-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Blood Rites - Origins & History of the Passions of War
Barbara Ehrenreich(C)1997
Metropolitan Books
Hennry Holt & Companty
ISBN 0-8050-5077-9
-----
I can not say enough about this book. These excerpts do it little justice. I
strongly recommend reading this book.Well-written and thoughtful; when all is
said and done, the veneer between passions, expectations, propaganda and
thought can be very thin. There are chapters on the warrior elites, the
sacralization of war, the effect of missle(guns/longbow) warfare and war
worship. A very important book.
Om
K
-----
The idealization of war by peoples become
primitive again is no sign of moral decadence,
but on the contrary the sign of a new hero-
worship and sacrificial spirit.[1
-Count Keyserling
13
THREE CASES OF
WAR WORSHIP
Lofty feelings directed toward an intangible, superhuman being: Most people of
our own time would recognize these as the ingredients of a religion. The
analogy between nationalism--and I mean, of course, "secular" nationalism--and
religion has been drawn many times. Benedict Anderson admits nationalism's
"strong affinity with religious imaginings."[2 Toynbee went further, seeing
nationalism as a replacement for Christianity, which had been vitiated by a
soulless capitalist economy. But for the most part the relationship between
nationalism and religion has been left as a sort of decorative analogy. Few,
if any, have pressed the issue or found it useful to pursue the notion of
nationalism as a religion, complete with its own deities, mythology, and
rites.
One reason we hesitate to classify nationalism as a kind of religion is that
nationalism is a thoroughly "modern" phenomenon. It emerges in Europe in the
nineteenth century and is spread throughout the third world--largely in
reaction to European imperialism--in the twentieth century. Our own modernist
bias convinces us that things which are recent must also be "modern," in the
sense of being rational and "progressive." On one side of that great
historical divide identified as the Enlightenment lie superstition,
oppression, and fanatically intolerant religions. It is on the other side,
along with science and a faith in progress, where we locate nationalism. To
acknowledge that nationalism is itself a kind of religion would be to concede
that all that is "modern" is not necessarily "progressive" or "rational": that
history can sometimes take us "backward," toward what we have come to see as
the archaic and primitive.
It is in times of war and the threat of war that nationalism takes on its most
overtly religious hues. During the temporary enthusiasms of war, such as those
inspired by the outbreak of World War I, individuals see themselves as
participants in, or candidates for, a divine form of "sacrifice." At the same
time, whatever distinctions may have existed between church and state--or,
more precisely, between churchbased religions and the religion of
nationalism--tend to dissolve. During World War I, for example, secular
authorities in the United States devised propaganda posters in which "Jesus
was dressed in khaki and portrayed sighting down a gun barrel."[3 For their
part, religious authorities can usually be counted on to help sacralize the
war effort with their endorsements. During the feverish enthusiasm of World
War I, the Bishop of London called on Englishmen to kill Germans--to kill . .
. the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old.... As
I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon
everyone who dies in it as a martyr.[4
But if nationalism is to be more than a temporary passion whipped up by war,
it has to find ways to sustain and institutionalize itself apart from more
conventional religions. It must, in other words, assume some of the trappings
of a conventional, church-based religion itself. Uplifting myths are required,
special holidays, and rituals that can be enacted by people who may not feel,
at the moment of enacting, any great passion at all. Such rituals and myths
keep nationalism alive during times of deprivation and defeat even during
interludes of peace--just as, say, Christian ritual preserves the faith in
people who may only occasionally, or once in a lifetime, experience genuine
spiritual transport.
It was World War II that saw the full flowering of institutionalized
"religious" nationalisms, designed to maintain the fervor of whole populations
for months and years at a time. In many ways, the Second World War was a
continuation of the first, growing out of grievances implanted by the first
war and featuring some of the same alliances and forms of war-making. The
tank, the submarine, and the airplane, for example--which did so much to
distinguish World War II from the wars of previous centuries--were all first
deployed in World War I. So the two wars may be seen as a continuum analogous
to the Thirty Years War--a "double war" that could not find a way to stop.[5
But World War II was distinct in ways that required the sustained emotional
mobilization of the participant populations. First there was the sheer size of
the armies involved. The armed forces of the United States, which had numbered
about 5 million in World War I, reached over 16 million at the height of World
War II, and other belligerents put similar proportions of their populations
into uniform. More important, though, was the fact that this was a "total"
war. In World War I, there had still been some inhibitions against the
targeting of civilians, who ended up accounting for 15 percent of the
fatalities. By World War II, the destruction (and exploitation) of civilians
was deliberate policy on all sides. The British used air power to "de-house"
the German population; the U.S. bombed the civilian populations of Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, and Dresden; the Germans and Japanese destroyed cities and exploited
defeated populations as slave labor. As a result, in World War II the civilian
share of fatalities, including Holocaust victims, shot up to 65 percent of the
total.[6
Air power made the mass bombings of civilians possible, but it was the huge
involvement of civilians in the industrial side of war that made it seem
strategically necessary. In the culmination of a trend under way since the
beginning of gun-based warfare, millions of civilians were now enlisted in the
business of manufacturing weapons and othervvise supplying the increasingly
massive armies. In this situation, there were no "innocent" civilians, except
possibly children, and the war took on a genocidal character unknown to the
more gentlemanly conflict of 1914-18. Nowhere was this clearer than in the
U.S. confrontation with the racially different Japanese. William Halsey, the
commander of the United States' naval forces in the South Pacific, favored
such slogans as "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs" and vowed, after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that by the end of the war Japanese would be
spoken only in hell.[7
In its relentless appetite for "manpower," World War II even challenged the
traditional male exclusivity of war. Women not only filled in for missing
males in munitions factories and other vital industries; they were invited
into the U.S. and British armed forces as clerical and administrative workers,
issued uniforms, and allowed to participate in the pageantry, as well as the
risks, of war. Soviet women, or at least some of them, briefly achieved full
warrior status, "flying combat missions, acting as snipers, and participating
in human-wave assaults."8 In a war in which a civilian faced nearly the same
chance of dying as a soldier, there was no "protected" status for females
anyvvay. War was everywhere, and everyone was a part of it.
