1. Blood sacrifice preserves the nation.
   
   
2. The nation is the shared memory of blood sacrifice.
   
   
3. Body sacrifice lies at the core of nationalism.
   
   
4. To die for one’s country is the ultimate expression of faith in social existence.
   
   
5. Warfare is the most powerful enactment of the ritual of blood sacrifice.
   
   
6. The creation of sentiments strong enough to hold the group together periodically requires the death of a significant portion of its members.

In short, society depends upon the death of sacrificial victims at the hands of the group. Warfare is a ritual that creates sacrificial victims. Nations come into being by virtue of their capacity to produce death.

Thomas Jefferson said, “Occasionally the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants.” Rudolph Hess declared, “The stream of blood which flows for Germany is eternal—the sacrifice of German men for their Volk is eternal—therefore Germany will also be eternal.” This is the most succinct summation of Nazi ideology I’ve come across.

Nazism meant perpetual, never-ending death—bloodshed—for Germany. According to Hess, Germany lived insofar as it consumed the blood of sacrificial victims. What’s more, if Germans had to shed blood for their nation—so would everyone else. Hitler initiated and enacted the most massive sacrificial ritual in human history—the “Second World War”—that claimed an estimated 60 million victims.

Blood sacrifice is undertaken for nations, but also in the name of valorizing any sacred ideology. Ali Benhadj—a revolutionary Islamist leader from Algeria—declared:

If a faith, a belief, is not watered and irrigated by blood, it does not grow. It does not live. Principles are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for Allah. Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day.

Whereas the soldier dies for his country, suicide bombers die for Allah.

The First World War also generated a massive number of casualties: 9 million dead and over 21 million wounded. Some observers were gratified by the slaughter. Writing in 1916, P. H. Pearse, founder of the Irish Revolutionary movement, was thrilled to observe the carnage:

The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this—the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.

From Pearse’s perspective, it didn’t matter what country the soldier died for—whether France, Great Britain, Germany or Russia—as long as the world was warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. The First World War enacted a ritual of “august homage”: millions of lives sacrificed for countries. As soldiers died, so nations came alive.

The war of 1914-1918 was called a world war, and also “the great war”: No one wanted to be left out (it’s a family affair). Based on this war, Australia was born as a nation, as was Canada. These nations claimed their space on the world stage by virtue of the fact that they delivered “heroes” who had the courage to die for their country. The soldier, Marvin points out, is the fundamental sacrificial victim: giving his life so his nation might live.

According to Rene Girard:

Sacrifice accords the god all that he needs to assure his continued growth and vigor. If we neglect to feed the god, he will waste away; or else, maddened by hunger, he will descend among men and lay claim to his nourishment with unexampled cruelty and ferocity.

Nations are hungry gods whom we feed to keep alive. The dynamic of sacrificial death is structured as a blood transfusion: the life-sustaining substance of human bodies passes into the body politic. Warfare is “eternal” because we cannot resist feeding the hungry god, which requires a perpetual stream of blood to maintain its life. Thus does blood sacrifice create nations.

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