Mei Ha Chan Executive Director Library of Social Science For information on purchasing this book at a special, discount rate, click here.

Library of Social Science publishes—though our Newsletter—short pieces by Richard Koenigsberg crystallizing his central theorems. Many of you have asked us to contextualize Richard theories—to provide a broader framework.

The best way to get a deeper understanding ideas is to read Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War. We encourage you to purchase this groundbreaking book and are offering it as an e-Book at a special price. Please click through for buying options.

I often ask myself, “Does anyone really understand Richard’s disturbing ideas?” Reading the review below, it appears that some of you “get it.”

Younes Abouyoub observes that—according to Dr. Koenigsberg—nations do not go to war for the “rational” reasons typically put forth by historians. Rather, warfare is generated to create “opportunities for killing and dying.”

That’s it in a nutshell! Beneath the “reasons,” bedrock is the desire to generate death and destruction. Beneath the sound and the fury, the declarations and proclamations, what remains—what is central in each and every war—is the killing and dying.

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Mei Ha Chan
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MeiChan1@libraryofsocialscience.

War is not a means to and end rather os an end in itself. By drawing on the Aztec conception of war as a 'sacred activity,' Dr Koenigsberg compares the First and Second World Wars to the Aztec martial tradition, which consisted in capturing enemy combatants and ceremonially offering them as a sacrifice to the sun. For the Aztec, warriors who fall on the battlefield bring the sun to life; the sun in turn becomes the reincarnation of the warrior. Likewise, Koenigsberg says, by giving their life as an offering, modern soldiers give birth to their nation: 'As the soldier dies, so the Nation comes alive'.

Furthermore, the author examines political violence in its different manifestations and concludes that Genocide like warfare is a societal form of violence not an individual one. Yet while warfare is taken for granted and legitimized in the collective consciousness, genocide is commonly perceived as an anomaly, a transgression of norms established by human societies.

Subtly echoing Hannah Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil,' Dr. Koenigsberg concludes that the Final Solution imagined by the Nazis was not something exceptional in the ideological context of the Twentieth Century, since the logic of genocide grew out of the logic of war. The Second World War and Genocide were after all two sides of the same coin. For Hitler, since German soldiers were dying by the thousands to allow their Nation to live, Jews, whose loyalty was questionable, had to become sacrificial offering to the God that Hitler worshiped i.e. the German Nation. Hence, the Holocaust represented less an aberration than a sacrifice for the German body politic.

Through its analysis of modern warfare, the author questions rightly the concept of 'country' and 'nation.' and wonders why people do have a staunch quasi-religious faith in such concepts. The question of blind obedience is touched upon in many parts of this book but unfortunately never fully developed or answered.

Dr. Koenigsberg advances an interesting thesis to explain political violence and modern warfare. Yet, he could have buttressed his account by providing a more detailed analysis of the question of obedience and the institutional and societal mechanisms government put in place in order maintain 'the established order' and the collective 'fundamental beliefs' that make people obey and 'die for the Nation'.