It seems that the sun revolves around the earth—but this is not the case. War was once conceptualized as “male aggression.” Contemporary research points in a different direction.
General Sir John Hackett observes that the military makes demands that “few if any other callings do.” While emotionally-disturbed people talk about being “trained to kill,” the whole essence of being a soldier, Hackett says, is “not to slay but to be slain.” Gwynne Dyer states that by becoming soldiers, men “agree to die when we tell them to.” General Douglas MacArthur concurred with these assessments when he told West Point graduates that as soldiers they were required to practice the “greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.”
This book will explore the idea of “dying for one’s country” as a central dimension of the ideology and institution of warfare.
According to “realist” theories, nations go to war for rational, utilitarian reasons: the quest for territory or power, national defense, etc. Adolf Hitler is conventionally seen as wishing to achieve “world conquest.” It seems that way. Yet in 45 years studying Hitler’s texts, I never saw him speak in terms of conquest or conquering.
When Hitler declared war on September 1, 1939, he asked each German to do “what he was prepared to do”: to “lay down his life for his people and for his country.” Hitler went on to say that if anyone thought he could “evade this national duty,” he would “perish.” In his declaration of war, Hitler set forth the essence of Nazism: Either die for Germany, or we will kill you. Building on the case of Nazism, this book will explore the role of sacrificial death in nationalism and warfare.
In Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, Carolyn Marvin examines this intimate link between nationalism and sacrificial death in war. Focusing on the United States, Marvin argues that “bodily sacrifice is the core of American nationalism.” At the behest of the group, the “lifeblood of the community must be shed.” Group solidarity flows from the value of this sacrifice. Based on his study of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Babak Rahimi similarly concludes that the soldier’s sacrificial blood “bestows new life for the community,” as it “identifies the reality of the nation with the destruction of each body on the battlefield.” Or as Nazi leader Rudolph Hess put it: “The stream of blood which flows for Germany is eternal—the sacrifices of German men for their Volk is eternal—therefore Germany also will be immortal.”
Writing about the Second World War, John Dower observes that Japanese soldiers—like American soldiers—died believing they were giving their lives for a noble cause, and did so in a spirit of duty, honor and obedience in ways familiar everywhere. Japanese fighting men died because “their country and sovereign called upon them to do so.”
In the opening days of 1943, General Sir Thomas Blamey gave an emotional speech to his exhausted Australian troops: “You have lost many comrades,” he told his men, “but you have learnt that it is the highest and sweetest achievement of us all that we should die for our country.”
Such words, Dower says, could have been “placed in the mouth of a Japanese commander almost without change.” But when Japanese spoke of the nobility of dying for their emperor and country, their enemies offered this as evidence of their “peculiar fanaticism, irrationality, even collective psychosis and death wish.” The number of United Kingdom airmen who gave their lives in World War Two was ten times greater than the number of Japanese who died as pilots.
This book builds on the hypothesis that sacrificial death in warfare is common to many cultures—revolving around the willingness to give one’s life as a testimony of devotion to an object conceived as sacred in one’s society. When the other guy dies for his sacred object (e.g., the Japanese soldier or Islamic jihadist), sacrificial death seems self-destructive, even bizarre. When we die for our sacred object, sacrificial death is conceived and experienced as noble, honorable and beautiful.
Hitler stated that any man who loves his people “proves it solely by the sacrifices which he is prepared to make for it,” insisting that giving one’s life for the community constitutes the “crown of sacrifice.” Political leaders of nearly every nation in the world have expressed, and continue to express, similar sentiments.
The French theorist Ernest Renan—in his famous essay “What is a Nation?” (1882)—stated that one loves one’s nation in proportion to the “ills that one has suffered.” Suffering in common, Renan says, “unifies more than joy does.” A nation is a large-scale solidarity constituted by the “sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”
Following the Vietnam War, the belief in the validity of sacrificial death for a cause faded as mankind seemed to be moving toward the “end of history”. September 11, 2001 resurrected the idea of sacrificial death (martyrdom) for the sake of a sacred ideal. Bin Laden declared that Muslim youth “Love death the way you Americans love life.” Islamic revolutionary Ali Belhadj declared that if a faith or belief is not “watered and irrigated by blood, it does not grow.”
René Girard observes that resemblances among sacrificial rites practiced in disparate cultures are striking—that variations are never sufficient to “disguise the basic similarities.” Hubert and Mauss describe the sacrificial process apart from any specific culture’s context as “some kind of technique.” How can we understand the sacrificial technique or methodology?
