Once again I express my appreciation to Robert Proctor, author of the monumental Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, who asked me to reflect on my theory of sacrifice posing the following questions:
1. When is self-sacrifice justified?
2. Is there no cause worth dying for?
3. Aren’t there cases where the State justifiably sacrifices some, for the good of the whole?
The problem with these questions is that Professor Proctor view self-sacrifice as a personal issue or moral question for individuals. In actuality, the obligation to sacrifice is built into culture. Nearly every society contains a sacrificial imperative, whether conceived in relationship to a god, a nation, or any other sacred object. Sacrifice is not a question of personal desire or moral choice. Individuals internalize their culture's sacrificial imperative. Sacrifice i thus is a relationship between a human being and a cultural object deemed sacred by a particular society.
I've written numerous papers on the theme of sacrifice--and perhaps three-hundred Newsletter, some of which are here.
Below are a few salient quotations, some written by authorities on the topic--others by representatives of a particular society articulating the sacrificial imperative.
I'm gradually reaching the conclusion that the sacrificial imperative lies at the core of human culture. I was going to call this issue of the LSS Newsletter the WILL TO SACRIFICE. But I began to realize that the individual's will to sacrifice is not separate from the sacrificial imperative of the society in which the individual is embedded. The individual will to sacrifice is constitute by the "will" of society--that demands sacrifice. This is not a question of choice. The cultural definition of what one must sacrifice for--defines the "will" of the individual. The sacrificial imperative becomes a deeply embedded fantasy or desire, which the individual may find difficult--even impossible--to resist.
Richard Koenigsberg
PS: Please click through the link connected to a given entry below--to locate the source of the quote.
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Arthur Feiner says that sacrifice is 'a gift, an act of renouncement. It always presupposes that the worshipper give some of his substance or his goods to the gods. The reason the worshipper does this is to survive by insuring the god's survival. "If he is to live, the universal life must continue and consequently the gods must not die."
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Franco Fornari states that "War as a sacrificial duty, though performing essentially destructive functions, has for men the significance of a destruction put into the service of the preservation of what they love. Men see war as a duty toward their love object. What is at stake in war is not so much the safety of the individual as the safety of the collective love object." War is a "voluntary destruction of previously accumulated reserves of human capital," an act performed with the implicit intention to "sacrifice a certain number of lives."
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Visiting the First War One battlefield on March 31, 1917 (De Groot, 1988), Douglas Haig reflected upon the hundreds of thousands of British casualties:" Credit must be paid to the splendid young officers who were able time and time again to attack these tremendous positions. To many it meant certain death, and all must have known that before they started."
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Harvey Whitehouse writes that will "Willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of a group has been documented all around the world and throughout human history, from the Christian martyrs of antiquity to the followers of Jim Jones in Guyana, from the Spartans at Thermopylae to the kamikaze pilots of Japan. In recent decades, a murderous form of self-sacrifice – ‘suicide terrorism’ – has become increasingly common, with an estimated 3,500 such attacks recorded in the past thirty years."
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Kelly Denton-Borhaug finds that the “sacrificial war narrative”—at the heart of American citizenship—has “Incredible power” and deeply shapes our understanding of the nation. References to death in battle as “necessary sacrifices” constitute a “powerful motivation for warfare.” These references, Denton-Borhaug says, are drawn from centuries of Christian interpretation of the “death of Jesus as required for salvation.” Warfare is transformed into a sacred enterprise devoted to saving the nation from its enemies. Just as Christ died to save humanity, so does the soldier die to save his nation. Like Christ, “Soldiers die so that we may live.”
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Analyzing the sermons of German pastors during the First World War in The Gospel of Nationalism (1986), Arlie J. Hoover found that “the sacrificial soldier lay at the heart of religious nationalism.” The soldier, like Christ, was ready to “place his earthly life on the altar of love.” German pastors looked upon the warriors death as the “most beautiful of all deaths.” The death of a German soldier resembled the “freewill offering of Christ himself,” who left his life voluntary for his brethren. Whoever dies in battle, “dies in the Lord”—because he has “subordinated his bodily good” and “offered his life for the good of the Volk.”
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Sabrine Behrenbeck (in Betts an Eghigian, 2003) observes that in the nineteenth century an interpretive framework had been adopted for locating the death of the soldier in the scheme of Christian sacrifice. In most European states, sacrificing one’s life “on the altar of the Fatherland” was a common trope in justifying a soldier’s death. The nation served as the highest ethical value, justifying—and thus demanding—any sacrifice. As the refrain of a famous soldier’s song went, “Germany must live, even if we must die.”
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J. W. Baird’s To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (1990) fleshes out the fantasy of sacrificial death as the essence of German nationalism. The poet Josef Magnus Wehner mused on the enduring meaning of Langemark and the Great War. It had been a religious experience for him and for those who had served at the front. Christ's passion had found its parallel in the deeds of those soldiers, who had sacrificed themselves for the nation.
Wehner celebrated this sacrifice in a poem: "You should neither cry nor grieve, for our sacrificial blood was life win. God created death as a brother to life: The heart of the world beats with the blood of heroes." In his last letter to his mother, written before his death on the western front in 1940, Hitler Youth officer Ernst Nielsen tried to prepare her for the loss of her son.
When the news arrived, he warned, she was not to grieve; rather, she was to affirm the nobility of the cause: "If I die, mother, you must bear it, and your pride will conquer your pain. Because you have the privilege of offering a sacrifice. That is what we mean, when we say Germany."
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