FROM ANDREW "THE HAMMER" HAMMER

Below is the FOURTH BATCH OF PUBLICATIONS BY RICHARD KOENIGSBERG ON THE THOUGHT PROCESSES AND IDEOLOGIES WHICH GIVE RISE TO WAR AND GENOCIDE. Please CLICK THROUGH EACH LINK BELOW to read full papers or lectures.

Best regards,

Andrew C. Hammer: July 21, 2023. 12:35 PM
  1. Ideology, Perception, and Genocide: How Fantasy Generates History: My method consists of examining ideological statements as manifest content of a dream to reveal the ideology’s latent meaning. I focus upon specific phrases, images and metaphors bound to central terms of an ideology. In the case of Nazism, phrases like “the German nation,” “the German people,” “the Jew,” etc. were central.  Hitler’s Ideology (1975) presents recurring images and metaphors contained within Hitler’s writing and speeches to reconstructing the central fantasies that were enacted as Nazism.
     
  2. If One Aspires to Achieve Peace, One Needs to Know Why People Love War: When UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar realized Saddam Hussein would not withdraw troops from Kuwait—and therefore that his nation would be subjected to a massive assault—he declared: “I cannot imagine that someone wants war for the pleasure of killing his own people.”

    It is customary for national leaders to send soldiers into battle (where death occurs), but Perez’s way of putting it makes us uncomfortable. Using slightly different language, however, our discomfort disappears. One may say that Hussein derived pleasure—once the war had begun—knowing that his people were honorable and virtuous and did not shirk their duty to sacrifice their lives for their country; to die for Iraq.
     
  3. Killing and Dying for the Sacred Object: Commentary on R.D. Hinshelwood: The primary task of an ideology, Hinshelwood says, is to promote devotion to and survival of ideas held by the group. How does it happen that an idea becomes so powerful that people are willing to kill and die for it? I examine how people attach to ‘sacred objects’ conceived as more significant than individual human beings. Collective forms of violence are generated based on perception of ‘enemies’ acting to destroy a sacred object imagined to constitute the foundation of one’s society.
     
  4. Love of War: War is loved because it provides the occasion for sacrificing lives to rescue a society’s sacred ideal. The proof of the pudding is in the dying and killing. One may sacrifice “others” or members of one’s own group. The dream remains the same.  If sacrificing one’s life for a sacred ideal is good, how can war be bad?
     
  5. Making Conscious the Unconscious in Social Reality: Hitler projected his symbiotic fantasy into political units. Austria symbolized Hitler’s body and Germany the body of his mother. Hitler’s political ideology sought destruction of boundaries separating Austria from Germany—so that these two separate bodies politic could fuse into one body. The actualization of this fantasy meant that henceforth the “twofold destinies of Austria and Germany” would be “eternally one.” There would be “no separation of history into Germany and Austria.” When Germany annexed Austria, Hitler fulfilled his infantile wish.
     
  6. Nationalism, Nazism—Genocide: The Nazi movement grew out of an ideology embraced and shared by millions of people. National Socialism enacted propositions or theorems contained within this ideology. Here, I delineate the structure of Nazi ideology: the coherent fantasy that shaped the ideology. I show how the Nazi movement grew out of the libidinal energy contained within this fantasy.