“Dulce et decorum est”: The Phenomenon of Martyrdom in Western Nationalisms of the 18th–20th Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article considers the phenomenon of martyrdom in the Western nationalisms of the 18th–20th centuries, and is analyzed in three examples. These are the cults of Marat, Lepelletier, Chalier, and other martyrs in France during the 1789 French Revolution; the cult of Abraham Lincoln and other “martyr president” cults in the USA; and the Irish martyrdom ideologies from the 17th century to the 1916 Eastern Rising. The classic studies on nationalism (E. Gellner, B. Anderson, E. Hobsbawm, etc.) do not pay attention to the topic. Other works consider separate cases, though lack a general theory. Thus, the article’s major goals are to discover what is the role of martyrdom in nationalisms, and how is it related to religious ideas. In order to answer these questions, the author proposes a structural, or “compositional”, model, suggesting that the discourse of martyrdom consists of the three motives of founding, militancy, and mobilization. These three components work as an integral “engine” that allows a nationalist movement or a nation-state to fight to create the new reality and preserve what was created. The author suggests that the balance of these three motives in each individual case may differ, so one of the motives may be hypertrophied, while the other two motives are simply “completed” to the minimum level. Proceeding from the fact that martyrdom in nationalisms constantly refers to religious ideas, images, and rituals, the author concludes that martyrdom is an integral phenomenon with no clear borderline between “secular” or “religious” with regard to both individual cases and the elements of a much larger case.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".