Here is a lousy quote from the opening scene in Gone with the Wind:

There is a tendency in the state of Texas, and in southern literature, to imagine and fantasize about the 'Old South' as the last gasp of feudalism, feudal honor, feudal obligation, and its accompanying virtues and vices. This tendency credits the Old South with retaining special vestiges of nobility, and a connection between the earth and the people on it.

Let's try to clarify when and where feudalism existed. It was a form of politics, or social organization, that predominated in some parts of Europe, especially England, during the medieval period. It began falling to pieces in the Early Modern period, beginning with the Tudor monarchy; that is to say , it began falling apart under Henry VII. Henry VII's successor, Henry VIII, used parliamentary process to destroy the feudal lords that put his ancestors on the throne in 1066; the destruction culminated in the English Civil War, which diminished not only the feudal lords, but the monarchy as well. 

During this same time period in Early Modern England, feudal lords began severing their relationships with their serfs and vassals; the lords sought to shift away from subsistence farming so as to enter the English wool industry and conduct lucrative trade with Europe. The movement to kick the serfs off the manor and to introduce shepherding was known as the 'enclosure' movement. While it temporarily solved some debt and financial problems for the English nobility, it ultimately created a wealthy merchant class that could maximize its own benefits from European trade. Henry VII and his successors saw the new professional bourgeoisie class as a source of power that would allow them to confront their dangerous nobles. 

So the feudal system in England began collapsing in the mid 16th century, just prior to the establishment of the first English colonies in America. 

Let's look at the South. Remember, Southern legends often associate the Old South with the feudalism of Old England.

Two facts about the Southern economy undermine the notion that it was a feudal system:

First, the dominant economic activity of the south was capitalist, and it came in two forms. First, cotton dominated the economic landscape. Cotton tended to exhaust the soil, and required the opening of new lands to continue its growth. Most of this cotton was sold to Great Britain, where it was processed into cloth. Southern planters sold the remainder to northern industrial states like New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

The original southern lands--those that rested along the Atlantic, like the Carolinas and Georgia, were exhausted after generations of growing tobacco and cotton. So these states, especially after the banning of the international slave trade in 1808, specialized in breeding and exporting slaves to cotton plantations opening in Texas and in the territory belonging to the Louisiana purchase.

Now--what do these two facts tell us? Well, first, they bear no serious relationship to feudalism. In feudalism, both lord and peasant were stuck to the land, and as the land went, so they went. Land ownership was primarily a status symbol and a useful political lever; lords and peasant were judged on their ability to maintain a calm sense of order and habit despite raids, violence, and encroaching rivals. Though lands changed hands, this was viewed as ignoble, and lesser than maintaining custom and holding on to what one already had.

In the Southern United States, on the other hand, Westward expansion allowed the depletion and shuffling off of old soil, and old obligations for new frontiers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The South was not feudal in character. Though feudalism, and more specifically, classical notions of liberty, served as a productive intellectual scaffolding for the processes that occurred on any given plantation. So did traditional morality as found in the Bible. Southerners also used a sort 'scientism' to argue for the 'naturalness' of slavery due to the perceived inferiority of people of African descent. Through Southern society looked conservative and later, after the war, became conservative, it was in fact fairly radical form of agricultural capitalism. No one had ever quite used up soil and labor the way the South did in the years leading up to the civil war. Never before had there been such a worldwide demand for cotton, which we must remember is an inedible agricultural product. Southern planters used the land to grow a product that held no nutritional value. They relied on international trade to maintain their lifestyles, and to help feed their families, their workers, and their slaves. There was nothing feudal about it. The planters were bourgeois, callous, and rich.

By some accounts, when one assesses capital in the United States in 1860, slaves accounted for more wealth than all the railroads and all the manufacturing combined. Southern states viewed the Republicans as a dual threat, both to their wealth and their way of life. Republican candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, did not even appear on state ballots in many Southern states. When Lincoln won 180 electoral votes, and virtually all of the northern states, he only obtained a plurality of the popular vote, and not a majority. Southern states were shocked and outraged, though they had astutely avoided any displays of outrage when the mere plurality favored the South in 1844, 1848, and 1856 presidential elections. 

Now, I do not mean to denigrate the south simply to raise up the northern states as a collection of model states. States both north and south refused women the right to vote. Northern states treated untrained immigrant labor as expendable. Since northern manufacturing could not compete with European manufacturing, the northern industrialists demanded tariff protections to allow them to capture the supply chain to Midwest farmers and Southern planters. 

But as Barrington Moore points out in his classic treatise, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), the North did see a short-lived union between the interests of Northern industrialists and small farmers. What allowed this alliance? In part, it was the rapid formation of the Republican party, and the party's desperate attempt to pull together disparate elements of society to win elections that would swing the balance of power towards the creation of government-sponsored infrastructures like better roads, new cut canals, and continental railroads. 

The broader Republican campaign in 1860 made the alliance between small farmers and northern industrialists quite clear: "Vote yourself a farm--vote yourself a tariff."

