Andy Blunden. December 2005
Hundreds of young Muslims willingly give their lives fighting foreign occupiers, while we Westerners, it seems, can’t cope with an increase in petrol prices, far less give up our lives for our country and our beliefs. Is this true?
Is it just religious fanatics who die for a cause? Does a people too absorbed in digital TV and alloy wheels no longer understand why people die for their country? Or is there just nothing worth dying for in our way of life?
Well, there is, and John Howard is going to put us to the test by taking away those social and political freedoms won at the Eureka Stockade, in the 8-hour movement, the anti-conscription fight, women’s liberation movement, free-speech and countless such battles, including Anzac Cove, Kokoda and everywhere else, over the past 200 years. This will be a time for martyrs in Australia.
And there will be no shortage of volunteers. But, what circumstances determined that Clarrie O’shea’s imprisonment would trigger a general strike and destroy the “penal powers,” while Craig Johnson would serve his time with very little to show for it? How did Cindy Sheehan stimulate a resurgence of the anti-war movement where others had failed?
Under what conditions does a victim become a martyr, someone whose suffering under the normal and lawful social arrangements is so widely and acutely felt to be an injustice that it triggers a social movement which destroys those arrangements?
To begin with, there has to be a real possibility for a social movement, even if one does not yet exist. And on the other hand, the social arrangement in question must already be to some extent “unreal.” But a martyr’s gotta do what a martyr’s gotta do, and she does not weigh up her chances before doing what she has to do. For the martyr, the law is unreal and deserves to perish ..., but this may prove to be just subjective. How can the subject (i.e., the victim or martyr) prove to be the reality?
Three things are necessary.
Firstly, the subject must present to the world as someone anyone can recognise and identify with. “There but for the grace of God go I.” People have to be able to see themselves (or a loved one) in the person of the martyr, and want to, almost enjoy, seeing themselves in the martyr. The martyr must be an attractive person, someone in whom people identify what is best in themselves. It is however the moral character of the subject which is most important in determining their role as a martyr. It helps to be personally attractive, but it is essential to be a saint. When Malcolm X declared “Black is beautiful” he had the character to carry it off.
When we talk of the subject being sympathetic and attractive, it is the act of martyrdom which is at issue, not the subject’s entire character as such. And the act of martyrdom transforms the subject’s personality which is afterwards viewed only through the lens of their martyrdom. Who knows what sort of a woman Rosa Parks really was, but isn’t it clear that she was a strong and courageous woman with a powerful sense of injustice, that she should refuse to move to the black section of the bus when ordered to do so in Montgomery in 1955? Every Black person in the country must have wanted to do what Rosa Parks did. Perhaps many had?
Now Ronald Ryan was not someone who could be called “attractive”; a small-time criminal, imprisoned for shop-breaking and weapons offences, with no previous history of violence before his attempted escape; he was the icon of the kind of person who ought to be rehabilitated, not hung. It is interesting to recall that only a few years before Ryan escaped, allegedly shooting a warder, Kevin Simmonds had become a public hero, complete with fan club, anonymous wall-posters, marriage proposals and sympathetic tabloid headlines by escaping, breaking into another prison and bashing a warder to death, and then eluding police for 37 days; he was eventually convicted of manslaughter rather than murder by a sympathetic jury. Simmonds is remembered as ‘good looking and charismatic’. Everyone (except screws) loves an escapee. Simmonds and his accomplice were subsequently (and somewhat unsurprisingly) treated with brutality by prison warders till Simmonds eventually took his own life, but their case was central to the prison reforms of the 1970s.
