I think the suicide bomber comparison was not necessary.
Maybe not necessary since it was prone to be misunderstood as me comparing any kind of self sacrifice (no matter how lofty the goal) with such despicable acts of terrorism. That is not what I meant.
However, certain mechanisms in our own adorsion for characters who sacrifice their own lives going down usually fighting against huge oposing armies and the adorsion which by certain people is given to people who commit such acts are not 100% different (which is not to say that there weren't any differences).
What does annoy me to some degree is that we are sometimes extremely uncritical about the concept of a heroic sacrifice and that concept, so common in fiction, is so often being abused when sending people to die in war.
People who really, really want to live and therefore are not quite as ready to sacrifice if not for their own dear lives are usually regarded with some degree of contempt for their "cowardice" while even in case of movies about such senseless slaughters as those of WW1 the image of tenthousands of young people senselessly slaughtered in the muddy mess of the trenches is more common to evoke some kind of sense of glory which I don't feel is a fair to those so pointlessly slaughtered.
Even back then one of them, Wilfred Owen (who was shot just a few days before the end of that war) put it in a poem which shows all his despise for the way the sense of glory was abused to the end of this horrible war:
Dulce et decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
One may argue, of course, that in case of movie sacrifices the purpose of the sacrifice is usually much more direct (safe the life of a friend or the like) than it is in case of war. But the mechanisms of thought, this fascination for giving up on live, this yearning for a glorioius death is not written on an entirely different page in an entirely different book.
Like I said, I don't mean to discredid the entire concept of self-sacrifice in fiction. It has however been overused to some degree. In many genres it is getting ever more difficult to find stories without that kind of self sacrifice. Personally I would enjoy seeing a few more "cowards" as characters not deserving only contempt. There are such characters, but very rare they are.
