Dear Colleague,

Library of Social Science's IDEOLOGIES OF WAR, GENOCIDE AND TERROR WEBSITE is considered one of the world's most valuable resources presenting research on the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence. 

Beginning in 2008, Orion Anderson and Richard Koenigsberg began identifying the most significant papers, lectures, videos and source documents. We're presenting the results now through a series of Newsletters. Please scroll down to review the titles and links. Please click through any link to read the paper or view the video.

Best regards,

MHGS

PS: Among authors whose writings are included in Volume I are: Scott Atran, Omer Bartov, Paul Berman, Richard Bessel, Peter Bloom, Daniel Brownstein, Morton Braenden, and Phillippe Burrin.

Ideologies of War, Genocide & Terror 
Publications & Video

Ackerman, John Wolfe

• Why Political Theology Again? Reviewing Paul W.Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty and Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Book Review)

Alvarez, Josefina Echavarría

• Re-thinking (in)security discourses from a critical perspective (Paper)

Anderson, Orion

• Selected Photos from World War I
• Selected Photos from World War II and the Holocaust
• Selected Photos of Dead Soldiers in Trenches (World War I)

Aroneau, Eugène

• Inside the Concentration Camps: Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler’s Death Camps (Book Excerpts)

Atran, Scott

• For Cause and Comrade: Devoted Actors and Willingness to Fight (Paper)

  This report provides initial evidence that ‘devoted actors’ who are unconditionally committed to a sacred cause, willingly make costly sacrifices—including fighting and dying.

• Reframing Sacred Values (Paper)

  People believe that devotion to essential or core values—such as the welfare of their family and country, or their commitment to religion, honor, and justice—are absolute and inviolable.

• War as a Moral Imperative (Not Just Practical Politics by Other Means) (Paper)

Atta, Mohamed

• Last Words of a Terrorist (letter/document)

Ayling, Douglas

• Consider the way in which Zizek’s focus on fantasy has helped him to develop the notion of ideology and how it works. (Paper)

Azzam, Shiekh Abdullah

• Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations (Lecture)

  “History does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its loft edifice except with skulls, Honour and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.”

Bailey, J. & Susman, M.

• Caring Corrupted: the Killing Nurses of the Third Reich (Video Documentary)

Baird, J. W.

• To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Book Excerpts)

  “During the Great War, propagandists and poets alike joined hands in exalting the blood sacrifice of the youth of Germany, thus transforming carnage into ethereal national revelation.”

Bartov, Omer

• Genocide and War: The Holocaust as a War Goal or an Obstacle to Victory (Video)

  “From: Symposium Marking 70 Years Since the Wannsee Conference The Organization of the Mass Murder of the Jews and Its Significance (Yad Vashem, January 23, 2012)”

• Industrial Killing: World War I, the Holocaust, and Representation (Lecture)

Behnke, Andreas

• ‘Postmodernising’ Security (Paper)

Behrenbeck, Sabine

• The Transformation of Sacrifice: German Identity Between Heroic Narrative and Economic Success (Book Chapter)

Bein, Alex

• The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with Special Reference to Germany (Paper)

Berger, Peter

• The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Book Excerpts)
• The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Book Excerpts)

Berman, Paul

• Terror and Liberalism (Book Excerpts)

  “It is odd to think that tens of millions of people might end up joining a pathological political movement. Surely, millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies.”

Bessel, Richard

• Nazism and War (Book Excerpts)

  “Only weeks before unconditional surrender, on April 7, 1945, Donitz called upon all naval officers to fight to the bitter end. Military police and SS units patrolled behind the lines to catch and kill any soldier who might be suspected of desertion.”

Bin Laden, Osama

• Declaration of War Against the Americans (Text)
• Interview with Osama Bin Laden (Interview)

Bloom, Peter

• Fighting the “Real” Enemy: Fantasizing the Liberal “Final Solution”

  Enemies, whether or not they constitute an actual threat, reflect an illusionary identity connected to a collective cultural fantasy. This paper seeks to construct a theory for understanding the universal political and cultural role of paranoia, demonization and enemy creation. It highlights the affective “grip” of ideologies revolving around a mass fear of enemies across time and contexts. Selfhood is constructed through the presence of a “fantasamatic narrative” centering on the eternal struggle to realize a promised utopian state against the constant threat of a malicious “Other”.

Bloxham, Donald

• The Final Solution: A Genocide (Review Essay)

  Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Commentary by Jürgen Matthäus, Martin Shaw, Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen & Donald Bloxham.

Bonadeo, Alfredo

• Mark of the Beast: Death and Degradation in the Literature of the Great War (Book Excerpts)

  “Only men who know how to overcome their ‘personal material egoism’ can understand that war is ‘desirable and holy’—because it brings death, and death welds the individual to the nation (Enrico Corradini).”

Bowman, Glen

• Xenophobia, Fantasy and the Nation: The Logic of Ethnic Violence in Former Yugoslavia (Book Chapter)

Brown, Norman O.

• Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Book Excerpts)

• Who created the symbolic order? What is the source of the “power” of society? Freud observed that the mythological conception of the universe is fundamentally psychology projected into the external world. Brown suggests that not just mythology, but the entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Stephen Spender: “The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.”

Browning, Christopher S. & McDonald, Matt

• The Future of Critical Security Studies: Ethics and the Politics of Security (Paper)

Brownstein, Daniel

• Mapping the New Authoritarianism? Trumpism, Tampons, and the Nation’s Electorate (Article)

Bryson, Michael

• Dismemberment and Community: Sacrifice and the Communal Body in the Hebrew Scriptures

  “The formation of community is inextricably bound up with violence in the Hebrew scriptures. The first murderer becomes the first city-founder. The first unified action by the tribes of Israel—the first not in response to an external threat—results from the dismembering of a woman’s body.”

Brænder, Morton

• Justifying the Ultimate Sacrifice: Civil and Military Religion in Frontline Blogs (Dissertation)
• Justifying the Ultimate Sacrifice: Civil and Military Religion in Frontline Blogs (Excerpts)

Bteddini, Lida

• Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Paper)

Buhrmester, Michael & Swann Jr., William

• Identity Fusion (Paper)

Burrin, Philippe

• Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (Book Excerpts)

  “Hitler viewed his war against the Jews as a battle for the salvation of the world, a fight to the death that could only end with the extinction of one of the two adversaries.”

Buzan, Barry

• Security Concepts (Video Series)