It is obvious enough that a young, reasonably attractive, former air hostess, like Cornelia Rau, is more likely to trigger outrage against arbitrary detention powers of the Department of Immigration than the thousands of middle eastern families who languished in detention. The lack of sympathy that Australians tend to feel towards poor people arriving on our shores in leaky boats is legendary. It has been suggested that the ease with which antipathy overrides sympathy in such cases, is a kind of displaced feeling of guilt. We are after all, an entire nation that arrived in leaky boats and subsequently did quite well for ourselves. But one must be mindful of such perverse responses to suffering. The contrasting welcome given to Bosnian refugees flown in on government aircraft, and Afghani and Iraqi refugees fleeing the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and the US blockade shows how governments can manage perceptions, but with a cynical and reactionary government in power, opportunities for a negative reaction are everywhere. (Kay Nesbit, tragically disfigured by a shotgun blast when she innocently answered the door, survived with an awfully disfigured face to become a relentless advocate for victims of crime. Her case demonstrated that looks are not everything, but I suspect that Kay is an effective martyr despite her disfigurement, as much as because of it.)
And it’s not just the subject’s character, but who they are, their “story.” Craig Johnson is handsome enough fellow, even charismatic, but a “run through” the offices of Skilled Engineering and Johnson Tiles is just something not very many people can see themselves doing or could empathise with at all. On the contrary. Kevin Simmonds (in 1959) got more sympathy for bashing a screw to death with a baseball bat, than Johnson did (in 2002) for scaring some office workers.
Heather Osland served 9½ years in prison for murdering her husband, her only means of escape after 13½ years of him beating and terrorising her. Many, many people could easily sympathise with Heather’s act, and Heather was and remains an exemplary advocate. Probably the reason that she was not successful in getting justice for herself at the time of her trial, or until 9½ years after her imprisonment for murder, was that her husband had so hurt her. After those years in prison and time to collect her wits, her friends and her strength, she has become a fine icon and symbol for the cause of battered wives, and will eventually get the law under which she was jailed changed and her own sentence overturned.
Clearly it is not a question of violence or non-violence; like almost all military heroes, martyrs can be violent, so long as people can empathise with their violent act, and it can be seen as proportional to the injustice met, appropriate to the context, and expressing a legitimate feeling.
It is for similar reasons that it is always a dangerous thing to go on hunger strike. Self-harm does not generate sympathy if it is not understandable; life has to be understood to have become unbearable. A hunger strike says “Life is unbearable and I would rather die,” but there has to be the conditions for the unbearability of life to be recognisable.
Bobby Sands was a hero to Irish republicans for whom he was in every way an icon, and he not only led a large group of hunger-strikers in H-block, but inspired many others to follow him in other ways. But Margaret Thatcher was unmoved by the prospect of Irish republican prisoners dying in British prisons. I think English voters already saw the IRA as fanatics, and a hunger strike could not make them change their minds in just 6 months. Altogether 10 Irish hunger strikers starved themselves to death. Although it is doubtful how many British voters were persuaded, it is clear that the hunger strikers galvanised Irish republicans for a protracted fight to the death which ultimately led to success for their movement. The Irish hunger strikers were true martyrs for the republican cause; they inspired others to fight, and probably knew that they would die without reprieve from Margaret Thatcher.
We will return later to the question of martyrdom as a call to arms, as opposed to a cry for help, but the martyr whose role is to prove that an injustice is being done, rather than simply rallying force against it, has to be prepared for the fact that there will not be an eleventh hour reprieve. The martyr who places their life in the hands of the a power invites that power to affirm or deny their culpability, and must leave room for that decision to be made one way or the other. It took more than 30 years from when the first young Spanish conscripts applied for recognition as conscientious objectors (insumisos) in 1971 until the law was eventually repealed in 2003 when more than 50% of all conscripts were conscientious objectors. Over 1,000 insumisos had been imprisoned over that period. But in the end they won, and it is unlikely that Spain will ever again consider military conscription.
On the subject of self-harm, I think the same kind of rules that apply to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ also apply to self-inflicted punishment. If you’re going on hunger strike, then having your lips sewn together (like the asylum-seekers in February 2000) is actually the least of your problems; it is symbolic. But what kind of signal does it send to someone who does not already sympathise with you? It says “I am a really crazy person.” The psychological damage done by these detention centres is an issue and most educated people understood this; the lip-sewing did catch media attention, but it did not necessarily generate wide public sympathy, even though it very effectively pulled the hearts-strings of refugee supporters and spurred them to fight even harder.
