Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War by Barbara Ehrenreich

Author:Barbara Ehrenreich [Ehrenreich, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847083852
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Where the tradition is historically vague or insufficiently uplifting, imagination has filled in. Nineteenth-century Prussians, for example, saw themselves as the successors of the Spartans and the Assyrians, or rooted their pedigree in medieval times, sometimes describing themselves as “crusaders.”18 Medieval knights, in turn, sought roots in ancient times, through a twelfth-century genre of romances which described the heroes of the Trojan War as if they were medieval knights themselves, complete with suits of armor.19 Addressing the cadets at West Point, General MacArthur conjured up a ghostly succession of American warriors who were to serve as the superegos of the young. Were the cadets ever to fail in their duty, “a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, honour, country.”20 For imaginative reach, though, no one has matched the German Nationalist science of “aryanology,” which sought to trace the Wehrmacht’s ethnic and spiritual lineage back thousands of years to the prehistoric Indo-European armed male band, or Männerbund. These pseudoscholarly efforts to construct a continuous bloodline of German-Aryan warriors no doubt played a role in Hitler’s conception of himself as a member of a “race of Aryan god-men.”21

There has been, at various times and places, a real basis for the warrior’s notion of a warrior lineage: Metal-and-muscle technology tended to favor a hereditary warrior elite, with warrior status passed on from father to son, largely because of the cost of equipping each fighting man, especially if he required armor and horses. In medieval Europe, for example, a single knight’s equipment was worth the equivalent of about twenty oxen, or the plow teams of ten peasant families.22 Thus warriors had to be wealthy compared with average people (or, in the case of mercenaries, employed by wealthy men), and wealth took the form of land, which was inherited through the blood lineage, or noble family. Many acres of land, cultivated by peasants, were required to maintain a noble household with its corps of knights and squires; conversely, the extreme social inequality characterizing feudalism could be maintained only by employing armed force, from time to time, against the resentful peasantry. “Feudal aristocracy existed by war and for war,” Toynbee wrote; “its power had been founded by arms, and by arms that power was maintained.”23

Much of Europe’s warrior elite persisted as an unbroken blood line for centuries, well into the age of guns. To take the case of Prussia, a warrior society par excellence: As late as 1871, 96 percent of officers promoted to the rank of brigadier general were from the landed nobility; by 1914, 58 percent were still men of the landed aristocracy, almost half of them holding titles that dated back to before 1400.24 Similarly, the pre-World War I British officer corps was rooted in the landed aristocracy, a regimental position being one of the few occupations deemed suitable for a young man of relative wealth and leisure. Thus, right up into the twentieth century, armies

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