Desert Warfare

In my research about traditional conceptions of hospitality in Arab culture, I got to reading a bit about Lawrence of Arabia, a figure who I had never really explored before, but who seems like an important historical link between current events and those that came before. Lawrence was sent into the Levant by the British government to help foment an Arab rebellion against the Ottoman Turks. He became a special advisor to Bedouin tribes, who have always been guerilla raiders, engaging the Ottoman Empire in costly and inconvenient asymmetric warfare. Lawrence developed close ties to the men he lived and fought with by “going native”, adopting local customs, dress and language to gain the men’s trust as an outsider.

The story has close parallels to lore around figures like Osama Bin Laden, who along with the Mujahideen fighters was assisted - allegedly - by the CIA in waging an asymmetric proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Much the same techniques still operate today in Afghanistan, according to a modern strategy website.

The U.S. Army Special Forces have gone back to their roots in Afghanistan. Using techniques developed and used with great success as far back as World War II, Special Forces A Teams are operating in remote Afghan valleys, and forming their own small armies by hiring local Afghans to help catch any Taliban or al Qaeda who might come through. U.S. troops have hired armed Afghans in the past, but from local warlords. This did not work too well. The warlord who supplied the troops had their own agendas. This included not getting any of their lads killed, and being open to bribery from the opposition. All of this is considered traditional in the Afghan scheme of things. A warlord becomes a warlord by having enough money to pay troops, some way to raise more money to keep paying them, and enough battlefield sense to keep down friendly casualties. Any warlord who misses too many payrolls, or gets too many of his guys killed, finds that no one wants to follow him anymore. A warlord without gunmen is no longer a warlord.

T.E. Lawrence penned a famous military document, the 27 Articles, which was a set of practical principles for military advisors working closely with Arab tribes. His final commandment reads:

The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. Keep always on your guard; never say an unnecessary thing: watch yourself and your companions all the time: hear all that passes, search out what is going on beneath the surface, read their characters, discover their tastes and their weaknesses and keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain is saturated with one thing only, and you realize your part deeply enough to avoid the little slips that would counteract the painful work of weeks. Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.

Gaining Trust

Such has been the stuff of covert tactical operations teams and special military “advisors” for generations. The essence of the work appears to have changed very little over time, requiring that the outside advisor gain the trust of the group to which he is attaching himself. One method whereby Lawrence is said to have gained the trust of his Arab irregulars is through feats of physical endurance:

“Few of even the most hard-bitten Arabs would ride with him from choice. He never tired. Hunger, thirst and lack of sleep appeared to have little effect on him. He had broken all the records which had been sung (about) for centuries. On one occasion he rode his camel 300 miles in three consecutive days. His spiritual equipment overrode the ordinary needs of flesh and blood,” said Stirling.”

Lawrence of Arabia has become something of a legendary figure on account of his military exploits. But the basic principles which he adhered to seem to operate on many other levels, as most of the real work that he did was actually social and cultural. Cultural anthropologists and marketing agencies, for one, apply these same types of techniques to study and penetrate social groups. [See also: COINTELPRO] But the same thing happens on a much more ordinary day-to-day level as well.

Consider starting a new job: you arrive for your first day wearing clothes you think are appropriate and follow the lead of bosses and co-workers to model your own behavior. You learn from the people around you and adopt elements of their dress, personal style, customs and behaviors in order to become integrated with the group identity. There’s not necessarily anything nefarious about it: the same thing happens with friends. You share your interests with one another, and end up influencing each another.

But, in order to truly become accepted as a full-fledged member of any social group, no matter what it is, you typically have to “pay your dues.” That is, you have to accrue value within the community. Any close network of human relationships has attached to it an informal web of favors and other types of value exchanged (gifts, etc) over a long period of time. An outsider to any group does not have this long history of sharing value with other members, and therefore must build up that kind of relationship with others in the group in order to be fully accepted.

Initiation Rituals

Membership rites, rituals and ordeals have long been a mainstay of fraternal organizations the world over. Hazing in fraternities, sometimes brutal and humiliating, is a modern institutionalized example of what it may take to be admitted into the inner circles of a hierarchically-organized social network. In such groups, a trusted member typically will have to vouch for or sponsor new members. You can see these same principles operating in many different arenas in American life, from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to things like labor unions.

