Ideology | Library of Social Science Blog

Ideologies and Blood Sacrifice

Sheikh Abdullah Azzam

In his lecture, “Martyrs: The Building Block of Nations,” Sheikh Abdullah Azzam—a revolutionary Islamic leader who influenced Bin Laden—presents a theory of history. History, Azzam explains, “does not write its lines except with blood.” Glory does not build its lofty edifice “except with skulls.” Honor and respect cannot be established “except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.” The Muslim Ummah continues to exist, Azzam says, by virtue of the “blood which flows as a result of spreading this divine ideology.”

Similarly, Ali Benhadj—leader of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front—states that a faith becomes real to the extent that one’s belief is “watered and irrigated by blood.” Principles must be reinforced by “sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom.” A faith is propagated by “counting up deaths every day—adding up massacres and charnel houses.” Since the purpose of death and martyrdom is to confer truth upon one’s ideology, it “hardly matters if the person who has been sacrificed is no longer there.”

According to the theory of history presented by these Islamic radicals, ideologies come alive to the extent that people are willing to kill and to die for them. The “truth” of a faith or belief system is founded on the blood that flows in the name of that ideology or belief system.

These ideas relating ideology and the flow of blood echo the theory of Carolyn Marvin, who states that “blood sacrifice creates the nation.” What is really true in any society, Marvin says, is what is “worth killing for, and what citizens may be compelled to sacrifice their lives for.” In the West, people “die for the country.” Azzam and Benhadj advocate martyrdom for the sake of the Ummah—the Islamic community.

Marvin’s theory grows out of her study of American politics and history. Yet her understanding of the relationship between ideology and sacrificial death is identical to Azzam’s theory, which claims that “history does not write its lines except with blood,” and that of Benhadj, who states that a belief becomes established only to the extent that it is “watered and irrigated by blood.”

We may broaden this theory. Perhaps—in the domain of politics—sacrificial death functions as a mode of validation. Ideas come to be believed as true to the extent that human beings in societal groups are willing to die and kill for them. As Franco Fornari puts it: “The ideas for which we die must be true—because death becomes a demonstrative process.”

Recent issues of this Newsletter have interrogated the meaning of that episode of societal mass slaughter we call “The First World War.” What was going on? Why would political leaders ask young men to get out of trenches and run into machine gun fire and artillery shelling for four years (1914-1918)—resulting in 9 million dead and 21 million wounded? Perhaps the theories of these Islamic radicals provide a clue.

As Azzam and Benhadj were enamored with the idea of sacrificial slaughter, so did a number of Western political commentators look favorably upon the deaths of soldiers during the First World War. P. H. Pearse—founder of the Irish Revolutionary movement—was thrilled to observe the carnage (cited in Kamenka, 1976):

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.

As Benhadj states that a belief must be “watered and irrigated by blood,” so Pearse claims that it is good for the world to be “warmed with the red wine of the battlefield.” Benhadj says that faith in Allah is propagated by “adding up massacres” and “counting up deaths every day;” Pearse understands the death of millions of soldiers as a form of “august homage”—an offering to God and country.

Sacrificial death (slaughter), in short, functions as a form of validation or verification. The production of blood—of cripples and corpses–brings an ideology into being—brings it alive. One may call the sacred ideal—in whose name dying and killing occur—Allah, or the Muslim Ummah, or (the Christian) God, or the country. Regardless of the entity for which people die and kill, in our hearts, the dream remains the same.

In a similar vein, French nationalist Maurice Barrès had this to say (in The Undying Spirit of France, 1917/2009) about his nation’s soldiers who were dying daily during the First World War:

Oh you young men whose value is so much greater than ours! They love life, but even were they dead, France will be rebuilt from their souls which are like living stones. The sublime sun of youth sinks into the sea and becomes the dawn which will hereafter rise again.

Barrès gushes over the deaths of French soldiers. The fact that they have given their lives for France means that their value is greater than the value of ordinary citizens. Based on the souls of these young men, “France will be rebuilt”: blood sacrifices create the nation. Sounding like an Aztec priest, Barrès claims that the “sublime sun of youth” sinks into the sea and becomes the “dawn which will hereafter rise again.”

The “stones” mentioned by Barrès evoke headstones—the memorials of the First World War—that served to commemorate soldiers who had died in battle. Even before the war ended, the French government (as well as governments of many other nations) began creating enormous, elaborate cemeteries. The French lavished meticulous care upon these cemeteries—showing much more concern for the lawns with their elaborate rows of crosses—than they showed for the young men whom they carelessly and promiscuously threw into battle.

Bob Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone”—one of the most popular of the twentieth century—may contain esoteric meanings:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

However, it also serves as a description of one’s emotional reaction upon coming to live in New York City—the ultimate “Gesellschaft society.”

Sociologists define the “Gemeinschaft society” as one characterized by personal interaction: one’s relationship with other human beings defines the community. The Gesellschaft or urban society, on the other hand, is characterized by the absence of interaction and intimacy among people in the physical environment.

