SUICIDE WARRIORS OF THE WESTERN WORLD
By Richard A. Koenigsberg
British General Douglas Haig, reflecting on the “root matter” of the First World War, cited a speech by Moslem Emperor Baber before sending his troops into battle (in 1527):
“The most High God has been propitious to us in such a crisis—that if we fall in the field, we die the death of martyrs; if we survive, we rise victorious the avengers of the cause of God.”
People in the West claim to be astonished by the behavior of Islamic suicide bombers. What is more astonishing is how the West has forgotten or repressed its own history—really the entire history of the Twentieth Century—that consisted of sending young men to be martyred in massive rituals of slaughter given names such as “World War I” and “World War II.”
In The London Gazette on April 8, 1919, Haig summed up what had occurred during the First World War, observing that total British casualties in all theatres of war—killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners—“are approximately three million (3,076,388).” He cites these extraordinary statistics unflinchingly and without apparent guilt.
Douglas Haig does not experience guilt because—like contemporary Islamic leaders—he imagines that he is fighting to “avenge the cause of God.” Indeed, his thinking is nearly identical to that of Islamic radicals. If Britain was not victorious in the war, still the soldiers would fall in the field and “die the death of martyrs.”
My recently published book, Nations Have the Right to Kill (see below), might have been called Nations Have the Right to Compel People to Die. Western people are comfortable with the idea of killing because they prefer to think of warfare as a manifestation of strength and (masculine) aggression, rather than as a pathetic demonstration of abject self- destruction.
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NATIONS HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL:
Hitler, the Holocaust and War
By Richard A. Koenigsberg Paperback: 136 pages
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Language: English
ISBN: 978-0915042234
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When the King visited the front in December 1915, Haig complained that he did not understand the importance of training and character. The King, he claimed, seemed inclined to think that his troops were “by nature brave” and was ignorant of all the training necessary to enable a company to “go forward as an organized unit in the face of almost certain death.”
On March 31, 1917, Douglas Haig visited the Somme battlefield, site of the most destructive battle in British military history. In a single day (July 1, 1916), 20,000 British soldiers died and 40,000 were wounded. Reflecting on the battle, Haig noted that for many of the soldiers “it meant certain death, and all must have known that before they started.”
To this day, historians cannot explain why nations such as Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Austria asked young men to get out of trenches for four years to be gunned down by machine-gun fire and torn apart by artillery shells. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, men were killed, resulting in an estimated 9 million dead and 21 million wounded.
The most parsimonious explanation for what occurred is that the leaders of nations—like Islamic leaders converting warriors into suicide bombers—were sending young men to die. The young men of the First World War were martyrs, or as people in the West would put it, “heroes,” or perhaps more precisely: sacrificial victims. The difference, of course, is that Islamic radicals send suicide bombers to die one by one, whereas Western leaders sent young men to their deaths en masse.
Of course, we know what occurred during the First World War. But in another sense we do not know what occurred. We shy away from a genuine encounter with—truly contemplating—the ugly, pathetic, astonishing reality. It’s all “written up in the history books.” But on the other hand, it’s so difficult to grasp or conceive of the actuality—the enormity of what human beings brought into being.
Actually, we don’t believe it. We deny responsibility. We pretend that wars do not originate in the human mind. Why do we imagine that warfare is coming from “some place else?” Because people in the West continue to be profoundly religious, even as they imagine themselves to be secular. This religion is so dominant that we barely recognize we are under its spell.
The Gods that dominated the world in the First World War continue to dominate today. We still worship entities given names such as France and Great Britain and America. As Moslems believe in Allah, so do people in the West believe in “countries.” In the Western imagination, nations compel human beings to kill and die.
It is as if people are asleep within the matrix: dreaming the same dream together, but not knowing they are in the midst or under the spell of this dream. Dominated by a collective dream or fantasy in which nearly everyone is immersed, people believe that Nations Have the Right to Kill. As Islamic radicals believe that their actions are generated by the will of God, so people in the West believe that their actions are generated by the will of “countries.”
In the name of these entities called countries (conceived as if actual, omnipotent beings), anything and everything is judged to be permissible. Hitler declared, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” Most forms of political violence are generated according to this template: “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue _______ we have performed the greatest deed in the world.”
Praise for Nations Have the Right to Kill:
“Richard Koenigsberg is an intrepid generator and disseminator of novel ideas regarding human violence and destructiveness, ideas that are startling all the more for being self-evident once they have been absorbed. The identification of the individual with the nation and, reciprocally, the equation of the nation with oneself, can create a horrific psychic situation whereby redemptive actions are invoked that can be suffused with bloody violence and destruction. Koenigsberg's ideas cut trenchantly through conventional, rationalized notions about culture and war, enabling us to understand human institutions in utterly new ways.”
—Ruth Stein, Ph.D., Clinical Professor, New York University, author of For the Love of the Father
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“Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide studies will welcome Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War. Richard Koenigsberg shows how Hitler’s obsession with the death of millions of German youth during the First World War—combined with his belief that Jews had shirked their military responsibilities—led to the Holocaust. Combining solid historical scholarship and profound psychological insight, he opens the door to a host of further explorations. This book is recommended for courses that address the whys of the Holocaust, as well as historical and contemporary genocides.”
—Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs, Department of Religious Studies and Chair of Judaic Studies, University of Alabama
“In this illuminating study of warfare, Dr. Richard A. Koenigsberg discusses how collective acts of violence safeguard the idea and practice of the nation. War, Koenigsberg argues, is a form of sacrificial violence: a ritual process through which a nation becomes alive. Individuals must sacrifice themselves in order for the nation to survive. He induces this persuasive argument from an array of historical examples across centuries, with special focus on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. With great precision, he shows how in the Second World War Hitler encouraged the death (murder) of thousands of his obedient soldiers as a way for the German nation to attain vitality and permanence. Accordingly, Hitler engaged in acts of genocide because he believed the slaughter of Jews would balance out the loss of his heroic soldiers. A fresh and passionate mode of theorizing war, Nations Have the Right to Kill provides a tantalizing look at how nations are constructed through sacrifice of self and other.”
—Professor Babak Rahimi, Program for the Study of Religion, University of California, San Diego
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“Using Hitler as a focal point, Dr. Koenigsberg offers a riveting examination of the ideology of political violence. Nations Have the Right to Kill contains a message that anyone with an interest in changing the course of human history should internalize and reflect upon. Its striking lucidity will be a catalyst for our collective evolution.”
—Lee Hall, JD, author of Capers in the Churchyard
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