• Suffering and sacrifice.

• Suffering and sacrifice. Sa matter? Haven't you seen the talk shows? Sacrifice is back. Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, they are so 20th century. Citizens don't mind a little sacrifice for the common good, the pollsters have discovered, using the very latest techniques. Young people are no longer interested solely in money, the pundits declare. We cough up millions for flood and tsunami victims (while we wait for Halliburton to nail down that no-bid contract). It must be mourning in America.

Suffering and sacrifice play a big role in our stories about altruism. Sometimes we think that they are all the same thing. There's no shortage of ways to express our inner sacrificer-- we can lose our livelihood, the respect of our friends and family, a limb to a roadside bomb, brain function to a police beating, our babies to toxic waste exposure. We can choose to put ourselves in harm's way or simply be in the wrong place when religious and corporate terrorists strike.

The great thing is that anybody can sacrifice. We don't have to starve in a refugee camp, or suffer some horrible disease. The rich have just as much right to sacrifice as anyone else. Look at Bill Gates. He gave away 50 trillion dollars, and now spends his days passing out peanut butter sandwiches in an orphanage. Undercover agents report that members of Opus Dei, one of the wealthier instruments of Roman Catholic mystical authoritarianism, foreswear sex but like to flog themselves.

For folks at the bottom of the ladder, their isolation or low social standing can in themselves become the marks of superior merit or genius. One man wrote movingly, "To me truth is precious . . . . I should rather be right and stand alone than to run with the multitude and be wrong. . . . The holding of the views herein set forth has already won for me the scorn and contempt and ridicule of some of my fellowmen. I am looked upon as being odd, strange, peculiar. . . . But truth is truth and though all the world rejects it and turns against me, I will cling to the truth still." He'd just proved the world is flat, but still no one would return his calls (Engel 144). The persecution story is a handy explanation for all sorts of traumas and failures. Metzgar writes of a segment of the liberals,

As I was preparing myself for college, so was my mother, and with the help of the Civil Rights movement as seen through the eyes of the liberal media, we adopted the college-educated, liberal-middle-class view of ourselves as part of a tiny, virtuous minority. Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching exactly the opposite message then: that most people had decent and humane values they would act on if you forced the issue. But that message did not serve our purposes, did not provide us with a powerful legitimating identity like liberal self-righteousness did. To us Johnny Metzgar was powerful and dangerous, and the liberal-middle-class characterization of him helped us free ourselves from his domination. But it wouldn’t have worked at all if he hadn’t still had a firm commitment to social justice that we could use against him (192).

The appeal of oppressed minority status is so great that some assume it even in the face of laughably contrary realities. I think of the right-wing activists, celebrated by the media, bankrolled by billionaires, fawned on by judges and presidents, who continue to whimper about being persecuted by the secular humanist U.N. / Dan Rather tyranny. They can't keep Jews and liberals out of their children’s classrooms; competition keeps wages low in the beating up immigrants industry; they might go to jail if they kill women; their kids see naked dinosaur bones on the internet; the whole world is against them. These folks hated the civil rights movement but are quick to adorn themselves with pirated rhetoric. How many books and articles include “Politically Incorrect” in the title? Yes, these hundreds or thousands of writers are brave, lonely voices in the wilderness, relentlessly hounded by the mighty jackbooted legions of women’s studies professors.

Or how about the U.S. Christians whose keen sense of persecution leads them to act as if Nero ran the Supreme Court rather than a bunch of right-wing Catholics? Like Shia Islam, Christianity has a long underdog tradition that's still useful to trot out long after achieving domination. Jeremiahproject.com covers the "War on Christianity" in all its gruesome detail, from the torture cells of North Korea to the sneers of network broadcasters. David Limbaugh describes Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christians (2003). "Read This Book Before It Becomes Illegal!" warns the cover of Janet Folger's The Criminalization of Christianity (2005). Learn how the homosexual agenda is driving Christians to prison and eternal damnation! The victim posture helps explain why conservative Christians have embraced the current jihad with such enthusiasm; they need Muslim bigotry in parts of Asia and Africa to obscure centuries of Christian conquest, not to mention more recent events like the mass murder of Muslims by Christians in Bosnia and Kosovo.