It is important here to note, I think, that the issue of the presentation of an attractive image of the martyr is not a question simply of the role of the media and their needs. The media is just one, albeit important, arena of struggle in society; relations within the media do not belong to a different world from relations in other institutions of capitalist society. The role of the martyr as icon is a universal human relation, not a property of the mass media. The mass media were not sympathetic to conscientious objectors in 1966 Australia, but the image of young schoolteacher, Bill White, being dragged from his classroom by a policeman for refusing to fight in a war was really hard to hold in the “violent protestor” frame. One of the differences made by modern electronic media is that the subject themself usually has the opportunity, and indeed obligation, to tell their own story to the mass of the population.
Secondly, there has to be a narrative, an ethos, a theory, a discourse, in which the subject can be inserted, which makes sense of the subject’s suffering and in which everyone can see an explanation of their own suffering or potential suffering or injustice.
This is a kind of context dependence. It is easier to martyr oneself fighting Tory anti-worker laws, than those brought in by Labor, partly because it is so much easier a story to understand, that the Tories are attacking the workers, than explaining why a Labor government is. Immigration officials failing an economic migrant from Silesia on the dictation test might have stood up, but it really made a mockery of the idea to try to cast Egon Kisch as an illiterate. It is interesting that many illustrious dissidents from the Soviet bloc countries totally lost their way when they came to the West, because without a police apparatus trying to stop them saying what they said, what they said didn’t make a lot of sense.
The narrative underpinning the subject’s claim generally has to be already authenticated or on the verge of acceptance, or at least be a new version of an already legitimated story of suffering. So for example, there are doubtless many fathers grieving for their lost soldier-children, but it is hardly a surprise that it is a grieving mother (Cindy Sheehan) who succeeded in breaking through, for the narrative of the grieving mother is so well-established, while that of the grieving father is still relatively novel. Given this, Terry Hicks has done exceptionally well in the slightly different role of the father standing up against the injustice done to his son by an evil foreign power with the collusion of our own cowardly government.
The presence of this narrative is the primary objective condition for martyrdom, “objective” in the sense that it does not normally or necessarily emanate from the subject themself; it exists independently, in the broader society, but in the “symbolic register” – the mythology, theology or expert discourse of the day.
It is not sufficient that everyone has to be able to say “That person is just like me,” or my mother or my son or my friend, or my favourite soap-opera hero, etc., – it is also necessary that the explanation of their suffering is something which is known to be true, and/or is vouched for by the appropriate institutions – law courts, scientific institutes, churches as appropriate, or if not institutions like these, then the story-tellers of society, the script-writers, novelists, journalists, etc. This raises two issues: (1) the clarity with which the subject is identified in the given story or theory, and (2) the extent to which the story itself receives acceptance.
(1) The circumstances surrounding the suffering of the subject have to be relatively unambiguous, not multiple interpretations or muddied by suggestions that things are not as they seem. For example, David Irving, the “holocaust denier,” aims to make himself a martyr for the cause of anti-Semitism by first making himself a martyr for free speech; he certainly succeeds in posing difficult ethical dilemmas for libertarians, but he has never succeeded in making himself a real martyr in either sense. The subject’s image and their act or experience of martyrdom has to either fit into an already-existing mould, or the work has to be done to demonstrate the validity of fitting the subject into the validating paradigm. The shocking case of “C” who was not only gang raped but shared around by several groups of Lebanese youths in Sydney was a vehicle for increasing penalties and legislating the new crime of “aggravated sexual assault in company” (something several football teams seem to have got away with since). But let us be thankful that C did not want to take up a career in right-wing politics and sought only justice. Not only did she bravely face her tormentors in court, but went on TV and presented as an exceptional character, who would always be believed. A lesser person in a less-extreme situation could have been belittled by innuendo. Opponents will always try to introduce counter-narratives to muddy the water; in this circumstance, the subject’s moral character is everything.