The distinctively religious nationalisms that emerged around the time of World
War II drew heavily on familiar religious traditions but inevitably rendered
them more "primitive" and parochial. Recall Karl Jaspers's classification of
religions as "pre-" and "post-axial," with the "axis" being that ancient
equivalent of the Enlightenment, the heyday of classical Greece. The pre-axial
religions were tribalistic, postulating deities with limited jurisdictions and
loyalties, while the post-axial religions were, at least in theory,
universalistic and addressed to all people alike. Thus all the participants in
the bloodbath of World War II were adherents of, or at least familiar with,
creeds that held out some notion of the "brotherhood of man": Christianity in
the case of the Americans and Europeans, Buddhism in the case of the Japanese,
and, if it can be counted as a kind of "religion," the atheistic ideology of
international socialism in the case of the Soviets.
But nationalism is nothing if not tribalistic and cannot, by its very nature,
make the slightest claim to universalism: No one expects Poles to offer their
lives for Peru, or goes proselytizing among Canadians to win their allegiance
to the flag of Nigeria. In the religion of nationalism, the foreigner is
always a kind of "heathen" and, except in unusual circumstances, unsusceptible
to conversion. To the extent that nationalism replaced the universalistic
(post-axial) religions, as Toynbee saw it doing, human beings were abandoning
the bold dream of a universal humanity and reverting to their tribalistic
roots.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the Soviet Union, where the war prompted
Stalin to abandon the universalistic ideology of communism for a narrow and
quasi-religious nationalism. Nationalism, he observed, was "the key to
maintaining civilian morale,"[9 and he exhorted his people to follow the
example of "our great ancestors," a category in which he now listed not only
Lenin but such counterrevolutionary figures as tsarist generals, feudal
landlords, and even a saint of the Russian Orthodox church.[10 At the same
time, the Soviet government displayed a sudden friendliness toward the
traditional Russian Orthodox religion, halting anti-religious propaganda and
permitting the church to reestablish a Holy Synod. In 1944 the glaringly
anachronistic "Internationale" was replaced with a new, more suitably
parochial anthem.[11
Here we will look briefly at three examples of the kinds of religious
nationalism that were associated with, or grew out of, World War II: Nazism in
Germany, State Shinto in Japan, and the ritualized "patriotism" that emerged
in the postwar United States. Each of these served its adherents as a
"religion" by offering an entire worldview, justifying individual sacrifice
and loss and mobilizing the uplifting passions of group solidarity. And as
religions, each has reached back--past Christianity or, in the Japanese case,
Buddhism--to more ancient, "pre-axial" kinds of religion: pre-Christian
European religion in the case of Nazism, Shinto itself in Japan, and Old
Testament Judaism in the case of American nationalism.
