FOR NATIONS TO LIVE, SOLDIERS MUST DIE
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Richard A. Koenigsberg on Carolyn Marvin

In Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999), Carolyn Marvin states that we “misunderstand the genuinely religious character of patriotism.” The power to compel believers to die in the West has passed from Christianity to the nation-state. Willingness to sacrifice oneself for the community, according to Marvin, constitutes the “ultimate sign of faith in social existence.” Whereas Rene Girard theorized that preserving the unity of the community requires violence toward an outsider or marginal group, Marvin proposes a more radical hypothesis: preservation of the nation-state requires sacrificing members of one’s own group.

The sacrifice of members of one’s own group, Marvin proposes, is the fundamental purpose of the institution of warfare. In our conventional way of thinking, nations go to war to defend the homeland, defeat the enemy, achieve “victory,” etc. Marvin states that beneath these declared motives lies the real purpose of warfare, namely the need to sacrifice members of one’s own community.” Blood sacrifice,” Marvin declares, “Preserves the nation.”

It is the task of the soldier to perform acts of self-sacrifice in the name of the nation. General Douglas MacArthur told graduating West Pointers in 1962 that they as soldiers “above all other men” were required to practice “the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.” Marvin calls soldiers the “sacrificial class.” Soldiers are that group of people within a nation who are required to “die for their country” when asked to do so. They are the designated sacrificial victims.

“The community celebrates and reveres its insiders turned outsiders. From within the boundaries, the community fears and worships these outsiders it consumes to preserve its life.” Soldiers are celebrated, revered and worshipped because they (like Christ) take the sacrificial burden upon themselves.

They are the designated victims who are required to suffer—and perhaps to die—members of the group. The soldier becomes an “insider turned outsider,” a member of the community who has been thrust outward from within the nation’s boundaries in order to do battle over there—on foreign soil.

The task of political and military leaders is to persuade young men of the virtue of sacrifice. This is accomplished by appealing to their narcissism and idealism through the use of words like “honor,” “glory” and “heroism.”

In a lecture that formed an important part of the training of British Officers in the First World War, Colonel Shirley (Kerr, 1993) stated that his objective was to convince the soldier who had entered the service of his Country to proceed to serve her “with all your heart and with all your soul.” If you have done your best and yet must fall, Colonel Shirley explained to his Officers, you may take comfort in the thought that you will have “suffered for a cause greater and more noble than that for which any man has ever yet sacrificed his all.”

One million volunteers joined the British army the first year of World War I, 1914. War Office recruiting stands were inundated with men persuaded of their duty to fight. On September 9, 1915 Basil Hart (Kerr, 1993) asked his parents not to wear mourning clothes in the event he died. “I do not wish you to regard my death as an occasion for grief,” he said, “but of one for thanksgiving. For no man could desire a nobler end than to die for his country and the cause of civilization.”

Frenchman Robert Dubarle (Horne, in Coetzee and Shevin-Coetzee, 1995) wrote similarly, shortly before his death, of the “glorious privilege of sacrificing oneself, voluntarily. Let us try, without complaining too much, to offer our sacrifice to our country and to place the love of fatherland above our own grief.”