When Clarrie O’shea refused to hand over the union books to the courts, he was carrying out the orders of his union membership and acting in concert with all the left unions who had prepared the ground for a confrontation for months in advance. The meaning of his act and the implications of his jailing were therefore immediately and well understood by every unionist in the country. People who were off-sick would have phoned in “on strike,” such was the clarity of the response.
(2) The validity of the narrative is determined by two things; (A) it has to fit into one of the accepted “paradigms of suffering,” and (B) it has to be validated by the appropriate clergy, figures with the authority to speak on the relevant kind of suffering.
(A) By “paradigm of suffering,” I mean a set of relations or subject positions, a narrative if you will, in which a subject suffers wrongly. For example, the honest person silenced by a morally weak repressive authority, the wife or child of the violent father, the abandoned child, the visionary who is ignored, the innovator whose idea is stolen by the powerful, the victim of industrial poisons and “cover-up” of the facts, the free spirit victimised by unfeeling authority, etc. These are universal stories of unjust suffering. The subject has to “fit into” some such narrative.
A paradigm of suffering has several components. (a) A “paradigm of need,” for example, recognition that being stateless means suffering in a specific way is necessary make sense of why a stateless Palestinian deserves our support; (b) A “paradigm of justice” is needed to show that the subject’s deprivation is unjust. For example, lack of money or education or life-experience is always understood to underlie suffering, but for the subject to be a martyr and not just a suffering person, there must be injustice implied in the deprivation, excessive inequality or a failure to receive what was deserved. So for example, an injured volunteer fire-fighter asked to pay their own medical expenses has been treated unjustly; being paid 1/10 of what you boss earns is tough, but not necessarily unjust, but being paid 1/1000 of what your boss earns is unjust; childbirth is painful but not unjust, but to get the sack for missing work that day is unjust, etc.
In order to translate unjust suffering into a social movement, there has to be (c) an ethic of responsibility. By ethic of responsibility, I mean the broad social ethos which determines which direction people look for blame when something bad happens. For example, when the city is flooded people might blame the government, various authorities or institutions (the weather bureau, the water authority, etc), or contrariwise, the victim (for failing to heed warnings, for failing to take out insurance or just for moaning about it), or big business (for environmental damage). The ethic of responsibility is deep-seated, but not uniform and homogenous. For example, victims of medical malpractice may want to place blame on inadequate regulation or infrastructure, but the finger of blame tends to be pointed at the individual doctor until the work is done to shift the issue into the narrative of social responsibility.
Nowadays if someone is made redundant from their job, people would not automatically look to the government as the party responsible for the suffering. Unless it could be shown that some form of discrimination was involved, it would normally be the victim who was blamed.
Whistleblowers are now protected from victimisation by employers in State, though not Federal, law because of the sacrifice of numerous martyrs to the cause of corporate responsibility. “Whistleblowing” is a role that is readily recognised as an honourable one. Being the union organiser is not as honourable as it used to be, though the Occupational Health and Safety officer is still a well-respected role, and to sack the Health and Safety officer would be widely interpreted in terms of corporate greed and cover-up, two widely legitimated narratives.
(d) Finally, a subject’s claim of injustice pre-supposes some explanatory model. By explanatory model I mean simply the mechanism whereby someone actually suffers pain. Nowadays, there is a strongly medicalised explanatory model of pain. The suffering of someone who is sacked would be verified by a doctor not a lawyer or priest; it would be manifested in “low self-esteem” and “stress” and pills would be prescribed. So for example, if someone heard a voice telling them to attack Australian soldiers because of the infidel occupation of the Holy Land, then the public might accept that the person had missed their medication and suffered from delusions, rather than that the person was a traitor, far less on a mission from God. Unfortunately, the American public had been well-primed to accept the unlikely story of Italian anarchist bank-robbers when Sacco and Vanzetti were fitted up; probably the public in today’s America, would smell a government rat in such a case. In Europe of course, Sacco and Vanzetti were icons of Europeans victimised by narrow-minded and brutish America.