Nazism
Nazism may be the closest thing there has been to a freestanding religion of
nationalism, unbeholden and even hostile to church-based religions. Historian
Arno Mayer observes that nazism had all the earmarks of a religion. Its faith
and canon were institutionalized in and through a political movement which
bore some resemblance to a hierarchical church. The self-appointed head of
this church, the fuhrer, exercised strict control over a ranked political
clergy, as well as over a select order of disciples, with all the initiates
wearing uniforms with distinct emblems and insignias. During both the rise of
nazism and the life of the Nazi regime, this clergy acted as both the
celebrants and the congregations for a wide range of cultic ceremonies, some
of which took place in sacred shrines and places. Most of these ceremonies
were conspicuously public and massive, their purpose being to exalt, bind, and
expand the community of faithful. [12
Hitler would have agreed with Mayer. "We are not a movement," he told his
followers, "rather we are a religion.') The purpose of his Ministry of
Propaganda and Enlightenment was to communicate not information, he remarked,
"but holy conviction and unconditional faith."[13 Nazism had its own prophet,
the Fuhrer; its own rituals of mass rallies and parades; even its own "holy
days." According to historian Robert G. L. Waite:
The Nazi holidays included 30 January, the day [Hitler] came to power in the
year he referred to as "the holy year of our Lord 1933," and 20 April, his own
birthday and the day when the Hitler youth were confirmed in their faith. The
holiest day . . . was 9 November, celebrated as the Blood Witness [Blutzeuge]
of the movement.[14
Ordinary citizens found many ways to participate in the new religion. They
displayed Mein Kampf in their homes in the place of honor once reserved for
the Bible; they even addressed prayers to the Fuhrer. The League of German
Girls, for example, developed its own version of the Lord's Prayer: "Adolf
Hitler, you are our great Leader. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy Third
Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon earth," and so on.[15 Ceremonies of
Nazi oath-taking consciously paralleled religious rites of confirmation, as
this account from a Nazi newspaper makes clear:
Yesterday witnessed the profession of the religion of the blood in all its
imposing reality . . . whoever has sworn his oath of allegiance to Hitler has
pledged himself unto death to this sublime idea.[16
Raised as a Catholic himself, Hitler drew heavily on Christian imagery for his
religious fantasies. He often compared himself to Jesus or, in a more Jewish
formulation, to the promised Messiah; he thought of the SS as his own version
of the Society of Jesus.[17 But he and his followers had no use for
Christianity's claims to universalism, nor of course for its appeal to mercy,
and took measures to restrict the role of the German churches. A more
congenial religious foundation for Nazism could be found in the pre-Christian
Germanic beliefs that nationalist intellectuals had dug up and imaginatively
reconstructed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According
to Guido von List, a leading popularizer of such volkisch ideology,
Christianity, with its gospel of love, had been a disaster for the ancient
German people, leading to "the debilitation of Teutonic vigour and morale."[18
Nazism represented a return to the unsullied warrior culture associated with
the ancient, tribal Germans. Its swastika was lifted from the mythological
Aryan repertory of images, and its state was meant to recall the pagan male
warrior band, or Mannerbund.
Hitler himself was a fanatical devotee of war and nationalism-as-the-religion-
of-war. As Keegan argues, much of his outlook and ambition was shaped in the
trenches of the western front, where he served as an infantryman from 1914
through 1917 in a regiment which, like so many others, lost more than 100
percent of its initial troop strength. Again and again, young Hitler survived
artillery bombardments that left his comrades piled up dead around him,[19
only to see their replacements similarly dispatched. No doubt he owed some of
his messianic sense of himself to these narrow escapes, and it may be also
that the relentless, industrialized slaughter of trench warfare served as
psychological preparation for the annihilation of the Jews and other
undesirables at home.
There is no question, though, that the war was for Hitler an experience of
religious intensity. He wrote in Mein Kampf of being "overcome with rapturous
enthusiasm" at the outbreak of the war.[20 On the train ride to the front,
when the troops spontaneously burst into "Die Wacht am Rhein," Hitler
recalled, "I felt as though I would burst."[21 He was a brave and dedicated
soldier, though prone to annoy his comrades by lecturing them on politics or
the evils of smoking and drinking. Thoroughly puritanical in his devotion to
war, he later described the trenches as a "monastery with walls of flame."[22
Thus the Nazis did not rely on the traditional Christian rationale-- vengeance
for the killing of Christ--for their genocidal treatment of the Jews. In the
Nazi theology, a major crime of the Jews was to have betrayed their country in
war. Never mind that German Jews had served loyally in the First World War;
never mind that they were, by the thirties, more thoroughly assimilated into
gentile society than they had ever been. To Hitler they were a hateful, even
mocking, reminder of defeat. In the Nazi imagination, Jews were prominent
among those responsible for the famous "stab in the back" that supposedly
prevented German victory in the First World War. For the Germans to regain
their archaic purity as warriors, all traces of this "foreign" evil had to be
expunged. Only then could the nation rise up, as a single organism, from the
humiliation of defeat to the status of global predator.
There is a tantalizing detail in Waite's study of Hitler: his fascination and
identification with wolves. As a boy he had been pleased to find that his
given name was derived from the Old German "Athalwolf," meaning "noble wolf."
He named his favorite dog Wolf, called the SS his "pack of wolves," and
believed that crowds responded so rapturously to him because they realized
"that now a wolf has been born."[23 Mimi Reiter, a teenaged Austrian girl who
was briefly involved with Hitler in 1926, recalled a curious outburst in a
cemetery, where they had gone, at Hitler's. request, to visit Mimi's mother's
grave:
As he stared down at her mother's grave he muttered, "I am not like that yet!
