Heroism and Self-Sacrifice for the Nation? Wars of National Liberation

Abstract

Post-heroic warfare, with its aversion to casualties or preference for standoff attacks, seems to stand in direct contradiction to the war of national liberation, a conflict which practically demands sacrifice, acts of heroism, charismatic leadership and, at the point of ‘cognitive liberation’ among large sections of the population, the achievement of mass mobilization.¹ Moreover, all of these elements, particularly sacrifice or the creation of martyrs, seem crucial to the establishment of national founding myths. Yet, the first paradox of wars of ‘national’ liberation, particularly those at the close of the era of European empires in Africa and Asia, is that they often took place among peoples without a sense of national unity or even national identity, and therefore they frequently assumed the character of civil wars. Identities associated with nation-states, where they did exist, were imagined, borrowed from European ideologies, created, forged and propagated in an instrumentalist fashion by more educated vanguards.