(B) The support of the “appropriate clergy” is essential to validate the subject’s sacrifice. By “appropriate clergy,” I mean the institutional representatives who are socially legitimated to pronounce on certain kinds of facts. For example, an asylum seeker denounced as an “illegal” needs a QC to verify that they are breaking no law in seeking asylum and a political leader, preferably on the government side, or a well-known media expert in foreign relations, etc. to verify what they are seeking asylum from. The battle has to be fought and won in the “symbolic register,” and this means in the relevant social institutions, not just amongst “the public,” as well as in personal sacrifice.
Journalists, movie-makers, novelists, etc., the “official story-tellers,” can go a long way towards substituting for such “expert verification” however. Harvey Milk, the gay US politician whose assassination, and the lenient sentence passed on his assassin, sparked the White Night Riots and gave national impetus to the “outing” movement; he need hardly have died at all, but for generations of homophobic story-telling, but the history of assassination of reformist political leaders in the US made his assassination and the official succour given the assassin, a story which was instantly understood and believed. On the other hand, vigilante-ism is so widely promoted in movies from Superman and Zorro to Falling Down, that vigilante-ism is always an available narrative for violent criminals to turn themselves into martyrs.
But unless popular culture is already in support, or at least providing an opening for possible acceptance, the subject needs some authority to legitimate their claim to unjust suffering – both their suffering and the injustice of that suffering.
The best martyr is themself such an authority, and can tell the story of their suffering in their own voice and be believed. In that instance, the martyr can be said to be not only the icon, but a symbol of the principle they uphold.
The greatest martyrs of our times have been such symbols-and-icons, icons of the fight against an old world and symbols of a better world to come. Nelson Mandela for example, stoked up the anti-apartheid struggle for 20 years from inside prison walls. Not only was his suffering a standing call to arms to get him released, and to risk death in doing so, but he and his comrades articulated why apartheid was wrong and how a non-racial society could be built. Che Guevara, not only died at the hands of hirelings of colonialism, courageously, arms in hand applying his theory of neo-colonialism, but he explained at great length and with great authority why neo-colonialism was wrong, and how and why it had to be destroyed. Martin Luther King’s voice still rings out to this day, more than 40 years after his assassin tried to silence it. The combined icon-and-symbol is certainly the most powerful subject for martyrdom. Cindy Sheehan has turned out to be an exceptionally eloquent speaker, touring the US non-stop for weeks on end addressing meetings, appearing on TV, passionately and relentlessly advocating her cause. No minder or spokesperson could ever have achieved the same result. The very face of a grieving mother, when she speaks the word of antimilitarism surpasses what any orator can do.
Generally speaking, the relevant narrative, with its paradigm of suffering, ethic of responsibility and explanatory model cannot be created in toto, ex nihilo; most components of the requisite narrative, at least, must be available. Here the media does play a significant part. It is the work of professional communicators – actors, journalists, writers, storytellers, and so on – in conjunction with the various experts – academics, political leaders, the clergy, and so on – to make this narrative available and place it in the consciousness of the general public.
It may be the case that the role of the subject is precisely to introduce a new understanding, a new discourse. There is a chicken-and-egg issue here. It is given that the subject suffers under the existing normal social arrangements, which are not seen as unjust. But the subject is seen to suffer unjustly. The social movement which challenges those social arrangements only comes into being as a result of the subject’s actions, but the elements must be present to some degree.
Let us put together the conditions needed for an act of martyrdom to lead to the formation of a powerful social movement.
