National Disintegration

Anyone following recent political events in the United States will have a feeling of what it means to say that a nation is falling apart. Given this experience, one can begin to comprehend Adolf Hitler—whose entire political career originated in his belief that Germany was “disintegrating.”

Hitler’s Ideology presents and analyzes the central images and metaphors in Hitler’s writings and speeches. Hitler’s rhetoric often refers to the “disintegration” of Germany. In my book, Hitler’s statements clustering around this term appear in a table entitled “The Disintegration of the National Body.”

Hitler wrote and spoke about the “decomposition” of the German nation, and of the “splitting up of the body politic.” He stated that the German people found itself in the midst of a “process of dissolution,” observing that “internally the body of the people began to dissolve.” It was a “chaos of views and concepts,” Hitler believed, that had “torn asunder the German people.”

According to Hitler, the bourgeois world had failed to notice the beginnings of a process that threatened to “dissolve the German people once more into its basic elements.” This increasingly rapid “falling to pieces of the organic structure of the nation” acted to “destroy the people’s trust in their leaders.”

Hitler became profoundly anxious reflecting upon Germany’s incipient decomposition or disintegration. What to do? Hitler’s response to this question was the source of everything that followed. His career revolved around his determination to prevent or reverse the process of German disintegration.

Rudolf Hess often introduced his Fuehrer’s speeches with the phrase, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Perhaps few people have ever identified as deeply with their nation as Hitler did. He experienced himself as being “at one” with his nation. Germany existed within the fabric of his being.

Hitler spoke of Germany as if it were an actual physical entity. What was disintegrating when the nation was falling apart—was the German body. What more, Hitler identified his own body with the body politic. When he claimed that Germany was disintegrating, it is likely that he experienced this disintegration as a condition of his own body. Thus, from Hitler’s perspective, the “falling to pieces” of the German nation was simultaneously a world historic event and a personal one.

The following passages provide a sense of the immense power that Hitler attributed to the destructive force attacking Germany, and of the cosmic threat that he believed it posed:

This attack is levelled against the very substance of peoples as peoples, against their internal organization: it is levelled, too, against the leaders of these peoples, against those who represent each people’s own race, against their intellectual life, against their traditions, against their economic life, in a word against all those other institutions which determine the picture of the individuality, the character, and the life of these peoples and States. This attack is so embracing that it draws into the field of its action almost all the functions of life, while no one can tell how long this fight may last.

It is only rarely that the life of peoples suffers from such convulsions that the deepest foundations of the edifice of social order are shaken and that this social order itself is threatened or destroyed. But to-day who will refuse to see or even deny that we find ourselves in the midst of a struggle which is not concerned merely with the problems of frontiers between peoples or States but rather with the question of the maintenance or the annihilation of the whole inherited human order of society and its civilizations? The organization of human society is threatened.

According to Hitler, the attack taking place was directed not only against Germany, but against races, peoples and states. What was at stake was the survival or annihilation of the “whole inherited human order of society and civilization.”

Hitler was unique in that he believed that it was his personal responsibility to rescue Germany—and Western civilization. Germany was falling apart. Society was disintegrating. Hitler was an activist who refused to sit back while the world collapsed. He made it his business to “do something” to rectify the situation.

At the moment Hitler perceived the incipient breakdown of civilization—this is when violence enters the picture—based on his belief that he had identified the cause of national disintegration. Hitler believed that communism, or the Jew, was responsible. Doing something about Germany’s plight, therefore, meant taking action against communism and the Jew.

Hitler claimed that Marxism was a conception of the world with disintegration as its aim—leading to the “splitting up of the body politic.” The Jew, he felt, was a “ferment of decomposition” among races—a “dissolver of human culture.” The Jewish “demon of disintegration” symbolized the “unceasing destruction of peoples’ lives.”

Modern political structures grow out of the individual’s willingness to “identify with the nation.” Nationalism is a cultural form with profound psychological implications. As people are expected to devote themselves to their countries, so is the nation incorporated into the self.

