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Dear Colleague,
LIBRARY OF SOCIAL
SCIENCE will publish a book in early 2010 consisting of a collection of
papers developing themes presented in my essay presented directly below. I
would like to hear from you about your own ideas. Please write to me at rakoen...@earthlink.net.
How does one go
about ascertaining the truth of a political ideology? Franco Fornari
calls war the spectacular establishment of a general human situation
whereby “death assumes absolute value.” The ideas for which we die must be
true, Fornari says, because death becomes a “demonstrative process.”
Islamic terrorists
and suicide bombers have helped to bring forth into consciousness this
relationship between death and truth. In the following passage, Ali
Benhadj—a revolutionary Islamist leader from Algeria—articulates the
connection between belief and death—or blood-sacrifice:
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;
by adding up massacres and charnel-houses. It hardly matters if the person
who has been sacrificed is no longer there.
A belief grows,
according to Benhadj, to the extent that it is reinforced by “sacrifices,
suicide operations and martyrdom.” Faith in the ideology is propagated by “counting
up deaths.”
I suggest that
Islamic radicals illuminate a fundamental dynamic underlying the historical
process: How slaughter, dismemberment and death function in the name of
conferring truth upon an ideology. We imagine that what we die and kill for
must be real. It is difficult to conceive that the massive dying and
killing that constitute "history" occurred in the name of
no-thing.
In my book Nations Have the Right to
Kill,
I have written about the tens-of-millions of soldiers killed or wounded in
the course of the First World War. Roger
Griffin shows how this episode of mass slaughter was conceived as
“regeneration.” Blood sacrifice functioned to revivify civilization, that
is, “nations” such as France, Britain, Germany and Russia.
One of the clearest
statements linking mass slaughter in warfare to cultural and national
regeneration was made by P. H. Pearse—founder of the Irish revolutionary
movement. Observing the carnage occurring on a daily basis in France during
the First World War, Pearse gushed:
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.
This declaration at
first seems bizarre. However it does not take long to realize that it is an
extreme form of a proposition that lies at the heart of the historical
process—and that many people take for granted: “The individual must die so
that the nation might live.” Or: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s
country” (Horace).
In the Middle-East,
the process of dying and killing to prove the truth of one’s belief system
or ideology is called “martyrdom.” In the West, we call it sacrifice or
“heroism.” The difference between Islamic radicals who die for Allah and
Western soldiers who have died for their country is quantitative: Suicide
bombers tend to die one-by-one; whereas Western soldiers have tended to die
en
masse.
The apogee of
the Western fantasy of regeneration through sacrifice occurred during the
Second World War, brought forth by Adolf Hitler. Hitler declared in Mein Kampf that in the First World War the
most precious blood had “sacrificed itself joyfully.” Thousands of young
Germans had stepped forward with “self-sacrificing resolve” to give their
young lives “freely and joyfully” on the altar of their beloved country.
In the Second World War, Hitler perpetuated and expanded upon the ideology
of regeneration through sacrifice and mass-death.
LIBRARY
OF SOCIAL SCIENCE will publish a book in early 2010 consisting of a
collection of papers developing themes presented in this essay. I would
like to hear from you about your own ideas. Please write to me at rakoen...@earthlink.net
To this day, we
valorize willingness of people to “die for their country.” In our hearts
the dream remains the same—although there is a radical change in the quantity of human beings that we
are willing to sacrifice.
Still, we are barely conscious of the sacrificial mechanism: how dying and
killing function to confer truth or reality upon our sacred ideologies.
In his paper, “Martyrs:
The Building Block of Nations,” Sheikh Abdullah Azzam explains that the
life of the Muslim Ummah is solely dependent on the “ink of its scholars
and the blood of its martyrs.” History, he says, does not write its lines
“except with the blood of its martyrs.” Glory does not build its lofty
edifice “except with skulls.”
Honor and respect,
Azzam declares, cannot be established except on a foundation of “cripples
and corpses.” The Muslim Ummah—the divine ideology—continues to exist in
the course of history only by virtue of the “blood which flows in order to
spread and implant this divine ideology into the real world.”
In his statement
that the life of the Muslim Ummah is dependent on the “ink of its scholars
and the blood of its martyrs,” Azzam identifies the fundamental dynamic
generating political history. Dying and killing are undertaken by
proponents of an ideology in order to prove the truth of this ideology. We
remember ideologies—they are glorified in history—insofar as large numbers
of people have died in their name.
Historians
continually write about Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Mao by virtue of the
prodigious number of people that were killed as they sought to validate the
ideologies they put forth. Those who practice the historical craft
continually “count up deaths” and “add up massacres” (Ali Benhadj). The
“significance” of a war or battle or act of genocide is judged according to
the number of people that died in that war, battle or act of genocide.
In order for history
to occur, many human beings have to “die for their country” and its sacred
ideology. But it takes two to tango. Without historians to record them,
these deaths would have no meaning. Historians function to remember episodes of
mass-slaughter. The
“greatest” events in history are those that generated the largest numbers
of deaths. We remember leaders who were responsible for these deaths.
History, as Azzam notes, is built on the “lofty edifice” of skulls.
History books and
television documentaries keep alive the memory of leaders whose actions
generated mass-death. Recently, television documentaries focus on another
species of mass-murderer: criminals who slaughter individuals one by one.
Of course, the deaths they have caused are paltry as compared with the
number of deaths brought about by historical figures.
Mass-murderers who
have been responsible for the deaths of ten or twenty people are thought of
as instances of severe pathology. Yet those who have been responsible for
the deaths of hundreds-of-thousands of human beings are conceived as “great
personalities” that lie at the heart of the historical process.
History, Abdullah
Azzam observes, does not write its lines “except with blood.” A belief, Ali
Benhadj says, must be “watered and irrigated by blood” if it is to grow.
These Islamic radicals are aware of the relationship
between ideology and blood sacrifice: How ideas and ideologies become
true—come to constitute the historical process—by virtue of acts of
slaughter undertaken in the name of these ideas and ideologies.
In the West, we are
less conscious of this causal relationship between slaughter, history and
truth. We imagine that history happens more-or-less by chance or accident.
We do not conceive that human beings intentionally bring about acts of mass-slaughter
in order to create history. Hundred-of-millions have died as a result of
political violence in the Twentieth Century. Yet, we imagine, all of this
has happened against our will. We are not responsible.
The ideas and
actions of Islamic radicals help us to become aware of how human beings seek to create history by
generating acts of slaughter. In order to awaken from our own nightmare of history,
it is necessary to become conscious of how we ourselves have brought about
mass slaughter in the name of conferring existence upon—verifying the truth
of—our sacred ideologies.
With best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
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