Definition
A martyr is a person who chooses to suffer or die rather than renounce their beliefs or principles, typically for a religious or political cause.
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Excerpts from News Articles
Many Circassians were Muslim and the name “Caterina” was commonly assigned on conversion to Christianity. Caterina refers to St Catherine of Alexandria, a Roman convert who became a martyr , so the name both referenced this act of conversion and an example of devoted service for the newly converted’s emulation.
“Empty and aching, like the narrator of Paul Simon’s America, Sharlet drives cross-country, from a Sacramento rally for the insurrectionist martyr Ashli Babbitt to his home in Vermont, searching for the answer to Trump’s American carnage but equally for indelible images, pungent phrases—the stuff of myth—that will give shape to his own grief as well as ‘the grief that is in us all now,’ a heartsickness born of ‘the passing of certain possibilities—democratic, ecological— . .
I do not care about the fretting naysayers who worry that the still mysterious charges may be difficult to prove or that Trump will emerge as a martyr – strengthened and an even more formidable political force.
What we do know is that the former President will do and say anything to turn these cases to his advantage; he will attempt to burnish his image as savior and martyr of the MAGA millions; he will do and say anything to deepen his bond with voters who, as he tells them day after day, are the victims of élites in the media, the universities, the courts, and beyond. And, as he proved on January 6, 2021, Trump is prepared to foment violence and civil strife so long as it furthers his interests.
Much has been made of the political capital Trump stands to reap from this move. He can play the martyr ! Seize the headlines! Paralyse his opponents so that they are unable to move against him!
Victor Menaldo: Trump’s best move, according to his theory of the world, is to be a martyr and to weaponize the symbolism of a former president being indicted and claim it’s totally politicized.
“You’ve got to work hard to make President Trump a martyr ,” added Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), another GOP lawmaker who has been critical of Trump. “Congratulations to Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, who has managed to do just that.”
That’s a slight cherrypicking of “people who have been arrested” as a group, which obviously does include Nelson Mandela (and, arguably, Jesus) but also Ted Bundy, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Dahmer and so on. It’s a bold assertion to infer that everyone ever arrested was actually a martyr . Even those who want to defund the police don’t usually advocate literally opening the prisons and stopping arrests for all crimes.
“It’s an interesting parallel,” said David Stebenne, a professor of history and law at Ohio State University. Debs “was viewed by his supporters as a martyr , and the Socialist Party did not trust the mainstream media of 1920,” the professor added.
During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, led by then-Senator Joe Biden, he faced accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill. Then last year, stories in The Washington Post abounded about how Mr Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. To many conservatives, all of this scrutiny has turned Mr Thomas into a martyr for their cause. (The fact he is also one of the most prominent Black conservatives also allows them to claim liberals are being hypocritical when they speak about racial equity).
Is Wilde exempt because his droll quips are still quite devastating, and still hit their targets? Anyone taking on Wilde would have to be willing to come off as one of the sanctimonious buffoons he made fun of. But above all, I think, he’s spared because he represents—indeed, was a martyr to—one of the great causes of our time, which is LGBTQ rights.
That need gets activated when someone feels the loss of significance, the sense of being slighted, humiliated or excluded, but also when there is an opportunity for a gain in one’s sense of significance, being the object of admiration, a hero or a martyr in other people’s eyes.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing congresswoman from Georgia who has become a voice for white Christian grievance in the GOP, said he was a martyr when she said the fact he is “white, male, christian, and antiwar” made him “an enemy to the Biden regime.”
In the campaign video, Leslie’s character of the oil company says: “Whenever he speaks publicly or posts about anything on social media, he acts as if he’s a martyr .
Valentine’s Day, in fact, originated as a liturgical feast to celebrate the decapitation of a third-century Christian martyr , or perhaps two. So, how did we get from beheading to betrothing on Valentine’s Day?
The book offers a mish-mash of information pertaining to attitudes about sex, prostitution and women from the Weimar period to the end of the second world war. Paragraphs detailing the concentration camp brothels and the bizarre sadomasochistic relationship Hitler had with his niece Geli Raubal, although interesting topics, read oddly in conjunction; and Goebbels’s fawning over movie starlets such as Lída Baarová is its awkwardly a story about an early Nazi ‘ martyr ’, Horst Wessel, whose murder was supposedly related to his housing a local prostitute. (In fact, the Communists were responsible, tussling for power with the National Socialists.)
We can’t be in a position of ever allowing — just because some guy is going to be a martyr — of allowing the fellow to get away with this kind of wholesale thievery. Or otherwise, it’s going to happen all over the government.
