Birthday Baffler
Mercenaries, foreign fighters, and freelancers
Today’s my birthday, so it’s an excellent day to become a paid subscriber! For less than the price of a piece of cake, you’ll get all of my work straight to your inbox. I am deeply grateful to each and every one of my subscribers. You’re what allows me to continue doing this.
I have a new piece out in The Baffler today, “Yugoslavia Calling”. A few month ago, editor Matthew Shen Goodman contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing something on the theme of mercenaries, foreign fighters and freelancers. The piece began to take shape in my mind almost immediately. The war drew so many losers, outcasts, ideologues, fanatics, sadists, and entrepreneurs looking for a buck (I guess every war becomes a magnet for such types), that there were already stories I knew I wanted to tell. There are many more that didn’t make it into the final piece.
I began researching the piece with a true distaste for the violent men who felt called to the region to fight in a foreign war, for a cause that was ostensibly not their own. I judged them as losers or sadists, people who couldn’t succeed as civilians. But then, at some point during my research, I think I started to acquire a little bit of empathy for them. Were their motivations always all that different from the human rights activists and politicians demanding humanitarian intervention? There were differences, sure, but there was also overlap. Exploring this tension, between the international community’s cosmopolitan concern, and the motivations of the foreign fighters, became a major theme of the piece.
I hope you enjoy the piece, and as ever, I welcome your feedback.
Happy very belated birthday!
May I ask if you've seen that Adam Curtis documentary called TraumaZone, which showcased - without narration - a bunch of footage out of Russia from 1985-89 (via BBC archives)? It was such a visceral plunge into the chaos and hope-and-haplessness of that period, and as such was very eye opening. The usual critiques of Curtis oversimplifying the problem(s) still apply, but for a storm chaser he's usually pretty damn close to the eye of the proverbial action he's looking at. I ask in the context of your latest piece in The Baffler.
If I had one riff of a reaction (or question) to what you wrote about the Yugoslov/Balkan wars it would be to wonder out loud, as a fellow member of the Western society that produced the "liberal internationalists," if our main task is to get both the elites and citizens of that vast society to inherently accept that we are not morally - and hence, not systemically either - a clearly superior choice for the rest of the word, never mind even for ourselves? Because as we look around us in 2026, what *exactly* has been achieved, and for whom?