KOENIGSBERG: I have a bibliography of 1600 items on war and genocide. My focus has been the First World War, the Holocaust, the Second World War--and the Iraq War (2003). Historians study wars as if each has a distinct cause. They labor intensively and produce fascinating books.

However, the "cause" of most wars...is THE NATION ITSELF. This is what nations are meant to do: to kill and make certain that many people die.

No one expressed this idea better than Hegel. I have produced several quotations below. According to Hegel's theory of history--the purpose of the state is the subordination of the individual; to create the state as "the absolute power on earth."

Every war may be different in its particularities, but on the other hand each and ever war is the same. War exists to enact the will of the state. The "great man" is one who articulates the will of the state, that is, who brings about war in order that people might kill and die--enacting the power of the state.

I didn't read Hegel when I was in college. They threw him at we poor freshmen. His writing was too difficult and obscure. As it turns out, however, his idea is similar to the one I document in Nations have the Right to Kill

"The Nation State is spirit in its actuality is therefore the absolute power on earth. The State is the Spirit of the People itself.  The actual State is animated by this spirit.   Against this Will, other national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World." From G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Law,  331.

All the worth which the human being possesses - all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and The Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. 

PRIMACY OF THE STATE VS. THE INDIVIDUAL: "In civilized nations, true bravery consists in the readiness to give oneself wholly to the service of the State so that the individual counts but as one among many.  Not personal valor alone is significant; the important aspect lies in self-subordination to the universal cause." From G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Law in Jacob Loewenberg (ed.), Hegel: Selections (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 465.

"The origin of a State involves imperious lordship on the one hand, instinctive submission on the other.  Obedience - Lordly power, and the fear inspired by a ruler - in itself implies some degree of voluntary connection. It is not the isolated will of individuals that prevails; individual pretensions are relinquished, and the general will is the essential bond of political union." From G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History in Jacob Loewenberg (ed.), Hegel: Selections (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 398.

THE HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF GREAT MEN: "In public opinion all is false and true, but to discover the truth in it is the business of the great man.  The great man of his time is he who expresses the will and the meaning of that time, and then brings it to completion; he acts according to the inner spirit and essence of his time, which he realizes.  From G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Law in Jacob Loewenberg (ed.), Hegel: Selections (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 461.