Tariffs and hard scrabble farms along the Ohio River are not especially romantic. But they are a superior part of the American memory to the disturbing nostalgia of some Americans for a feudal Southern society that never existed. 

Wavell, Archibald. Allenby: A Study in Greatness, George G. Harrap & Co. (Vol. 1 1940; Vol. II 1943.)

 The life of Edmund Allenby, a soldier and a statesman, in many ways anticipated the trials of his first biographer, Archibald Wavell. Born of "old-rooted English stock," Allenby grew into a tall, barrel-chested young cavalry officer. He served among the first generation of officers in which attendance at Staff College, rather than purchase, ensured promotion. He loved literature, the outdoors, and hunting; his letters to his wife rarely depict warfare, but often mention nature. Allenby's first  experience in a contest of arms occurred during the Boer War of 1899-1902. He served ably, but more importantly he developed connections with the soldiers who later became the key officers of the First World War. Such connections helped ensure his promotion through the ranks. When the Great War began he immediately assumed command of a division of cavalry as a major-general. But the weight of command transformed his personality, so that an "easy-going young officer and a good-humoured squadron leader [became] a strict colonel, an irascible brigadier, and an explosive general." Out of fear and resentment, his men coined him "The Bull." The early years of the First World War cemented his reputation, as thousands of men died under Allenby's command as he bluntly executed orders from above. The year 1917 proved particularly fateful. Allenby began the year with serious losses at the Battle of Arrass, removal from the Western front, and the loss of his only son to German artillery shells; Allenby ended the year in the Middle East with the conquest of Jerusalem. The next year, he conquered Damascus. Given fresh resources and a weakened enemy, Allenby commanded one of the most decisive and efficient campaigns in the history of modern warfare as he swept up the Mediterranean coast and destroyed the Ottoman Empire. His relentless energy provided the Egyptian Expeditionary Force with the necessary momentum to decisively defeat the enemy.

 T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom gives a far more heroic portrait of Allenby than Wavell does here; in fact, Wavell goes to great lengths to temper Lawrence's praise with a sober assessment of Allenby's flaws: his zeal for rules, loyalty, and unquestioned service. Wavell writes with praise, and yet a subtle sense of irony creeps into the biography, as though Wavell no longer believes in greatness. While it lacks the humor of some of Wavell's other works, the book sustains interest as a surprisingly impersonal reflection on Wavell's views of military and civilian leadership.

Archibald Wavell (Field Marshal, Viscount, and Viceroy of India) published his two volume biography of Field Marshall Edmund Allenby in the midst of his own challenges. Wavell served under Allenby in the First World War as a liaison and a staff officer with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. As Wavell finished the first volume of the biography, he served as Commander in Chief in the Middle East, a status similar to the command Allenby once held. As Wavell finished the second volume, he held the Viceroyalty of India, a status somewhat greater than Allenby's eventual post of High Commissioner of Egypt and the Sudan.

Ever since Basil Liddel Hart's glowing statements on T.E. Lawrence strategic genius, Lawrence's reputation has centered on his military accomplishments, rather than his achievements in art. This is a mistake. 

Orde Wingate despised Lawrence's record as a war-leader, possibly because Wingate recognized something of his own failings in Lawrence. But Wingate also felt that Lawrence abdicated his personal responsibilities as an officer to play too much the desert warrior. There are no records of Wingate actually shooting an enemy in combat--he was too busy maintaining his supply line and keeping his troops on the march. Lawrence fired his weapon often, and preferred the emotional rush of battle to the more mundane tasks typically required of officers in combat. Lawrence's emphasis on action, in Wingate's view, was an abdication of responsibility. 

Lawrence's campaigns are often held up as a positive example of irregular warfare, and as a better way of fighting than what soldiers faced in the trenches of the First World War. Lawrence himself was not so sure that he was actually preserving life, or winning battles more efficiently. The numbers, in fact, indicate that he lost men at a higher rate than most British units that faced action on the Western front. This is not surprising. State control and industrial efficiency seems to reduce  casualties, either because men lose their willingness to die as a mere part of a 'machine' rather than as an individual warrior, or else because industrial society provides soldiers with better access to medicine and stable rations. State control also increases the number of prisoners taken, and reduces the number of prisoners slaughtered. 

British methods of warfare and 'state control' might outright reduce the 'proportion' of people who die violently. Lawrence noticed this, which explains why he heaps praise upon Allenby above and beyond any other soldier in the First World War, and why he denigrates Allenby's rival commanders not as butchers, but as unimaginative sticks-in-the-mud. 

So why does Lawrence seem attracted to desert warfare? His writings indicate that he appreciated the straightforward human practicality of 'desert' warfare. Yes, the violence in the desert was terrible, but it was coupled with a familiarity, a spirit of adventure, and a sense of honor that Lawrence never felt while working for the British military in Cairo prior to his desert campaigns. 

