People attach to "sacred objects" conceived as more significant than the self. Collective forms of violence arise based on identifying “enemies” imagined to be acting to destroy a sacred object.

Political violence is undertaken as a demonstration of devotion to a sacred object. Terrorists die and kill for Allah, for a Palestine homeland, or for the Caliphate. Western people in the 20th Century died and killed for objects with names like Germany, France, Great Britain and America.

Anyone who has studied the First World War for many years--as I have--recognizes that the “rational choice” model of political behavior is bizarre, even silly. Nothing was gained or accomplished by fighting this war—unless one views monumental destruction and mass murder as virtues.

Jay Winter concludes his magnificent eight-part video series (The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, 1996) in a tone of baffled bewilderment, summing up as follows:

The war solved no problems. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.

However destructive, futile and meaningless--from a practical perspective--the First World War accomplished what it set out to accomplish: to produce a monumental--radical--demonstration of devotion to the nation state.

Human beings died in the name of the sacred object that defined their own civilization. One might even view the First World War as a form of sacrificial competition, as each nation conducted its military activities as if there were no limit to the number of young men who could be “thrown into the furnace to feed the flames of war”(David Lloyd George in Haste, 1977).

"Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men." But evil is always bound with "the good." The evil thing cannot be separated from the sacred object in the name of which evil acts are undertaken. Indeed, the nature of the nation-state is to transform evil into goodness; to turn dross into gold.

Nazism is a case study of how sacred values generate death and destruction on a vast scale. Heinrich Himmler—speaking of the extermination of the Jewish People in a speech delivered to SS officers and Nazi officials at Posen in October 1943—declared: “We had the moral right, the duty to our own people, to kill these people who wanted to kill us.” Himmler concluded—speaking about Final Solution: "We can say that we have carried out this most difficult task out of love for our own people.”

Love for the people, love for the country, mass murder: go together like a horse and carriage. The Final Solution was undertaken in the name of rescuing Germany. Jews, somehow, were viewed as the negation of Germany; of everything the nation stood for.

Hitler said: “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” Rarely do leaders act with such fanaticism. But in their hearts the dream is the same. It's always a question of rescuing a sacred object. In the name of the project of rescue, any and all acts are deemed justifiable, however inhumane.