This is a human condition. He was named after a famous South American martyr . That tells you how worldwide she was and curious.
“They are happy to martyr themselves in this litigation to seek more money on the GoFundMe me campaign … to turn the case into something that resembles an inquiry and they don’t care if they win or lose,” Chrysanthou said.
After the Roman Empire legalized Christianity in the early fourth century, smaller buildings called shrine churches were sometimes built around the tomb of a martyr . At times, the bodies of the martyr were exhumed by local bishops and reburied within the city itself, in a special tomb beneath the floor of a larger church or basilica.
In Montgomery, the 40 names of those martyred in the Civil Rights Movement are carved into the black granite of the Civil Rights Memorial, accessible to the public 24-hours a day.
But narratively, Trump has already turned the frenzy over a possible indictment into fodder for his overarching message of political martyrdom , creating a clear us-vs.-them line for his competitors to dare to cross.
One thought that has stuck in my mind about the number 33 is that it is the age at which Jesus Christ is popularly claimed to have been crucified, martyring himself so that humanity would be able to enter the kingdom of Heaven and sit by the right hand of the Father for all eternity. By contrast, by 33 I plan to have completed Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the third time (but I’m stuck on the desert part, so we’ll have to see).
Another attack on Friday killed two members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were hailed by Iranian media and officials as “ martyrs ” who died fighting “terrorism”. Last month, the airport in Aleppo was knocked out of service in an Israeli strike.
But Babri was not destined to be the only mosque to be demolished; rather, it was only the first of many monumental martyrs that were to follow. The slogan, “Babri to bas jhanki hai, Kashi Mathura baki hai” (Babri is only a sneak peek; Kashi and Mathura are yet to happen), attests to the longing that persists even today. A list of such Muslim landmarks and monuments marked for demolition has been in broad public circulation for quite some time.
The indictment of Donald J Trump has not driven a wooden stake through his heart. He has risen, omnipresent and ominous again, overwhelming his rivals, their voices joined into his choir, like the singing January 6 prisoners, proclaiming the wickedness of his prosecution. As he enters the criminal courthouse to pose for his mugshot and to give his fingerprints, evangelicals venerate him as the adulterous King David or the martyred Christ.
It’s an obvious allegory: She is Ireland, the fields are Ireland’s four provinces, and the strangers are the British. The blood of Irish martyrs nourishes the old woman, and at the play’s end, Cathleen transforms into a young girl “with the walk of a queen.”
In the Christian tradition, the violence of the crucifixion was something willingly taken on by Jesus out of love for the world. His status as a victim, if we think of him in those terms, was a voluntary giving up of power and willing submission to human forces so that others might have life. The victim rhetoric we see used by the religious right in Australia, while based on similar Christian martyrdom traditions, has a rather different dimension.
My death may cause political chaos in Georgia, but my martyrdom will certainly be considered a victory for Putin — a powerful symbol to all leaders in this region, and possibly the world, who fail to stand up to Russian imperialism.
More than 60,000 books and countless articles give eloquent testimony to the accuracy of poet Walt Whitman’s prediction that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years.” The events of the war left a rich heritage for future generations, and that legacy was summed up by the martyred Lincoln as showing that the reunited sections of the United States constituted “the last best hope of earth.” Warren W.
Some of Saddam’s signature monuments remain in place, largely because they had a nationalist meaning that went beyond him. Still towering over the Tigris River, for example, are the Victory Arch, an arch formed by two giant hands holding crossed swords, and two large turquoise half-domes called the al-Shaheed Monument, or Martyrs ’ Monument. They were opened in 1983 and 1989 to commemorate those killed in Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, Francis has at least twice a week referred to Ukraine and its people as being " martyred " and has used words such as aggression and atrocities to describe Russia's actions.
In his message Francis also mentioned instability in Lebanon, expressed the hope that the " martyred Rohingya people" of Myanmar "may encounter justice", and called for more aid for the victims of earthquakes in February that killed nearly 56,000 people in Turkiye and Syria.
Comparing Trump to religious and political martyrs is both laughable and frightening. Late last month, Joseph McBride, attorney for some Jan. 6 defendants, tweeted that Donald Trump is just as important to the United States now as Martin Luther King Jr. was the month before he was assassinated in 1968.
The president currently has only two official Democratic challengers, and neither is serious competition. Marianne Williamson, the progressive spiritualist and motivational speaker who got into the race last month, has only a 25 percent favorability rating among Democrats. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced he was challenging President Biden last week, might have a famous political name (he’s the son of martyred senator Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s brother), but he has no chance of gaining serious support, given his anti-vaccine views and contention that George W. Bush stole the 2004 presidential election.