The Arab 'irregulars' that fought beside Lawrence risked hearth and home in an immediate way. More than one of Lawrence's fighters, in fact, saw their homes destroyed by the Turks in retaliation for joining with the Arab revolt. More than one Arab also saw his village destroyed, and his family annihilated, during the panicked Turkish retreats from Palestine and western Jordan. And so the Arabs often risked not only their lives, but their families and tribes to fight the Turks--and sometimes each other. The Arab revolt involved a type of warfare that was less organized in the sense of mass bureaucracy and written protocol, and yet no less sophisticated in its nuance and complexity. 

And so Lawrence wrestles with the following, implicit idea throughout Seven Pillars of Wisdom: He senses that the Arab way of war is more virtuous, honorable, and personally fulfilling than the sort of violence that destroyed the lives of his friends and brothers along the European Western Front. But given that Lawrence knows the superiority of British warfare for battlefield outcomes (Lawrence always suspects the British will emerge triumphant), is it morally acceptable for him to dabble in Arab nationalism and 'desert warfare'? Lawrence believes that Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia rightfully belong to the Arabs--but he is a student of history, and knows that even as he props up a certain brand of Arab nationalism, he is setting in motion a thousand difficulties for hundreds of extant ethnic and religious groups living in the same region.

Throughout Seven Pillars Lawrence examines his conscience, and recognizes that ultimately he has fought this war to satisfy his own peculiar appetite for violence, warfare, and chivalry. Many of his Arab friends admire him for it, but he considers himself a sham. The Arab irregulars, in Lawrence's eyes, live with the virtues of the desert; but he, their leader, merely wears the costume--he possesses the heart, but not the mind.

The Arabs who followed Lawrence died at tremendous rates--nearly sixty of Lawrence's two-hundred personal bodyguards perished within a year. Their villages burned. Their children and wives lived unprotected, and hungry. 

The European powers, on the other hand, featured stronger, centralized state governments compared with Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine. Even on the Western and Eastern fronts, preserved a macabre sense of decorum. Yes, terrible acts took place in the First World War--murder, rape, pillaging, poison gas and vicious trench fighting. But even then, the war in Europe obeyed strange rules: the taking of prisoners, the feeding of troops, and the separation between the war-front and the home-front. 

I conclude this letter with a couple of quotes from General Archibald Wavell, a man who fought alongside Lawrence in the Palestine campaign. 

 That is to say, Lawrence was too aware of who he was, and who he was not. He was British, and a bastard-born, and not of Arabia. His education positively dripped with the soaking benefits wrought from state-sanctioned security and comfort. But he fought alongside his friends as though he were an Arab prince. He never forgave himself. He loathed the Turks, and often justified his actions in the war as a chance to destroy something he loathed. In this light, Wavell viewed Lawrence as "a Hamlet who had slain his uncle neatly and efficiently at the beginning of Act II, and spent the remainder of the play in repenting his act and writing a long explanation of it to Horatio." (Wavell The Good Soldier, 1948, 59-61).

I think most people would say 'no.' Just like most people would refuse to follow Lawrence into Syria in 1911, before the war, much less in 1916, when the Arab revolt faced destruction along the shores of the Red Sea. But the people in our lives almost always say 'no.' That is what makes leadership, and art, and astonishing success so very rare. People say 'no,' because they are weak, and saying 'no' is easy.

And yet, people said 'yes' to making 'Lawrence of Arabia.' Perhaps it was perhaps, the sort of British thing to do, as when Lionel de Rothschild loaned Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli the money to purchase the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal.

To return to Roger Ebert:

Special operations soldiers are often identified with classified information and covert operations: quiet, secretive missions that go without much notice or reward. But there is an ironic element to this description. Many special operations soldiers do in fact publish detailed accounts of their actions that tend to valorize their friends and validate their own actions. 

But Wikipedia provides a list of many Delta Force members, some of whom published memoirs of their experiences. This seems to violate the aura of secrecy. A similar pattern can be found throughout the world. One of the most famous soldiers in Israeli history is Muki Betser, a special operations soldier who published an account of his life in a book ironically entitled Secret Soldier: A True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando.

Soldiers face tremendous uncertainty in conventional warfare, where the strategic mission is often influenced by far off political events and rapidly changing local conditions. One of the compelling reasons for joining  special operations is to mitigate that uncertainty by taking part in narrowly defined missions that consist of carefully planned operations. Not all special operations missions are well planned, or well defined. But as Betser suggests, special operations soldiers are able to control at least some aspects of their mission. This can provide a source of comfort, and a sense of confidence. There is not necessarily a correlation between thoroughly planned operations and useful strategic accomplishments, but special ops can nevertheless provide a sense of stability and purpose. Narrowly defined objectives may be easier to achieve, and provide a stable platform for small successes. Stability and trust and good planning are not the only reasons that soldiers seek to join (or form) special operations units. But Muki Betser's quote demonstrates that this is an important part of the puzzle. 

Curiously, special operations soldiers, often noted for their courage, desire to control war, and make fear palatable and manageable. War is not chess, but sometimes one can choose to develop a game within war for the sake of sanity and survival.