There are indeed groups that do face systematic discrimination, up to and including imprisonment, rape, torture and murder. But, in guile or ignorance, whining wannabes divert our attention from the real atrocities.

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“ . . . the movement is also committed to a program of sacrificial service for the benefit of others. As a benevolent institution, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan must give itself to the task of relieving and helping the suffering and distressed, the unfortunate and oppressed.” --Marcus and Burner, 236
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The best sacrifice, of course, is the kind we honor in others-- post-mortem. "They sacrificed their lives for us," we say of the soldiers blown to bits, a little tear trickling down our national cheek. This is news to the deceased. They didn't plan to die for you and me and Halliburton Oil Services.

Leninists of the left and right justify their slaughters this way: You can't make omelets without breaking eggs. A few must sacrifice for the good of the many. And so forth. Native cultures sterilized by Civilization, peasant villages flooded for hydropower or burned down for democracy, whole industries rolled up and containered off to wage-free zones . . . well, someone has to sacrifice for Future Generations. A friend from Peru says that the Spanish conquest of the Americas was a good thing, despite the tens of millions killed; at least the survivors got to hear the gospel. The play I love most dearly, Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, is basically an elegant excuse for Stalin's forced resettlement of millions of people, supposedly for their own good.

At least in the play the displaced shepherds get to hear an explanation. The prophets of the better world to come rarely survey the goats as to how they want their throats slit. These visionaries themselves are too important, indispensable really, to stretch their own necks out on the chopping block-- when it comes to, say, not triple-charging taxpayers for war supplies, or cutting back on fossil fuels to keep the oceans out of Florida and Bangladesh. The promised land is right over there --can't you see it?-- just over the next horizon, insert your quarters in the slot. Or as rude George Orwell said of the eager egg-breakers (to scramble these metaphors beyond Humpty Dumpty): Where's the omelet?

Folks were less ambitious in the old days. Every so often they'd throw a party. A rich guy would bring along his goat, and say a prayer, and slit its throat. 'Here is our offering to you, Mumbo-Jumbo," the rich guy would say. "Here is our sacrifice. Now bless this community. Bring us sun and water and prosperity." Then he'd cut up the goat and make goatburgers and pass around the barley beer. The villagers would chow down and dance and fornicate in the bushes. Back in the day they knew how to sacrifice. The god’s thirst for blood is momentarily slaked, everyone else has eaten his fill, and the rich guy wins a special place in heaven, or at least the envy of his neighbors.

But sometimes it's good for us to feel the pinch a little more personally. It builds character. I had to give up yummy tomatoes, because they made my guts hurt. Now I can sleep at night, and I'm a better person for it. Mornings as I drive to work, rain or shine, I see a neighbor jogging up toward Sharp's Ridge. Feel the burn! No doubt she'll have a longer life and svelter figure than mine. Other people sacrifice by working hard and saving their pennies. If the work don't kill 'm they'll be able to buy that dream house or send the kids to college or retire before they're crippled. The good ol Protestant work ethic is what it is (this side of the world)-- the Ant and the Grasshopper, smug bankers with gold watch chains, all that. Investing for the future, or even for eternity. Paraphrasing the early Christian writer Tertullian, Peter Brown writes, "'By continence [no sex], you will buy up a great stock of sanctity, by making savings on the flesh, you will be able to invest in the Spirit'" (Furlong 11).

