The paper presented here is adopted from a keynote address presented by Dr. Koenigsberg at the United World College of the American West. People claim to be astonished by contemporary terrorists who blow themselves up in the process of attempting to kill their enemies. Yet Westerners barely reflect upon their own suicidal political rituals, for example the First World War. The vast casualties that occurred during that war were the result of millions of men acting precisely like terrorists: allowing their bodies to be blown to bits as they attempted to blow up the bodies of their enemies.

Soldiers who die on the battlefield are idealized and memorialized by their countries. A veteran of the Second World War—speaking on July 4, 2001—stated that “the ultimate hero is the dead soldier.” The dead soldier is a hero because he has sacrificed his life for his country.

Perhaps death in battle is conceived as “sweet and fitting”—a good thing—because the act of dying in warfare constitutes a demonstration that the soldier loves his nation. Dying for one’s country represents the supreme act of devotion—the apogee of love.

In the case of Islamic radicals, willingness to die for a sacred ideal is called martyrdom. Jonah Winters explains (1997) that the Arabic word shahid provides the meaning of the term martyr, which means “witness” or “testimony.” The martyr gives witness to the sincerity of his belief by virtue of his willingness to die and kill for it.

In the West, people do not believe that sacrificial death or martyrdom is the purpose of political violence. Rather, we assume that societies engage in activities such as warfare in order to achieve real objectives, e.g., self-defense, the acquisition of territory, economic gain, etc. We do not conceive of martyrdom or sacrificial death as the purpose of war.

Ali Benhadj, on the other hand—leader of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front—proposes that slaughter and death are political activities or goals that should be pursued for their own sake. If a faith or belief is not “watered and irrigated by blood,” he writes, it “does not grow; does not live.” Principles, he says, must be reinforced by “sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for Allah.”

According to this conception of radical Islam, martyrdom and sacrificial death are ends in themselves—apart from any political objectives the group may seek to attain through their violent actions. The purpose of martyrdom or sacrificial death is to substantiate the truth or reality of one’s ideology by giving witness to one’s sincerity and the depth of one’s devotion.

Franco Fornari argues (1979) that the ideas for which we die must be true “because death becomes a demonstrative process.” Warfare allows a society to put its money where its mouth is. Willingness to sacrifice one’s life represents proof of devotion. Dying is represented as good and noble because it occurs in the name of one’s nation and its sacred ideals.

A young Iranian revolutionary interviewed in the 1980s stated that the blood shed by Iranian martyrs was like the water of an irrigation canal that “gives life to crops.” By virtue of the blood shed by martyrs, the “religion will grow.” This relationship between blood sacrifice and the authentication of religious beliefs is not difficult to understand. Does a similar mechanism lie at the heart of Western warfare?

In Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999), Carolyn Marvin theorizes that what is really true in any society is what is “worth killing for, and what citizens may be compelled to sacrifice their lives for.” At the behest of the group, Marvin says, the “lifeblood of community members is periodically shed” through the enactment of a ritual called “war.” According to Marvin, “blood sacrifice creates the nation.”

During the First World War (1914-1918) young men on the Western front representing the nations of France, Great Britain and Germany were required to get out of trenches and try to break through the opposing line. Men in trenches on the opposing side were waiting. They slaughtered the oncoming troops with machine gun fire and artillery shells. Nine million men were killed in the First World War and twenty one million injured.

Many political leaders of the time glorified the soldiers’ sacrifices. P. H. Pearse, founder of the Irish Revolutionary movement, declared that the first two years of the war had been the most “glorious in the history of Europe.” Heroism, he said, had come back to the earth. Such “august homage,” Pearse gushed, was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives “given gladly for love of country.”

People claim to be astonished by contemporary terrorists who blow themselves up in the process of attempting to kill their enemies. Yet Westerners barely reflect upon their own suicidal political rituals, for example the First World War. The vast casualties that occurred during that war were the result of millions of men acting precisely like terrorists: allowing their bodies to be blown to bits as they attempted to blow up the bodies of their enemies.