Individuals vary in the degree to which they identify with their nations. What characterized Hitler was the depth of his attachment: the degree to which he equated own being and body with Germany.
Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Hitler applied this proposition to himself. He was willing to become nothing in order to be everything. One became everything to the extent that one identified with one’s nation. Hitler projected his self entirely into Germany.

Thus, his struggle for survival (Mein Kampf) was simultaneously a struggle for the survival of the German nation. The Jewish force of disintegration within Germany was within Hitler’s body. If the nation was to survive—if Hitler was to survive—the Jewish force of destruction had to be removed— from within Hitler’s body, from within Germany, and from the world.

Hitler’s struggle was to keep Germany—and himself—alive. Given that this was a question of “life against death,” no actions were off-limits. Thus followed the fundamental premise of Nazi morality:

We want to prevent our Germany from suffering, as Another did, the death upon the cross. We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany, we have achieved the greatest deed in the world.

The Goal of War is Death

Hitler’s view of the “Aryan” was not what many people imagine. What was “most strongly developed in the Aryan,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, was his willingness to sacrifice himself for the community: to “give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s life for others.”

The Aryan was “not greatest in his mental qualities,” but in the extent of his willingness to “put all his abilities in the service of the community.” The Aryan “willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.” The “superiority” of the Aryan race grew out of the capacity of the Aryan to sacrifice his own life for the sake of the community.

The idea that one should sacrifice one’s own life for the sake of one’s community or nation was the bedrock of Nazi ideology: the anlage out of which everything else grew. Nazism meant absolute devotion to Germany: willingness to die for one’s country. Hitler’s “will” revolved around actualizing this ideology—bringing it into being.

Nationalism, Hitler believed, meant acting with a “boundless and all-embracing love for the people,” and, if necessary, dying for it. A man proves his love for his people “solely by the sacrifices he is prepared to make for it.” Giving one’s life for the community constituted the “crown of sacrifice.”

Military service meant consciousness of the duty to fight for the existence of the German people by “sacrificing the life of the individual, always and forever, at all times and all places.” To be a Nazi, in short, was to be endlessly, eternally willing to die for Germany.

Hitler was deeply disturbed by Germany’s loss of the First World War (or, rather, by her surrender). On the other hand, he idealized the death of the German soldier in battle. The young regiments went to death in Flanders, Hitler wrote , crying Deutschland ueber Alles in der Welt (Germany above everything in the world). With “fatherland love in our heart and songs on our lips,” Hitler’s regiment had “gone into battle as to a dance.”

More than once, Hitler said, thousands of young Germans had stepped forward to “sacrifice their young lives freely and joyfully on the altar of the beloved fatherland.” Having died in battle, the best comrades—“still almost children”—slumbered in the sacred ground having “run to their death with gleaming eyes for the one true fatherland.”

Nazism was an ideology of sacrificial death. To be a Nazi was to be willing “to die for Germany” (the title of a book by Jay Baird). “Obedience to authority” does not convey the meaning of Nazism. Rather, the willingness to submit and to sacrifice one’s life grew out of faith: love for one’s country and loyalty to Adolf Hitler, who was conceived as the perfect embodiment of Germany.

When a boy entered the Hitler Youth at age 10, he swore to devote all his energies and strength to Adolf Hitler, vowing that he was “willing and ready to give up my life for him.” The Wehrmacht soldier swore by a sacred oath that he would render “unconditional obedience” to Hitler, willing at all times to “give my life for this oath.” And the SS-man famously vowed “obedience unto death.”

Nazism was a cult of sacrificial death. Willingness to die for Germany constituted the core of Nazi ideology. “Obedience unto death” was the fount of morality: a vow to surrender one’s life when Adolf Hitler asked one to.

Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Nazism was the will to nothingness: negation of the self in the name of glorifying one’s nation. Sacrificial death was the highest ideal. Dying for Germany was the summum bonum: the end in itself (at the same time containing all other goods).