[Ich bin noch nicht so weit! ]" He then gripped his riding whip tightly in his
hands and said, "I would like you to call me Wolf."[24
This incident, assuming it was correctly remembered, bespeaks a worldview
divided into the most archaic categories of all: not Aryan vs. non-Aryan or
gentile vs. Jew, but predator vs. prey. Hitler had seen too much "like that,"
too many comrades reduced to meat. To be dead is to be vanquished is to be
prey. But in Hitler's worldview there is no middle ground, no mode of
existence apart from this bloody dichotomy. Those who do not wish to be prey
must become predators. Conversely, those who are not predators are prey. To
have survived (the First World War, in Hitler's case) is to have achieved the
status of the wolf. The ancient European warrior sought to transform himself
into a wild carnivore; so too Hitler transcended the failed art student he had
been as a youth, survived the war, and became what was, in his own mind, the
only thing he could be: a predator beast.
State Shinto
By the time of the Second World War, Japan already boasted a fifty-year
tradition of secular nationalism, promulgated relentlessly through every
institution of Japanese life. Public education, which reached 90 percent of
Japanese children by 1900, included military training for boys and the
systematic inculcation of militarism and emperor worship for both sexes.
Arithmetic classes did calculations based on battlefield situations; science-
class topics included "general information about searchlights, wireless
communication, land mines and torpedoes."[25 A reading text offered the story
of an unsufficiently enthusiastic sailor, whose mother admonishes him:
You wrote that you did not participate in the battle of Toshima Island. You
were in the August 10 attack on Weihaiwei but you didn't distinguish yourself
with an individual exploit. To me this is deplorable. Why have you gone to
war? Your life is to be offered up to requite your obligations to our
benevolent Emperor.[26
Among the institutions enlisted to the aims of Japanese imperialism was
Shinto, the traditional religion. One of the world's oldest surviving
religions, Shinto features thousands of deities, or kami, which are worshipped
in private homes and at thousands of shrines around the country. Until the
Meiji period, in the late nineteenth century, Shinto seems to have been
largely apolitical and not even, by the overheated standards of the West, very
"religious." It coexisted peaceably with Buddhism, concerning itself with the
maintenance of the shrines, the observance of festivals, and the performance
of domestic rituals and weddings. It is no wonder that so many of the samurai
had preferred Buddhism, with its austere metaphysic and magnificent
indifference to death.
But the samurai were a tiny elite, and their Zen Buddhism never attracted a
numerically significant following.[27 With the militarization of Japanese
society that began near the turn of the twentieth century, it was the ancient
"folk religion," Shinto, that was conscripted to the nationalist cause.
Japan's victories in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-
Japanese War (1904-05), followed by the annexation of Korea, transformed the
once reclusive island nation into one of Asia's leading military powers.
Shinto priests were now expected to inculcate patriotism along with more
ancient forms of piety and to preside over nationalistic rituals, such as the
veneration of the emperor's portrait.[28 In return, the Shinto priesthood was
given public money for the training of priests and the maintenance of shrines,
as well as state support in its growing rivalry with Buddhism. By the eve of
World War II, Shinto had become, for all practical purposes, the state
religion.
The aim of State Shinto was what historian Helen Hardacre calls a "nationwide
orchestration of ritual": the entrainment of the entire population through
simultaneous ritual observances. Children began the school year with patriotic
celebrations in which the emperor's official statement on education served as
"a sacred object" of worship.[29 Passengers on streetcars were "required to
stand and bow reverently" when passing the Imperial Palace or important Shinto
shrines.[30 Older Shinto rituals were also recruited to the nationalist cause;
many of these, according to Ruth Benedict, were benign enough and certainly
ancient:
On the frequent days of rites official representatives of the community came
and stood before the priest while he purified them with hemp and paper
streamers. He opened the door to the inner shrine and called down the gods,
often with a high-pitched cry, to come to partake of a ceremonial meal. The
priest prayed and each participant in
order of rank presented . . . a twig of their sacred tree with pendant strips
of white paper.[31
What was new about State Shinto was the synchronization and centralization of
ritual, so that the same ceremonies were now observed by everyone at the same
time, from the emperor at a central shrine to peasants at their yohaisho, or
"place to worship from afar."[32 No one, Christian or Buddhist, was exempted
from what Hardacre calls this "daring attempt at social engineering."[33
To escape charges of religious totalitarianism, state authorities took the
position that Shinto was not a "religion" at all but something both more
secular and more deeply rooted in Japanese life: the "national spirit" itself.
