"Between Remembrance and Fetishism" by Lucas Turks

The cult of the deads and the heroes as expression of the human demand to exorcise the war.

The man, as rational animal, possesses that aspect commonly denominated self-consciousness. It can be characterized as the human ability to perceive our own existence. Now, even if we accept as datum of fact this human skill, we have also the necessity to see the fact that the self-consciousness is not a monolithic structure, but it is expressed in more varying types, according to the different activities of the human being to which it refers. We will find so the self-consciousness of the existence, of the procreation as mean of transmission of the life, of the rationality as surplus of the human brain and also the death's self-consciousness.

Under this last aspect, it is notably complicated the work of whom wanted to define a deepened study of the existing correlation between war and psychological attitude of the man towards the “death.” The man, seen as descending of an endless series of typologically identical beings identical (conscience of stock through the reproduction), has an enormous difficulty to face his own death. It is so great the fear that rises in our mind to conceive the end of our thoughts that the death is denied, through the varied religious theories. Such negation of the personal death doesn't implicate, however, that the phenomenon "death" is disproved in every case, rather it can be affirmed that the self-consciousness of the death has been the first phase of learning of the self-consciousness in general. This has been possible because even if the man potentially denies his own death, the same cannot be said for the death of the others. This relationship with the other individuals is not common in the animal world. Hardly an animal is able to distinguish between a dead similar and a simply dormant one. Instead, the man has the full awareness that another man is able to or straight must die.

This way through the death of the others, the single human being is able if not to accept, at least to understand his own end. This concept becomes more and more important entering in the anthropological territory of the war experience. The death in war since the ancient times is not thought simply as an eventuality but as an event by the high probabilities of realization. Although they exist in the history examples of wars for so to say “transposed”, in other words resolved with the passage of the enmity from the mass to single individuals (i.e. the classical examples of Achilles against Hector in the Iliad or of the Oratii against the Curiatii in the war between Alba Longae and Rome), in our writing we will speak about what happened or happens in the struggles between tribe and people for that that it concerns antiquity and between nations for the contemporary period.
To exorcise the fear of the fighter to die or to see those people who fight to his side dying, already in remote times, they were two primary solutions: a) the sacrificial rites b) the necrolatry or cult of the dead. It is difficult to establish a temporal prominence between the two phenomena, because they seem to have been born nearly contemporarily. Yet, they have two different finalities. Let's start from the sacrificial rites.

The contempt toward the enemy that brings death and destruction in the victorious community, created a disposition and depth resentment toward him, that was initially resolved with the annihilation of the tribe or population that lost the armed conflict. This type of solution remained in fashion until the fighters were numerically few and the clashes were little more than hooligans' brawls. With the growth of the human communities and with the transformation of the their economy from nomadic to permanent, the utility to have manpower at no cost was understood. The indiscriminate slaughter was transformed so in slavery. A culturally advanced population as the Greek thought natural this institution. The economic necessities, however, didn't let forget that atavistic feeling of hate that had characterized the first times of the history. So it was thought to move on single individuals the aboriginal acridity.

The human sacrifices following the wars became diffused. Those of the Aztecs are famous, mainly because cruel and of enormous proportion. Killing some selected enemies preserved intact the work force made enslaved and at the same time it satisfied that thirst of revenge caused by the war. The creation of temples devoted to these sacrifices made necessary also a priestly caste that organized these rites and really with birth of the polytheistic religions not tied up to the animism and the naturalism, the second important modification of the phenomenon took place. The sacrifices of prisoners were not consequence of the wars anymore, but straight cause of them.

It was fought and it was killed for getting individuals to sacrifice to thirsty of blood warlike divinity or simply to placate natural phenomena like drought or eruptions (as in the tradition of the Hawaii islands). The abandonment of such customs has happened with extreme slowness, coming up to the modern age as in the Aztec example remembered above. Rather, affirming that the sacrifice of the enemy has been completely abandoned it is incorrect, because it is still possible to recover in war period some episodes that are very similar to that type of expression of the hate toward the enemy. Typical example is the retaliation, recognized in the international public law even if with different and less bloody formality of what it normally happens in the armed conflicts. The operations of raking and mass executions perpetrated in a lot of wars including the second world conflict (of imperishable memory has to be what happened in Oradour-sur-Mer, France) has many aspects in common with the ritual sacrifice of the past. Certainly, the characteristics of unjustified revenge have overpowered the religious character of the event, but some characters of rituality still persist. They are for instance the declarations that those events had some juridical bases, the famous "orders to perform", only to recall some already built schemes accepted by the international community. Or it is recalled the action of retaliation to show as the wickedness it was in the enemy part and that violence was only a “correct and suitable” punishment, as in the case of the Ardeatine Pits here in Italy.

