WARFARE AS TORTURE:
MAKING PRESENT SOVEREIGN POWER

From Paul H. Kahn, Sacred Violence

A group of people lying on the ground

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“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. Viewing the battlefield from a certain distance, it is not even clear who is the object of sacrifice: the enemy and the conscript suffer the same threat and burden of physical destruction for the sake of making present sovereign power.”