At the metaphysical core of the new nonreligion, and overlapping more
traditional Shinto concerns, was the notion of kokutai, meaning, literally,
nation-body.[34 Kokutai parallels the European intellectuals' notion of the
nation-as-organism; it was the mystical living entity which arose from the
fusion of individual citizens into a single and devoted mass. Symbolized by
the emperor and the Shinto shrines, kokutai demanded absolute fealty from the
citizenry, including a willingness to give their lives. As with European
nationalist ideology, dying was no tragedy if one's death strengthened the
nation-body, or nation-as-organism. A document published by the Japanese
Ministry of Education in 1937 makes an argument that could have been lifted
from Hegel:
Offering our lives for the sake of the emperor does not mean so-called self-
sacrifice, but the casting aside of our little selves to live under the august
grace and the enhancing of the genuine life of the people of a State.[35
For all its continuities with the past, State Shinto by no means reflected
some preexisting Asian willingness to submerge the individual in the
collective whole. "Kokutai" may have been an ancient word, but the "Kokutai
Cult" arose only in the 1930s. The whole notion of the nation as a mystical
"body" or organism centered in the actual body of an individual leader was a
phenomenon of the modern era-- the era of mass armies. In the era of a mounted
warrior elite, Japan had nurtured an elite ethic of war: the samurai code, or
bushido, analogous to the European knights' Christianized "chivalry.' But in
the era of gun-based mass armies, bushido had to be democratized to include
the masses, who were now free, as once only their superiors had been, to
experience a "glorious" death in war.[36 Just as European nationalism
represented a democratization of an older, elite warrior ethos, State Shinto
was bushido for the masses.
Like European nationalisms, State Shinto saw war as a sacred undertaking. The
popular writer Tokutomi Iichiro described the Second World War in the ritual
language of Shinto purification. ceremonies: "For the Japanese," he wrote,
"the Greater East Asia War is a purifying exorcism, a cleansing ablution."[37
Other influential intellectuals--professors of history and philosophy at Kyoto
Imperial University--added that war "is eternal" and should be recognized as
being "creative and constructive."[38
Japanese religious nationalism outdid its European counterpart in one respect:
the glorification of the war dead. Europeans honored their fallen soldiers
with monuments and holidays; the Japanese worshipped them, and still worship
them, as gods. Almost 2.5 million are so honored at the Yasukuni Shrine in
Tokyo--not only kamikaze pilots but less distinguished soldiers and even army
nurses. At the shrine, which is filled with photos and other memorabilia of
the deceased, worshippers leave small plaques inscribed with their prayers. It
was in the knowledge that they would become kami, and be appealed to by
ordinary citizens for intervention in such mundane matters as high school
grades, that six thousand young Japanese volunteered for suicide missions in
World War II. A poem found on the body of one Japanese soldier after the
battle of Attu in the Aleutians was translated as saying: "I will become a
deity with a smile in the heavy fog. I am only waiting for the day of
death."[39
American Patriotism
In the American vernacular, there is no such thing as American nationalism.
Nationalism is a suspect category, an ism, like communism, and confined to
other people--Serbs, Russians, Palestinians, Tamils. Americans who love their
country and profess a willingness to die for it are not nationalists but
something nobler and more native to their land. They are "patriots."
In some ways, this is a justifiable distinction: If all nations are "imagined
communities," America is more imaginary than most. It has no yolk, only a
conglomeration of ethnically and racially diverse peoples, and it has no
feudal warrior tradition to serve as a model for an imaginary lineage the
average citizen might imagine himself or herself a part of. But at the same
time, there can be no better measure of America's overweening nationalist
pride than the fact that we need a special "American" name for it.
Nationalism, in contemporary usage, is un-American and prone to irrational and
bloody excess, while patriotism, which is quintessentially American, is
clearheaded and virtuous. By convincing ourselves that our nationalism is
unique among nationalisms, we do not have to acknowledge its primitive and
bloody side.
Americans might well take pride in their uniquely secular civic tradition: The
Founding Fathers were careful to separate church and state, not only because
they feared the divisiveness of religious sectarianism, but because they did
not want to sacralize the state. Their aim was to ensure, as John Adams wrote,
that "government shall be considered as having in it nothing more mysterious
or divine than other arts or sciences."[40 But war inevitably wore down the
wall between church and state, between government and the "divine." In the
late nineteenth century, America's imperialist ventures abroad helped infuse
American patriotism with a new, quasi-religious fervor. Then, during the Cold
War that immediately followed World War II, American nationalism began to
invoke the dominant Protestant religion, to the point, often, of seeming to
merge with it. Patriotic Americans countered the official atheism of the enemy
nation with a proud fusion of "flag and faith." The point "was not so much
religious belief as belief in the value of religion," historian Stephen J.