(a) Vladimir Propp defined the seven archetypal characters to be found in any traditional story, such as the villain, the hero, and so on. A conclusion which can be drawn from his observations is that, to be comprehensible, a story can have only one villain. There can be a hero (a.k.a. martyr), those who help the hero, and the hero’s objective or loved one, and on the other side apart from the villain himself, and you can have a false hero, but not a second villain. The false hero, or usurper, claims to be the hero and may act like a real hero, but whereas the villain has to be defeated, the false-hero only has to be exposed; whereas the villain’s motivations are evil and he is the target of anger, the false-hero has character weaknesses, even vices, but is not evil; he has to change his mind, or be neutralised, but he is not the target of anger. So it is important for the subject, if she is to become a martyr and a hero, rather than a long-forgotten victim or false-hero, to show to the world in the most unambiguous terms, who is responsible for the injustice done to them, the party against which all must concentrate their anger. If there are many villains, then either they are all involved in a conspiracy with the one principal villain, or more likely, they are parties which have been misled by the villain.
Martin Luther King could easily have identified multiple villains – white racists, indifferent white liberals, cowardly blacks, “Uncle Toms” – but he concentrated his condemnation on the white racists and appealed to all the others to come around and do the right thing.
(b) Having selected our hero (martyr) and villain, and assigned other subject positions appropriately, we have to decide on a basic paradigm of justice: on what universal principle of justice can this claim be validated? Either Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were spies who gave information needed by the Soviets to build nuclear weapons and were war-heroes, in effect, for the Soviet Union, or they were framed and are victims of a miscarriage of the US Justice system. They are martyrs either way, but whether they were martyrs for fairness in the US judicial system or martyrs of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA implies quite different appeals to justice.
(c) The explanatory model has to be in place. The asbestos victims who have transformed themselves from victims into heroes though their campaign for compensation from James Hardy, their bodies strewn along the route, could not do what they have done until the scientific community established the validity of the diagnosis of asbestosis as a deadly disease of the lungs resulting from even minute exposure to the material. This work too, required a social movement to get done, but it was a necessary prior step before actually nailing the company.
(d) If these elements are combined into a compelling drama of good versus evil, all that remains is to cast the characters into their correct roles.
This brings us to the final element which is necessary for a martyr to bring the world into line with their perception of reality. Firstly, was the subject which I described as an icon of suffering; secondly, was the validation of the universal significance of their suffering, which I called a symbol.
Thirdly, there must be other people who identify with the martyr and their story, who actually identify with the subject and see the suffering of the subject as, potentially at least, their own suffering. This is the martyr’s “target audience.” However sympathetic the martyr and however believable their story, unless there are others who can see subject as a mirror of themselves or their loved ones, enough to make a social movement, then they are not real. You cannot be a martyr for a cause if you are the only person who is concerned with that cause.
I refer to the person who raises their hand and says “there but for the grace of God go I” as the index of the principle in question. Such people will ideally themselves become heroes of the same kind to the same cause, and to the extent that this is the case, then you have a social movement which will grow and grow.
For Gandhi to throw British imperialism out of India, there had to be a nationalist movement of some kind in India. Non-violent protest could never have summoned up such a movement from nothing. Gandhi’s role was to unify it, give it a single goal and make it confident of victory. As it happens, he found many martyrs like himself capable of making a movement to carry on that struggle till victory.
The question might be asked: if authorities jail and murder opponents in order to repress a social movement, how much repression is necessary until the rate at which new fighters and new martyrs are generated, is overtaken by the destruction of enough people to crush the social movement altogether? Is it a necessary law that repression only pours oil on the fire? Clearly not. The swift, brutal repression of the Left in Indonesia in 1965, in which several million leftists and their families were murdered, was so total that political opposition was simply eliminated for a whole generation. Sudisman was an exemplary icon and symbol for the struggle of Indonesian socialism, but hardly anyone in Indonesia knows his name. Another modern example is the destruction of the Black Panther leadership, which had the effect of reducing a sophisticated social movement to a current of indiscriminate gang violence. The total repression exercised under Fascist and Stalinist regimes, did manage to make martyrdom foolish for more than a generation.
