Dying for Oneself

Rastinews — Soldiering was once, more often than not, a paid trade. Sovereigns, emperors and rulers fed, equipped and paid their soldiers to safeguard their dominion, expand their borders and sustain their political power. From the Roman legions to the armies of later empires, military service was largely a service financed by the state, the sovereign or the ruler. Even when soldiers went without regular pay, war was never entirely without reward. Plunder, pillage, land, captives, the right to collect taxes and various privileges won after battle all offered real gain to those who fought. War, then, was shaped not only by courage but by economic expectation. Soldiers often fought not for abstract ideals but for tangible returns — money or income.

There were, of course, those who fought voluntarily for religion, for jihad, or for causes deemed sacred, as in the Crusades. But that devotion differed from loyalty to a modern national fatherland. Allegiance was directed not at a nation but at a faith, a sovereign, a dynasty, or some other order held to be sacred.

The spread of conscription in the 19th century, together with the rise of the nation-state, transformed the meaning of war at its root. "Dying for the fatherland" came to be defined as the individual's highest duty to the state and the nation. Phrases that feel entirely natural to us today — "we die for the fatherland," "we give our lives for the flag," "martyrdom is the highest rank" — are, in the span of human history, remarkably recent narratives. The rhetoric of "Fatherland, Nation, Sakarya" is not nearly as ancient as it is assumed to be; it is a powerful political and cultural narrative built by the modern nation-state. The shift was not merely rhetorical — it also overturned the economic logic of war. For most of history, those who fought were driven by tangible interests: pay, plunder, land, status or a sovereign's patronage. The modern nation-state replaced personal interest with national identity, the sovereign with the fatherland, and material reward with the idea of sacred duty.

Reading Yahya Kemal Beyatlı's line from Akıncılar — "A thousand horsemen, as joyful as children on the raid" — as pure romantic heroism therefore misses something. That joy belonged not only to the thrill of conquest but to the plunder, the wealth, the new lands and the hope of social advancement that victory would bring. War was also an economic enterprise, promising material gain to the side that won.

The modern nation-state replaced that arrangement with an entirely different economy of meaning. National identity took the place of plunder, the fatherland took the place of the sovereign, and the rhetoric of sacred sacrifice took the place of personal interest. The poor in particular, though they owned not an inch of land, were persuaded that they were "owners of the fatherland" and called on to die for it without expecting anything in return.

This may be the modern nation-state's most striking ideological achievement: turning the propertyless into guardians of property, the landless into keepers of the land, the poor into willing sentinels of the border. Directing broad masses of people toward death, in the name of national belonging and without expectation of material return, is one of the most powerful ideological productions of the modern political order.

The psychological dimension of this process cannot be ignored either. Nationalist discourse often produces more than belonging — it also offers a narcissistic compensation. A person who feels powerless over their own life, who struggles with poverty, exclusion or a sense of failure, is given the feeling that they are a subject of history, part of a great cause, important enough to save the country or even the world. The powerlessness of everyday life is thereby offset by the sense of grandeur that collective identity provides. Individual narcissism seeks its repair inside national or collective narcissism.

Death, as a result, stops being a mere biological end. It is reinterpreted as a sacred duty owed to the survival of the nation. Sacrifice becomes one of the highest virtues, while an individual's life is presented as a value that can be surrendered for the nation's continuity.

Yet death is an experience a person meets only once in life. What makes it so shattering is precisely that: it is singular, it cannot be repeated, and it cannot be rehearsed. That is why death is at once terrifying and a person's most personal, most non-transferable truth.

Perhaps this is why a person should be able to die within the meaning of their own life, not for the ideals of others, the sacred causes of states, or abstract narratives. Because death, in the end, belongs not to a political slogan but to the individual alone — the one and only truth that is truly theirs.

A person should die for themselves.

At the Scene of the Accident

When we reached the scene of the accident, the car behind us stopped as well. Screams rising from the wreckage filled the scene with a deep sense of helplessness. Just then another car, coming from the opposite direction, pulled up, and several people got out. One group wasted no time, prying open the doors to pull the injured free. The other group tried to stop them, shouting, "Don't touch them, wait for the ambulance!" Within seconds the argument grew; voices rose, shoving began. Eventually everyone's attention shifted from the injured to each other. The people who, moments earlier, had lain in pain waiting for help were forgotten, while the healthy people around them began fighting among themselves.

