Dear Colleague,
An interesting review of Nations Have the Right to Kill appeared recently in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. An excerpt appears below (you may read the entire review here).
The author notes that my book “confronts the taken-for-granted worlds of nationalism and political realism” and makes them “suddenly seem utterly bizarre and peculiar.”
I like this way of putting it. If we look simply at the reality of what occurs when nations wage war (stripped of symbolic overlay), many of us might agree that warfare is bizarre and peculiar, not to mention destructive and self-destructive. As a reminder of the strange behavior that constitutes warfare, please view the following videos:
http://www.ideologiesofwar.com/docs/video/paths_of_glory.html
http://www.ideologiesofwar.com/docs/video/saving.html
As an example of the weird thought processes that often generate group violence, please see: http://www.ideologiesofwar.com/docs/video/strl1.html
If someone from another planet witnessed these videos, he or she might conclude that human beings are crazy. Indeed, in the quiet of a movie theater—witnessing the chaos and absurdity of battle—people often murmur, “War is insane.” I suggest we rigorously pursue this intuition by viewing warfare as a manifestation of shared psychosis.
Because many human beings share the fantasies that give rise to the ideology and institution that we call “war,” people who initiate and engage in warfare are not clinically psychotic. Rather, paradoxically, we often think of warfare as being among the most normal institutions and normative forms of behavior—lying at the core of societies and history. How can it be that a radical, self-destructive and perhaps psychotic form of behavior simultaneously is conceived as the essence of the historical process?
Perhaps this is because we human beings live within the psychosis. We are part of it, and it is part of us. What would it mean to separate from the shared fantasy or psychosis of warfare in order to imagine the nightmare of history as something other than our self?
Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
Review Essay of Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 48 Issue 4 (December 2009).
By Matthew Eddy
University of Oregon - Eugene, Oregon
If a case can be made that nationalism is a religion or a quasi-religion, few books rival Koenigsberg’s slim volume, Nations Have the Right to Kill.
Employing anthropological philosophy and historical analysis, the author skillfully confronts the taken-for-granted worlds of nationalism and political realism (structurally embodied in militarism and warfare), and makes them suddenly seem utterly peculiar and bizarre, even as they are shown to have logical resonance with earlier regimes of “human sacrifice” like that found in the priesthood and warfare of the Aztecs. Throwing back the curtain on reifications of the nation-state, Koenigsberg interrogates motivations and rationalizations behind the human tragedies of the two World Wars, and how the two wars might be related in ways not previously considered.
One of Koenigsberg’s central theses is that it was Hitler’s belief that German Jews had been “shirkers” of their military responsibilities in World War I which motivated his pursuit of the “Final Solution.” Many readers are likely familiar with history textbook accounts of how Hitler blamed Germany’s loss in WWI on the Jews, but Koenigsberg advances a more nuanced version. Through rhetorical and biographical analysis Koenigsberg aims to reveal Hitler’s own thought processes as he came to embrace, as an article of faith, the idea that “Nations have the right to kill”—the right to kill their own soldiers as well as populations within the nation that deny this faith (e.g., pacifists and Jewish “shirkers”), that refuse to worship the nation and who maintain subnational or cosmopolitan loyalties, or that serve to “drain” the nation’s resources. It was Hitler's justifications for the mass slaughter he witnessed in WWI, which became logically extended to the Nazi euthanasia and genocidal programs.
Koenigsberg advances several arguments about modern warfare at a high level of generality, though we should remember that not all wars fit the template of the World Wars. He proposes it is more accurate to speak of nation-states killing and “sacrificing” their own soldiers in wartime, as opposed to speech conventions that would have us believe enemy armies have killed their fallen soldiers. In a supporting argument, Koenigsberg debunks modern warfare as an expression of traditionally “masculine” heroism, when in reality it often demands absolute submission and “abject passivity” such that one offers “no resistance” when “put forward as a sacrificial victim” (p.55). His anthropological lens comes through as he writes, “We encourage the soldiers delusion of masculine virility and call him a hero—in order to lure him into becoming a sacrificial victim” (p.76).
Scholars of religion may bristle at the running metaphor of nationalism as a religion, viewing such definitions as a sacred canopy that has become, conceptually, far too big a tent. Yet, the force of Koenigsberg”s contention leaves little doubt that in analyzing nationalism and warfare, we are treading on a kind of sacred ground in which rituals and duties engage issues of basic trust and faith, and the meaning of life and death, even as ultimate and redemptive meanings are promised. The assertion that nations demand “human sacrifice” in war as a ritual process which justifies and “makes the nation come alive” (p.33), builds momentum through accounts of the two World Wars, and a suggestive chapter comparing Aztec and Western Warfare. The Aztec practices of war were conceived as a “sacred duty” to the sun god, and the rhetoric of Hitler and many other wartime European leaders are shown to parallel those
ancient ideologies of human sacrifice.
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