Whitfield has argued, and above all "the conviction that religion was
virtually synonymous with American nationalism."[41
But for all its debts to the Protestant tradition, American nationalism does
not depend on any particular religion for its religious dimension. It is,
practically speaking, a religion unto itself--our "civil religion," to use
American sociologist Robert Bellah's phrase. In some of its more fervent and
sectarian versions, American nationalism makes common cause with white
supremacy, anti-Semitism, and Christian millenarianism and even adopts Nazi
symbolism. But my concern here is with the more mainstream form of
nationalism, which is thought to unite all of America's different races,
classes, and ethnic groups. Compared to the blood-soaked rhetoric and rituals
of Nazism, this civil religion is a bland and innocuous business--perhaps
especially to someone who was raised within its liturgy of songs, processions,
prayers, and salutes. It is, nonetheless, an extension and a celebration of
American militarism, and no less bellicose in its implications than State
Shinto or Nazism.
American patriotism, like the nationalisms of other nations, is celebrated on
special holidays, and these are, in most instances, dedicated to particular
wars or the memory of war. The Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Flag Day, and
Veterans Day all provide occasions for militaristic parades and the display of
nationalistic emblems and symbols, especially the flag. On these and other
occasions, such as commemorations of particular wars or battles, bugles are
blown, wreaths are ceremoniously laid on monuments or graves, veterans dress
up in their old uniforms, and politicians deliver speeches glorifying the
nationalistic values of duty and "sacrifice." Through such rituals and
observances of nationalism as a "secular religion," historian George L. Mosse
has written, war is "made sacred."[42
But the "religion" of American patriotism is also distinctive in at least two
ways. First, it features a peculiar kind of idolatry which can only be called
a "cult of the flag."* {*Other comparable, English-speaking nations--the
United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia--do not indulge in flag worship.
According to the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 7, 1996), British efforts to create
a mass market for Union Jacks have fallen flat: "Many don't like what it
stands for. A fair number aren't sure when, or if, the law lets them unfurl
it. Quite a few haven't the foggiest idea of which side of it is up."} Just as
the wartime Japanese fetishized the emperor's portrait, Americans fetishize
their flag. A patriotic pamphlet from 1900 declared in unabashedly religious
terms that the United States "must develop, define and protect the cult of her
flag, and the symbol of that cult--the Star Spangled Banner-- must be kept
inviolate as are the emblems of all religions."[43 Early twentieth-century
leaders of the Daughters of the American Revolution held that "what the cross
is to our church, the flag is to our country," and, in more overtly primitive
terms, that the flag had been "made sacred and holy by bloody sacrifice,[16
The American flag can be found in almost every kind of public space, including
churches, and it must be handled in carefully prescribed, ritual ways, down to
the procedure for folding. It is "worshipped" by displaying it, by pledging
allegiance to it, and, occasionally, by kneeling and kissing it.[45 It is the
subject of our national anthem, which celebrates a military victory signaled
by the survival, not of the American soldiers, but of the American flag, when
the rockets' red glare,
the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night
that our flag was still there.
And anyone who still doubts that the American flag is an object of religious
veneration need only consider the language of the proposed constitutional
amendment, narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1995, forbidding the
"desecration" of flags.
The other distinctive feature of American nationalism-as-religion, at least as
compared to those of more secular-minded nations, is its frequent invocation
of "God." We pledge allegiance to a nation under God, our coins bear the
inscription IN GOD WE TRUST. This was not just a concession to America's
predominant Christianity, as Bellah explains, because the God being invoked is
not exactly the Christian God:
The God of the civil religion is . . . on the austere side, much more related
to order, law, and right than to salvation and love.... He is actively
interested and involved in history, with a special concern for America. Here
the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the
equation of America with Israel . . . is not infrequent.[46
Put more bluntly, this is the Old Testament God, short-tempered and
tribalistic. And it is not so much "order, law, and right" that concern Him as
it is the fate of his people--Americans, that is, as his "chosen people"--in
war.* {
*Though I am borrowing some of his insights, I should make it clear that
Bellah's concept of the American "civil religion" is quite different, and does
not explicitly involve nationalism or militarism. He imagines it as some
vague, generic type of religion that 'actually exists alongside of and rather
clearly differentiated from the churches and serves to provide a transcendent
framework for our notion of America. Only when he observes that "the civil
religion has not always been invoked in favor of worthy causes," and that it
lends itself readily to the intolerant nationalism of the "American-Legion
type of ideology," do the euphemisms begin to crack, revealing that what we
are talking about sounds very much like nationalism} "If God is on our side,"
Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell observed confidently in 1980, "no matter
how militarily superior the Soviet Union is, they could never touch us. God
would miraculously protect America.[47
In fact, every aspect of America's civil religion has been shaped by, or
forged in, the experience of war. Memorial Day and Veterans Day honor the
soldiers, both living and dead, who fought in past wars, and war veterans are
prominent in the celebration of Independence Day and in promoting the year-
round cult of the flag. The cult itself can be dated from the Spanish-American
War, which signaled America's emergence as a global imperialist power. It was
on the day after the United States declared war on Spain that the first
statute requiring schoolchildren to salute the flag was passed, by the New
York State legislature, and in the wake of World War I, eighteen states passed
similar statutes.[48 And it was in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War,
that the coins and the pledge of allegiance were modified to include the word
"God." At the middle of a century that included American involvement in two
world wars and military incursions into the Caribbean, Central America, Korea,
and the Philippines, America was a nation draped in flags, addicted to
military ritual, and convinced that it was carrying out the will of a stern
and highly partisan deity.