Properly employed, certain kinds of suffering can be tickets to prestige and promotion. I read that, for decades after the U.S. Civil War, a common campaign tactic was to "wave the bloody shirt"-- that is, to remind the voters of the sacrifices the vets made to win the war. We demand no sacrifice of our politicians, but we like it when we see it-- possibly we take their pain (born in a log cabin, obscure cancers, the token dead child) to indicate something about their grit and determination. More commonly, I expect, it just shows that they share and must therefore understand at least a bit of the suffering that is our common lot. "She paid her dues," is one way to say it. That doesn't necessarily mean she is braver than anyone else, but rather that she shares our experience. After all, most folks don't choose to have the worst befall them. But, effectively storied, their experience can bring credibility and open the doors to power.

(Of course, we admire some variety of risk-taking more than others. Lately we've discovered firefighters and rescue workers. Still not too many tunes, videos, or neighborhood fundraisers for heroic cab drivers, farmers, fisherfolk, miners, meatcutters, or desert-crossing immigrants. We praise selfless moms in lieu of salaries.)


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"Service members have faith in the core values of the military: duty, loyalty, honor, selflessness and courage. That faith sustains them as they answer the call to do what must be done. They also have faith that no casualties are meaningless, wasted or ignored. . . . "
-- Kevin M. McNabb, Lt. Col., U.S. Army (Time 10-30-06 Letters p. 14)
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In certain circumstances the sanctity we earn from extra pain allows us to leapfrog the normal social restraints. Lots of religious traditions, for instance, urge us to cut our ties with this sinful world, so it's no wonder that some groups equate the sacrifice of material wealth with dissolving their obligations to the social order. Cohn writes of the Brethren of the Free Spirit and other medieval sects, for whom "poverty properly observed abolished every sin; from which it followed that the poor, could, for instance, fornicate without sin . . . " (158). For others, it was sexual abstinence that was the ticket to special privilege: the observant priests, and especially women. Of medieval religious women Furlong writes, "Virginity was a bid for freedom . . . a radical overcoming of nature; for women it was also a device for making it easier to take control of their own lives, an argument used by some suffragettes much later in history" (23).

In such cases sacrifice is a claim to privilege based on a claim of ultra-conformity to the boss' values and a sort of supernatural one-upmanship of the supposedly celibate male priests and saints; the deservingness of the good daughter posed against the unworthiness of the irresponsible slut. The medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen "comes back from the divine throne with messages that are a bit of an anticlimax," e.g. that women can't be priests, disabled children are God's way of scolding parents, that men shouldn't touch their genitals. She also applauded the crusade against the Cathars in southern France, which killed tens or hundreds of thousands. Catherine of Siena, who starved herself to death to show her devotion, was a big fan of crusades against Jewish and Muslim people. The young people of Starship Troopers, not to mention a bunch of immigrants in the U.S. military, purchase their citizenship by killing aliens; but they do get to have sex.

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“I have worked like a galley slave throughout these eight years, morning till night, and I have given all I could to this work . . . I am happy with the results.”
-- Vladimir Putin, Russian Prime Minister and ex-President (Remnick 56).

"Combat was starting to take its toll on me . . . . But still my dedication, my patriotism, was strong."
--L.A. street gangster Kody Scott (Faludi 1999 p. 475)
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Sacrifice functions commonly to mobilize our neighbors' contributions to our own cause. By casting our actions as sacrifices, we may inspire others to do likewise. Or we may want to reassure them by stressing how accepting our policy will help them rather than ourselves (it usually takes a battle-hardened p.r. firm, or your very own media empire, to pull this one off). A posture of sacrifice can also serve to keep our costs down, by not letting others know how much we want what they have; they might let me have it for free, and feel great for their charity. The palace, the chauffeur, I would just as soon live in a cave and walk on burning coals, but I’ll take what you offer as a gesture of respect to that higher power we both serve.

