Nations Have the Right to Kill
Our foundation originates in Richard Koenigsberg’s book, Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust, and War, which argues that modern war is a state-sanctioned ritual of self-destruction.
“Richard Koenigsberg is an intrepid generator and disseminator of novel ideas regarding the psychodynamics of human violence and destructiveness, ideas that are startling all the more for being self-evident once they have been absorbed. Koenigsberg's ideas cut trenchantly through conventional, rationalized notions about culture, the nation, and war, and enable us to see through the psychic machinations of human institutions in utterly new ways.”
—Ruth Stein, author of For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism
Read Book ReviewsPolitical Psychopathology
When a human being kills another human being, we may call it murder. When leaders kill in the name of nation-states, the act is rarely viewed in the same terms. The Foundation explores political mass murder and what may be called the psychopathology of normality.
Read the Position EssayWhat Our Special Colleagues Have to Say
"The nation-state can become a terrible idol. People will sacrifice everything— their reason, their individuality, their morality—for the sake of its imagined unity. It’s a kind of collective possession, where the group’s identity overrides all else, and you see this in the worst moments of history: wars, genocides, purges, all justified in the name of the nation-state’s sacred mission. That’s what happens when ideology replaces reality."
"The suicide bomber is not a lone, crazed individual but rather a product of a group dynamic, a collective fantasy that is deeply rooted in a culture of shame and honor. This act of self-destruction, fused with the destruction of others, is not merely a personal choice but a performance of a shared narrative that glorifies martyrdom and vengeance against a perceived enemy. The group’s ideology—whether religious, political, or cultural—provides the psychological scaffolding for such acts, making the unthinkable seem not only possible but obligatory. This is not just about individual pathology but about a collective mindset that transforms murder-suicide into a sacred duty."
"Humankind's strongest social bonds and actions, including the capacity for cooperation and forgiveness, and for killing and allowing oneself to be killed, are born of commitment to causes and courses of action that are "ineffable," that is, fundamentally immune to logical assessment for consistency and to empirical evaluation for costs and consequences. The more materially inexplicable one's devotion and commitment to a sacred cause — that is, the more absurd—the greater the trust others place in it and the more that trust generates commitment on their part."