American's civil religion is limited, however, in ways that Nazism and State
Shinto were not. Democracy guarantees, or at least has guaranteed so far, that
Americans will not have some central, godlike figure--a Fuhrer or an
emperor--to focus and excite their nationalist zeal. Then there is the
multiethnic and multiracial character of the American population. "America is
no nation," the British ambassador observed dismissively at the outbreak of
World War I, "just a collection of people who neutralize each other."[49
Lacking a Fuhrer or a yolk, America's civil religion has the potential to
focus on the American (and Enlightenment) ideals of democracy and freedom.
This would be something truly unique among nationalisms: a loyalty to country
tempered and strengthened by a vision of a just polity that extends to all of
humankind.
Such inclusive visions--international socialism being another-- have not, of
course, fared well in the era of nationalism. Within the United States, a
national loyalty based on Enlightenment ideals has had to compete, again and
again, with the more fervent and volkisch forms of nationalism nourished by
nativism and racism. The Christian right, for example, is as much a
nationalist movement as a religious one and serves as an ardent lobby for the
U.S. military. "The bearing of the sword by the government is correct and
proper," Falwell wrote during the Cold War, segueing easily from bladed to
nuclear weapons. "Nowhere in the Bible is there a rebuke for the bearing of
armaments."[50
But the Old Testament-style thunderings of the Christian right are only a
particularly florid version of the civil religion shared by the great majority
of Americans. Since the end of the Cold War, America's quasi-religious
nationalism has continued to thrive without a "godless" enemy--without a
consistent enemy at all--nourished by war itself. In other times and settings,
outbursts of nationalist fervor have often served as a preparation for war,
but in the United States, the causality increasingly works the other way, with
war and warlike interventions serving, and sometimes apparently being
employed, to whip up nationalist enthusiasm. Nations make war, and that often
seems to be their most clear-cut function. But we should also recall Hegel's
idea that, by arousing the passions of solidarity and transcendence, war makes
nations, or at least revives and refreshes them.
The United States is hardly alone in its use of war to further domestic
political aims. In 1982 Margaret Thatcher's brief war with Argentina over the
Falkland Islands occasioned an outburst of British nationalism and an enormous
boost for Thatcher in the polls. Serbian aggression in the former Yugoslavia
temporarily salvaged the Milosevic government from the disastrous consequences
of its economic policies. Or take the curious case of Ecuador, which is not
normally thought of as a nationalistic society at all. After ordering his
troops to resist Peruvian border. incursions in early 1995, the deeply
unpopular, seventy-three-year-old Ecuadorian president, Sixto Duran Ballen,
found himself suddenly "bathed in the nationalist fountain of youth," as the
New York Times put it. Flag-waving crowds welcomed him back from a diplomatic
tour, and he could be seen daily on the balcony of the presidential palace,
"energetically pumping the air with his right fist, and leading crowds in
rhythmic chants of 'Not One Step Back!'"[51 No doubt, when the armed
confrontations subsided, Ecuadorians went back to burning "Sixto dolls" in
effigy.
In the post-Cold War United States, though, wars--or at least
"interventions"--became the habitual cure for domestic malaise. Ronald Reagan
used a Marxist coup in Grenada as the excuse to raid that island in 1983.
George Bush discovered the energizing effects of military action early in his
presidency, with his thrillingly swift invasion of Panama and capture of its
de facto head of state. Two and a half years later, with the economy in
recession and his approval ratings down, Bush decided to respond to the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait with a massive U.S.-led military intervention, "Operation
Desert Storm." Public opinion was evenly divided on the necessity of war right
up until the eve of hostilities, but once the killing began, it was popular
enough to boost Bush's approval ratings to over 90 percent, which is very
close to those of the deity.
The Gulf War evoked a burst of nationalist religiosity that, although clearly
manipulated by television coverage of the war, seemed to be both spontaneous
and deeply felt. Flags appeared everywhere, along with bumper stickers, T-
shirts, and buttons urging Americans to SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. As if flags were
not a sufficient proof of loyalty, they were joined by yellow ribbons, which
had been originally displayed in solidarity with the U.S. hostages held by
Iran from 1979 to 1981 and seemed to indicate that America was once again the
wronged party or victim. In my town the Boy Scouts affixed yellow ribbons to
every tree and bush lining the main street, and similar outbreaks of
nationalistic fetishism occurred all over the country. Sports teams and public
employees insisted on the right to wear American-flag patches on their
uniforms; dissenters (and those deemed to look like Iraqis) were in some cases
attacked or threatened with attack.[52
In effect, the war had reduced a nation of millions to the kind of emotional
consensus more appropriate to a primordial band of thirty or forty
individuals. In their imaginations, Americans were being threatened by an
outsize, barely human enemy, always represented by the lone figure of Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein. And like the primordial band confronted with a
predator, we leaped into a frenzy of defensive action, brandishing the
fetishes of our faith--our flags and yellow ribbons--against the intruding
beast.
