Warfare is about killing and dying. This much we know. We ordinarily emphasize the role of killing. We suggest that the institution of war revolves rather around dying. The objective of war is the death of the soldier. Warfare is an institution that produces corpses.
Historians focus upon who “wins” a war and who “loses.” Nations engage in warfare, it has been assumed, to determine who the “winner” will be, and who the loser. But what if this way of looking at war—how we always have looked at it—is obsolete.
If warfare is not primarily about killing, nor about winning or losing, what is war all about? We hypothesize that the institution of warfare revolves around the issue or question of truth. That for which we die becomes true.
The truth emerges, not only by virtue of the death of our enemy, but by virtue of the death of our own soldiers. We wage war to demonstrate our sincerity. Death constitutes a testament or testimonial; a demonstration that we believe in our sacred ideals. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.
When a soldier is killed in battle, we say that he has “died for his country.” No one will argue about this way of saying things. The soldier has “given his life” for his nation. But let’s put this slightly differently: soldiers are sent to into battle by nations so that they may die. Death is not an unforeseen event. We send soldiers to war so that they may die or be wounded—thus demonstrating the sincerity of our belief—the depth of our devotion to our nation’s sacred ideals.
Each nation has different ideals. So, warfare is not dying for this ideal or that ideal; for this or that nation. Death in warfare, rather, constitutes a template or methodology for determining the truth. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.
After a war (and sometimes during a war, as was the case in the First World war) nations build memorials to the dead. We build monuments to confer honor upon those who have died in the name of their nation’s sacred ideals.
One might say that war is waged in order to build memorials to the dead. Warfare seeks to produce sacrificial victims. Each side produces sacrificial victims in order to prove the sincerity of its beliefs.
Our understanding of warfare grows out of research on Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. What does the Holocaust have to do with war? More than anyone else, Hitler understood the deep structure of the ideology of warfare. SS-men were instructed to become “obedience unto death.” Although many embraced the Nazis’ view of themselves as “supermen,” Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels knew better. The objective of these men was to teach soldiers—as well as other Germans—how to die willingly.
The Nazis called it the Final Solution. Historians and the general public call it the Holocaust. Whatever one calls it, the intent of Germany was to exterminate the Jewish people. This is clear. But a close reading of statements Hitler made—as the war against the Soviet Union began in mid-1942—reveals that he understood that warfare and the Final Solution were intimately related.
Hitler declared, “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without the slightest regret over the spilling of precious German blood, then I naturally also have the right to destroy millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”
In short, Hitler said that if society gave him the “right” to send his own soldiers to die in battle, then why would he not also have the right—why would he regret—sending the Jewish people to die in concentration camps? The logic of genocide followed based on the logic of warfare.
A characteristic of war is that the death of the soldier on the field of battle is often hidden. The public does not like to know or think about what actually happens on the battlefield. The title of Rene Girard’s book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, tells the story. The thing hidden, according to Girard, was the killing of a “scapegoat,” a human being who existed at the boundaries of society. But one might also view soldiers as human beings who exist at the border of society. They too become scapegoats.
Anyone who has viewed photographs or descriptions of a battlefield at the end of a war—knows that soldiers often die a miserable, pathetic death. The first victims of the Holocaust similarly suffered miserable, pathetic deaths. These occurred in the Soviet Union when the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) rounded up Jews from towns, then compelled them to stand or lie in ditches—where they were shot to death. Historians estimate that over a million Jews were killed in this manner. Later, concentration camps became the location of extermination.
From a purely physical perspective, viewing the bodies of those who have died, there is little difference between the soldier’s death on the battlefield and the death of a victim of the Holocaust in a concentration camp. The difference is in how we speak about these deaths. The death of a soldier is viewed as honorable and noble. The death of a Holocaust victim is never described in this manner. The Holocaust depicts death at the hands of the nation-state without sugar-coating, suffering and degradation stripped of words like duty, loyalty, and honor.
Paul W. Kahn says that looking at a field of battle after the battle has concluded, “strewn with severed limbs and broken bodies, men disemboweled and beheaded,” it is not clear who is the object of sacrifice. The enemy and the conscript “suffer the same threat and burden of physical destruction.”
We circle back to the question of what these men were dying for. Put simply, men in the Twentieth Century died for nations. But do we really know what “nations” are? What are these entities which generate death on such a massive scale? And why do human beings give nations the “right” to take human lives?
We know the names of the “leaders” who generated mass-death in the Twentieth Century. People like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. But the massive dying that occurred under the leadership of these men was possible only because they represented their nations. This is why these men had the “right” to kill.
People may be horrified by the actions initiated by these leaders, but once we evoke the idea of the nation, we are not mystified. People say to themselves, “This is what nations do. They sometimes engage in operations which result in the deaths of hundreds-of-thousands, even a million people. What is to explain?”
The mission of the Foundation for the Study of Political Psychopathology is to explore the question, “What are nations and why do we assume these entities are entitled to bring about the deaths of human beings?” According to Rudolph Rummel, there have been well over two-hundred million deaths in the Twentieth Century resulting from wars and genocidal episodes. Rummel wonders why textbooks assigned to students rarely emphasize the fact that nations are killers.
Up to now, we have taken for granted the “normalcy” of mass-murder undertaken by nation-states. Our mission is to “bracket” the question of normalcy. What if we begin with the individual human being—who would rather live than die. Then we look at ideologies of destruction in a new way. We view that which ordinarily is viewed as normal—as abnormal. We investigate the psychopathology of normality.