Donald Trump has posthumously awarded the rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the US.

In an emotional ceremony at the White House on October 14, Trump told his Kirk’s widow Erika that her husband “was a martyr for truth and for freedom … From Socrates and St. Peter, from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, those who change history the most — and he really did — have always risked their lives for causes they were put on earth to defend.”

Martyrdom has a long and successful history in US political mythology. This arguably began with Joseph Warren a Boston physician and American patriot who was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

Warren was involved in almost every major insurrectionary act in the Boston area before dying in battle and became a rallying point for the American independence movement.

Another martyr was abolitionist John Brown of “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave” fame. While he was alive, Brown was seen by many as difficult and fanatical.

But after he was captured and hanged for treason in 1859, he was elevated to martyr status as a folk hero of the Unionist side in the American civil war. As the song says: “his soul goes marching on”.

Some martyrs have been tied to civil rights, democratic and independence movements – think of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers in the US, Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Mahatma Gandhi in India, whose memory has inspired resistance to tyranny and injustice.

Bobby Sands, the imprisoned IRA MP who died in 1981 after a lengthy hunger strike that aimed to get IRA prisoners political status, is now widely credited as an important figure in the Irish republican cause. At the time, Sands and his fellow IRA soldiers were treated as terrorists by the British government.

Mythmaking for legitimacy

But it’s authoritarian movements and regimes for whom martyrs often become almost central to their ideology, helping them manufacture legitimacy through mythmaking. Authoritarian movements use martyrs to exploit people’s emotions.

They storify their deaths – exaggerating their significance and reinforcing grief, pride and vengeance through elaborate ceremonies and in monuments and school curriculums. It’s a way to shape collective memory in ways that provide a moral justification for repression and provide a rallying point for loyalty.

In fascist Italy, after the dictator Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, he had the remains of 300,000 soldiers transferred to massive new ceremonial graveyards with great ceremony and accompanied by priests loyal to Il Duce’s regime. Guidebooks, pamphlets, films and newspaper articles were used to publicise these ossuaries. They became a must-see destination for schools, universities and clubs.

Mussolini was adept at using these “fallen heroes” as a central tool of Italian fascist propaganda. From then on, any Italian fascist who had died for the cause was glorified as a hero.

His aim was to inspire others to have similar levels of loyalty and religious devotion. It’s a lesson that clearly hasn’t been lost on the current Italian prime minister, Georgia Meloni, pursuing a similar tactic in sanitising the memory of prominent figures from the country’s fascist era.

Martyrs were also important to the mythology of the Bolsheviks. Bolsheviks killed in the cause were given red funerals, which were theatrical and verged on the religious. They offered a release and motivation for zealous members in support of the movement. Graves were treated as shrines and the stories of those who died would fill Soviet schoolbooks.

Portrait of murdered Nazi stormtrooper Horst Wessel.
Stormtrooper turned Nazi saint: Horst Wessel. Bundesarchiv, Bild

Adolf Hitler and his propaganda chief Josef Goebbels also used martyrs to great effect. The 14 Nazi party members killed during the unsuccessful Munich “beer hall putsch” of 1923 were memorialised in a square in the centre of Munich and given their own day (after the war, the four police officers killed defending the Weimar republic were given a plaque in the same square).

But the Nazi movement’s most famous martyr was Horst Wessel. A young stormtrooper who was shot in a street brawl with a communist agitator, Wessel had written a song glorifying the Nazi movement’s struggle against communism. After his death in 1930, the “Horst Wessel lied” became the Nazi anthem and his death became a justification for fighting (and after the Nazis took power, imprisoning) opponents of the Nazis.

They also serve

In North Korea, Kim Jong-suk – the wife of eternal leader Kim il-Sung – is still portrayed as a martyr for the regime in the fight against Japanese occupation and in supporting her husband. Her death is commemorated each year as a quasi-sacred event.

It all helps to reinforce a culture of unquestioning loyalty to the Kim clan dynasty. By the early 2000s, her biography became a separate subject in the North Korean curriculum, while a museum was set up in her honour.

Martyrs also play an important role in Iran. Iranians who died for the revolution have been heralded as heroes. Their photographs adorn city streets and commemorations fill the calendar.

Those that died in the Iran-Iraq war are venerated in massive murals, monuments, billboards and comic strips. Massive pictures of more recent “martyrs”, such as Qassem Soleimani, the former head of the Revolutionary Guard’s al-Quds force who was assassinated in 2020 in a US drone strike, line some of the main thoroughfares in the capital Tehran.

Donald Trump: Charlie Kirk was a “‘martyr for freedom’ .

There is an enduring power of political martyrdom that is useful to both democratic and authoritarian movements. Democrats tend to use martyrs to broaden participation and protect pluralism, while in authoritarian movements, martyr narratives often fuse faith with politics and, in some cases, glorify violence.

In the case of Charlie Kirk, some scholars have even argued that Kirk’s elevation to martyr status appears part of a Trump administration campaign to vilify the liberal left.

The deaths of key figures that are attached to certain regimes or movements can be used to persuade people beyond reason, inspire undying loyalty and bind followers more tightly to each other and to their leaders. The US is more polarised than ever over what kind of martyr Charlie Kirk has become – and what, exactly, his death is meant to symbolise.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Natasha Lindstaedt, University of Essex

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Natasha Lindstaedt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.