Linked Article By: Bret Devereaux (2020) related tags: #WarHistory #FremenMirage #StateConstruction

Pop history has a nasty tendency to compress all of that into one idea of ‘Rome,’ which rises once and falls once, as opposed to the reality of a Rome which rose, fell into civil war, then rose some more, then had a crisis, then stabilized, then fragmented, then fell in some places while remaining stable in others.

On top of pop history (depending on definition, I suppose—I assume it tends to be the popular history engaged with in documentaries and outside of formal educational institutions) and probably influencing pop history, I'd argue that the ways Roman history are taught in schools support this.

Much like how pop biology suffers with the bare minimum with little nuance being taught in schools (see: gender and sex), which continues supporting people's poor understanding of biology (because most people rarely go beyond what schools enforce upon them and then believe that to be the end—an issue that I see in another way), the history we teach in compulsory schooling also suffers the same problem (along with other social studies/sciences).

The Romans also defeated the Illyrians (in what is today the Balkins) in fairly tough country in 168 and then put down a massive revolt there from 6-9AD, with the revolts drawing from a number of tribal groups such as the Daesitiatae, Breuci, Pannones, Dalmatae, among others – the Romans inflicted a lot of death in the area, but also effectively ethnically cleansed it by re-dividing the people there to break up the old tribal groupings.

I have to wonder something... If we actually made this part of history more well-recognised, would people actually start recognising how the world looks with regards to nationalities? Would 'Germans' be able to actually tell me what it means to 'be German' (without telling me what they think other people think of them or what foods are supposedly unique to them)?

Or would people realise that we've always been somewhat different but also intermingling (sometimes by force and via genocidal structures), causing us to be... not super different over time. Sure, we have our varying cultural understandings, but many of them seem to become gradually more superficial (even if interesting) rather than substantial.

This isn't to say we shouldn't recognise or engage with cultures; we absolutely should. But it does kind of highlight the ways in which we neglect past events, how they shape us, and that we've been doing them for ages and keep doing them over and over again in different contexts (or rather, the current “elected” kings keep doing it).

Amercanisation, for example, basically was a way of “break[ing] up the old tribal groupings” for immigrants coming to the US and thus enabling some to participate in a category of “whiteness.” You see similar behaviours in the construction of whatever “European” means.

I also want to note what that would have meant for someone living among the Alemanni – generations of low-scale raiding which, when it escalates into major warfare, results in crushing defeats involving heavy casualties. The grief and misery of the first half-dozen failed invasions don’t instantly vanish because the next invasion didn’t fail.

Pondering this for modern times and the fights we certainly need to have against modern states... should be done. Though this isn't the point of this piece, it's hard for me not to think about this after having read all these things about so-called revolutionaries and why we should engage in violent self-defense and self-protection: I don't think we deal with the grief and misery nearly enough, even if we do need to use those tactics.

We should consider the grief and misery we will endure and figure out how we can deal with it... and that should be part of our 'prefigurative' culture building. We can't forever mourn, but we do need to find ways to come to terms with it... if we are going to be having those skirmishes in increasing numbers.

One thing I hope is made clear by the short italicized textboxes I’ve scattered throughout, is that the Romans complaining about ‘decadence’ clearly has no temporal connection to Roman decline. As soon as we have a Roman literary tradition (not counting fragments, we have almost no Latin literature before the mid-second century, where the tradition opens with, among other authors, M. Porcius Cato, a noted complainer about Roman decadence!), Roman elites are complaining about decadence – too much urbanism, too much eastern philosophy, too much wealth and luxury (ideas which, for the Romans, are linked by their opposition to the ideal of the morally pure, frugal, untutored Roman small-farmer).

The more I think on this (fascist) bullshit that this series is debunking, the more bizarre it becomes for me that people have been saying this for centuries.

It's much the same as the constant focus of things like politicians on “the heartland” in the US (meaning rural America, usually rural Midwest between the Rockies and Appalachia) or the constant focus on villages over large cities for their election goals (outside the US, too).

Also worth noting what behaviours are treated as “decadent” and how that morphs over time.