Warfare constituted a vast arena giving Germany the opportunity to sacrifice young men. When the war against Russia began, German General Gerd von Rundstedt admonished the soldier of the Second World War to emulate his brothers of the First World War and to “die in the same way”: strong, unswerving and obedient, going “happily and as a matter of course to his death” (cited in Baird, 1975). Goebbels was satisfied that German soldiers went into battle “with devotion, like congregations going into service.”

The Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death

In “The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death,” Stewart Twemlow and George Hough examine the case of Jim Jones and his followers of the Peoples Temple. On November 18, 1978, in Guyana, approximately 900 men, women and children perished after drinking from a metal vat of grape Kool-Aid mixed with poison.

The authors analyze the transcript (based on a tape recording) of the very last “White Knight” sermons delivered by Jones to his followers. As external threats against Jonestown mounted, Jones increased his demands, ultimately insisting that his followers be prepared to die for him as the “ultimate expression of their loyalty.”

As Jones expounds on why he embraces death—and why other members of the group should do so—the crowd becomes “audibly more enthusiastic.” Later in his sermon, as Jones reiterates that it is time to die, members of the community are “cheering exuberantly at the idea.” From this point forward, there will emerge numerous spontaneous exhortations by audience members—for the community to embrace its death.

In the midst of the numerous calls for their communal death, a lone female audience member raised objections. However, there were no other objections. Appeals for communal death and farewell testimonials increased exponentially. One loyal member spoke to Jones in tears: “We’re all ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we’re ready. All the rest of the sisters and brothers are with me.”

On February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels spoke before 15,000 people at the Sportpalast. The German sixth army had just suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, and the seriousness of the war began to come home to the German people. Goebbels exhorted his flock to commit to the war effort. Please view an excerpt of the speech here.

After pointing to “rows of wounded soldiers” sitting in the front, Goebbels posed a series of questions. The audience, Goebbels said, represented the whole nation, and their answers would be “answers for the German people throughout the world, and especially for our enemies who are listening to us on the radio.”

Goebbels asked: “Are you ready to follow the Fueher and to wage war with wild determination through all the turns of fate”? And: “Is your confidence in the Fuehrer greater, more unshakable than ever before”? And: “Are you absolutely and completely ready to follow him wherever he goes and do all that is necessary”? An ear-splitting Ja! (yes) was the reply to each question. Stormy applause increased in intensity with each of Goebbel’s questions.

At the climax of his speech, Goebbels screamed: “Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we could ever imagine today”? Pandemonium broke out in the Sportpalast. “Now, Volk,” Goebbels raved, “arise and storm, break loose.” Shouts of “Heil” flowed through the hall, thousands of voices joining in as if one man. “Fuehrer command, we follow.”

“The tide had irrevocably shifted against the German war effort in the fall of 1942. The German military was perfectly aware of this situation. General Alfred Jodl: ‘When the catastrophe of winter 1941-42 broke, it became clear especially to the Fueher that victory could no longer be achieved.’

The machinery of destruction and annihilation went into high gear at the very moment the war was lost. The Wehrmacht fought for three years and the nation was mobilized in a total war effort notwithstanding the leadership’s knowledge that this war effort would not make a difference in the eventual outcome.

Death was talked up as the only way for soldiers to redeem themselves. In the cruel metaphysics of the Third Reich, the only way to be a man was to be dead. Goebbels and Hitler deliberately prepared for death—their own and that of the nation—on the funeral pyre made of the ruins of their imperial dreams.”

Michael Geyer in Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany

In their study of Jonestown, Twemlow and Hough state that a charismatic leader can “inspire his followers to actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death.” Group members may “heroically choose to die rather than to become crushed by enemy forces closing in.” The leader is like a pied piper who “leads the community of the faithful” precisely where they have “unconsciously directed him to lead them.” Joseph Goebbels was the pied piper of Nazi Germany, leading his people into the valley of death.

In subsequent speeches and published documents, Goebbels continued to exhort the German people to die. In another speech at the Sportpalast on June 5, 1943, he explains that “the laws of war are harsh. Millions of German soldiers today have to be ready to die on the battlefield for their people.” As the war on the Eastern Front progressed, he was satisfied to note that German soldiers “go into battle with devotion, like congregations going into service.”

