Most of my papers are published online. However, this one has not yet been uploaded. NATIONS KILL A LOT OF PEOPLE originally was presented as the Keynote Address at a Symposium on "Roots of Evil: Continued Challenges for the Denial of Mass Human Rights Violation," April 4, 2008 at Fordham University. Since then, it has gone through a number of iteration, resulting this paper that I'm presenting in three parts through the LSS NEWSLETTER.

With regards, Richard Koenigsberg

CLICK HERE FOR A LIST AND DESCRIPTION OF MY LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS.

ABSTRACT: Nearly 200 million people were slaughtered in the 20th century as a result of violent acts undertaken by nation-states. Do we truly grasp the reality of destruction that societies have leveled against their own people? I examines the concept of genocide-denial within the framework of a broader form of denial: our refusal to look at the destruction wrought by our own nations—and by civilization itself."
 

NATIONS KILL A LOT OF PEOPLE:
Denial of the Destructiveness of Civilization: Part I

Well over two-hundred and fifty-million people were killed in the Twentieth Century as a result of political violence. This includes an estimated two-hundred million deaths that were the result of people killed intentionally by governments, and perhaps fifty million deaths as the result of warfare. Among governments that were the most prolific in murdering people were the communist USSR, China and the Mao Guerillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and of course Nazi Germany.

According to our conventional way of thinking, nation-states are essentially peaceful and strive to do good things. But occasionally wars or acts of genocide break out. The technique for intervening to prevent political violence that follows from this way of thinking is that of "conflict resolution." If nation-states resolve their differences by reasoning together, then violent political acts will not occur.

The evidence suggests that this model of political violence is false. Based on what occurred in the Twentieth Century—and continues to occur in the Twenty-First—it is more reasonable to hypothesize that there is something inherent within the nature of the nation-state that generates mass-murder. Nations kill a lot of people.  What I wish to focus on in this paper is a case study of how nation-states kill people. I'll discuss the relationship between genocide and warfare in Hitler's Germany, a topic I've been researching for over forty years.

Turkey played a significant role in the First World War.  In the fighting at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, Mustafa Kemal brought his troops to the area where Australians troops were coming ashore and pushing up the slopes. Before the encounter between the two forces, Kemal addressed his troops, uttering a phrase that has become famous. "Men," he declared, "I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die." It seems that just as political leaders can murder people deemed foreign or "not one of us," so they can order the deaths of their own people, specifically soldiers.

The following passages evoke something with which we are familiar:  "We were crowded together like sardines in the cattle car. There were moans, groans, and whimpers in that car; the smell of pus, urine, and it was cold. We lay on straw. The train waited for hours." "Food was our most difficult problem. Our eyes gleamed, like the eyes of famished wolves. Our stomachs were empty and the horizon was devoid of any hope." "We stood in interminable lines, to receive a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea. We had too much food in order to die, but too little in order to live."

"The inability to bathe led to incredibly filthy conditions, which inevitably resulted in a plague of lice. We felt like livestock rather than human beings." "There is only anxiety, fear, and terror, a life without return along with terror without an end." "The heart is overwhelmed at the unbearable thought that the smell of dead bodies is the beginning and end and ultimate sense and purpose of our being."

These passages of course sound like descriptions of death camps written by Jews. In actuality, they are letters written home by German soldiers from the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Like Jews in the death camps, German soldiers—in places like Stalingrad— were starving, freezing and dying.

Hitler was one of sixty-five million men who fought in the First World War, an instance of mass-slaughter generated by nation states. Nine-million men were killed in this war and nearly thirty-million wounded or reported missing. During the period of 1914-1918 across Europe and in the wider world, men were killed on an average of more than six-thousand per day.

Hitler was one of millions who was compelled to hunker down in a trench, and to endure the wet and cold and mud, scarcity of food, rats, bedbugs, and the endless artillery barrages that reigned down upon the pathetic men huddled in holes below the ground.

He witnessed the dismemberment and death of hundreds of his comrades—and experienced the stench of their decaying bodies. Over four-thousand men in his regiment were killed, but Hitler miraculously survived. Two-million German men died in this war and millions more suffered injuries. Hitler was lying in a hospital bed—blinded by poison gas—when the war ended in November 1918.

Hitler was traumatized by Germany's defeat. Had the death of two-million German men been in vain? Hitler became obsessed with the idea that Jewish men had avoided military service—even though this was not the case—they served and died in the same proportion as German men. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that when he returned from the front he was surprised to discover that "all the clerks were Jews and all the Jews were clerks."

Why had Jews not been serving and dying at the front like German men? Why had the best men sacrificed their lives for Germany whereas the worst men had survived? These questions haunted and tormented Hitler. He declared that if there was a war in the future, the next time Jews would die too.

One might expect—based on the horrors he had experienced and witnessed and his knowledge of the massive number of German deaths—that Hitler would have condemned and renounced warfare. But he did not. He refused to acknowledge that the deaths of two-million German men had been in vain and that warfare is horrible and futile. On the contrary, Hitler continued to glorify war and the idea of sacrificial death.

Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that when in the war years death had snatched "so many a dear comrade and friend from our ranks," it would have been a "sin to complain" because after all were these young men not "dying for Germany." Insofar as the young men had died for Germany, Hitler claimed that their deaths had not been a bad thing. He was in a state of denial. He continued to believe in the goodness of Germany—in spite of the fact that his nation had caused the deaths of millions of its soldiers.

One might imagine at least that the German Generals who planned and executed the war—Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenberg—would have been hated and excoriated by Hitler and the German people. However, this was not the case. On the contrary, the two generals became national heroes. Von Hindenburg was elected second President of the Weimar Republic in 1925 and re-elected in 1932.