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“The Bakkers [1970s televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye] saw nothing to apologize for; it was all part of Jim’s prosperity theology. ‘Why should God have junk?’ he demanded. ‘Why should I apologize because God throws in crystal chandeliers, mahogany floors, and the best construction in the world?" (Martz 60).
[Not to mention the million dollar home in North Carolina, the half-million dollar home in Palm Desert, CA, the $600,000 vacation condo in Florida, the $148,000 mountain house in Gatlinburg, the $4500 air-conditioned dog house, the 50-foot walk-in closet in the Presidential Suite at Heritage Grand Hotel, the $11,000 jacuzzi at the PTL studio, the $9000 truffles imported from Belgium for a party. . . .]
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More modestly, some men claim merely that their husbandly “sacrificial love” gives them the right, nay, the duty to boss women around (happyfeminist.typepad.com/happyfeminist/2006/02/the_effect_of_b.html). "Servant leadership" has been a particularly hot product among men in danger of losing the traditional bread-winner role:

The solution that Promise Keepers offered to this work-marriage dilemma was masterful, in its own way. Once men had cemented their identity to Jesus, so the organization's theory went, they would reclaim a new masculine role in the family, not as breadwinners but as spiritual pathfinders. . . . The ingenuity of such a solution was that it slipped the traces of traditional male work identity without challenging the underlying structure of the American male paradigm: that paradigm was simply reformulated in religious-battle terms. Men's shared 'mission' now became the spiritual salvation of their families; men's 'frontier,' the domestic front; men's 'brotherhood,' the Christian fraternity of Promise Keepers; and men's 'provider and protector' role, offering not economic but religious sustenance and shielding their wives from the satanic forces lurking behind consumer culture" (Faludi 1999 p.240).

We oughtn't overlook the personal growth aspect. When I'm down and feeling blue, a bit of self-mortification is just the thing to cheer me up. Let's say I don't know what to do with my life, nobody likes me, and I'm overwhelmed by the meanness and ugliness around me. I feel so much better when I puke up lunch or don't eat at all. Get that rebellious body under control! Now I've got a clear goal and I can see the progress day by day. I thumb my nose at the world while I slim my waist and thighs. I'll use my body as a billboard of contempt for the world, and what are you going to do to stop me? Send me to bed without my supper?

Eating disorders are just some of the forms of sacrifice that help us regain a sense of control in a deranged world. Indeed, times of chaos can trigger mass movements of self-sacrifice, as when the Flagellants flogged themselves through the plague-ridden streets of medieval Europe. There's a certain high associated with some forms of self-abuse (that is, till you die from it). The cosmic pilgrim can get great special effects from psychedelic drugs, and cheaply too; but for that satisfying shiver of spiritual triumph, nothing beats a little self-mutilation.

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“After all, a saint without an audience would just be a masochist with no place to go” (Browne 218).
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The magic of sacrifice also helps us make a virtue of necessity. Quite understandably, we have an almost irrestible urge to find something good or useful about our suffering; we comb the rubble for some tiny keepsake. After 9/11 I heard so much about dying for Freedom and going to a Better Place it made me wonder why we don't blow ourselves up every week. (Now we know that Pres. Halliburton had precisely the same thought.)

Sacrifice lets us recast our suffering or deprivation as noble choices. "In my childhood fantasy life I was quite taken with notions of poverty and asceticism. At times I dreamed of joining a religious order. These fantasies were inspired by religious teachings but also by the fact that I just found it psychologically less stressful to give up attachment to material goods. Unlike my siblings I did not know how to ride a bicycle or play tennis, nor did I dream of playing a musical instrument or driving a car-- things that cost." (hooks 53). Below I touch on stories that help explain our disappointments and failures; the forced sacrifice is a favorite.

Others have described the process for enlisting, inspiring and killing those pesky suicide bombers of our current nightmares. We can also point to the Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate mass suicides (or unresisted murders, we can't be sure) to get a sense of what it takes to prepare us to risk our lives for the boss. We'd like to see these cases as bizarre anomalies, but they're really no more than outliers on the continuum of human behavior. Whichever holy war you favor, there's no doubt that martyrdom takes a lot of specialized training and an elaborate incentives package.

