Weekly Mind Dump: Why Dictators Need Martyrs

Those who die for Trump, praised as “martyrs,” will be perceived by future historians as mere losers and their uber-hero Trump couldn’t care less about them.

Tombs of the martyrs: MAGA’s Ashli Babbitt and Nazism’s Horst Wessel

Week of 9/7-9/13, 2025:

One common feature of dictatorships and autocratic movements, regardless of ideology, is the need for hero-martyrs. Those fallen in service to the cause are elevated into a pantheon of heroes in order to rally followers around the regime’s strongman, replete with a mythologized legend worthy of gods in Valhalla. Dictatorships’ martyr-heroes, however, invariably differ from those of democracies.

Joseph Warren, a physician and one of America’s Founding Fathers, proclaimed before giving his life at the Battle of Bunker Hill,

I will either set my country free or shed my last drop of blood to make her so.

Just before being hanged by Virginia authorities, militant abolitionist John Brown declared,

If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit, so let it be done!

Martin Luther King:

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Democracy’s heroes courageously sacrifice their lives in service to raising humanity to a higher moral level and they employ stirring, uplifting words to do so. Not so in authoritarian regimes.

Right-wing figure Charlie Kirk is being elevated into MAGA Valhalla following his tragic killing at the hand of a gunman in Utah this past week. A sampling of his public statements:

I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.

Black women do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.

Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.

The irony of his opinion on guns should be lost on no one. But also note the contrast with traditional American martyrs. No uplifting words to elevate humanity to a higher level. When times become troubled, people turn either to the forces of light, as represented in Martin Luther King, or those of darkness, emblemized in the likes of Charlie Kirk, who never appealed to “the better angels of our nature” (coined by another of democracy’s martyrs, Abraham Lincoln). The political martyrization of Kirk began with Trump’s delivering his remains home on Air Force Two and ordering that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff. Solemn eulogies and hosannas to the dead man’s greatness follow.

MAGA’s first political martyr is Ashli Babbitt. Richly deserving of obscurity, she became an overnight martyr for the far-right when the flash of the bullet ended her life during the January 6, 2021 Beer Belly Putsch. Radical right bloggers and chat room denizens wasted no time hailing Babbitt as “the first victim of the second Civil War” and promising “Your blood will not be in vain. We will avenge you.” Trump ordered that Babbitt’s remains be buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

At the time, I wrote an essay titled, “The American Extreme Right Finally Has Its Own Horst Wessel.” Wessel was a twenty-two year old Nazi street fighter, part-time pimp and promising youth leader in the party’s stormtrooper apparatus. He was fatally shot in 1930 by communists. As one of thousands, Wessel should have sunk into the annals of forgotten nobodies of the cause.

Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, however, with a sharp eye for messaging, decided to make Wessel a sacrificial champion of National Socialism. He was hailed as a “hero of the Brown(shirt) revolution.” Goebbels staged an elaborate funeral with a cast of thousands and had built a large, Nazi-festooned gravesite. At Wessel’s memorial service, Hitler extolled him as among those who are “not only the martyrs of their struggle but also the seed from which the subsequent harvest would come.” The “Horst Wessel Lied” became the Nazi anthem.

The MAGA anthem, “Justice For All” is an altered version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” having been sung by the so-called J6 Choir — the now pardoned Capitol insurrectionists. It is overlaid with Trump reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance.”

One of the Soviet communists’ vaunted political martyrs was a thirteen-year old boy, Pavlik Trofimovich Morozov, lauded for snitching on his father to the secret police, who was then executed. Vengeful family members allegedly murdered Pavlik in 1932. Stalin’s henchmen used his death to promote the perverse notion that family betrayal to serve state power was good. Statues of him were raised, schools and youth groups were named in his honor. An opera, a movie and songs were made about him. The school that Pavlik attended became a shrine.

Autocrats’ hero-martyrs often are seamy characters. Historian Alan Wykes writes that Horst Wessel “did a great deal more for the Nazi image as a dead pimp than he had ever done as a live Party member.” Ashli Babbitt failed in business and was in an “open marriage” with her second husband and another woman. Post-Soviet researchers found that little of the lore surrounding Pavlik Morozov was true. Villagers from his hometown described him as a “shithead” who “did nothing but cause trouble,” that he always had lice in his hair and smelled terrible.

MAGA is lucky to have Charlie Kirk as its latest martyr. Raised in a stable middle class Christian family, Kirk, a college dropout, founded his Turning Point USA at age 18 and achieved remarkable success. He was also a happily married family man.

Yet he appealed to people’s base instincts, making him an ideal servant of Trumpism, which, like classic fascism, elevates hate, violence and criminality to consolidate its power.

Authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that

Fascism evolved out of paramilitary environments, with a cult leader who orchestrated violence. Once in power, fascists used propaganda to change the public’s perception of violence, associating it with patriotism and national defense against internal and external enemies.

MAGA is fast coalescing from a grievance-driven mob into a structured and disciplined American-style fascist movement. Those who die for Trump, while praised in turbo-charged language as “martyrs,” will, like Wessel and Morozov, be perceived by future historians as mere losers, individuals so deluded by lies and medieval myth-mongering that they sacrificed their lives for nothing. And their uber-hero, Donald Trump, couldn’t care less about them.