Dear Colleague,

The deadline for your abstract for our book volume—Nationalism, War and Sacrifice: Dying for one’s Country—is coming up in four weeks (May 28). We encourage you to send us your abstract as soon as possible (the detailed call for papers is directly below).

One of the contributors to this volume will be Professor Ivan Strenski, the renowned scholar of religion and Holstein Family and Community Professor of Religious Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Among Strenski’s fifteen books are Contesting Sacrifice, Thinking about Religion, and Why Politics Can't Be Freed From Religion.

In his highly acclaimed paper, “Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim 'Human Bombers',” Professor Strenski examines suicide bombing as a form of martyrdom where the act of self-immolation constitutes a peculiar kind of gift that the victim offers to the community.

The torrent of writings and speculation evoked by suicide bombings provides an opening to examine the Western posture toward sacrificial death. Nationalism, Strenski notes, is a form of religion in which human beings are willing to kill and die for transcendent entities.

Why do we say that it is “sweet and fitting to die for one’s country?” How are we to understand the willingness of societies to forfeit human bodies in the name of glorifying mystical bodies called nations? What is the nature and meaning of the soldier’s gift to the community?

Our book volume, Nationalism, War and Sacrifice, will explore and interrogate this phenomenon of killing and dying for a sacred ideal, which seems to be at the heart of The Western Way of War.

We look forward to receiving your proposal.

Best regards,
Orion

Orion Anderson Communications Director Library of Social Science Telephone: 718-393-1104 Fax: 413-832-8145 oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com

NAZISM AS DESTRUCTION AND SELF-DESTRUCTION

Two million German soldiers died in the First World War. Yet Hitler declared that “the most precious blood had sacrificed itself joyfully.” In the mid-1930s, Hitler said that he would not hesitate to go to war because of “ten million young men I shall be sending to their death.” Declaring war on September 1, 1939, Hitler asked every German to “lay down his life for his people and country.” If anyone thought he could “evade this national duty,” he would “perish.” Hitler’s declaration of war contained the essence of Nazism: either die for Germany, or we will kill you.

Historian Michael Geyer notes that the German military’s “machinery of destruction and annihilation” went into high gear at the very moment Hitler and the Nazi leadership knew the war was lost. Casualties peaked at 450,000 in January 1945, when Germany became—in the words of Richard Bessel—the site of “the greatest killing frenzy the world has ever seen.”

Despite defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels in1943 persuaded the German people to embrace “total war.” Insofar as millions of German soldiers were dying on the battlefield, individuals at home likewise were obligated to “bring the hardest sacrifices of blood.” As the carnage reached its climax, Goebbels observed with satisfaction that the German people had “surpassed themselves as a result of the bombing raids,” heroically overcoming fear—finally coming together to form a genuine national community.

In his classic, “What is a Nation?” (1882), Ernest Renan explained that love of country is proportional to the “sacrifices to which one has consented and the ills one has suffered.” Nazism represented the apotheosis of national sacrifice, generating suffering and destruction on a monumental scale. In the end, Geyer says, the Third Reich was about “collective death.” The distillation of Nazism, according to Bessel, lay in the “senseless destruction of human life” as Hitler and his cohorts turned Europe into a “sea of blood.”

Building on the case study of Nazi Germany, this volume will explore nationalism in its relationship to warfare and sacrificial death.

BLOOD SACRIFICE GIVES RISE TO THE NATION

General Douglas MacArthur told West Point graduates in 1962 that as soldiers, they were required to practice “the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.” General John Hackett stated that the essence of a soldier is not to slay, but to “offer oneself to be slain.” In Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, Carolyn Marvin says that the irrefutable sign of patriotism is “making one’s body an offering, a sacrifice.”

Soldiers’ sacrificial acts possess profound meaning for society. Babak Rahimi says that their blood bestows “new life on the community.” Marvin theorizes that society “depends upon the death of its own members at the hands of the group;” while Richard Koenigsberg declares that in war the “blood and body of the sacrificed soldier gives rise to the reality of the nation, anchoring belief in material reality.”

THE INDIVIDUAL MUST DIE SO THE NATION MIGHT LIVE

Fighting to the last breath on the Eastern Front, most German soldiers continued to believe in the nobility of their struggle because while “individuals die, the Volk lives on.” Nazi Germany represents an extreme case, but the idea that individuals must die so nations may live lies at the heart of Western warfare. The Roman poet Horace declared, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” What is the nature and meaning of this dynamic that conceives death in battle as a noble act that enhances and valorizes one’s nation? This volume will interrogate and explore the meaning of this idea or fantasy: that in order for a nation to live and flourish, human beings must die.

Questions to consider include, but are not limited to:

• The self versus the enemy as sacrificial victim
• Warfare as potlatch, or conspicuous destruction
• Sacrifice, honor and masculinity
• Heroism
• Human bodies and the body politic
• Death for one’s comrades: “Greater love hath no man…”
• Sacrificial death and memorialization
• Nations and the fantasy of immortality

Implications for Critical Security Studies