THIS weekend clergy will be informing their congregations that there is more to Easter than chocolate eggs and bunnies. 

No doubt they would prefer their congregations, politicians and the public to focus on the suffering of Jesus and the meaning of his death by crucifixion. 

And perhaps our hypothetical clergy have a point. The earliest traditions about Jesus that gave rise to the Easter story suggest that he was brutally killed because of overturning the tables of the moneychangers and dove-sellers in the Jerusalem Temple. 

This was at Passover when relations between the Jewish populace and the Roman authorities would have been tense, not least during a festival remembering the Israelites escaping slavery under another imperial regime. 

Whatever the precise explanations given for Jesus’s execution, it seems that the Roman authorities were convinced enough that he was a seditious threat and so he was put to death as a bandit.

Roman crucifixion was a cruel, humiliating and painful death, partly designed to let onlookers know who was running the world. 

But what should have been a failure for the followers of Jesus was instead rethought in sacrificial terms and as something central to the early Jesus movement by picking up on Jewish stories about martyrdom and their inspirational and redemptive significance for the ongoing survival of the community. 

The most famous of these was (and is) Hanukkah, the annual commemoration of the Jewish revolt against Seleucid rule which also included gory stories about martyrs and their function in keeping Jewish ideas alive. 

Stories about martyrs and martyrdom from the ancient world are unafraid of explaining the gruesome details. 

Today, this is something typically forgotten in popular understandings of Easter where we are more likely to see manufactured controversies about whether the word “Easter” is mentioned in connection with chocolate eggs, something to which Theresa May pandered last Easter. 

Politicians regularly promote an Easter that is understood in banal terms, though if we look carefully there is always an ideological twist. 

David Cameron, for instance, used the Easter story as an occasion to justify his intensification of neoliberalism. 

He even used an Easter reception to ground his outsourcing of the state by claiming that Jesus invented the “big society” (remember that?) 2,000 years ago and that the Tories were simply carrying out the Lord’s work today.  

Of course, the state does have concepts of death and its sacrificial benefits but regulates death accordingly. 

The deaths of civilians in wars can be rendered euphemistically and conveniently as “collateral damage” or merely “unfortunate” but necessary for the greater good. 

The death of a soldier or police officer, or someone dying for their family, can be remembered as an acceptable or heroic sacrifice. 

But the language of martyrdom remains alien and can conjure up notions of irrationality, particularly when associated with a group like Isis. 

As with the crucifixion of Jesus for Christians, martyrdom may remain a concept known in contemporary English socialism, but it is still a relatively harmless concept typically displaced to a heroic past when mouthing the words to The Red Flag.

However, martyrdom in its more uncomfortable sense once again came to the fore with the death of the activist Anna Campbell in Afrin. 

Campbell had gone to fight with the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) for the progressive Rojava revolution. 

The motivations of those who have volunteered to help or fight in Rojava have been misunderstood by certain commentators, such as Simon Jenkins in the Guardian who thought she should have used her skills and idealism to “more productive ends” such as aid projects and thought her fighting in Afrin “bizarre.” 

More generally, in some of the reporting of the deaths of British volunteers prior to Campbell, there has been a tendency to focus on their anti-Isis motivations while claiming it is only the foreign Kurds who interpret such deaths as martyrdoms.  

Since Campbell’s death there has finally been some attempt to understand why people like her have dedicated their lives to such a dangerous cause in a context where martyrdom is normative. 

What we know about Campbell is that she was a committed activist prepared to take great risks for her political beliefs. But we do have more detailed ideological explanations from other British and Irish volunteers in Rojava about their revolutionary rationale. 

Named of course after the great trade union leader, one group of volunteers called the Bob Crow Brigade have publicly discussed their reasoning and they openly embraced the language of martyrdom. 

They unashamedly took the term “immortal martyrs” from the Kurdish idiom Sehid Namirin, to denote those who have died for the cause, in this case the socialist cause. 

The Bob Crow Brigade were fusing these Kurdish ideas with half-remembered martyrdom traditions from the radical and revolutionary left and the ways in which the deaths of figures such as James Connolly, Rosa Luxemburg, Fred Hampton, Che Guevara and, more recently, Ivana Hoffmann, were understood. 

The Bob Crow Brigade updated The Red Flag. Indeed, in one widely circulated picture associated with the Bob Crow Brigade, the revolutionaries were pictured on a roof with the graffiti: “With the blood of the martyrs our flag is red.”

This was more than an annual mouthing of a socialist hymn about a glorious past. Death for the Rojava revolution was happening all around them and could happen to them. 

But the Bob Crow Brigade argued that martyrdom, and everything it entailed, could jolt the Western neoliberal mindset into realising that violence will be used against those who want to defend the gains made by the left. 

By embracing notions of martyrdom, groups like the Bob Crow Brigade can be understood as developing means of coping with the possibility of imminent death. 

Martyrdom for these volunteers can also be seen as a means of constructing a degree of political agency in the face of the might of organisations like Isis, as well as providing a counter-narrative to the idea that those fighting for the Rojava revolution were to be labelled “terrorists.” 

But martyrdom was also assumed by such volunteers to be an inevitability when fighting against the seemingly indestructible force of capitalism and challenging the dominant Western acceptance that there is no coherent alternative imaginable. 

This was understood as reclaiming the traditional view of revolution and liberation, namely that violent rupture in capitalism is a near inevitability if overthrowing capitalism is to be taken seriously.

With parallels in Turkish leftism, martyrdom was understood to be a form of vanguardism or a specialist act which would function as an inspirational example of the significance of the Rojava revolution back home and show the possibilities available for growing the British and Irish left. 

Martyrdom from the perspective of these volunteers was also constructed in terms of hope and motivation for the future and the continual building of a communal society. 

But in this understanding of death, the socialist or communist ideal was understood to emerge in a victorious future. Those lucky enough to live in these times will have benefited from the actions of the fallen martyrs. 

The martyrs would be remembered for the consequences of their actions and it is in this sense that groups such as the Bob Crow Brigade could argue with sincerity that the “martyrs are immortal.”

We should not generalise about the motivations of all the volunteers who have gone to Rojava, but we do have the accounts by volunteers publicly available to see that there are thought-out explanations. 

These volunteers have put themselves in incredible danger to support progressive politics in the face of fascistic threats. 

It is little wonder that they have brought back with them the language of martyrdom in its most stark sense of dying for a humane cause. 

Following our hypothetical clergy this Easter, those of us who lead relatively comfortable lives, who can barely comprehend these sorts of risks, can at least have the decency to acknowledge that these are people whose political reasoning should be appreciated on their own terms.