Quite as marvelous, sacrifice is the device by which we which we exchange worldly pain for a high-class reincarnation or bonus points on the heavenly ticket. It's like some new technology, say a solar panel or Bush's long-promised hydrogen engine, that allows us to make use of a resource we could never tap before. All the things we fear and suffer turn out to be good, the raw fuel for Zion train.


So even by sacrifice we act in our own self-interest, or try to. But if I sound ungracious about it, a little peeved, please forgive. Really, I don't dispute our need to make sacrifices. On the contrary, I want us to do it better-- more fairly, more effectively, with our eyes more firmly fixed on actually helping each other. A crazy idea, I know.

Individual and collective sacrifice is very important, due to the simple facts that all of us depend on the hard work and sacrifice of our neighbors and ancestors, and none of us will see all the fruit of our own good work. The heart of any great cause are the people who see the link between their personal struggles and those of society as a whole. This is especially true of the great work of freedom and democracy. How many have died, in solitary lynchings in the forest or massacres in soccer stadiums or forgotten in some cancer ward-- and we survivors have better lives as their gift. Sacrifice stories are a way to remind us that our contributions make a difference, even if we don't live to enjoy them ourselves. We build communities on the understanding that we help each other.

Think of the political implications of how Metzgar's labor leader dad changed his sacrifice story:

When Johnny Metzgar retired in 1969 at the age of fifty-six, he knew exactly how privileged he was and to what he owed his good fortune. But the way he explained that to himself changed. In the early days of his retirement, he’d defend his privilege by claiming to be an ‘opening wedge’ that would eventually win early retirement for everybody. Later, as that claim became less credible, he’d point to all the years he had spent in the mill to earn it . . . .
There is an enormous difference between these rationales for his privilege. Both make a claim to be just, but the latter looks to the past (he’d done something to deserve it) and claims a personal entitlement. . . . The opening-wedge, argument, on the other hand, saw his retirement as acting on the future in the service of social justice. This is what had always enchanted him about the union (183-4).

In Metzgar's account, this retelling of history was one step in the long process by which his father turned his back on his own political experience and commitment.

Under the right circumstances --not as often as we like to think-- strategic suffering can change the balance of powers. The political jiu-jitsu of the Ella Baker-era civil rights protests --when, by exposing the ugliness, corruption and incompetence of Southern racism, jailings and beatings came to be seen as a victory for the movement-- has served as a model for many of us for decades.

The images are so powerful and moving we tend to forget that these folks were not just acting symbolically. Civil rights workers did actually disrupt the courts and churches, did actually ruin business for racist landlords and employers, did actually cost politicians votes and foster unrest among the foot-soldiers of racism.

Purely symbolic actions, on the other hand, are basically appeals for intervention from the outside --the federal government, say, spurred on by horrified public opinion-- to do what the community in struggle cannot do for itself. Through spectacular public relations coups such as the demolition of the World Trade Center (which no doubt set the Hollywood mayhem meisters to gnashing their teeth with envy), Osama's merry martyrs mobilized men and money from around the world for their worldwide enterprises. The Vietnamese monks who burned themselves alive circa 1963 expressed a mass resistance against the dictator Diem that spurred his masters in the U.S. to arrange his indelicate demise (though ultimately the reformers could not prevail against Washington and Hanoi).

Many times, however, there is no helpful outside force available. Gandhi beat the British imperialists in part by embarrassing them with public opinion back in England. In "The Last Article," Harry Turtledove speculates Gandhi would not have fared so well under a Nazi occupation.

For all its propaganda value, the success of political sacrifice depends above all on material effects: how it disorganizes the enemy or deprives them of resources. Our current crop of suicide bombers have certainly changed the balance of force in the Middle East, not simply by inspiring or terrifying their neighbors, but by physically thwarting the world's most powerful military, and forcing it to fall back on the traditional, low-tech tactics of paying some of the gangsters to kill the others.

