BETTER RED THAN DEAD 

Richard Koenigsberg

The only reason we know a sovereign exists--is because we witness dead soldiers on the field of a battle. This is a primary function of kings and presidents: to sacrifice young men to prove the existence of their society's sacred idea.

This is a scientific principle, not a moral judgment. You may love the ideal or consider it detestable. I'm pointing to the relationship between two variables that depend on one another. Dead soldiers give credence to a sacred ideal, whatever it may be. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.

The end of sacrificial dying requires that a society begin to abandon its sacred ideals. This is what seems to be occurring in the United States today. The slogan of the Fifties, "Better dead than red" has become "Better red than dead."

First World War Battlefield

From Paul H. Kahn, Sacred Violence

“The battlefield is strewn with the disemboweled and beheaded, with severed limbs and broken bodies. All have died a terrible death in a display of sovereign power. Viewing the battlefield from a certain distance, it is not even clear who is the object of sacrifice: the enemy and the conscript suffer the same threat and burden of physical destruction for the sake of making present sovereign power.”