Decline is not inevitable, nor irreversible, and it does not appear to be the product of ‘good times.’ And the victory of the Fremen appears far from inevitable either, except, perhaps on time-scales so uselessly vast that they communicate nothing more incisive than that all things can collapse and that nothing lasts forever. That’s a true lesson, but not a new one, and when discussing the rise and fall of empires, it is about as probative as saying that, if you roll dice enough times, you will eventually roll snake eyes. Which – yes, you will, but that observation tells you nothing about why or when or what you might do about it, only that the laws of probability in the extreme long run have not yet been repealed.

Again, not inherent to this post, but this final sentence... I think this is why I hate the ways in which so many anarchists write things about how to fight the state? It really sounds exactly like that.

If we keep doing it, we'll win one day. Which... maybe. But it tells me nothing about how we might do it, why we're doing what we're doing, or what we can do to keep going rather than getting a handful of small victories and keeping tally of tons of losses.

Linked Article By: Bret Devereaux (2020) related tags: #WarHistory #FremenMirage #StateConstruction

But before we get into that, we need to talk about what we mean by the state. The state is a system of social organization that is so prevalent in today’s world that all too often we take it for granted that it is the only form of social organization, or the chief one, when in fact it has been around for only a tiny minority of our species’ tenure on this planet. Now the modern, political-science definition of a state today tends to run something like this (this is, for the curious, Max Weber’s definition): a state is a political entity (a polity) which exercises a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory. Another way of defining the phenomenon – and one more useful in the very early stages of state-formation – is to define a state as (to use Wayne Lee’s formulation of the common definition from Waging War, 36), “a society with marked social stratification, with a centralized and internally specialized government capable of extending bureaucratic control out into a settlement hierarchy” consisting of multiple (at least usually three; center, regional centers and subordinate communities below them) tiers.

Going to be reading a few of Bret's works (which are lengthy), but I want to gather some of the quotes I find. This is something that I wish more people working on history and anthropology would actually engage with because... well, it's true that most people assume that the state is a natural and obvious structure of organisation (it's also occasionally tacked on to the hierarchy of progression: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (thanks to Elman Service for this absurdist typology that he outlined in the fucking 1960s that won't go away).

There’s a lot more to this process – one day we’ll talk more about state formation on its own – but I wanted to lay out the basic outlines because I want to show how central military power is to this process. While the state produces all of these very un-Fremen things: social complexity, increased specialization, bureaucracy (which in turn leads to literacy and from there to very un-Fremen literature) and the accumulation of large amounts of wealth, it does so in the pursuit of military power. And it worked: the state was and remains the single best organizational principle for the creation and direction of violence ever derived. With only a handful of exceptions (which we’ll discuss in the final part of this series), the potential violence the state can bring to bear wildly outstrips the capacity of other forms of social organization.

Also going to tuck away this quote here.

I don’t want to get into all of the possible permutations of pastoralism, from mostly stationary ranching to transhumance to true nomadism – that’s for another time. But I do want to note the existence of these unfarmable places, because they are places that the state struggles to go, and in some cases can never truly go into. The state, as an organizational system, is fundamentally based on farming communities: densely populated, sedentary and highly specialized. But pastoralist societies are often thinly populated, transitory and largely unspecialized. Whereas an expanding state could simply convert tribal farmers into new state subjects, relying on the (borrowing the idea from Landers, The Field and the Forge (2005) demographic space created by those farmers (the available agricultural surplus, community centers like towns and villages to serve as administrative centers, transportation infrastructure, and sedentary farmers) to do so, pastoralists are a difficult fit with the state. They often don’t stay neatly in one place for the purpose of taxation or extraction, there is no easy administrative center to organize them, and – knowing that their rough terrain gives them a degree of insulation from state control – they tend to be truculent.

This also might highlight a part of why borders are so strictly enforced and become more strictly enforced as time goes on. The same applies to places where you must consistently report your home address (especially, but not limited to, having to do so immediately and directly to an institution, be it an immigration service or the police). I don't know if it's a correct assumption, but if we could easily go to different places whenever we wanted or needed... Similar issues would apply.