V. WARFARE AS BLOOD SACRIFICE

Leaving aside the issue of normality versus abnormality, how may one understand mass political movements revolving around slaughter? I hypothesize that political violence is intimately bound to faith, or belief. Slaughter and sacrificial death function in the name of demonstrating the validity of the ideology with which a group identifies. The proof of the pudding is in the killing and dying.

In the following passage, Ali Benhadj—a revolutionary Islamist leader from Algeria—articulates the relationship between faith, belief and 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.

Faith becomes real—according to Ali Benhadj—to the extent that it is "watered and irrigated by blood." Beliefs need to be reinforced by "sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom." The validity of the ideology is computed based on the sum of the deaths that have occurred in the ideology’s name. One counts up deaths and adds up massacres.

Suicidal military tactics are associated with Middle-Eastern terrorists. However, people in the West have practiced military techniques that may be characterized as suicidal. World War I—1914-1918—involved many of the nations of the world, resulting in an estimated 99 million dead and 37 million wounded or missing. The Western front during the First World War was the site of one of the greatest instances of mass slaughter in history (see Nations Have the Right to Kill, 2009).

World War I is famous for how battles were fought. Each of the combatants on the Western front—the French and British on one side and Germans on the other—dug themselves into trenches. Battles occurred when troops from one side got out of their trench and moved toward the opposing trench—hoping to survive the trip through "no man’s land," cut through barbed wire, and break through the enemy line. Rarely did breakthroughs occur. Rather, men were mowed down in massive numbers by artillery shells and machine gun bullets.

One typical British “attack” —that occurred during the Battle of the Somme—is described in the German regimental diary:

Ten columns of extended line could clearly be discerned. Each advancing column was estimated at more than a thousand men, offering such a target as had never been seen before, or thought possible. Never had the machine gunners such straightforward work to do nor done it so effectively. They traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks unceasingly.

One would expect such a futile, unproductive battle strategy would have been quickly abandoned. But it was not. Battles continued day after day, week after week, month after month, producing a prodigious volume of corpses and mutilated bodies. During a sixth month period in 1916, nearly one million men were killed in the Battle of the Somme and at Verdun. This was an average of more than 6,600 men killed every day, more than 277 every hour, nearly five men every minute. Yet battle-lines barely changed.

Some political commentators of the time looked favorably upon the slaughter that was taking place. Observing the carnage of the First World War, P. H. Pearse—founder of the Irish Revolutionary movement—gushed (see Nations Have the Right to Kill):

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.

These words written nearly 100 years ago resonate with ideologies put forth by Islamic revolutionaries. Where Pearse asserted that it was “good for the world to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield,” Ali Benhadj states that belief must be "watered and immigrated by blood." While Pearse calls battlefield deaths an “offering” that pays homage to God and country, Benhadj states that faith in Allah is propagated by suicide operations, massacres and by “counting up deaths every day.”

The mechanism of sacrifice lies at the heart of ideological systems regardless of cultural context. Lives are forfeited and blood spilled—in order to validate an ideology. Ideologies become real to the extent that human beings fight and die in their name. Surely we imagine—if so many people have killed and died in the name an ideology—there must be something to it. It is difficult to imagine that the sound and fury signifies nothing.

VI. HONORABLE DEATH

Thirty years ago, I witnessed a Japanese movie about the Battle of Port Arthur (1980) that took place during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.  The film depicted endless carnage and bloodshed. Japanese officers sent wave after wave of young men to attack Russian lines in battle after battle—where they were met with machine-gun bullets. Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were slaughtered. The Japanese general in the film—trying to motivate his troops to go into a battle that he knew would fail—explained: "Success is not the purpose. The purpose is to risk your life for your country."

In a strange and poignant scene, the general receives a note in the midst of a conversation with the Emperor, and begins weeping profusely. "Very gratifying," he says, "Very gratifying." The Emperor consoles him, asking the general to explain why he is weeping. The General reveals the note’s content: His first son has been killed in battle. "Very gratifying," the General says, still weeping, "It’s an honor for a soldier to die in battle. Very gratifying."

These words of the Japanese General echoed when I read the transcript of the audiotape recorded by Saddam Hussein for the Iraqi people on July 29, 2003, in which he paid tribute to his two sons—Uday and Qusay—who had been killed by U. S. forces:

I bring you the glad tidings, the honorable news, which is the wish of every sincere citizen struggling for the sake of Allah. We thank Allah for honoring us with their martyrdom. We sacrifice lives and money for the sake of Allah, Iraq and our nation. If Saddam Hussein had 100 sons other than Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein would have offered them on the same path.

We do not ordinarily link violent acts generated by people like Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden to their sacred ideologies—because we don’t believe in their ideologies. Sacrifice is perceived differently depending on whether human beings are dying for their ideal, or for our own ideal.

Professing faith in the sacred ideals that our own society embraces, we feel that declarations of sacrificial intent are sincere and meaningful. When human beings sacrifice their lives in the name of an undertaking in which we believe, their actions seem noble, heroic and beautiful. On the other hand, when people like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden commit acts of sacrificial violence in the name of ideals in which we do not believe, their declarations of faith seem hollow and insincere.