Click here for information on ordering The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism A truly bold and provocative treatise. —Political Psychology (Journal)   Click here for information on ordering Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology The best critical analysis in English of Hitler's thought. —Colin Day   Click here for information on ordering Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture A thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the interplay of unconscious phantasy and cultural phenomena. —Thomas Ogden, M.D., author of The Matrix of the Mind   Click here for information on ordering Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War A psychological inquiry of great depth and tragic urgency. —Walter A. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University

Hitler possessed a deep understanding of the Western ideology of warfare; did not shy away from looking at what it is. He understood that in waging war he was asking his own soldiers--his own people--to lay down their lives.

He felt justified in doing so because he believed that any man who loves his people "proves it solely by the sacrifices which he is prepared to make for it." National Socialist ideology was based on the proposition that everyone should act with a "boundless and all embracing love for the people" and if necessary "die for it."

Hitler conceived of war as the occasion upon which soldiers could sacrifice their lives for Germany. By so doing, they expressed their love for and loyalty to their nation. The soldier in war was required to practice "obedience unto death."

The fundamental stance of the soldier in World War I--and probably that of soldiers in most wars--is that of a victim. The soldier is obligated to be obedient to his commanders, even unto death.

In WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, Chris Hedges notes that the myth of battle as aggression "rarely endures for those who experience combat." Soldiers in the moments before real battles weep, vomit, and write last letters home.

Hedges describes his experience of battle: "I felt powerless, humiliated, weak. I dared not move. I could see the little sprays of dust the bullets threw up from the road.”

“Soldiers around me were wounded and crying out in pain. One died yelling out in a sad cadence for his mother. His desperate and final plea seemed to cut through the absurd posturing of soldiering. "Mama!..."Mama!"...Mama!"

Writing about the firefight in which he participated, Hedges states that this was "real war, sensory war, not the war of the movies and books I had consumed in my youth." The experience of war was "disconcerting, frightening, and disorganized, and nothing like the myth I had been peddled...War controlled me. I would never control it." The idea of battle as masculine aggression constitutes the myth or fantasy of warfare.

Wars are not waged. Roy Halliday states, because people are cruel or because men have an aggressive instinct. Wars are made possible because men are so "loyal, compliant, patriotic, and herdlike that their government can easily dupe them into rallying around its battle flag whenever it wants them to."