keep up with this series.