With the taking of conscience of what horrors has provoked a vision of this kind during the Second World War, the possibility of justified “sacrifices” in modern times appears impossible. The hate toward the enemy is expressed through the contempt of the ideologies and eventually of the actions of the adversary, but never towards the human beings. At least, so it is in the official and dominant version in the Western Nations. Unfortunately, they are under the eyes of all the ethnic massacres in Africa and in the former Yugoslavia. It seems that with the lacking of the institutions typical of the time of peace, the old customs also resurface as strong as in ancient eras.

Fortunately, the diffusion of the respect of the human laws is not purely theoretical. The ability to see a man also in the enemy's face has become common in the thought of the people and this has allowed that it found great resonance as substitutive of the hate toward the adversary, the second expression of the fear of the death in war that is the cult of the dead. Anthropologically discussed, the necrolatry is considered as the sublimation of the fears of the man for the loss of his own life in battle through the elevation of the fallen fellows to the rank of divinity. Still today as at the origins of the human history, tribes of the Amazonian Forest or the New Guinea try of to perpetuate the greatness of the dead warrior through the necrofagy or ritual cannibalism. To be able to keep with them, at least partly, the strength and the value of the dead person they eat parts of his body as affirmation of the love and the respect that that man had. Just for this reason the treatment above quoted was not entirely reserved to their own companions, but also to the enemy. Variant of the theme of the cannibalism is also the custom to keep parts of the body of the killed enemy on oneself. The inhabitants of the Borneo and their mummified heads or the Indians of America and their scalps are only two between the innumerable examples that could be done.

What in principle had been tied to the animist convictions of the primitive man, it was completely upset from the monotheistic religions. Already the Old-Testament Jewish were carriers of a cult of the dead in war entirely different in comparison to their predecessors. Who died in battle was a favorite of God. This also involved a change of the vision of the war itself that became “holy.” Joshua of the Jewish myth is carrier of destruction and death in name of God and those people who fall following him long the road toward the conquest of the Promised Lad rises to the role of saints ante litteram. What was only a hint in the Judaism, it finds full conclusion with the Islam of the origins. The warrior doesn't have to fear death because with it he can reach the Heaven of the fighters, where everything what was denied to him during his life it will finally be given to him. On the same bases they will find fertile ground the preachers of the Christian Crusades, with the aggravating fact of an enormous distortion of the message of love and universal comprehension contained in the Gospels.

Despite, as we have seen, the cult of the dead in war was and still is still diffused in the West (it is enough to think about the commemorations for the Unknown Soldier or for the fallen in the different wars that are typical of the secular tradition of numerous European and North American states), it finds its ideal position in the Extreme East, especially in Japan. The nationalistic Shintoism born in the nineteenth century was founded on the necessary sacrifice of the warrior and on his consequent elevation to the levels of the gods. The Kamikaze during the Second World War in the Pacific finished his own suicide attacks towards the month of June 1945 not because the voluntary lacks, but because the industrial production of the nation of the Rising Sun was not able anymore to furnish enough aircrafts! After the end of the war, the American occupants were forced to forbid the assemblages in front of the temples in memory of the fallen in war to avoid that they were transformed in revolts. Despite this, the mysticism that sustains the ideal of the Samurai it still remains today, though in a post-industrial view that would have to be its antithesis in some measures. Instead, the job efficiency and straight the “death in factory” so common in the Japanese mentality can be seen as a contemporary transposition of the cult of the warrior.

The negative sides of the cult of the dead that have been delineated (justification of the war itself, groundless sacrifice of the enemy and oneself own person) succumb in front of the ineluctable necessity to exorcise death in battle. The man doesn't deny the existence of the phenomenon "death" in war, but he tries to attribute a morally elevated meaning to it to calm the pain and the fear that it provokes. The memory of the fallen in war and also the contemporary fetishism that is expressed in modern times with the spasmodic search for objects belonged to the dead fighters (weapons, medals, other personal objects) it must not be seen as an adoration of the war or an invocation of it, on the contrary as superstructure of the human conscience (also collective) not to prostrate in front of the death and of the unknown meanings that it has.

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