Desertion, Secession, and Anachoresis
Contemplating the politics of radical withdrawal
This summer solstice finds me in back in Freiburg im Breisgau, tucked in the most southwesterly corner of Germany near the Swiss and French borders. In this bucolic place–surrounded by vineyards and solar farms–I’m fantasizing about running away. Three fellow American Ivy League professors recently left their jobs at Yale University to move to Canada, all of them scholars of fascism. Marci Shore, a Slavicist who studies the Holocaust, asserts that the lesson of 1933 is that “you get out sooner rather than later.”
I’ve also been reading about monuments to commemorate men who ran away, such as the famous “shot at dawn” war memorial in England, honoring the men and boys executed for “desertion” or “cowardice” in World War I. There is a memorial to deserters in Ulm, Germany and one “to the victims of Nazi military justice” in Vienna. Both acknowledge the men sentenced to death for refusing to serve in the Wehrmacht during WWII.
And then there is the spiritual tradition of anachoresis (from Greek: ἀναχωρέω), or withdrawal into the desert. Originally, anachoresis was an act of tax evasion; peasants in ancient Egypt could avoid paying their required tributes by abandoning their villages and hiding in the desert. The possibility of retreating away from settlements and surviving in a hostile natural environment guaranteed a level of freedom and autonomy which more sedentary populations had lost. Somehow the practice took on a spiritual meaning. Over the millennia, Christian “anchorites” were those who lived in self-imposed solitary confinement to withdraw from the obligations of ordinary life and grow closer to God.
Finally, I’ve been researching the first secession of the plebeians in the early Roman Republic. Around 495 BC, Rome was a city-state organized around seven hills surrounded by Greek, Etruscan, Sabine, Carthaginian, and other powers vying for domination of the Italian peninsula. A hereditary nobility ruled as an oligarchy, preserving for themselves all institutions of power. These blue-blooded patricians increased their wealth and expanded their influence through a series of wars with their neighbors but relied on a lower class of Roman plebeians to grow their food, make their wine, produce their goods, and fight their battles.
The patricians lived on the Palatine and Capitoline Hills and conducted their business in the Roman Forum which ran between them. The plebeians lived on the Aventine Hill and on the four outer lying hills which still fell within the perimeter walls of early Rome. Bounded by the Tiber River to the west and the Anio River in the north, the city was well-defended but still at constant threat of invasion. The patricians needed the cooperation of the plebeians to maintain their power, but this didn’t quell their ruthless habit of exploiting the lower class.
Fed up with the practice of debt-bondage as well as military conscription, the plebeian population of Rome left the city to camp out on an easily defensible mountain outside the city walls, where they apparently spent several months. Without workers or soldiers, the patricians faced certain ruin.
The patricians had to negotiate with the plebeians and granted them political representatives that would protect plebeian interests in the future, an act that shaped the structure of Roman governance for centuries to come. The plebeians didn’t fight; they just left the city and managed to survive on their own until things changed.
I’ve been asking myself: what would the equivalent of a plebeian secession look like today? Is it leaving the country? Is it desertion–literal or otherwise? Is it a withdrawal from consumption? From work? From digital life? From starting families? Could we all hide and survive somewhere in a desert (real or metaphorical) long enough to make our own oligarchs quiver in fear?
The thousands of who risked their lives to defect to the West sounded the death knell for 20th century communism in Eastern Europe. Approximately 100,000 American draft dodgers eroded popular support for the Vietnam War, hastening its end. The Associated Press reported in November 2024 that the Ukrainian army was dealing with a massive desertion problem, as shell shocked soldiers lost hope of victory. Over 100,000 Ukrainian men have been charged. The Russians have a similar problem, although the numbers are murkier. According to one report from March 2025, about 50,000 men have deserted. Can war continue if no one fights?
While it may seem more noble to stay and struggle, could it sometimes be more effective to slip away? These questions swirl in my head as I prepare to sweat my way through this the longest day of 2025. I don’t have answers. I only have obscure scholarly rabbit holes down which to lose myself–a kind of hermitage of the mind.
The German curator Wilhelm von Bode is credited with this Latin phrase from 1917: “Inter arma silent Musae.” It means “when weapons speak, the Muses fall silent.” I can’t hear the others, but right now, Kleio (the Muse of history) still whispers. Past acts of resistance have many things to teach us. How else can we grapple with that mother of all questions: what is to be done?
In solidarity,
Kristen R. Ghodsee
20 June 2025
Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
A few recent links:
Post Capitalist Parenting Pt. 2: Reimagining the Family w/ Kristen Ghodsee, Upstream Podcast, May 19, 2025
Meagan Day, “La machosfera es un placebo para los varones marginados,” Jacobin Revista, May 25, 2025
Meagan Day, “How Manosphere Content Placates Disenfranchised Men,” Jacobin Magazine, May 1, 2025
“Der Sozialismus behandelte Frauen besser,” Konkret Magazin, May 2025: 52-52
Meagan Day, “Tradwives are a Harbinger of Systemic Breakdown,” Jacobin Magazine, April 27, 2025