Media outlets tend to play up as well ordeals and tests required of new gang initiates. I remember in highschool hearing rumors about a gang initiation (I never heard what gang, exactly) ritual which consisted of driving a car at night with no headlights, until you passed another car which flashed their lights at you, as a reminder/notice that your lights are off. Allegedly, the gang initiate would then be required to follow, track down and kill whatever driver was unlucky enough to have tried to help them out. Whether such things really happen in suburban Long Island where I grew up or if they are simply urban legends is not the point I’m trying to make here.

Tribal Trust Networks

The point actually has to do with feudalism, the vassalage and lodge systems. In medieval Europe, knights swore fealty to lords, offering military aid in exchange for land use rights.

As the system developed in the seventh century, the vassals were gangs of freemen who voluntarily subjected themselves, in some varying degree of formality, to the authority of a leader, from whose distribution of loot they could expect to be fed, clothed and armed. The quality of a vassal was only in his fighting ability and the strength of his loyalty. The etymology of “vassal” is from a Celtic word gwas “boy” that designated a young male slave, with a Latinised form, vassus that appeared in Salic Law (Rouche 1987 p 429), not unlike the derivation of “knight” from Old English cniht and cognates in Frisian and Dutch, all meaning “lad”.

All later connotations, of chivalry, of aristocratic lineage and even of land-holdings have to be set aside: the original vassals were as mobile as their lords, a retinue of sworn bodyguards, whose status was a reflection of the status of their lord. The Merovingian kings of the 7th century dignified their personal retainers as antrustiones (Cantor 1993, p.198). In an earlier age, Alexander the Great’s bodyguard of generals were similarly singled out as his “companions.” The various meanings of peer (French paire) still retain some sense of this original parity among equals who followed the charismatic leader.

Prior to that, the Romans had the patronage system in which a wealthy patronus sponsored a cliens:

Latin translation: the protector. In archaic Latin: the father (pater).

Patronus (plural patroni) was part of the social customs of Ancient Rome, a social term that referred to the senior party in one of several social relationships.

It could refer to the protector, sponsor, or benefactor of a cliens from the lower classes or from outside Rome in a relationship called clientela. This social institution was ancient, extending into Rome’s earliest society. Indeed, the Romans believed it was invented by Romulus. In the earliest periods, patricians were patrons of plebian citizens.

The lesser partner in such a relationship had duties quite similar to that of a later feudal vassal:

A cliens had had certain obligations towards their patronus, including social ones. They were required to show up every morning as their patrons “levy” to see if there was any service that their patron required of them that day. Additionally, clientes were expected to contribute toward the dowry of their patron’s marriageable daughters. Clientes could not be compelled to testify against their patron in a court of law. Traditionally, clientes accompanied their patrons in times of war, as vassals.

Feudalism eventually evolved chivalric orders, closely tied early on to religious orders, and these knightly confraternities shared many of the characteristics of what later would become fraternal men’s organizations based around the lodge system. Groups like the Freemasons had more specific ancestry within the guild system of Europe, which basically operated according to the same principles. But instead of lords, knights, squires and pages, you had the master, journeyman and apprentice. In order to rise up the ranks in these trade guilds, you had to undertake bonded servitude to your master, complete various training regimens and so forth. The Japanese system of retainers closely paralleled European feudalism, and in most of these social systems, a lordless man, a rogue knight or a ronin - a samurai without a master - was looked upon with much derision, lacking the social status of those who had successfully gained admittance into a group.

Mutual Benefit Societies

The purpose of such a tight-knit group though, isn’t simply that lesser members pay service to those above them in the hierarchy. Everyone is supposed to benefit from membership (”membership has its privileges“):

A benefit society or mutual aid society is an organization or voluntary association formed to provide mutual aid, benefit or insurance for relief from sundry difficulties. Such organizations may be formally organized with charters and established customs, or may arise ad hoc to meet unique needs of a particular time and place.

Benefit societies can be organized around a shared ethnic background, religion, occupation, geographical region or other basis. Benefits may include money or assistance for sickness, retirement, education, birth of a baby, funeral and medical expenses, unemployment. Often benefit societies provide a social or educational framework for members and their families to support each other and contribute to the wider community.

