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We continue with our presentation of entries on our IDEOLOGIES OF WAR, GENOCIDE AND TERROR WEBSITE, featuring some of the greatest authors that have ever published on the dynamics of collective forms of violence.

Please scroll down to review the titles and links.

We hope you will take the opportunity to move your own research and writing forward by clicking through to any link to read the paper or view the video.

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MHGS

Ideologies of War, Genocide & Terror 
Publications & Video: Volume IV: I-M

Iraq Body Count

• Total violent deaths including combatants (Statistics)

Isaacs, Susan

• The Nature and Function of Phantasy, in: International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (Paper)

Jones, Adam

• Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Book Chapters)

Jones, James

• Why Does Religion Turn Violent? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Religious Terrorism (Paper)

Kahn, Paul

• Crossing the Border Between Law and Sovereignty (Chapter 5 of Sacred Violence)

  “The sovereign is born in a sacrificial shedding of blood that marks a new appearance of the sacred.”

• Evil and European Humanism (Paper)

  “One of the great puzzles of the West is to understand how culture has been tied to practices of evil. One view is that evil arises from the failure of culture – as if the civilizing forces have not been quite strong enough to overcome the brutish state of nature. The opposite view is that nature is innocent and that evil is the product of culture itself.”

• Imagining Warfare (Article)
   
• Law and Theology (Paper)
   
• Philosophy and the Politics of Unreason (Paper)

  “Regardless of its position on health care, the state is also an institution willing to deploy violence, death, and destruction. Our national narrative is organized around killing and being killed, at least as much as it is around the lowering of mortality rates or increasing gross domestic product.”

• Political Evil: Killing, Sacrifice, and the Image of God (Chapter 5 of Out of Eden)

  “The willingness to sacrifice for the creation and maintenance of political meanings always appears inconceivable to those outside of the community.”

• Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Introduction to the Book)
   
• Torture and International Law (Chapter 2 of Sacred Violence)

  “We have not so much abandoned the practice of torture as shifted its locus. The battlefield is strewn with the disemboweled and beheaded, with severed limbs and broken bodies. All have died a terrible death in a display of sovereign power. To view the battlefield is to witness the awesome power of the sovereign to occupy and destroy the finite body; to stand before the modern, democratic equivalent of the spectacle of the scaffold.”

Kantorowicz, Ernst H.

• The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Book Excerpts)

  “At a certain moment in history the state appeared as a corpus mysticum comparable to the Church. Hence, pro patria mori, death for the sake of that mystico-political body made sense; it became meaningful, as it was considered equal in value to the death for the Christian faith, for the Church, or for the Holy Land.”

Keim, Randy

• War Memorials, Anzac, and National Identity (Paper)

Kimura, Akio

• Mishima’s Negative Political Theology: Dying for the Absent Emperor

  With his spectacular suicide, Yukio Mishima reminded the postwar Japanese of what they had believed in during the war; it was not just the emperor as a god but the emperor as God, the absolute and transcendental being. While his behavior should be criticized for its anachronism, Mishima’s theology gives us a clue to understanding the idea that drove many Japanese to sacrificial death.

Krauthammer, Charles

• America, Battle-Tested (Article)

Lacquement, Jr., Richard A.

• The Casualty Aversion Myth (Paper)

Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie

• Does Sacrifice Avert Violence? Reflections from Nepal and the People’s War (Paper)
   
• Martyrs and Living Martyrs of the People’s War in Nepal (Paper)
   
• “KILL ONE, HE BECOMES ONE HUNDRED” Martyrdom as Generative Sacrifice in the Nepal People’s War (Paper)

Library of Social Science

• Review Essay of Carolyn Marvin & David Ingle’s Book Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag

  What is really true in any community is “what its members can agree is worth killing for,” or what they can be compelled to sacrifice their lives for. What is “sacred” within a given society is that set of beliefs “for which we ought to shed our own blood.” Warfare constitutes the central ritual allowing societies to enact or demonstrate faith in the nation.

• Review Essay of Ivan Strenski’s Book Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France

  Nationalists attacked the deplorable state of French morale. Intellectuals were derided for “egoism” and “lazy melancholy;” workers for lack of enthusiasm for collective causes. War represented a spiritual force that would “bind citizens into common service for the nation,” incubating a spirit of national unity. Just as Jesus’ death cleansed the sins of humanity, so common soldiers’ self-sacrifices were seen as expiation for France’s sins.