After 60 years, the terrorists of Israel and Palestine have yet to establish anything like a stable peace, not to mention democracy. I wonder sometimes what would have happened had the Palestinian leadership gone the civil disobedience route in the 1950s, aimed at U.S. and Israeli public opinion, instead of terrorism. Would Israel's government have been able to rationalize away a million arrests for civil disobedience the way it does the bombing of alleged terrorists? But, to paraphrase Donny Rumsfeld, we employ the tools at hand.

In the U.S., even when the practice of sacrifice --fasting for peace, let's say, or voluntary poverty as tax protest-- has little immediate impact on policy, it can serve as a sort of training for bigger battles to come. I don't always see the point of some political tactics which cost a lot without delaying for a minute the corporate machinery. But there's no question these also build up the discipline and esprit de corps we may need some day. Just as soldiers run miles with heavy backpacks, or slog through malarial swamps with mud up to the nosehairs, so we too practice to build the skills and endurance for democracy. The old civil rights trainings used to include simulated beatings, to prepare folks for what they were about to face. The risk of any training hallowed by tradition, as they always point out, too late, is that we will end up fighting the last war, and losing, rather than adapt to new circumstances and challenges.

Where the willingness to sacrifice is most critical --indispensable, really-- is in kickstarting the democratic process where it's been suppressed and sabotaged. If game theory predicts real-life behavior, people tend to cooperate once a cooperative mode has been established. But the gangsters can disrupt this with their self-serving turf wars and holy wars, and once the bonds of trust are broken, we get locked into the ever-intensifying rounds of raids and retaliation. Even the gangster bosses lose control. In these conditions it takes very brave people to take the first steps to break the cycle of violence. Very often the first to step up get their heads figuratively or literally chopped off. So people have to be organized as well as brave. Otherwise they sacrifice in vain.


The key point I want to make, boring but easily overlooked when we're desperate for self-assurance: it's not sacrifice itself that we need to honor, but the purpose. Gandhi, imprisoned IRA terrorists, and Saddam all suffered for their politics, yet we don't put an equal value on their purposes. We know all too well how much sacrifice is dedicated not to liberation but to destruction. And we need to be very clear about holding accountable the self-anointed martyrs and martyr-promoters of Halliburton & Al Qaeda.

I see several possible corruptions of the sacrifice story.

First, we can use real or ginned-up stories of sacrifice to win ourselves special perks and exclude people we don't like. We all know folks who claim prestige and position based on past contributions to The Mooment; a few may justify outright theft.

“Well, why not me?” Who had a better claim? The very fact that they had sacrificed as much or more than others who were profiting from the movement might have created some sense of personal entitlement. Even selflessness can become its own contradiction (Payne 354; see also Melissa Faye Greene's Praying for Sheetrock).

Masquerading as dirt-under-the-nails proletarian heroes, parasitic bureaucracies in China and Russia consolidated their strangleholds on vast populations.

Incredible as it may seem, it's also possible that some of us selfless revolutionaries end up treating our sex partners like dirt. We're too busy serving The People to be fair to the people around us.

Second, quite commonly we flaunt the violence we have suffered to justify the violence we plan to inflict. Pick any era for the self-serving stories of martyrs and their employers. Carroll points out,

Before the Crusades, Christian theology had given central emphasis to the resurrection of Jesus, and to the idea of incarnation itself, but with the war of the cross, the bloody crucifixion began to dominate the Latin Christian imagination. A theology narrowly focussed on the brutal death of Jesus reinforced the primitive notion that violence can be a sacred act. The cult of martyrdom, even to the point of suicidal valor, was institutionalized in the Crusades, and it is not incidental to the events of 9/11 that a culture of sacred self-destruction took equally firm hold among Muslims. The suicide-murderers of the World Trade Center, like the suicide-bombers from the West Bank and Gaza, exploit a perverse link between the willingness to die for a cause and the willingness to kill for it (The Nation, 9-20-04, 17).