It’s not like that in Australia. But for example, wholesale expulsions can be enough to quell student activism in a University, and ruthless sackings is often an effective way for a firm to prevent their employees from unionising. So there has to be the potential for a social movement that is capable of withstanding repression and fighting back. Sometimes caution is indeed the better part of valour ... but at some point, as Rosa Parks said: “No. I’m sorry. I’ve had enough. I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Also, it is by no means sure that martyrdom is the best form of heroism. I am inclined to think that Gough Whitlam would have done better as the Labor hero who triumphed over attempts to remove him, than as a Labor martyr whose sacking opened the way to 8 years of Liberal rule and left him remembered by many as an irresponsible prime minister. The idea that “the bad guy always wins” is a lethal prejudice with which there should never be any compromise. There is but a fine line between the victim and the martyr.
Further, it is not always obvious who “owns” a martyr. For example, when the Liberals thought to appropriate Simpson and his donkey for the cause of nationalism, they were evidently unaware that Simpson had been a Wobbly and a fervent internationalist. Nationalism feeds on martyrdom. It sends soldiers to their death by the thousands, and those dead soldiers, if their life is to be made sense of and celebrated, usually become martyrs for the nation. Simpson may have been a Wobbly, but he wasn’t going to build the OBU in the Dardenelles.
But how is that people like Howard, who deny any connection with Australian history when it comes to genocide against the original owners of the land or when the stolen generations are at issue, want to claim ownership of martyrs who created our liberal democratic traditions in the teeth of opposition from Howard’s Tory predecessors. How many people would know that Fred Hollows, that icon of medical philanthropy, was a Communist?
A social movement or institution is going to be able to claim “ownership” of a martyr if it shares the icons and symbols of the subject; the index – membership of the movement or institution, comes third. The Church can claim Mary McKillop even though many would say that they scarcely deserve it; the Church were after all her principal tormentors, and governments usually succeed in claiming military heroes, even Simpson. Perhaps the most important contribution martyrs make to a social movement is to provide it with its symbols and icons.
Timing is everything. The continuation of injustice must be unbearable. But the suffering of the subject beats the drum to which the social movement marches, and the rhythm has to be such that the movement can keep pace. A social movement can spring up very rapidly if the relevant narrative is widely available and believed in, but otherwise it can take time. The role of the martyr is to crystallise the narrative by helping people cast themselves in the operative role by acting out and personalising the role of the suffering subject.
The H-block hunger strikers began their hunger strike at intervals designed to bring about a new death from starvation every week; in the end it was 10 deaths over 20 weeks. The Thatcher government resorted to base deception to persuade the last hunger striker to pull back, mistakenly thinking that they had won, thus deflating the momentum of the campaign.
Did the first conscientious objectors in Spain know that it would take 30 years and 1,000 martyrs to stop conscription? Today’s suicide bombers do know that they will die and so will many who come after them before justice is found, but the hunger striker hopes that things will come to a head before they die. That is the whole purpose of choosing a slow death and placing your fate in the hands of authority.
Many struggles are won only by many acts of martyrdom. There are martyrs and there are martyrs. Lucky is the martyr whose rescue marks the end of injustice; great injustices take the sacrifice of many martyrs before they are put right. But we should all take this lesson from Bobby Sands: maybe one dying of hunger per week is too intense, too fast for the public, but the martyr and their supporters must calculate the pace at which public support can be won over, how long the suffering can be protracted and have a strategy which works over the dimension of time.
The role of the martyr in a country where politicians care about out-voting their opponents is broader than it is under regimes which normally out-shoot their political opponents. Oppressive regimes and occupying armies are not bothered by martyrs as such – only by the force of a mass of people who are prepared to die to obtain justice.
This is largely the role of a martyr living under an oppressive regime: to call upon others to be ready to die, to fight and not fear death. The subject’s suffering is a shared suffering. Here “expert discourse” (the founding ideas of a new nation, religious testament, inspirational utopian expositions) is necessary just to demonstrate that martyrdom is glorious and preferable to tolerating continued injustice, not to prove that injustice has been done. People already know that.
