Of the Politician's Rhetoric of "Sacrifice"

Political hacks of a certain kind love to speak of "sacrifice"--to tell the public that it must "sacrifice" for this or that end. For balancing the government's books. For the sake of "growth." For the sake of a war.

In doing so they remind us of their essential illiteracy and dishonesty. After all, what does the word sacrifice mean? It means one's giving up something they have that is of value to them--as when people who live by animal husbandry sacrifice the livestock that is the basis and measure of their wealth to propitiate a deity. This means that for us to speak of sacrifice the sacrificer must offer up the thing themselves, acquiescing in the demand; the thing being sacrificed must be theirs to be sacrificed; and the thing of theirs that they sacrifice must be something they regard as valuable.

When governments tell their public that they must "sacrifice" by having their health benefits or their pensions cut, or by paying more taxes, they eliminate the element of choice for the public--because, after all, the public does not make that choice, their government does. "But isn't their government run by their elected representatives?" those who have civics textbook ideas about democracy actually existing in those states whose political Establishments love to call them such will retort, and of course, those who insist upon claiming evidence of a public "consensus" behind everything that office-holders do.

As a practical matter what the public is apt to have is a government that, elected within conditions highly controlled by the elite, was voted for by only a minority of the public in even "landslide" circumstances (looking at Britain today, remember, only one in five eligible voters cast their ballot for Keir Starmer's Labour), and proceeded to behave in a manner that broke every promise it made to its public scarcely a month earlier in a Manifesto that was itself a rejection of virtually every pledge Starmer campaigned for the party leadership on a betrayal and line of policy that public is apt to highly disapprove, with this so much a constant of recent years that the electoral process enjoys ever less legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Indeed, from France to South Korea it seems to be becoming routine for the heads of government in so-called democracies to in the course of transacting what ought to be ordinary government business illegally invoke emergency powers for the sake of imposing programs entailing "sacrifice" because the opposition to them is such that they cannot implement them in any way at all consistent with even the slight and debased democratic norms that have been allowed to prevail until recently.

Looking at such a situation it seems safe to say that while one can imagine a context in which a government which is really representative of the public one can speak of that public's collectively choosing to sacrifice--but in any situation actually evident in such countries today it would seem that, no, the public at large isn't choosing. Rather others are choosing for it, in contradiction of and even in defiance of its preferences as they show themselves "generous with other people's things"--as it happens, the things of those who have least (such governments rarely call for "sacrifice" on the part of the rich, and even more rarely exact it). One can and should add to this that as the functionaries of those governments speak of "sacrifice," in "sacrificing" the well-being, and even the freedoms, of their country's citizens they themselves do not feel themselves to be giving up a thing of value--having no regard for those citizens' well-being and freedoms, and not even trying very hard to pretend that they do for as long as anyone can remember (indeed, these politicians, who have been constantly been attacking these things in the most open and sanctimonious fashion for many decades now, often seem grateful for the excuses to step up the attack that prompt their calls for "sacrifice")--yet again making their speaking in terms of sacrifice an absurdity.

The result is that even if their "leaders" are too obtuse to understand their misuse and abuse of simple words in their own language (such is what one now gets from the so-called "highly educated" that idiots of elitist mind love to talk about), the public should be under no illusions that in anything like such circumstances "sacrifice" is merely one of those words which are used to dress up the exploitation of the many by and for the few, and commensurately wary of any utterance from their "leaders" containing that term. This is all the more in as they are hearing it so much now, and will hear it so much more later, not least in the nations of Europe, where, as national Establishments clamor for "rearmament" and even a "war economy" from every orifice in a manner that can give the impression of a bidding war ("We think 2.5 percent of GDP is not enough! We're going for at least one percent more than that!" "Oh yeah? Well we're going for 5!"), those in "showbusiness for ugly people" are auditioning for their dream role as wartime leader. Hoping to be Churchill or De Gaulle as these have been mythologized by their cultists, they bear a stronger resemblance to other persons from England and France, and Italy and Germany, and many other countries we remember just as well from that conflict, and with whose (real life and not at all mythological) records their politics and personas and even the histories of their political parties in many a case would seem the far better fit.