One of the first questions I asked myself when I began living in New York City was, “How can I connect with other human beings?” I knew no one on my block (West 95th Street near Central Park West) and barely spoke to people in my apartment building. What was my “community,” and how would I develop a relationship to it?

I began reading The New York Post and The New York Times—and following the Knicks. Like so many others, my relationship to the community came to be constituted by a relationship with the mass media and “famous people.”

The mass media are so ubiquitous now that we take them for granted. We forget that one has to learn—be socialized into—this feeling that we have an intimate and personal relationship with events and people in the “outer world.”

When I was young, there was a clear distinction between one’s personal life and life presented by the mass media. One had to be seduced into paying attention to “current events” (David Letterman uses the term current events in a satirical way, bringing us back to a time when we didn’t take public events so seriously). We clearly distinguished between our “real lives,” on the one hand, and what was happening “out there”: what we read about in newspapers, heard on the radio, and saw on television.

What is totalitarianism? It is an ideology insisting that public life—the national community—is far more significant than one’s personal life. Totalitarian ideologies insist that there is no such thing as private life: one’s personal existence should be subordinated—always and forever—to the “life” of one’s nation.

Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Nazi legal expert Wilhelm Stuckart described the German “Volk community”:

The community of the Volk is the primary value in the life of the whole as well as of the individual. National Socialism does not recognize a separate individual sphere which, apart from the community, is to be painstakingly protected from any interference by the state. The moral personality can prove itself only within the community. Every activity of daily life has meaning and value only as a service to the whole.

Totalitarian ideology revolves around the idea that there is no domain of life or sphere of reality separate from the national community. Totalitarianism means devotion to “the whole.” The significance of the individual is denied. Totalitarianism means denial of separateness and separation.

The development of the modern nation-state is dependent upon accepting the proposition that one’s own fate and destiny are intimately linked with the fate and destiny of one’s nation. Totalitarian ideology takes nationalism a step further, insisting that the fate of the individual and the nation are entirely bound together: there can be no domain of reality where individuals pursue desires unrelated to the state’s goals.

Embracing the Volksgemeinschaft, Hitler required that individuals identify absolutely with Germany. It was necessary to overcome “bourgeois privatism” in order to “unconditionally equate the individual fate with the fate of the nation.” The Volk would encompass each and every German: “No one is excepted from this crisis of the Reich,” Hitler declared. “There may not be a single person who excludes himself from this joint obligation.” The Volk, Hitler explained, “is but yourself.”

Karl Marx similarly embraced the proposition that separation of the individual from society was intolerable, explaining that “liberty as a right of man” is not founded on the relations between men, but rather upon the “separation of man from man.” Human rights were founded on the “right of such separation”—the right of the “circumscribed individual withdrawn into himself.”

“Man as a member of civil society,” Marx said, is an individual separated from the community—“wholly preoccupied with his private interest and private caprice.” Like Hitler, Marx disdained “bourgeois individualism”: a mode of existence insisting upon the individual’s freedom to pursue personal interests and private aspirations.

According to Marx, “Human life is the true social life of man.” Only by virtue of one’s relationship to society did one become a human being. The ideology of freedom or the “rights of man”—asserting the individual’s right to act in accord with private interests—produced an exclusion from societal life that was “more complete, unbearable and dreadful” than exclusion from political life.

The liberal idea of freedom, from Marx’s point of view—the right to become “released from the shackles and limitations imposed by man”—was the expression of man’s “absolute enslavement and loss of human nature.” Liberation from society was a form of slavery. The true achievement of “human emancipation,” Marx insisted, would occur only when the individual man had “absorbed into himself the abstract citizen.” Liberation would occur when the individual—in his everyday life, work and relationships—had become a “species being.”

What Nazism and Communism had in common, philosophically, was the idea that there could be no truly human existence unless one’s life was devoted to the life of the community or collective. “Society” was all. The individual was required to subordinate himself to, and live for, “the whole.”

Hitler’s life consisted of his determination to kill off the idea of separation or separateness. This is precisely what “the Jew” meant: someone who was incapable of integrating into a national society. The Jew symbolized a “free-floating individual,” unable to bind to a nation-state—like a bacterium that roamed within a body, but was unable to find a permanent, stable place within it.

In killing “Jewish bacteria,” Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels sought to kill off the idea of individuality: exterminate individuals who were imagined to exist in a condition of separateness from the nation-state. As one ideologue put it, “You will be a Nazi—or we will bash your head in.” “You are one of us—part of the German nation—or you have no right to exist.”

Hitler’s Official Programme (Feder, 1927) put forth as its central plank, “The Common Interest before Self-Interest,” condemning leaders of public life who “worship the same god—Individualism” and “make personal interest the sole incentive.” Nazi totalitarianism was a revolution against individualism—the idea that a human being can exist in a state of separateness from society, the national community.

Germany was everything. That which was or desired to become separate from Germany could not—would not—be permitted to exist. Hitler’s fantasy of mass-murder was generated by his desire or need to destroy anyone and everything that was not part of the German self.