“Heroic Masochism: Masculine Privilege and the Uses of Pain” by Stephen Gardiner Gardiner’s essay maps the psychological processes underpinning the training of soldiers. From the denigration of the individual and fetishizing of the abject masculine body, to the purging of imperfection and the eroticism of suffering for the “greater good,” Gardiner takes a hard and uncompromising look at what it takes to transform institutionalized masochism into a willingness to die and kill for the nation. What if the Nazis’ primary purpose was not the conquest of Europe and subjugation of its peoples, but rather the ethnic cleansing of the Jew? Both the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa were directed at purging Europe of a perceived infection, a racist and irrational objective that became inextricable from the more “practical” priorities of waging war. Crim engages Mineau’s work to reveal the irrationality behind Hitler’s strategy, and the immense allocation of resources to the extermination of the Jewish-Bolshevik presence in Europe. “The Transhuman Soldier: A Comparative Look at World War I and the Iran-Iraq War,” by Babak Rahimi In both WWI and the Iran-Iraq War, soldiers were sacrificed en masse on the brutal front lines. These deployments, Rahimi suggests, were not due entirely to the rationale of wartime strategy, but were sanctioned in the service of a ritual slaughter meant to reify the “reality of the nation.” The martyr and soldier transcend individuality and mortality. They are immortalized and memorialized, attaining “a sacred quality with his ability to generate an all-too-superhuman vitality, a sacred death of transcendental reality.” Death becomes regenerative, absorbed into the collective experience of the immortal Nation. These deaths are commemorated and soldiers “resurrected” as contributors to the perpetuity of the collective body. Rahimi makes a bold comparison between WWI and the Iran-Iraq War, pinpointing a point of commonality in the myth of transcendence ascribed to the soldier—willing to die in order to both consecrate and regenerate an idealized collective. _____________________________________________________________________________________ “Moral Idealism and Mass Murder,” by David Harrisville Harrisville’s intriguing essay challenges the idea that the Nazi Party was unrepentantly amoral and evil. On the contrary, the strongest proponents of the Third Reich were acting on behalf of a particular morality that considered the strengthening and preservation of the superior race—the Aryan Volk—as an ethical imperative, and the eradication of degenerate races—particularly the Jewish people—as a necessary step to realizing that imperative. In essence, Harrisville suggests, “one cannot separate the Nazi’s belief in their own ‘goodness’ from the evil that their beliefs generated.” Naturally, not everyone would have bought into this dichotomous paradigm of Aryan good vs. Jewish evil. A propaganda machine was created to instill in the German people a steadfast conviction that certain moral qualities—cleanliness, patriotism, etc.—were intrinsically German, and certain antithetical qualities—greed, uncleanliness, insularity—were a threat to the well-being of the nation and its people. Certain undesirable populations were considered to literally embody these negative qualities, posing a threat to the Volk. In this way, genocide and mass murder became justifiable and warranted according to an ideology of distorted morality. _____________________________________________________________________________________ In US War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation, Denton-Borhaug argues that the use of the heavily weighted term “sacrifice” when describing and defining the deaths of soldiers in battle perpetuates the mythos of redemption through bloodshed. Weddle focuses on the Christian elements that pervade the discourse of sacrifice, identified by Denton-Borhaug as conflating the martyrdom of Christ and the death of the soldier, “mystifying” the latter as redemptive and necessary. By moving away from the religiously-laden associations of sacrifice, Weddle suggests that Denton-Borhaug is hoping that “we can acknowledge that the survival of humanity may well depend…upon breaking the spell of war made sacred by the deaths of warriors.” Review essay of Kahn’s Out of Eden by George A. Dunn Dunn writes that Kahn “makes explicit what is already near the surface of the militant rhetoric of contemporary nation-states,” that the liberal narrative of progress cannot contain or explain the “symbolic imagination that depicts us all as equal participants in the formation of a single transcendent entity:” the Nation, for which we are obligated to kill and die. “Modern liberalism” cannot define evil as anything other than a failure of reason, or “a symptom of psychological and social pathologies that might be amenable to the right kind of therapeutic intervention.” The concept of sovereignty, however, includes an irrational dimension that responds to “a very different kind of narrative, one of pain and sacrifice.” “Identity, the State and Sacrifice,” by Jean Bethke Elshtain Approaching the role of the feminine in wartime sacrifice is Elshtain, whose essay here begins with the Mother rather than the maid: “Mother and mother’s milk serve as a foundation for civic-spiritedness and willingness to die.” Elshtain moves on to consider the transformation of the State or nation into a mystical entity worthy of sacrifice, for whose sake wartime death is laudable, communal, and even brotherly. Citing a plethora of notable scholars, Elshtain traces the trans-historical phenomenon of the “death of the warrior pro patria.” She returns to the thread of her earlier analysis, writing that “the Sovereign may bear a masculinized ‘face’ but the nation itself is feminized, a mother, a sweetheart, a lover.” Bryson writes that “communities are formed…and communal identities are reinforced through sacrificial violence and the violence (often war) that follows…the pattern of violence, rather than being quelled by sacrifice, actually emerges from the sacrificial pattern.” The dismemberment of a physical body in sacrifice serves to unite a communal body in ways that an external threat may fail to do. It is through the sacrifice of the self that a greater Self may emerge, a pattern that Bryson finds recurrent in the Old Testament. “Fighting the ‘Real’ Enemy: Fantasizing the Liberal ‘Final Solution,’” by Peter Bloom Bloom’s paper centers a critical eye on the rhetoric used by liberal democracies—specifically the United States—to justify expansion, intervention, and aggression towards perceived threats to the state. Bloom writes that these non-liberal enemies are central to “the construction and stabilizing of the liberal democratic self.” The strategy of demonizing an enemy was present from the very beginning of the modern democracy, Bloom points out, as the near-eradication of North America’s indigenous peoples had been rhetorically justified in the name of “American Exceptionalism,”—a campaign that Hitler himself reportedly admired. |