Girard states that sacrifice “accords the god all he needs to assure his continued growth and vigor.” Or as I put it in Nations Have the Right to Kill, “As the soldier dies, so the nation comes alive.”
Excerpts of abstracts selected for possible inclusion in
Nationalism, War & Sacrifice |
“Memorializing War Heroes in the Context of the War on Terror, 2001-2012”
Michael Blain, Boise State University
The “compulsive repetition” of victimage rituals provides a stage for leaders to engage in the use of dramatic rhetorical discourses to vilify opponents as ultimate threats to “security” and to glorify heroes to sustain military or terrorist campaigns. The sacrifice of human life is central to these cultural practices (e.g., memorials to the Crucifixion of Christ in the Christian movement; the Nazi use of World War I memorials; the 9/11 memorials). These memorials are as crucial to generating a willingness to fight and die as are the disciplinary practices of the military, which deliver the troops to the field of battle and sustain the willingness to fight and die facing the enemy. |
“Nationalism, Honor, and Sacrificial Victims in the War Movies of Stanley Kubrick”
George A. Dunn & Kevin Corn, University of Indianapolis
Kubrick examines the ideologies that leaders have used to justify the bloody sacrifice of their citizens to the transcendent ideal of nationhood and, like the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s famous tale, allows us to see that “the emperor is naked.” The ideologies that underlie the sacrificial machinery of the state are shown to be monstrous when their fruits are measured against the demands of human decency (Paths of Glory), comically absurd when their rhetoric is held up to rational scrutiny (Dr. Strangelove), and generally paranoid in the way they forge solidarity by dehumanizing the “other,” who is in reality just a fantastic projection of our own insecurities and fears (Fear and Desire and Full Metal Jacket). |
“Dying for the Motherland: Orthodox Christianity & the Invention of “Isaac” a Jewish Military Hero”
Yael S. Feldman, New York University
“Ultimately,” says B. Anderson, national ‘fraternity’ made it possible, for so many millions of people, “not so much to kill, as willingly to die”… A WWI Jewish volunteer to the British Army similarly declared: “You don’t understand me: I am going to die… not to kill”. Sentiments of this sort abound in my study, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (2010). However, the language and imagery in which these sentiments are often couched reveal that they were not necessarily fuelled by the “horizontal comradeship” of the “imagined communities” argued for by Anderson. Rather, the willingness to die for one’s father/motherland seems to derive from a much older human ‘habit’ or ‘reflex’—the universal need to secure one’s well-being by appeasing the gods (or their human representatives). |
“Mishima’s Negative Political Theology: Dying for the Absent Emperor”
Akio Kimura, Meiji University
Just as Hitler asked every German to sacrifice his life for the country, the Japanese military government at the end of World War II told every Japanese to sacrifice his life for the country under the slogan, “Ichioku sogyokusai,” which literally means one hundred million broken jewels, and encouraged the people to keep fighting to the death. In fact, many Japanese died while the government hesitated to surrender and among those were the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were regarded as the sacrifice for the country. But more precisely, they were sacrificed not so much for the country as for the Emperor. After the war, in the transition from the pre-war authoritarian regime to the post-war democracy, such a blind Emperor worship gradually faded. But when Mishima Yukio, Japanese novelist, killed himself by seppuku in 1970, after expressing his loyalty to the Emperor, Japanese realized that it was only a dream that Japan had been democratized. Why did Mishima kill himself? Mishima’s suicide was a rite of sacrifice aimed at advertising for the exceptional presence of the Emperor in the post-war Japan, no matter how empty and outdated it looked. |
“Human Wave & Communist Ideology: Chinese Massive Attacks during the Korean War”
Xiaobing Li, University of Central Oklahoma
Some Western historians describe the massed Chinese assaults as “human wave” attacks “in an effort to overwhelm their better-armed opponents and capture their weapons.” Edward C. O’Dowd claims that “American infantrymen dubbed these massed groups of Chinese soldiers ‘hordes,’ and the attacks became known as ‘human waves’.” One of the important characteristics of the Chinese military is its emphasis on the human component in war. Mao firmly believed that a weak army could win in a war against a strong enemy because he was convinced that a man could beat a weapon. “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor,” Mao wrote. “It is people, not things, that are decisive.” Mao’s confidence in a human being’s “subjective capability” to determine defeat or victory in war made sense to the Chinese officers and soldiers. The idea that a soldier or a warrior, because of his godliness and virtue, can vanquish stronger opponents has a long tradition. |
