I had to edit out a couple of passages, but the full chapter (Ch. 13) with footnotes is available at this URL:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9902D&L=ctrl&P=R88571
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
----- 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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
pp.204-224
--[notes--