There's a great irony that I embrace. There's a "warlike" aspect to insurrectionary anarchism or perhaps anarcho-nihilism, to the point that nerds accuse either tendency of promoting or embodying "the aestheticisation of violence", but it's also something that you can infer (at least with the right instincts) from a longstanding (but often overlooked) aspect of the whole history of anarchism.
Henry Brown's analysis of the militarisation of the Spanish anarchist movement in The Anarchist In Uniform is in some ways instructive, or at least I find it fascinating and derive certain insights for own construction. Conflict had a strange place in 19th century anarchist thought. Whether it was Mikhail Bakunin's opinion, in the context of the certain defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, that civil war was "always favorable to the awakening of popular initiative and to the intellectual, moral, and even the material interests of the populace" for the simple reason that it meant the destruction of states and shocking the daily existence of the masses, or Pierre Joseph Proudhon's contradictory belief in the "divine fact" of war, there is a tendency in which armed struggle, at least in a revolutionary context, had a creative potential or effect, one that was framed in contrast to the violence of state instrumentality. This, of course, entails a logic that necessarily (whether explictly or implicitly) rejects pacifism. It can seem incongrouous, since, at least as Henry Brown says, there is always the yearning within anarchism for "universal peace" But then again Bakunin's example seems fitting for the negative dialectic that he espoused, as Erica Lagalisse outlined in Occult Features of Anarchism. It's even possible that negation as a subject must seem an all too abstract way of conveying what people like Bakunin really meant.
On the one hand, there is a danger presented by the historical experience of the Spanish anarchist movement, which, faced with the demands of open warfare against the Nationalist faction, decided to embrace a broad trend of militarisation in both practice and cultural/philosophical attitude. In pracitce, part of this had the unfortunate effect not only of "pragmatising" the anarchists but also synthesizing an ideology that could be uncharacteristically chauvinistic by anarchist standards (they wound up idealising the male frontline soldier in the revolutionary Republican struggle, while often denigrating the role of women in the same struggle). To be fair perhaps that aspect is ultimately more indicative of a strain of male chauvinism that already existed within the Spanish movement at the time, even before militarisation. It wouldn't be particularly surprising for the early history of anarchism, since Proudhon was so notorious in the French anarchist movement for his views on women that the term "libertarian" was coined by Joseph Déjacque to describe the kind of anarchist who would be more consistent on social liberation than Proudhon. For all that, though, the Spanish anarchists were ultimately defeated, and after this many Spanish authors retrospectively presented the militarisation they accepted as a compromise of their revolutionary ideals that ultimately hindered the anarchist war effort. On the other hand, Brown is right to say that modern scholarship on anarchism emphasized this late rejection to the neglect of the real diversity of anarchist thought, and that it is possible to derive a nuanced understanding of the potency of "martial ideals" outside the domain of the state and statist politics.
The fact is, the notion that the "martial spectacle" (again quoting Brown, this time via ¡Vivan las tribus!) of revolution as a wave of creative destruction sweeping away the old order is not so far removed at least in spirit from the negation espoused by anarcho-nihilism or in insurrectionary anarchism, and of course why should it be given its ultimate source. But the really interesting thing is how the same recognition can be detected both implicitly and hypocritically within non-anarchist revolutionary socialist movements. There is the old slogan, "No war but the class war", but it is a weak hypocrisy, not just because the "Class War" (and at that inevitably a class reductionist framing of that concept) serves to obscure the other cross-stitching social struggles that characterise the real landscape of modern socieities, but moreover because, although the anarchist rightly refuses to fight in the wars of the nations, they are resolutely fighters in what is more accurately called the social war: the ceaseless everyday struggle against all vectors of domination on the side of autonomy. That struggle can, in many instances, be as truly a war as any other, at least in that it is never really a bloodless struggle. But then again we know that already, or at least we realise this from the moment we think to raise our fists against our enemies. But then as long as we accept that, we can embrace the warlike spirit it calls for in any terms we want, and not limit ourselves to the revolutionary archetypes of the 20th century. Even by reaching to the past we can seek the example of any warrior spirit as long as it is ungovernable and therefore individually sovereign. Or, perhaps, we can see that sovereignty not in the past but in the present, in something as simple as queer bodies fighting for both survival and autonomy against the entirety of their world.
Remember, Gilles Deleuze was not wrong to say, "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.", but, if you are looking for weapons, it might well be that you need to wage war with them. As anarchists are always fighting in the social war, at the very least, one need do not much more than embrace the spirit of the matter.