In his pamphlet of September 26, 1943, Goebbels explained that “the duty of the individual during war extends to sacrificing his life for the life of his nation.” On a speech delivered on April 20, 1945, on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday—near the end of the war and Germany’s devastating defeat—Goebbels stated:

We will never desert him, no matter how dangerous the hour. We stand with him, as he stands with us—in Germanic loyalty as we have sworn, as we shall fulfill. We do not need to tell him, for he knows and must know: “Fueher command!—We will follow!”

What is the difference between how Jim Jones seduced and led his followers to die at Jonestown…and how Joseph Goebbels seduced and led his people to sacrifice their lives for Germany? Weren’t Hitler and Goebbels “charismatic leaders,” “pied pipers” who “led the community of the faithful” by inspiring their followers to “heroically choose to die rather than to become crushed by enemy forces closing in”?

Wouldn’t it be fair to say that Hitler and Goebbels led the German people to “actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death”? The difference between Jonestown and Nazi Germany is that Jim Jones led 900 people to their deaths, whereas the words and actions of Hitler and Goebbels led to the deaths of nearly 8 million Germans. The difference is in the number of people who participated in the social movement, and the magnitude of destruction that was generated. Yet, as I observed in a previous issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter, we rarely if ever use words like masochism and psychosis in relationship to political and historical phenomenon.

Well over 200 million people were killed in the twentieth century as a result of political violence generated by nations. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says that the twentieth century was dominated by the “politics of organized insanity.” Yet nowhere do we find a concept of psychopathology to characterize the destructive and often bizarre events in that occur on the stage of politics. Why is this the case?

Why don’t we use terms like “masochism” to describe how soldiers (and citizens) are willing to “die for their countries”? Daniel Goldhagen (1996) observes that the Nazis were in the grip of a “hallucinatory ideology” and that their writings about the Jews were so fantastic and divorced from reality that “anyone reading them might conclude that they were the produce of the collective scribes of an insane asylum.” Why do we hesitate to use a term like “psychosis” to characterize the Nazi belief system?

For further reading on this topic, please see my paper on collective psychopathology.

Despite the fact that defeat was staring the Nazi regime in the face, it persisted in its attempt to restructure Europe’s racial composition through mass murder. During the summer of 1944, after the Allied landings in Normandy, German casualties reached levels never before seen: over 215,000 German soldiers were killed in July, and nearly 350,000 in August. With defeat unavoidable, the Nazi regime persisted in sending its soldiers to their deaths in hundreds of thousands.

The result was casualties on a colossal scale—so much so that Germany in January 1945 became the site of what perhaps was the greatest killing frenzy ever seen. The last months of the war were by far the most bloody. In January 1945 alone, more than 450,000 German soldiers lost their lives (a considerably greater number of soldiers than either the United Kingdom or the United States lost during the entire war). In February, March, and April, the number of German military dead approached 300 thousand per month.

Richard Bessel (2004) in Nazism and War

Heroic Masochism (new paper)

Perhaps nothing has been more detrimental to scholarship than the dissociation of the study of politics and history from psychology. Why this will to separate one domain from the other? Perhaps in order to maintain the illusion of politics and history as a “sacred space”—not bound to limitations and ordinary human motives.

During my many years studying societal or collective forms of violence, I’ve often used the term “sacrifice” in writings and lectures. More recently (e.g., discussing the First World War in this Newsletter), I’ve preferred the terms “slaughter” or “destruction” or “self-destruction.” By using these words (as compared to “sacrifice”), one strips radical forms of collective violence of transcendental meaning.

I often reflect on the fact that I rarely (more accurately, almost never) have come across the term “masochism” in hundreds of books I’ve read on battle, warfare and soldiers. The title of Steven Gardiner’s paper, “Heroic Masochism,” provides illumination. By linking the term “masochism” to the term “heroism,” the idea of sacrifice for one’s nation loses its glamor.

