AZTEC WARRIORS/WESTERN SOLDIERS:
The Body Politic Feeds Upon Human Bodies
By Richard Koenigsberg
Online Publication Date: 7-May-2007.
CONTENTS
In our conventional way of thinking, warfare occurs when one group of people attacks another group. This attack may be occasioned by the perception of a threat to one’s own group; to conquer or plunder the other group; to obtain revenge for past injustices, etc. In any case, what we imagine we are witnessing when we observe men-at-war is "aggression."
The Aztec case permits us to reconceptualize the nature and meaning of warfare. Aztec warfare did revolve around conquest. More fundamentally, however, the purpose of Aztec warfare was to capture warriors in order to sacrifice them. When the Aztecs waged war, they did not try to kill their adversaries. Rather, they seized soldiers and brought them back home to the sacrificial block—where their hearts were extracted by priests and offered to the sun-God.
According to historian Alfredo Lopez Austin, as long as men could offer the blood and hearts of captives taken in combat, the "power of the sun god would not decline"—he would "continue on his course above the earth." To keep the sun moving in its course so that "darkness should not overwhelm the world forever," anthropologist Jacques Soustelle explains, it was necessary to "feed it every day with its food"—the "precious water," that is, with human blood.
Unlike Aztecs, we in the West do not conceive the purpose of warfare to be sacrifice. Rather, we imagine that wars are fought for "real" reasons or purposes. We understand the death or maiming of soldiers in battle as by-products or "collateral damage" that occurs as societies seek to attain practical or political objectives. We do not say that the purpose of warfare is to produce sacrificial victims, though the result of every war is a multitude of dead soldiers.
II. Sacrifice for gods called France, Germany and Great Britain
In the course of the First World War—1914-1918—approximately nine-million men were killed, twenty-one million injured, and eight million captured or reported missing. This war was the site of one of the greatest instances of mass-slaughter in the history of the human race.
The death toll for one five month period in 1916—during which the Battle of the Somme and Battle of Verdun took place—was almost a million men. This represented more than 6,600 men killed every day, 277 every hour, and nearly five each minute.
World War I is famous for the strange way in which battles were fought. Men were asked by the leaders of their nations to get out of trenches and to advance toward the enemy line—where they were met with and torn apart by artillery shells and machine-gun fire.
In spite of the futility of this strategy, it never was abandoned. The result: four years of perpetual slaughter. What was going on? Why were leaders willing to continue to push men into battle—and why did young men continue to fight—knowing there was a high probability that they would be killed and a low probability that anything could be accomplished?
We're dealing with something extraordinary. Historians to this day throw up their hands in despair when they attempt to explain the monumental carnage of the First World War. Joanna Bourke in Dismembering the Male (1996) states that during the First World War the male body was "intended to be mutilated." How may we comprehend an event—created by human beings—whose primary product was death and the maiming of men’s bodies?
When war was declared in 1914, excited crowds celebrated in every major city. One million volunteers joined the British army during the first year. War Office recruiting stands were inundated with men persuaded of their duty to fight. The soldiers were cheered on as they rushed off to battle.
The First World War cannot be understood apart from peoples’ attachment to entities called "countries." Leaders, combatants and populaces alike believed they were acting to defend and preserve their nations. A monumental orgy of destruction was undertaken and justified in the name of gods called "France," "Germany," and "Great Britain."
Perhaps the Aztec case throws light upon the First World War. British Prime Minister Lloyd George described the war as a "perpetual, driving force" that "shoveled warm human hearts and bodies by the millions into the furnace." In the First World War, human hearts and bodies were sacrificed in the name of regenerating gods called France, Germany, and Great Britain.
III. The Individual must die so the nation might live
Writing in the midst of the First World War, nationalist writer Maurice Barres praised French soldiers—who were dying on a daily basis:
Oh you young men whose value is so much greater than ours! They love life, but even were they dead, France will be rebuilt from their souls. The sublime sun of youth sinks into the sea and becomes the dawn which will hereafter rise again.
Barres’ description of how the death of young men would bring about the resurrection of France is nearly identical to Aztec descriptions of how blood sacrifice kept the sun alive.
Soustelle notes that the Aztecs believed that the warrior who died in battle or upon the stone of sacrifice "brought the sun to life" and became a "companion of the sun." The rising sun was the "reincarnation of a dead warrior." Barres declared that French soldiers—the "sublime sun of youth"—would sink into the sea to become the dawn that would "rise again." Just as Aztecs believed that the bodies and blood of sacrificed warriors kept the sun-god alive, so did Barres believe that the French nation would be regenerated based on the bodies and souls of dead soldiers.
According to historian Burr Brundage, Aztec warriors who died or were cremated on the field of battle "spilled their blood on the bosom of mother earth" and then in flames ascended to "enter the sun god’s entourage." Commenting on the First World War, P. H. Pearse— founder of the Irish Revolutionary movement—gushed that the last sixteen months had been the "most glorious in the history of Europe." The earth, he said, needed to be "warmed with the red wine of the battlefield." He described the carnage as an offering to God: millions of lives "given gladly for love of country."
The First World War was undertaken, justified and perpetuated in the name of countries. The assumption seems to have been that the "lives" of nations were more significant than the lives of human beings. Germany, France, and Great Britain were fed with the bodies and blood of soldiers—sacrificial victims—in order to keep these entities alive.
The phrase "The individual must die so that the nation might live" has been uttered throughout the history of modern warfare. The First World War represented an extraordinary enactment of this proposition or fantasy. In war, the body and blood of the sacrificed soldier gives rise to the reality of the nation.
