Dr. David W. Seitz is Assistant Professor of Speech/Communications at Penn State Mont Alto. Christianity—a foundational tradition of the western world—portrayed Christ’s sacrificial death as the perfect model of righteous action. References to this notion of sacrifice can be seen in American war memorials. Visitors discover an overwhelming sea of white marble headstones in the shape of the Latin cross, familiar allusion to Christ’s sacrifice. It becomes hard to deny the swelling sense of sacrifice that permeates from the numerous, harmonized rows of white crosses. Every soldier’s death becomes a sacrifice for the collective good of the citizens of Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world—not just the American state. Each buried soldier attains salvation, as his or her actions of war—presumably violent and against Christianity’s philosophy of peace—are justified, forgiven, and wiped away.

Each war memorial, “always tempered by a foregrounding of the lives lost in battle” attempts to serve as a single location that reorders and makes sense of the atomization and chaos of the combat zone. This reconfiguration never truly reveals the “screams,” the “clash of arms,” the “explosions and detonations” (i.e. the terror soldiers experience in combat), for to do so would defeat the memorial’s purpose as a site of closure.

As Henri Lefebvre writes, “To the degree that there are traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice, the monumental work erases them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude which encompass violence and terror”. Yet within memorials we find implications of the terror and violence of the battlefield through representations of the factual deaths of soldiers.

Simultaneously revealing and obfuscating the realities of war, memorials “embody grief, loss, and tribute or obligation; in so doing, they serve to frame particular historical narratives”. With few exceptions, these narratives include Western notions of the sacrifice inherited from Ancient Greek and biblical traditions.

The western world inherits its idolization of the ‘sacrificial soldier’ perhaps most directly from Pericles’ funeral oration. At the public burial of the remains of the Athenians killed in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, Athenian general Pericles delivered his famous speech about the value of democracy and the memory of those who had died in its defense. In this classic “epideictic utterance about soldiers from ‘our side’ who died in battle”, Pericles urged the living to:

realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valor, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.

The relatives and widows of the dead were to be comforted by the knowledge that the soldiers had willingly offered up their lives in defense of the Athenian state and its democratic ideals of peace, justice, and freedom. Pericles advised those “still of an age to beget children” to bear future citizen soldiers, for “not only will they help you forget those whom you have lost, but will be to the state at once a reinforcement and a security.” The sepulcher where the bodily remains were buried, “the noblest of shrines wherein [the soldiers’] glory is laid up to be eternally remembered,” would serve as a site of closure and permanent declaration of the most righteous of civic acts: sacrificing life for the state (Thucydides 2.34-46).

Building upon this notion of sacrifice, Christianity—a foundational tradition of the western world—portrayed Christ’s sacrificial death as the perfect model of righteous action. In the Old Testament, an individual who offered a sacrifice did not offer her/himself, but instead offered a precious possession in substitution, such as a child (as in the story of Abraham and Isaac) or an animal.

With Christ’s death, the sacrificer’s gift of her/himself became literal. Although Christ’s last words (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) implied a lack of agency, it was Christ’s willingness to die that consecrated humanity’s new covenant with God—for such willingness is not easy to attain, even for the Son of God:

Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. (The New International Version of the Bible, Luke 22.42-44)

With heavenly support, in the final hours of life Christ found the will to offer himself to death to save the whole of humanity.

References to these inherited notions of sacrifice can usually be seen in American war memorials. For instance, visitors of any American World War I or World War II overseas cemetery and memorial discover an overwhelming sea of white marble headstones in the shape of the Latin cross, a familiar allusion to Christ’s sacrifice. For visitors (American or otherwise), it becomes hard to deny the swelling sense of sacrifice that permeates from the numerous, harmonized rows of white crosses.

Every soldier’s death becomes a sacrifice for the collective good of the citizens of Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world—not just the American state. Additionally, each buried soldier attains salvation, as his or her actions of war—presumably violent and against Christianity’s philosophy of peace—are justified, forgiven, and wiped away. Ironically, we should note, these religious connotations outweigh the memory of the cross as an instrument of justified torture and death used by the state against its citizens.

The recently constructed World War II Memorial, situated closer to home on the National Mall, exhibits soldierly sacrifice in less religious, but just as powerful, terms. Etched at the bottom of the site’s “Freedom Wall”—a wall of 4,000 stars, each representing a hundred American lives lost in the “good war”—is the inscription: HERE WE MARK THE PRICE OF FREEDOM. At the site’s dedication on Memorial Day of 2004, Senator Bob Dole elaborated upon this price that Americans have so often been asked to pay:

What we dedicate today is not a memorial to war. Rather, it is a tribute to the physical and moral courage that makes heroes out of farm and city boys, that inspires Americans in every generation to lay down their lives for people they will never meet, for ideals that make life itself worth living… Certainly the heroes represented by the 4,000 gold stars on the “Freedom Wall” need no monument to commemorate their sacrifice. They are known to God and their fellow soldiers, who will mourn their passing until the day of our own. In their names, we dedicate this place of meditation. (Dole)

Like Pericles, Dole was a witness to the terror of war: stationed in the hills of Italy, his arm was ripped apart by Nazi gunfire during a frantic attempt to save a dying friend. But Dole’s dedication speech, like Pericles’ funeral oration and the abstract representation of death in the “Freedom Wall,” sublimates the terror of war into the heroism of soldierly sacrifice. Instead of testifying to the blood and guts that define combat, Dole’s words focus on the majesty of the American soldier’s sacrificial nature (so self-evident that its memorialization is almost perfunctory) and suggest that the “WE” inscribed below the gold stars stands for all of humanity.

We begin to see that the “heroism” found in American war memorials is rooted in an inherited definition of sacrifice as an individual act for the benefit of the common good. But upon reflection, sacrifice, in such terms, is an inherent contradiction to the promise of capitalistic democracy.

Kenneth Burke sheds light on this contradiction, arguing that during times of peace in America, there is “neither need nor room for a concept of individual sacrifice for the collective good,” for within Adam Smith vision of society, “individual aggrandizements are made synonymous with public benefits.” But in times of war—and in our memories of war—we imagine an Athenian democracy in which there exists a “collectivistic motive” for sacrifice:

An individual sacrifice must be presented in terms of public benefit. An individual impoverishment must be presented in terms of public wealth. An individual risk in terms of group security. In other words, for the conditions of a war economy, as for the conditions of warfare itself, we need a collectivistic motive, which will be shared by all except the war profiteers and the empire-builders of big business.

Similar to professional baseball teams, those “privately owned businesses which but have the mask of public institutions,” in times of war the U.S. military functions as a necessary collective entity whose efforts must be greeted by the average citizen with personal sacrifice or support.

Historically, terms like ‘law,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘tyranny,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘sacrifice’ have served as ideographs in the United States. These and other ideographs, which we find in political speeches of war and in the texts and designs of American war memorials, contribute to an effective “rhetoric of control” that maintains a collectivistic motive to sacrifice in war. Writing of American support for war in Vietnam, McGee tells us:

So it was that a majority of Americans were surprised, not when allegedly sane young men agreed to go halfway around the world to kill for God, country, apple pie, and no other particularly good reason, but, rather, when other young men displayed good common sense by moving to Montreal instead, thereby refusing to be conspicuous in a civil war which was none of their business. We make a rhetoric of war to persuade us of war’s necessity, but then forget that it is a rhetoric—and regard negative popular judgments of it as unpatriotic cowardice.

Depicting this rhetoric of war, American war memorials stride between day-to-day capitalistic democracy (so void of the potential for heroic sacrifice) and the necessary reversion to archaic societies in times of military conflict.