A veteran of the Second World War stated that, “The basic hero is the dead soldier.” According to Carolyn Marvin, “Blood sacrifice preserves the nation. Society depends on the death of its own members at the hands of the group.” If there was no such thing as a hero (a human being willing to die for his or her country), there could be no such thing as blood sacrifice. Without blood sacrifice, what would become of the idea of the nation?

We prefer to separate political causes from the behavior of soldiers. Though we may disagree with a particular war, we honor and revere soldiers for their sacrifices. However, is it possible to separate warfare from the behavior of soldiers? Doesn’t the very existence of warfare depend on the fact that some people are willing (or required) to sacrifice their lives?

We are aware of the social and historical meanings bound to the ideology of warfare and behavior of soldiers. Military organizations function according to the idea of “honor.” Soldiers conceive of their actions as noble sacrifices made in the name of and for the sake of the group.

However, what about the actual experience of soldiers: the psychic meaning of his or her endurance of pain and suffering; willingness to entertain the possibility of death and bodily mutilation. This is the subject of Steven Gardiner’s important paper.

The extracts here have been substantially edited by the LSS staff—for purposes of ease of reading and comprehension in Newsletter format. We hope you will read this important paper in its entirety, which appears here.

Thanks so much for your time and attention.

Excerpts from Heroic Masochism appear below

Soldiers, Misery and Death

Soldiers practice being miserable, and thereby learn to cope with the heightened emotions and flaring tempers brought on by chronic fatigue, unpredictable meals, and bad weather. Soldiers learn about their own mortality, the most ambivalent lesson: the reality and finality of death. It is precisely death that is the center of what it means to “be a (military) man.” Instead of being the one who expels, I become that which is expelled, leaving behind not myself, but a rotting corpse.

Purging Weakness

Every soldier is monitored and expected to self-monitor constantly for signs of weakness—that must be purged. Such weakness, of course, already exists in each of us by virtue of the actual fragility of our bodies, and our lives in the face of punishing climates, deadly weapons, and opportunistic infections.

To turn abject, penetrable and soft bodies into soldiers, institutions perform comprehensive surveillance. They create and demand high stake performances, monitor and test urine, blood and feces—and measure body fat percentages. The despised properties become a permanent part of the soldierly self. He (or she) must never forget what must be rejected, and this is paired with the special understanding that every soldier—no matter how hard—always risks slipping into abjection, and thus expulsion from the social/institutional body of the military.

In this context of ruthless competition, the myth of masculine plenitude is generated, a myth that amounts to the displacement of a shared human legacy of inevitable abjection—displaced not only onto women, but onto feminizable subjects. It is the context in which gender-authorizing institutions—men’s clubs, fraternities, religious organizations, schools, colleges and professions—have thrived. These institutions certify certain forms of masculinity and its privileges, often marking such belonging with rites that paradoxically involve reminders and experiences of abjection, including whipping, flailing, beating, and other forms of terrorization. The very rites so often used both to solemnize institutional awards of gender and to train the bodies and minds of initiates—almost invariably subject applicants to the very forms of abjection that masculine status supposedly will allow them to elide.

Heroism and Erotic Masochism

The mechanism of inclusion typically involves the use of pain and inculcation of heroic masochism. What allows heroism—other than association with countless narratives that showcase necessary suffering as a stage in the development of heroes (from the Labors of Heracles to the Passion of the Christ)—is the repression of the erotic potential of abjection.

This is not to say that this desire is eliminated. Rather, it is attached—not to the experience of abjection—but to the socially authorized purpose: group belonging, thwarting the enemy, preserving comrades, obedience to the institution, the redemption of the world—glossed in the phrase “the greater good.” This requires the pretense that “such sacrifices” have nothing to do with the horrifically fascinating and perverse attraction of the abject.

Heroic masochism, then, is the socially useful suppression of abject masochism. It valorizes sacrifice and finds meaning and purpose in suffering. Yet at the level of erotic arousal, its distance from abject masochism is never more than the flip of a switch. The selfish and the selfless merge in the uses of pain.