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"This was the 'protection' that I had romanticized in the hot thunderstormy summers of my adolescence as I read Tennyson's poetry, kings and queens, knights and ladies: and the 'protection' that during the Crusades of 1095 to 1270 C.E. meant metal chastity belts around the genitals of their wives by Christian European knights, who travelled to Jerusalem to free the holy places from 'the pollution and filth of the unclean,' the Islamic Persians, who, when Jerusalem was taken in 1099, were beheaded, tortured, burned in flames, while the Jews of the city were herded into a synagogue and burned alive" (Pratt 37).

"Going on a crusade was a good career move. Hop on a horse, kill a few hundred people, and come home a hero" (Shenkman 43).
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In Israel, Prime Minister Begin and other people have used the world's complicity in the murder of many millions of Jews in World War II to justify Israel's attacks on its neighbors (Bulkin 183), fostering in turn equally dishonest attempts to debunk the Holocaust.

The Nazis themselves claimed their sacrifices gave them the moral right to conquest (Lochner 83). Even concentration camp butchers protested their good intentions. Fest describes Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss:

Among his most outstanding characteristics were strict attention to duty, unselfishness, love of nature, sentimentality, even a certain helpfulness and kindliness, simplicity, and finally a marked hankering after morality, an abnormal tendency to submit himself to strict imperatives and to feel authority over him (278).

The monotonous theme of his life, the cardinal, desperate question of his as of every dependent, empty life, was: 'Where can I serve?' (282).

Rudolf proved to be the perfect servant, very dutiful. The starvation and torture, the crematoria, they were all for the greater good. Certainly he wasn't having any fun (and it's interesting to note how distressed some of the butchers were when their colleagues seemed to enjoy their work; to these prudish Nazis, such open delight was unseemly; perhaps they felt sadism should be savored in private). Höss found it very stressful to murder people every day.

His introversion reflected an inaccessible emotional coldness, and what he believed to be sympathy for his victims was nothing but sentimental pity for himself, who was ordered to carry out such inhuman acts. Thus he was able to claim merit for a completely self-centered sentimentality, which placed him under no obligation to take any action, and to credit himself with the mendacious self-pity of the 'sorrowful murderer' as evidence of his humanitarianism (283).

Nazis didn't invent the role of earnest killer, not at all. The imperialist powers of the previous century were already well practiced in the thrilling remorse of butchery.

A strange kind of benevolent ruthlessness has always been the hallmark of the colonial conqueror. From H. Rider Haggard’s fictional hero Allan Quartermain muttering ‘poor wretch’ as he puts a bullet through yet another Zulu warrior’s heart, to the real-life Winston Churchill, shuddering with excitement and horror as shellfire rips through the Mahdi lines at Omdurman, the literature of the day is peppered with compassionate exterminators. (Wrong 46).

No doubt a browse through the records would turn up similar sentimentality among the U.S. politicians and generals who directed the murder of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos a hundred years ago.

A couple generations later, Japanese soldiers were not noted for shedding tears for their victims, but they too had their spiritual side. As their army manual instructed,

A sublime sense of self-sacrifice must guide you throughout life and death. Think not of death, as you push through, with every ounce of your effort, in fulfilling your duties. Make it your joy to do everything with all your spiritual and physical strength. Fear not to die for the cause of everlasting justice (Hoyt 198).

And you couldn't find a more dedicated, cooperative, self-sacrificing and spiritual set of folks than the mass murderers of 9/11-- they make jihadists of the Halliburton variety seem downright decadent.

