FOUNDATION FOR THE STUDY OF POLITICAL PATHOLOGY

General Sir John Hackett observed that the military makes demands that “few if any other callings do.” While emotionally disturbed people talk about being “trained to kill,” the whole essence of being a soldier, he said, is “not to slay but to be slain.”

Gwynne Dyer, author of the acclaimed WAR states that by becoming soldiers, men “agree to die when we tell them to.”

General Douglas MacArthur told West Point graduates that as soldiers they were required to practice the “greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.”

When Hitler declared war on September 1, 1939, he asked each German to do “what he was prepared to do”: to “lay down his life for his people and for his country.” Hitler went on to say that if anyone thought he could “evade this national duty,” he would “perish.”

Based on his study of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Professor Babak Rahimi concludes that the soldier’s sacrificial blood “bestows new life for the community,” as it “identifies the reality of the nation with the destruction of each body on the battlefield.”

The French theorist Ernest Renan—in his famous essay “What is a Nation?” (1882)—stated that one loves one’s nation in proportion to the “ills that one has suffered.” Suffering in common, Renan says, “unifies more than joy does.” A nation is a large-scale solidarity constituted by the “sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”