The Barbarians
While the immediate relevance of the Boxers might be clearest for those who inherited its results, their history also offers a more general lesson in the relationship between physical culture and political dynamics. In the years following the last crisis, the US has seen a rapid resurgence of the far right, including the growth of a new, wide-ranging militia movement and the founding of smaller religious-martial cults that bear no small resemblance to those of the Boxer era. These movements tend to enshrine combative and “tactical” aesthetics in a way that combines a bare minimum of combat training with a much more substantial perfomative reverence of sheer, gun-oil masculinity. Like the Boxers, their martial activities can only be understood as the ancillary of a much larger, quasi-religious physical culture that has found its base most readily in the very areas most abandoned by the distant machinations of that grim demiurge we call “the economy.”