“Of Heroes, Martyrs and Apathy: the Limits of Ideological Manipulation in a Place like Columbia”
Gregory Lobo, University of the Andes
this chapter presents an “ideology critique” of Colombia’s ongoing media campaign to recruit martyrs for the nation, enriched by juxtaposing it with “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” that classic exaltation of the fallen and exhortation to the living. Taking Pericles’ validation and justification of the ultimate sacrifice as, in a sense, normative, allows for a revealing and contextually rich analysis of a series of television commercials in which a Colombian soldier – situated in the jungle in full battle gear – takes a few moments out from pursuing the (our) enemy to look directly at an individualized spectator and declare to him: “Even though I don’t know you, I will give my life for you.” |
“Why Enlist? Anatomy of a Recruit”
Moni McIntyre, Duquesne University
What motivates someone to join an all-volunteer force when the possibility of their death or dismemberment is clear and present? What, in addition to a poor economy, would entice individuals to put their life at risk when other options are available? How prominent is the prospect of dying for one’s country in the mind of a potential inductee? Do they aspire to be heroes or merely to “get by”? Do family expectations make a difference? Do officers and enlisted personnel have different motives for choosing the military either as a career or as a way station in their lives? How clear are they about the risks to their life and limb when they swear to support and defend the Constitution of their country? How much of a role does patriotism--as they understand it—play? Does religion play a part in their decision? If so, then in what way? Is the possibility of a sacrificial death and subsequent memorialization a part of their decision? |
“Live faithfully, fight bravely, die laughing”: The Behavior Socialization of German Boys in the pre-war Hitler Youth”
Nancy E. Rupprecht, Middle Tennessee State University
This article will discuss the implementation of the Youth Leadership's personality profile for German boys that was structured to create enthusiastic and obedient soldiers for the German future. To that end, German youth was systematically steeped in National Socialist behavioral values that were simultaneously ideals in which they were expected to believe and behavioral traits they were required to exhibit. In particular it will discuss those values designed to socialize boys to sacrifice their lives for their nation without hesitation: These include bravery, courage, toughness, discipline, duty, loyalty, obedience, selflessness, sacrifice and sacrifice-readiness (opferbereitschaft). |
“Their name liveth for ever more”: Narratives of sacrifice in British public remembrance 1918-2011”
Mark Sandle, The King's University College
This essay will examine the history of public remembrance of the two world wars within Britain since the end of World War One. The focus of this essay will be upon how a democratic state seeks to both remember and legitimate the sacrifices of its own citizens for the defence of the nation-state, and especially the use of religious and Christian notions in the public discourse surrounding remembrance. The theoretical approach taken in this piece will be to examine the idea of nationalism as a civic religion, and the way in which the nation-state becomes sacralised in times of war, showing how dying for the state confers immortality, hence the phrase “their name liveth for evermore”. |
Title and Topic To Be Announced
Ivan Strenski, University of California, Riverside |
“Sacrificing Women for Uniformed Men: Imperial Japan’s Comfort Women Rape as the Nationalism-Enhancing Cult”
Chiaki Takagi, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
War occurs within the male sphere. When a nation goes to war, men are asked to sacrifice their lives for the nation. Traditionally, women have engaged in this national project indirectly by serving men in uniform. During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army established the special facilities called Jugun Ianjo (Military Comfort Stations) to release their soldiers’ mental stress from combat and the strict military discipline. For this military project, many young women, mainly from Japan’s colonies, were recruited in deceitful manners and inhumanely treated as Ianfu (comfort women), or sexual slaves, by men who were to die for their nation. In this system, men’s bodily sacrifices for the nation were rewarded with women’s bodily sacrifices for men. It was a factory line of sacrificing crafted in the name of war. |
Title To Be Announced
Michael Vlahos, United States Naval War College
The new, emerging consciousness is a declaration by all of us that we are indeed together as humans, everyone: Every lingering and atavistic claim of religious nationalism is as corrosive of humanity's collective progress as a laboratory acid-beaker flung in hopeless spite at a glorious experiment near fruition. Religious nationalism is now a civilizational "dead hand," holding us all back. The final sacred spasms of blood-sacrificial visions may be the ruin of our collective hopes for a new world, pulling human energies away from the challenges that lie ahead. |
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