With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world,
and this insertion is like a second birth- Arendt

A woman shares a story; she and a group of Muslim doctors from across the world had been working out of Gaza. Faced with the carnage, they would often aim to comfort the injured, the dying, by telling them - this is a test from Allah, God is testing you. The answer would come back - we have passed this test already, we passed this test years ago. This is not our test. This is a test for you. 

What does it look like to pass that test? What is required of us in the face of genocide? When we insert ourselves retroactively into history, ask ourselves what we would do, as Aaron Bushnell put it before his self-immolation: “The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now”. Surrounded by historical canonisation, from the blackboard, the pulpit, the placard, we learn the names of those who died, were exiled, tortured, served sentences for other, prior injustices. We wait fifty years for the benefit of hindsight, of veneration. And so, paralysis. How can we ensure our actions move with real purpose? That they are not a mere salve for our collective conscience? That we are not becoming another mouth to feed in a movement already sated? 

It feels as though the crux of action- true action- is sacrifice. Yet sacrifice in political form is contentious- questions crop up of who can sacrifice, who has the luxury of giving themselves over, or of actively choosing to do so. XR and the like have based their modus operandi around individual sacrifice in the form of arrest- divorcing the act of sacrifice from concrete direct action. The action is the sacrifice. It has become an act of performance, often removed from long-term strategic goals: no coal mines were hurt in the making of this protest. In this way it has become quasi-religious- here we hang on our cross, that is the point. 

Protest has always carried this seed within it. The mechanics of a hunger strike are inherently religious, steeped in centuries of food refusal as a divine act. To self-immolate, to hunger strike, to put yourself at the mercy of hostile forces- all of this is to allow political purpose to become inscribed upon the body in the form of harm. And through this, sacrifice both exalts and burns through the individual. The sacrificial body reaffirms its own sanctity, the sense of mattering, by violating it. A relinquishing of the self that paradoxically must elevate it in the process because sacrifice demands recognition. Ego, then, becomes both the fuel and the potential undoing of sacrifice. 

Ego of a kind divorces us from shared purpose, communitarianism. Political action must be some voicing of a collective good- the vote cast long before the ballot box, change determined by the chorus- and political individualism has never borne so little fruit. Structuring life as an expression of political action is to give over to this whole. And to sacrifice is to extrapolate one’s ego upwards to that shared collective purpose, to allow yourself to be eaten by the movement, rather than to act only as a personal monument to the self. Becoming part of something larger. Yet ego is also what nourishes sacrifice. It is necessary for the individual to mean something, to have inherent worth, in order for their personal losses, pains, denials to matter, to be meaningful. Affirming the self through denying its needs. Priest-like: special in its ordinariness. But where religion offers a deity, an unwavering constant, movements are transient. They change. They fracture. And as a result of this transcience, sacrifice, actual pure sacrifice, is morbidly fascinating, rare & horrifying. We can’t rip our eyes away because it is so loud, straining the fibres of what we understand of human nature. To give so much, not to an eternal reality, but to a moment in time, a particular cause right now, live injustice, squirming and vital- strange
and obscene. 

There is documentary footage of the moment The Weathermen, the Marxist guerillas who declared war on the US over the war in Vietnam, found out the war was over. They had been underground, for years, and happened to be filming when news of the Vietcong’s victory broke. There is something heavy in the air, the personal and collective colliding; elation (‘I’d have to have my foot run over by a police car to feel bad today’), disbelief (‘We used to chant ‘right on take Saigon’... who believed it? Who could believe it? It just happened’) and a sudden lurching sense of directionlessness, scrabbling with how to move a movement forward that has subsumed them as individuals. Bernadine Dohrn eventually tells the cameras “we are not going to let the war in Vietnam be over”. But the war is over. And the machine keeps turning, in search of new fuel. The self is cast from the whole, the sacrifice complete. Such is the nature of supplication to a Movement, the political made divine: to be truly involved is to become kindling, there to be burned through, dead wood with a criminal record.

It can feel as though sacrifice used to be a greater & more self-sustaining part of what it meant to be a political operative- easy to look back and feel impotent. Cultures of surveillance, the abdication of political action to social media, the state’s widening of definitions of violence to encompass property have all served to push sacrifice out of the public eye. A Pro-Palestine activist I spoke to referred to their university as their “only accessible enemy”, a nod to not being able to grasp at that totality of power. When standing in the street is a calculated risk, it is hard to imagine going beyond that. We are more aware of the state’s capacity to monitor and punish, and are coming out sanitised, trapped in our echo chambers, chasing our own shadow. 