While hierarchy is not the only or necessarily the best way to organize groups of individual humans, its ubiquity as a social phenomenon is quite clear. These types of small groups, crews, communities, gangs, unions, fraternities, etc - like it or not - are the essential backbone upon which larger, more officially-recognized entities like states and nations rest upon. The rise of the nation-state in Europe followed the consolidation of power among certain nobles and the subjugation of lesser lords and their vassals to their interests.

America itself has a warlord history as well, though it’s rarely if ever described as such. George Washington, a plantation owner and essentially a feudal lord, raised, clothed, fed and trained a retinue of his own soldiers whose loyalty belonged first and foremost to him. Similar examples crop up again and again across the landscape of the American Revolution and throughout military history in general. Powerful men raise troops loyal to them, and then ally with one another for mutual benefit.

States are essentially composed of allied networks of warlords and lodges which have become so powerful that they have become legitimized. What are police, for example, except a fraternal lodge which has been granted an official monopoly on the use of coercive violence? Who is organized crime and who is legitimate business and government is often in the eye of the beholder.

American Tribal Warlords

The American republican system of government reflects this ancient organizational structure on many different levels. Each geographic region or territory is organized according to local and state hierarchies, under the formal rule of a governor. States and governors owe their allegiance upward to the Federal government which has powers and privileges not available to the individual states. Each state elects representatives to the federal government’s bicameral legislature to protect their regional interests and make decisions on behalf of their community.

What you have, in effect, is a legal system whereby local warlords - powerful men and women - are pitted against one another in bloodless debates and legislative maneuvering, jockeying for position and benefit at the expense of others. The great benefit of how our system works then, aside from sublimating violence between warlords (ie, political leaders), is that it attempts to balance these competing interests against one another, and checks the power of warlords by giving the ordinary citizen a feedback mechanism in the form of voting, and requiring that warlords and their actions be beholden to some common system of law. It’s certainly not a perfect system, but I believe that to be the intellectual and practical underpinnings of why our country is organized in the way that it is.

Voting and citizenship, of course, have their own hierarchical requirements. Originally according to the Constitution, only landed gentry were allowed to vote because only men who owned land (mini feudal warlords, essentially) were seen as worthy of influencing public affairs. The common man was seen as having no stake in matters, since he had not accumulated any wealth or property to protect.

When The Going Gets Rough

If the American and world economy keeps sliding into recession and eventual depression, I see there being some danger that our system which is designed to balance out competing “warlord” interests could become unhinged. Regions which have greater prosperity and resources already have more power than those without. As wealth becomes liquidated and value gets shifted around, the balance of power inevitably becomes upset. Into this vaccuum, powerful figures, warlords and demagogues (some with state-sponsored legitimacy) inevitably rise up. Their rise is fueled by the same drives which originally pushed men into becoming vassals for feudal lords: security, mutual protection. Maybe it won’t happen here in “the Homeland,” but we see these kinds of things happen with some level of constancy in other parts of the world. Is exporting our philosophy of freedom and government to those regions the answer? I’m not sure, but I feel like we’re about to be asked those questions in a much more real way…

And on a day-to-day level, the importance of this issue becomes even more immediate. If you have a society with massive unemployment, the people who are going to be first in line for jobs and other kinds of kickbacks and protection are the people who know people: the people who are part of informal and formal groups, lodges, fraternities and other types of associations and organizations. It’s just naturally how things seem to go, nevermind during times of great public stress.

All that said, what’s the best course of action? To me, it seems to be simply to get to know as many people as possible. Be connected to as many groups and sub-groups as you can, with as many degrees of legitimacy as possible. No one strategy or system of local and regional alliances will likely work so well as old-fashioned diplomacy and the balancing of intimacy with many diverse interests. That way, you can become a conduit for communication and commerce between groups. The other strategy, of course, is to become deeply enmeshed in one particular group and embed yourself as high up in the hierarchy as possible. That sort of thing has never really worked for my personality or lifestyle, but I can see the utility of it. Your third option, obviously, is to rely on and to support formal structures and legitimate systems of government. You can exercise your right to vote, you can volunteer in your community. A pragmatic strategy would be to do all of these things at once… But it all boils down to simply getting out into the world, getting to know other people, getting yourself known, and showing others that you can be a valuable ally, assistant and friend. Nothing counts more in this world, at any historical point, than authentic human-to-human bonds. Now is a great time to strengthen yours.