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"'This readiness to make sacrifices, this burning patriotism and this idealism!' she exclaimed in 1932 on witnessing a Nazi Party demonstration: 'And at the same time such tight discipline and control!'" (Evans 451. You can almost hear the panting.)
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Then there are the crusaders who hold no swords themselves, but instead staff Public Relations for the killers, from the women-hating woman mystics of medieval Europe* to Rambozoid mythologizers of wars of conquest. They glorify sacrifice in the service of mass murderers. It's a crime when priests and generals and CEOs beat or starve or kill folks; it's another crime if some of the surviving victims turn around and praise the killers, seeking pats on the head for delivering more of their neighbors to the death machine. None of us is purely killer or rescuer. All of us are complicit in some way in the mass murders around us, just as we are all in some way victims. All of us deserve understanding and forgiveness. But it only harms us to praise sacrificers without asking who they served.

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“‘I know Secretary Rumsfeld’s heart. I know how much he cares for the troops. He and his wife go out to Walter Reed in Bethesda all the time to provide comfort and solace. I have seen the anguish in his-- or heard the anguish in his voice and seen his eyes when we talk about the danger in Iraq, and the fact that youngsters are over there in harm’s way. And he is-- he’s a good, decent man. He’s a caring fellow . . . .’
“It was a typical assessment by Bush, who often speaks about the people he likes in terms of their inner character --a good man, a decent man-- rather than in terms of their concrete behaviors and actions. Bush didn’t try to defend Rumsfeld’s badly chosen words in Kuwait or his errors in judgment over the management of the war. Instead, he simply assessed the hidden qualities of the man, as if these outweighed his actions and erased their negative consequences. One might call this a redemptive, Christian perspective, in which forgiveness is seen as washing away every misdeed.” --McLellan (2008) 251.
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I'll throw in a fourth corruption for free, and it's one radicals are especially prone to. One expression I recall from a Christmas poster from the Sandinista Ministry of Social Welfare in Nicaragua: haloed baby on hay, fist in the air, and campesino-y adults bowing their heads over it, hands clasped in prayer. The caption: Birth of the Revolution: United in the Birth of the New Man. I suppose there’s more than one way to interpret it. The revolution makes everybody god? Or you have to be Jesus to live the revolution-- ?

When things don't go our way, when the social reality stubbornly resists our big ideas, it's tempting to blame our failures on the slackness, timidity, and lack of commitment of The Masses. Here's commie spy George Blake, looking back on his big adventure:

Obviously it has failed. It has not been possible to build that society. I for myself have worked out why that is so. It is that a Communist society is in a way a perfect society, and we are not perfect people. And imperfect people cannot build a perfect society. And people have to change a great deal still. It would take many, many generations and perhaps thousands and thousands of years before we can build such a society. But I also think that it is a very noble experiment which deserved to be successful. But which wasn't successful, because of human frailty (Feifer 63).

The false consciousness explanation sometimes takes on the same tone: we are easy dupes because of our ignorance, selfishness, materialism and violence. It comes very close to saying that a) it is our nature to be unjust, and b) we deserve injustice.

Hence we get these calls from this or that precinct of the left for the need to build better humans. It's one thing to understand that we can change: that we respond to our circumstances, that changing policies and institutions change our calculations of self-interest, that new opportunities encourage new behaviors; that, for instance, in a more democratic environment, fewer U.S. and Iraqi citizens would feel compelled to murder each other. But it was a stark admission of failure for Fidel & Mao & them to hang their political vision on the creation of that paragon of selfless service, the New Socialist Man. If they couldn't devise a system of governing that didn't require saints, they should have quit the revolution business. It is profoundly authoritarian to claim that for democracy to work, people have to become something else. And if we can’t love messy, bloody, beautiful human beings, what do we care about politics anyway? Build me a robot.

* "Women were bodies . . . and bodies were dangerous— dangerous to men and therefore dangerous to society as a whole. The physical austerities undergone by women mystics, and that young women often imposed on themselves, underscored society's need to control and purify the female body" (Petroff 205).