Heroic masochism achieves its most socially potent forms precisely in those cases where pain is multiplied to infinity—in burning, dismemberment, and crucifixion. Few can imagine the victim to harbor secret and equally infinite pleasures. Yet the construction of such experiences as sublime and transcendent depends precisely on the capacity to imagine the unimaginable: that annihilation through suffering and abject masochism is linked with something desirable: union with the infinite, communion with the divine, or obtaining permanent victory in the name of a nation.

Taking it Like a Man

Low crawling involves dragging yourself along with your body pressed as closely to the ground as possible, on your belly, keeping your head down: a useful technique if you are taking fire with little cover. It is, however, extremely uncomfortable and creates a lot of friction. Uniforms and body armor in the field minimize the bruising and scraping.

A drill sergeant liked to assign his soldier to low crawl in the barracks, along the smooth linoleum floor, in their underwear. The result was copious self-inflicted friction burns, like rug burns, on the knees, toes, elbows and at times faces and ears—as the sergeant stomped along behind those being punished, demanding they go faster and stay down.

Such non-standard physical punishment is frowned upon in the US Army but is nonetheless common. In my interviews and my own experience, I have encountered dozens of soldiers and veterans who were personally subjected to unauthorized, technically illegal training techniques. Not every soldier will be under the direct authority of a sadistic drill sergeant who makes it a point to go beyond the prescribed training techniques, but virtually every US soldier will have witnessed or heard of such excesses.

The excesses become part of the training milieu. And while soldiers with less “hardcore” trainers often feel sorry for those subjected to such punishments, soldiers in these platoons often take perverse pride in what they endure, and develop an awestruck respect for the drill sergeant.

The Privilege of Suffering

While risking injury or death in war might not seem like a privilege, it has been repeatedly constructed as such: as an opportunity to bond with the sacred nation. The benefit to those who become casualties might be considered as evanescent. However, the privileges accrue collectively, not just to soldiers, but to men as a class. Their participation as victim or perpetrator enmeshes men in a system that is reinforced by the most popular and well known narratives our culture has produced. Who doesn’t want to be a hero? This is more than a rhetorical question. The warrants for masculine privilege have their roots in the notion that suffering is, or ought to be, good for the soul.

Pain and its psycho-emotional kindred—humiliation, shame, anxiety—are at base forms of arousal that can be, and often are, invested with erotic energy. The investment, because perverse, and doubly perverse in the context of masculine homosocial environments, is to an extent unspeakable, unknowable. It is a powerful font of affect that attaches men to groups via the narrative of the greater good.

Suffering, then, has a purpose: service to the group, the family, the nation. The perversely alluring dread and ambivalence associated with initiation in the group—with acts of heroism, sacrifice, and death—are tamed. This structure underwrites masculine privilege and bonds men together—concretely and in the general sense of overvaluing values associated with a capacity to suffer willingly: toughness, self-discipline, emotional control, and discounting consequences to self or to others.

About the author: Dr. Steven Gardiner is assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. His research focuses on military institutions, nationalism, gender (particularly masculinity), and social movements. His 2010 chapter, “Relationships of War: Mothers, Soldiers, Knowledge” was included in Women, War and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism. His entry on “Militia Groups,” was included in The Encyclopedia of War and American Society (2006). He previously served the Portland-based Coalition for Human Dignity as an editor and director of research.

Women and war / blood sacrifice / crucified soldiers

Below are extracts from papers that appear on the Ideologies of War website—please click the links to read the entire paper .

WOMEN AND WAR

"White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War,"

Nicoletta F. Gullace

On August 30, 1914, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald deputized 30 women in Folkstone to hand out white feathers to men not in uniform. The purpose of this gesture was to shame "every young ‘slacker’ found loafing about," and to remind those "deaf or indifferent to their country’s need" that British soldiers are "fighting and dying across the channel.” Fitzgerald’s warned the men of Folkstone that there is a "danger awaiting them far more terrible than anything they can meet in battle," for if they were found "idling and loafing to-morrow" they would be publicly humiliated by a lady with a white feather.