IV. The body politic feeds upon human bodies
Based on analysis of the letters of French soldiers who fought in the First World War, historian John Horne finds that the central theme running through them was the idea of national sacrifice as a source of redemption and renewal. Shortly before his death, Robert Dubarle wrote of the glorious privilege of "sacrificing oneself, voluntarily." Looking at the warriors who had fallen around him, French soldier J. Saleilles wondered whether the "gift of their blood" was not the supernatural source of the "renewal of life that must be given to our country."
F. Belmont—moved by attending a field mass with 500 soldiers—wrote that the war, like all great sacrifices—"at least has a purifying role." It was by virtue of sacrifice and suffering that regeneration occurred. A Catholic priest serving as an ambulance man on the western front expressed a similar vision: "We await the decisive all-out assault. So many sacrifices! May they help bring the resurrection of a greater, more beautiful and truly Christian France."
From whence came this conviction that dead soldiers constituted the "supernatural source" of the renewal of the life of France. Why would the sacrifice and suffering of French soldiers bring about the regeneration of France? What is the logic that connects redemption of a nation to the death of its soldiers?
Perhaps the metaphor of the soldier’s death as a "gift of love" provides a clue. This metaphor conveys the idea of death in battle as a transfusion—the moment at which blood contained within the body of the soldier passes or flows into the body politic, functioning to energize the latter and keep it alive.
The Aztecs believed that the hearts and blood of sacrificial victims were required in order to keep the sun god alive. What sustained the First World War was belief that the hearts and blood of soldiers were required to keep nations alive. The First World War represented the enactment of a massive, sacrificial fantasy.
This fantasy of sacrifice builds upon the idea that nations are actual, concrete entities: real "bodies politic." In order to keep these entities—bodies politic—alive, they must be fed with human bodies. Just as the Aztec sun-god continued to exist only insofar as it was fed with the heart and blood of sacrificial victims, so do nations continue to exist to the extent that soldiers die in their name. The body politic feeds upon human bodies.
V. The Western fantasy of rationality
Most of us find the Aztec ritual of heart extraction bizarre, shocking and painful to contemplate. Yet we barely reflect upon our own suicidal political rituals—for example the First World War in which nine million people were killed and twenty-one million wounded. Western people believe that they are superior to the "primitive" Aztecs. At least the Aztecs understood the relationship between warfare and sacrifice.
Western people live deeply within a fantasy that human behavior is governed by rationality. We imagine that societies wage war for "real" reasons. We desperately cling to this fantasy of rationality in spite of the reality of what occurred during the Twentieth-Century. Two-hundred million people died as a result of political conflicts generated by states.
The central theme of the Twentieth Century was massive, collective acts of destruction performed by nation-states. The irrationality of these episodes of mass-slaughter stares us in the face. Yet social science continues to be dominated by the idea that political acts are undertaken in the name of achieving "real" goals or objectives.
In the Twentieth Century, Western people undertook acts of warfare and genocide—sacrificing human beings on a scale that would have been unimaginable even to the Aztecs. Yet we are not yet aware—unable to acknowledge—that we have been enacting massive rituals of sacrifice.
VI. The Nightmare of History
I write and speak about "awakening from the nightmare of history." Implicit within the aspiration of awakening from a nightmare is the idea that we are living within a dream. To this day, human beings continue to blow each other up in the name of nations, gods and ideologies. The magnitude of slaughter has diminished, but in our hearts the dream remains the same.
Infantryman Coningsby Dawson fought in the First World War and published two books while the war was underway—in which he attempted to convey the motives, experiences and suffering of British soldiers. These men, he said—in the "noble indignation of a great ideal"—face a worse hell than the "most ingenious of fanatics ever planned or plotted."
Dawson described what he witnessed as a soldier in the First World War. Men, he wrote, die "scorched like moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, tortured." Yet the carnage continued because again other men stepped forward to take their places "well knowing what will be their fate."
What was the source of this willingness to die for England? Dawson proclaims: "Bodies may die, but the spirit of England grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its way." Changing one word in this passage crystallizes the logic linking the death of soldiers to the growth of one’s nation: “Bodies may die—therefore the spirit of England grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its way.” A mathematic relationship is suggested: one’s nation grows in proportion to the number of men that have died in its name.
The nightmare of history derives from the fantasy that human beings exist in a symbiotic tie—cannot be separated from—their nations. Rudolf Hess often introduced his Fuhrer by declaring, "Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler." This is not an unusual idea. Many human beings identify—link their identities—with their nation.
Nations are conceived as omnipotent entities with which the self is fused. Human beings may equate their own bodies with a body politic. In the name of devotion to nations or bodies politic, societies are willing to sacrifice the lives of actual human bodies.
Awakening from the nightmare of history occurs when we begin to perceive and acknowledge that we live within a waking dream. The fantasy that is the source of our nightmare is belief that there is a domain of reality that exists within the world, but which also is separate from our world.
The fantasy of the nation permeates reality. The fantasy of one’s own nation—with its sacred ideals—generates the desire to "sacrifice." The desire to sacrifice arises when one’s nation appears to be disintegrating or in a state of decomposition.
In order to regenerate one’s nation, people imagine that it must be fed with sacrificial victims. Carolyn Marvin (1999) calls soldiers the religious class and states that "blood sacrifice preserves the nation." Like the Aztec sun-god, nations live on to the extent that they consume the blood and bodies of warriors.