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4. A Primer on Political Violence
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Four A PRIMER ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE since 9/11, a number of countries, including the United States, have made it clear that they are willing to shoot down civilian aircraft that threaten destruction to populations or important installations. Again, this looks like a utilitarian calculus—measuring lives lost against lives saved—but that is only partially correct. When the German Constitutional Court declined to accept a similar policy, it was not because there was disagreement on the calculus of utility.1 The measures proposed are not matters of public health but of “national security.” We make this judgment in this context because we think sacri‹ce is an appropriate demand within the ethos of political identity. The German court disagreed , ‹nding in the German Basic Law guaranteeing human dignity a thorough disavowal of a politics of sacri‹ce. In the United States, we quickly made heroes of those passengers who brought down the aircraft in the ‹elds of Pennsylvania on September 11. They are already celebrated in ‹lm. They have been effectively conscripted into a politics of life and death. They were aboard a ticking time bomb and chose sacri‹ce. In one direction, the ticking time bomb hypothetical builds on its 93 similarity to and difference from the ordinary exchange of threats and force in combat. In another direction, the hypothetical builds on an implicit contrast with what we might call the “hand grenade” hypothetical . Under it, you are asked whether you would be willing to throw yourself on a hand grenade to prevent death and injury to others. As with the ticking time bomb, there is a legal answer to the hand grenade problem. Instead of the no-torture principle, we ‹nd the principle that ordinarily no one is required to be a Good Samaritan at a substantial risk of life to oneself unless the required aid falls within one’s professional role.2 Even with respect to professionals, it is notoriously dif‹cult to ‹nd a straightforward answer to the question of whether someone has a legal obligation to take an action that will certainly cause his death.3 Must the policeman place himself in the line of ‹re to protect an innocent? Must the ‹re‹ghter enter a building knowing he will not come out? Must the soldier obey an order that is certainly—not probably —suicidal? Could the U.S. military deploy suicide bombers? Could it conscript kamikaze pilots? Legally, one can save oneself from the hand grenade. Again, however, the legal rule does not match our political ethos. The hand grenade test measures one’s willingness to engage in selfsacri ‹ce, the ticking time bomb one’s willingness to sacri‹ce others. In both, we can raise inde‹nitely the number of deaths at stake in order to test the balancing point—the metric—between the ethos of the political and the regime of law. The ambiguity in the term sacri‹ce captures the issue exactly: the act of sacri‹ce can refer to the self or an other. Sacri‹ce is both transitive and intransitive. Whom do we sacri‹ce for the state: citizen or enemy? The very act of sacri‹ce suggests simultaneously identi‹cation with, and separation from, the victim—even if the victim is the self. The imaginative linking of the two hypotheticals is the same intersection of killing and being killed, of sacri‹cing and being sacri‹ced, that is the experience of combat. Each combatant threatens the time bomb and absorbs the hand grenade. It is one and the same act that is killing and being killed. The juxtaposition of the two hypotheticals sounds as primitive as Aztec rituals. Is it the captured enemy who is sacri‹ced to the god or is it the member of the polity? The answer is both, for the ritual includes a symbolic exchange such that the former 94 SACRED VIOLENCE [34.203.242.200] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:24 GMT) can substitute for the latter. One ‹nds in archaic rituals of sacri‹ce a kind of “naturalization” of the enemy prior to his being sacri‹ced, followed by a postsacri‹ce identi‹cation, for example, in the wearing of his skin.4 A similar exchange motivates those proponents of torture who embrace the burden of guilt in violating the legal prohibition.5 The torturer is to suffer the pains of guilt and the risk of prosecution. Torturing , he gives himself up to the law for the sake of the...