It struck me then that more than a fight might have been happening. A person cannot always bear the intense psychological pain of witnessing suffering. Watching a loved one's helplessness, being unable to help, confronting the possibility of death — these place an unbearable weight on the psyche. In such moments, the mind can redirect the pain it cannot carry into another channel. A fight is sometimes one such outlet. Psychological tension that cannot be endured inwardly turns into physical struggle. Fists, shouting, bleeding faces become the visible bodily counterpart of an invisible psychic pain. It is as if a person tries to make the helplessness born of witnessing another's suffering controllable, by converting it into a concrete pain they can feel in their own body.

This may be why, at the scene of an accident, we see people fighting alongside the injured. The real battle is often not with one another but with a psychic burden they cannot bear. The body becomes the stage for pain the mind cannot carry; psychological pain is translated into physical pain. Because sometimes a wound on the body is easier to bear than an invisible wound on the soul.

Tarkovsky and Psychological Pain

Tarkovsky tells a story. People gather around someone badly injured in a train crash. They try to work out what happened; they talk among themselves, they debate it. But they do not help the injured person. When the injured man realizes no one is coming to his aid, he tries to bind his own wound. The scene is not simply one of physical neglect — it also depicts the collapse of witnessing. People sometimes cannot truly look at another's suffering, because to look at that suffering is not only to see the wound on the outside; it is to touch an ache, a helplessness, a sense of guilt within themselves. So instead of helping the injured person, they start talking around him. Here, talking becomes a means not of understanding but of not seeing.

Sometimes people try to ease the psychological pain of witnessing another's suffering by talking among themselves. They are beside the injured person but not with them. They appear to be looking at them but do not really see them. Their conversation becomes a curtain woven between themselves and the injured, so that they remain within the event while staying clear of the real call of that suffering.

This is another form of the death of the third party I described in earlier pieces. A living third party does not just watch; it bears witness, intervenes, takes responsibility. It can say, "Someone is suffering here." But once the third party dies, people circle the pain, interpret it, argue over it, even talk about it — without touching it. The wounded try to bind their own wound, while the crowd binds its conscience with words.

We could become world champions

In her essay "Gegen die Shitshow," Maja Göpel notes that today's politics and public discourse are increasingly organized around scenarios of collapse, decline and extinction. People are placed inside a constant narrative of threat: religion is being destroyed, the homeland is slipping away, the nation is under attack, the country is being torn apart. Society is not bound together by hope for a shared future but by shared fear. The language of politics increasingly manufactures catastrophe, threat and enemies.

A political order fed on negative emotion gradually makes people dependent on that emotion too. Fear, anger, hatred and a sense of threat are not managed by power alone; people pass them to one another, reproduce them, multiply them. Negative emotion becomes a social cycle that feeds itself. Before long, people live not on hope but on anger, not on curiosity but on suspicion, not on solidarity but on hostility.

One of the clearest traits of dictatorships is that they systematically destroy people's basic sense of trust. The "basic trust" Erik Erikson described is the psychological ground that lets a person experience the world as reliable and predictable. Writing on torture, Jean Améry says torture strips a person not only of their body but of their trust in the world. A tortured person can no longer trust anywhere. Authoritarian regimes produce a similar process at the social scale. People come to doubt their neighbors, their institutions, the media, the law — even their own judgment. Distrust breeds paranoia, and paranoia breeds new fears. The system rebuilds itself on an ever-multiplying supply of negative emotion. A frightened person does not just flee the threat; they also cling harder to the power that promises them security.

Conspiracy theories gain power on exactly this ground. Paranoia reads the world not through coincidence, contradiction and uncertainty, but through hidden intent, secret plans and invisible enemies. In moments of fear and insecurity, the mind wants to turn complex events into a simple, coherent story. The idea that "someone is doing this on purpose" is often easier to bear than the pain uncertainty produces. Even an imagined enemy feels more concrete than uncertainty.

Humanity's susceptibility to conspiracy theories may run back thousands of years. People have long tried to explain disasters, diseases, wars, famines and deaths they could not otherwise make sense of through the will of invisible forces. Conspiratorial thinking is not only a product of modern political paranoia; it is one of the darker forms of humanity's effort to give meaning to chaos. Religion sits in a delicate but important place here. Calling religions conspiracy theories outright would be reductive, since religion is not only a system of explanation but also a realm of mourning, meaning, belonging, morality and comfort. But when certain religious narratives harden into an unquestionable order of explanation, they slide into the logic of conspiracy. The shared ground shows itself when the world's evils, disasters or social crises are explained as the plan of invisible forces; when an absolute intent is sought behind every event; when doubt is treated as sin and obedience as virtue. So the real issue is not religion itself, but the claim to unquestionable truth. When a narrative exempts itself from criticism, doubt and thought; when it reduces the world's complexity to a single hidden cause; when it starts managing people's fear instead of easing it, it no longer stays within the realm of belief. It can turn into a structure that weakens trust and keeps a person permanently on guard against the outside world.