In a country like Australia, what we have is certainly worth dying for; but until someone is trying to kill you in order to take away these freedoms, this question does not arise in reality.
This is important to understand. Any would-be hero who brings upon themselves a degree and kind of suffering which is theirs by choice, cannot inspire mass resistance. The subject’s suffering must be seen to arise from aspirations and values shared with the masses, which most certainly include staying alive. Until the very existence of the society itself is called into question, voluntarily going to one’s death in a cause is wrong.
This is doubly difficult because contemporary discourse does not validate threats to society as a whole; terrorism, child-molesters and so on, threaten individuals, not society as a whole. A “communist take-over,” Japanese invasion or Soviet nuclear attack are not the kind of threats recognised in today’s ethos, threats which could justify military-style heroism.
The greater threat to free speech is still empty halls rather than police raids. And so far, few people are being punished for lecturing to empty halls.
To voluntarily choose death in such circumstances would be to enter a narrative which is seen as fit only for foreigners and religious freaks. The Australian Army is participating in the illegal occupation of Iraq, continuing centuries of exploitation of the Arab peoples by Europeans; people are dying in Iraq resisting that occupation; Iraqis would be entitled to ask: why we do not lay down our lives to help them? So long as we do not, aren’t we complicit in the war?
But the Semiotics of martyrdom determines that if the subject suffers only because they have chosen to (rather than as a victim of injustice), then their self-imposed suffering must be proportional, in relation to what others can be asked to endure. There is a reciprocal relation: martyrdom calls forth the movement which later makes martyrdom understandable. People could understand you refusing to pay a fine or disclose your source, and doing a few day’s jail for it, but to set up a fortress and resist arrest arms in hand, would move you into the psychiatric register.
Conscription provides the opportunity to create martyrs whose suffering is in proportion to that of the citizens on the imperialist side of an unjust war. The young teacher who refuses military service and is dragged off to prison for the duration is every mother’s son and is doing just what every young person ought to do in that situation. At a certain point, “going underground” and risking long prison terms is called for. But the same young person who goes into hiding to play “urban guerrilla” suffers from delusions, not injustice. Ulricke Meinhof and Andreas Baader actually enjoyed a stunning level of popularity in Germany, but this was a romantic support, and never support which could be translated into “urban guerrilla warfare"!
There is a danger that the practice of becoming a suicide bomber, if it has not already, may move from being a heroic response to foreign occupation to becoming an irrational response to anomie and hopelessness. It is unlikely that very young suicide bombers have any more understanding of what they are doing than do child soldiers drafted into pointless conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is the responsibility of the citizens of a modern democracy like ours to defend our liberties from government. This means that when a government passes laws which may punish people for doing what is right, we must do what is right and refuse to make any concession to save ourselves until the repeal of the unjust laws and the removal of unjust officials.
But we must do so intelligently so that the Semiotics of martyrdom allows for a mass movement to build behind us if we are right.
Trade unionists representing workers and organising industrial action must not stop defending their members and must not pay fines imposed for doing this necessary work. Peace groups charged under sedition laws for organising marches and demonstrations must not desist. Journalists facing jail for publishing information about people detained under anti-terror laws must continue to publish.
If what you are doing is right, then you have a responsibility to keep doing it.
One final cautionary note. It is not all semiotics. Fundamentally, it is about people collaborating, and forming new relationships; but we are often so distant from one another that the metaphor of signalling one another seems more appropriate than that of working together.
For example, probably the most effective action in defence of asylum seekers was not a hunger strike or media event, but the rural activists who simply found jobs for Afghani Temporary Protection Visa holders on labour-starved farms in outback Australia. The Afghanis are notoriously hard workers, country people like their hosts, and they got on famously. The farmers mobilised by this experience turned the heads of National Party MPs in a way that nothing else did.