I think of the people I know who have travelled to the Middle East, I think of the people I know giving aid out of vans in Kharkiv- all of this covert, all of it self-conscious. And even here, certainty is a fictitious commodity, moral parameters coming into stark relief once you look beyond prison as the worst outcome. A friend involved in warzone aid commented on how often it is the worst people doing the best things in an environment that it is almost impossible from the comfort of the outside to imagine inhabiting. Conservation is full of people who moonlight as mercenaries, funding of radical groups is channelled through despots,  places of conflict are not the ethicist’s creche.  As Anthony Lloyd wrote of his own impetus in Bosnia during the 90s (“my war gone by, I miss it so”) action is often used merely as “a passport to war”. Violence, with its magnetic pull, distorts the moral compass. Ego, corruption, a need to feel central. The world does not stop to measure our motives.

This interplay of sacrifice and ego reveals itself across history’s greatest acts of resistance. To sacrifice is to enter into a narrative larger than the self, yet it is also deeply entwined with the self’s desire for significance. From early modern tragedies to modern resistance fighters, sacrifice is often a way to present a memory, a fable, a mythology, connected to the wider movement. Sacrifice functions as a bridge, as a conduit for storytelling, a transformative power that erodes as much as it creates. It is sacrifice that allows for the power of a movement to stretch forward. As martyred Palestinian activist Bassel al-Araj put it: “The beginning of every revolution is an exit… This is how heroic figures can be understood by the general public, who are overpowered, as though by instinct… We therefore also understand the smooth transition from the outlaw into the revolutionary—the one who resists.” So too, sacrifice is an exit, from one world into the next, from one role into another, from a subject into a conduit and that is what makes it so charged, so transgressive, so titillating. It is submission in the heroic form. 

Among the belongings of al-Araj found alongside his body in 2017 was a letter, intended for publication upon his death. He had been in hiding for six months after release from Israeli custody, knowing he would be found. He saw his sacrifice, his martyrdom, as a continuation of a long line of Palestinian history, writing “I have read for many years the wills of martyrs and have always been puzzled by them: quick, brief, short on eloquence and without satisfying our search for answers to our questions about martyrdom… I am now on the path to my fate satisfied and convinced that I have found my answers.” This reflection captures the kinship between sacrifice and narrative form, where martyrdom becomes the stories that sustain resistance. Sacrifice, as with al-Araj’s final act, becomes not only a political or personal decision but an entrance into history, a conscious merging of the self with its own destruction. The martyr’s fate is sealed, not in the act of dying, but in the way they are remembered. Such is
the point. 

It is also a way to make sense of suffering you never invited upon yourself, for those who never chose to sacrifice, thrust into positions of unwilled suffering and loss. Here, to return to the notion of sacrifice as the action is hollow,  phyrric. For those who have no choice, martyrdom takes on a different, more tragic form. It is not an act of volition, but one of framing. Their suffering is not performance or strategy but grim reality. Here, the notion of sacrifice becomes a language with which to discuss loss, to frame resistance, defiance. “If I must die/ let it bring hope/ let it be a story”, to Rafeet Alareer; memory as the action. The only remedy to the unspeakable becomes to speak it.

In some ways, it’s a return to the religious roots of sacrifice: the image of the cross, of the body as a casing, the soul as eternal. Action is worldly, combustible- pure acrylic and kerosene- the highest form of human activity, as in Arendt, yet perversely the most fleeting, destined for the void. Storytelling is the means by which we capture it, make it gospel, parable, entombing lost lives in amber, trying to catch the end of the Sellotape. These narrative arcs underscore the way we understand sacrifice whether chosen or not, and we see them everywhere: Bushnell on Facebook, Alareer through his poetry, books of martyrs. Sacrifice demands our witness- Don’t look away. Say their name. 

If action is born from bearing witness, stories prepare others to do the same. Protest movements have always been about narrative- symbols of revolution, resistance, and struggle far more enduring that the material causes beneath them. We are all too painfully aware of the shapes our lives leave once we have ceased to inhabit them. We are all witnesses. And witnessing requires us not just to see, but to hold, imbibe, to speak. In this retelling, in the act of witnessing, we create fresh conviction—we compel others to act, to resist, to sacrifice. So to pass the test is to insist on being close up, because close up is the only place from which these stories make sense, from which we can feel out their edges and forms. To pass the test is to give yourself disembodied, as a pair of eyes, ears, hands- and accept what you are called on to do. Open to the calling, whether in motion or attention, cleaving to the flame.