A number of scholars have proposed, in the words of social scientist Paul
Stern, that nationalism "gets its force by drawing on a primordial sociality"
rooted in our long prehistory as members of small-scale bands.[53 Mechanisms
of entrainment--mass rallies in the case of Nazism, synchronized rituals in
the case of State Shinto, televised war news in the contemporary United
States--re-create for us the sense of being part of a unified and familiar
group analogous to the primordial band. It may be, as Toynbee suggested, that
capitalism, with its "war of each against all," leads individuals to crave
this experience of unity all the more. To the alienated "economic actor,"
militant nationalism, with its parades and rituals, exhortations and flag-
waving, holds out the tantalizing promise of a long-lost Gemeinschaft
restored.
But socialism, in the twentieth century, has hardly been an effective antidote
to the twin forces of capitalism and nationalism. It too promised community
and self-loss in a collective undertaking, but the project of "socialist
construction" turned out never to be quite so compelling as the project of
war. People who would lay down their lives for their country will not
necessarily give up a weekend to participate in a harvest or the construction
of a dam. Love of our neighbors may stir us, but the threat posed by a common
enemy stirs us even more.
The sociality of the primordial band is most likely rooted, after all, in the
exigencies of defense against animal predators. We may enjoy the company of
our fellows, but we thrill to the prospect of joining them in collective
defense against the common enemy. Ultimately, twentieth-century socialism lost
out to nationalism for the same reason the universalistic, post-axial
religions did: It has no blood rite at its core, no thrilling spectacle of
human sacrifice.
pp.204-224
--[notes--
Chapter 13
1. Quoted in Vagts, A History of Militarism, p. 440.
2. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 10.
3. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, p. 209.
4. Quoted in ibid., p. 207.
5. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 270.
6. Strada, "The Horror of Land Mines."
7. Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 36.
8. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 286.
9. Quoted in Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, p. 137.
10. Ibid., p. 129.
11. Ibid., p. 138.
12. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 96.
13. Quoted in Waite, The Psychopathic God, p. 29.
14. Ibid.,p.31.
15. Ibid., p. 31.
16. Ibid., p. 30.
17. Ibid., p. 30.
18. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 68.
19. Keegan, The Mask of Command, pp. 235-58.
20. Quoted in Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 77.
21. Ibid., p. 80.
22. Ibid., p. 103.
23. Quoted in Waite, The Psychopathic God, p. 26.
24. Ibid., p. 224.
25. Ienaga, Japan's Last War, p. 23.
26. Quoted in ibid., p. 26.
27. "Because the Zen masters did not preach the easy way to salvation as did
the masters of the Pure Land sects, Zen did not become a mass movement.
Instead it tended to be a religion of the elite." Hane, Premodern Japan, p.
80.
28. Hardacre, Shinto and the State, pp. 23-25.
29. Ienaga, p. 22.
30. Ibid., p. 109.
31. Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, pp. 88-89.
32. Hardacre, p. 32.
33. Ibid.
34. Fridell, Wilbur M., "A Fresh Look at State Shinto," Journal of the Amer-
ican Academy of Religion 44/3 (1976): 547-61.
35. Quoted in Blomberg, The Heart of the Warrior, p. 192.
36. Ibid., p. xii.
37. Quoted in Dower, p. 225.
38. Ibid., p. 216.
39. Quoted in ibid., p. 231.
40. Cousins, "In God We Trust," p. 95.
41. Quoted in Sherry, In the Shadow of War, p. 159.
42. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 33.
43. Quoted in Goldstein, Saving "Old Glory," p. 13.
44. Quoted in ibid., p. 14.
45. Ibid., p. 93.
46. Bellah, Robert N., "Civil Religion in America," in Hudson, Nationalism and
Religion in America, pp.146-52.
47. Falwell, Listen, America!' p. 106.
48. Bennett, ". . . So Gallantly Streaming," pp. 72-73.
49. Quoted in garnet, The Rockets' Red Glare, p. 145.
50. Falwell, p. 98.
51. Brooke, James, "Two Leaders Seek Laurels Along Peru-Ecuador Border," New
York Times, February 9, 1995.
52.See, for example, "It's a Grand Old (Politically Correct) Flag," Time,
February 25, 1991, p. 55.
53.Stern, Paul, "Why Do People Sacrifice for Their Nations?" in Comaroff and
Stern, Perspectives on Nationalism and War, pp. 99-121.
pp. 262-264
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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