A poster designed for the mayor of London put the same message bluntly. Addressing "The Young Women of London," the mayor asked: "Is your ‘Best Boy’ wearing Khaki? If not, don’t YOU THINK he should be? If he does not think that you and your country are worth fighting for—do you think he is worthy of you? Don’t pity the girl who is alone—her young man is probably a soldier fighting for her and her country—and for You. If your young man neglects his duty to his King and Country, the time may come when he will Neglect You. Think it over—then ask him to JOIN THE ARMY TO-DAY!"

BLOOD SACRIFICE
CREATES THE NATION

"Sacrifice and the Creation of Group of Identity: Case Studies of Gallipoli and Masada,"

Renee Lockwood

The battles at Gallipoli (1915) during the First World War are often seen to represent the moment of independence for the Australian nation, offering a chance for its true national character to emerge. Despite its Federation in 1901, Australia had not yet succeeded in producing a unique identity. Ken Inglis: "The altar had not yet been stained with crimson as every rallying center of a nation should be." After the huge loss of life at Gallipoli, Australia’s hopes of a national identity born of blood and sacrifice were realized.

The idea that sacredness and power are born from a willingness to die are fundamental to the ideology of sacrifice. The sacrificial victims embody the entire group collective. Thus, the horrors of Gallipoli are made noble, and acts of slaughter are neither murder nor suicide.

THE CRUCIFIED SOLDIER

"National Cemeteries and National Revival: The Cult of the Fallen
Soldiers in Germany,"

Author(s): George L. Mosse

During the First World War, Walter Flex felt that death in war made life meaningful, even if that life was devoid of meaning until the moment of sacrifice. Modern war became an extraordinary event that enabled men to reach for higher things.

The quest for "higher things" separated the front-line soldier from those leading ordinary lives. War was considered a cosmic process. Within this process, the cult of the fallen occupied a central position. In war cemeteries and war monuments, the abstract became concrete and could be touched and worshipped.
The cult of the fallen assimilated the basic themes of Christianity. The exclamation "Now we are made sacred" implied an analogy of the sacrifice in war to the passion and resurrection of Christ. The war, according to Walter Flex, was the Last Supper: one of the chief revelations through which Christ illuminates the world. The sacrificial death of the best of our people, he continued, is only a "repetition of the passion of Christ."

Some of you may not be aware of our Ideologies of War website—the research arm of Library of Social Science. Ideologies of War represents a resource for scholars, bringing together significant papers, book chapters, book excerpts, photographs and videos focusing on the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence.

We hope you will take time to explore this website and read some of the writings that appear there. Among the nearly 100 resources:

Roger Griffin

The Meaning of “Sacrifice” in the First World War (Paper)

Paul Kahn

Torture and International Law (Book Chapter)

Richard A. Koenigsberg

The Soldier as Sacrificial Victim: Awakening from the Nightmare of History (Paper)

Carolyn Marvin

Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Book Excerpts)

Ivan Strenski

Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim ‘Human Bombers’ (Paper)

Brian Victoria

Holy War: Toward a Holistic Understanding (Paper)

Recently, we presented a “Call for a Review Essay” for the following titles:

Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Mark S. Schantz)

Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Alan Kramer)

We are in the process of selecting reviewers.

More broadly in the next weeks, we will move toward interrogating the sacrificial logic that generates episodes of collective slaughter, as well as the commemorative processes that come into being after (and during) war.

We are creating a special bibliography page on the First World War, and commemoration.

These resources are for our book reviewers, but also for all readers of the Library of Social Science Newsletter, and especially for those of you who wish to join us in interrogating the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence—in order to awaken from the nightmare of history.

Best regards,
Orion

PS: To provide a sense of the articles that appear on the Bibliography page for the First World War and Commemoration, we have provided extracts/summaries of three papers, each of which may be read in full by clicking through to the links.