• Review Essay of Ruth Stein’s Book For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism

  Collective forms of violence are perpetuated in the name of an ideal that binds the group together and functions to “sanctify the actions of a (collective) perpetrator on a (collective) victim.” Large scale forms of violence are undertaken in the name of an ideal object that can move groups to decree the liquidation of anything that “challenges its validity and superiority.” Forms of behavior deemed criminal on the individual level may be “condoned and encouraged when perpetrated collectively.”

Lim, Timothy C.

• Constructivism and International Relations (Presentation Slides)

Linderman, Gerald F.

• Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (Book Excerpts)

  “The linkage between honor and courage manifested itself in Civil War solders’ frequent referenced to the ‘honorable death’—inevitably the courageous death— and the ‘honorable wound’—inevitably suffered in the course of courageous action.”

Lockwood, Renee

• Sacrifice and the Creation of Group of Identity: Case Studies of Gallipoli and Masada

  “It has often been acknowledged that nations are born of war. Yet recent scholarship suggests that it is not the sacrifice of the enemy that creates a unified group identity, but the sacrifice of the group’s own. This essay demonstrates the truth of this hypothesis on the basis of two primary case studies: the ‘sacrifices’ made at Gallipoli and Masada.”

MacMillan, Margaret

• The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War (Essay with Photos)

Mahoney, Mark J.

• The Death Penalty: Three (of Four) New Perspectives (Essay)

Marklund, Andreas

• The Manly Sacrifice: Martial Manliness and Patriotic Martyrdom in Nordic Propaganda during the Great Northern War (Paper)

Martin, Emily

• Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State (Paper)

Marvin, Carolyn

• A New Scholarly Dispensation for Civil Religion (Book Chapter)
• Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion (Paper)
• Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Book Excerpts)
• The Totem Myth: Sacrifice and Transformation (Book Chapter)

Mayer, Ruth, & Weingart, Brigitte

• Discursive Contamination: Terrorism, the Body Politic, and the Virus as Trope (Paper)

McPherson, James

• For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Book Excerpts)

  “Civil War soldiers wrote much about courage, bravery, valor—the mark of honor. But they wrote even more about cowardice—the mark of dishonor. Most wanted to avoid the shame of being known as a coward—this is what gave them courage. Civil War soldiers went forward into a hail of bullets because they were more afraid of showing the ‘white feather’ than they were of death.”

Mendible, Myra

• Post-Vietnam Syndrome: National Identity, War, and the Politics of Humiliation

  This essay is concerned with the extent to which Vietnam consistently plays out in popular memory as a psychodrama of humiliation, casting America in the role of victim. News pundits, filmmakers, and political leaders alike have exploited the evocative power of this humiliation tale, invoking its stock characters and themes to elicit predictable responses in target audiences. This affective logic binds subjects to cycles of compensatory violence, fueling militaristic strains in America’s political culture and setting the stage for a series of wars and interventions.

Mertz, David

• The Racial Other in Nationalist Subjectivations: A Lacanian Analysis (Paper)

Mineau, André

• SS Thinking and the Holocaust (Book Extracts)

Moghadam, Assaf

• Motives for Martyrdom: Al-Qaida, Salafi Jihad, and the Spread of Suicide Attacks (Paper)

Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik

• From Iwo Jima to Iraq (Video)
   
• War and National Renewal: Civil Religion and Blood Sacrifice in American Culture (Paper)

Mosse, George L.

• National Cemeteries and National Revival: The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Germany (Paper)

  “The cult of the fallen assimilated basic themes of Christianity. The exclamation ‘Now we are made sacred’ implied an analogy of the sacrifice in war to the passion and resurrection of Christ.”

Mumford, Lewis

• The Myth of the Machine (Vol. II): The Pentagon of Power (Book Excerpts)
   
• The Myth of the Machine (Volume I): Technics & Human Development (Book Excerpts)

Murphy, Raymond E.

• National Socialism: Basic Principles, Their Application by the Nazi Party’s Foreign Organization, and the Use of Germans Abroad for Nazi Aims (Government Document, U.S. Department of State)