Dictatorships carry this same logic into politics. They constantly manufacture enemies, constantly point to threats, constantly keep alive the feeling that "they want to destroy us." Society then chases invisible enemies instead of thinking about its real problems. Insecurity stops being a malfunction and becomes the regime's fuel. People can trust neither their neighbor, nor the law, nor the media, nor even their own perception. In the end, dictatorship seizes not just people's behavior but their capacity to trust the world at all.

Social media today runs largely on the same emotional economy. Anger, hatred, blame and public shaming have become the most effective tools for grabbing attention. Algorithms surface content that enrages people, not content that calms them. Nearly every debate now ends in some scenario of collapse, catastrophe or extinction. People are not merely exposed to these emotions; they produce, share and spread them. Negative emotion becomes an energy generated not only by power, but by society itself.

Yet no political order can survive on fear alone. People cannot live in constant fear. So authoritarian regimes pair fear with collective pride. Grand construction projects, massive military parades, endless refrains of "the biggest," "the strongest," "the most homegrown," and narratives of national triumph all serve this function. Society is told, on one hand, that it is under constant threat; on the other, it is fed symbols meant to make it feel powerful.

Among the most striking of these symbols are instruments of death. Tanks, fighter jets, missiles, rockets and drones stop being merely military technology; they become symbols of national pride. The display Turkey staged at the World Cup opening, with military vehicles front and center, is notable in this light. That a country's pride should draw not on its art, its science, its law or the institutions that protect human life, but on machines of death, is something worth pausing over.

Analyzing fascism, Erich Fromm explains this tendency with the concept of "necrophilia." Fromm's necrophilia is not simply a perverse interest in dead bodies. What he means is a character structure drawn toward death rather than life, toward destruction rather than production, toward domination rather than creativity — an admiration for what destroys life rather than what multiplies it. Loving death, then, is not just breaking into cemeteries at night to steal corpses. The love of death also shows itself in a fetishistic relationship with weapons. Carrying guns on the chest, keeping them under a pillow, posing with them, or identifying with them almost as with a beloved person all reveal the symbolic and emotional bond formed with instruments of death. What is at stake is not technical interest in a weapon, but a fetishistic relationship with the tools that produce death.

What people take pride in today is drifting further from the institutions that sustain life. Instead of science, education, art, health or justice, killing capacity is what gets foregrounded. Drones, fighter jets, missiles and rockets are presented not merely as technological achievement but as core symbols of national identity and collective pride. Technologies that produce death are beginning to replace the values that produce life.

The unsolved murders of the modern age are changing too. Killing is increasingly handed over to technology; death becomes a technical operation carried out by remote control. Those who develop these tools are presented not as engineers but as national heroes. The unidentified killings of the past have thus become, today, an identified killing technology. Those who produce death are applauded, rewarded and placed at the center of collective pride.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of authoritarian regimes is not simply frightening people. Their real achievement is making fear, anger and death into ordinary parts of people's everyday inner lives. People are no longer only governed by these emotions; they produce them, recirculate them, and pass them on to one another. So, without power needing to keep intervening, fear, hatred and the love of death turn into a social order that reproduces itself. This order tells people, on one hand, an endless story of collapse and extinction; on the other, it turns instruments of death into a story of salvation and pride. This spirit — exalting death over life, destruction over production — is one of the most visible political forms today of what Erich Fromm called necrophilia.

Yet necrophilic spectacle carries its own tragic irony. Those who displayed power yesterday on America's streets, with their guns, their rallies and their national team, became part of that very spectacle at the World Cup — only to be eliminated and sent home. Those who staged a show of phallic symbols, displays of power and machines of death were, on the stage of their own performance, symbolically castrated. The claim to greatness, might and invincibility met its own limit on the pitch. The phallic spectacle built on instruments of death produced no lasting narrative of victory; instead, it turned into an exposure of lack, defeat and fragility. For any politics that glorifies death rather than life becomes, sooner or later, the victim of its own spectacle.

I know this has turned into a very associative piece…