Well, the Hammer created a notebook for me, summing up the Newsletters I've been sending out. It is a list. There are about 26 Newsletter titles on each page, approximately 93 pages. The first Newsletter (on this iContact venue) was created on June 16, 2008, at 5:05am, the most recent (before this one) on March 21, 2024, at 8:07am. War and genocide, warfare and the Final Solution, with a bit of terrorism thrown in. 

If my mathematics are correct, this comes out to sixteen-years of Newsletters. The iContact program counts them diligently. There has been a total of 3889 Newsletters, 3890 once this one goes out this evening (it's almost 1am in New York City).

What was that novel we read in our freshman year of college? The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad? My freshman English teacher, Professor Ihab Hassan, had a witty(?) phrase, THE HEART OF DARKNESS IS A DARKNESS OF THE HEART. 

I've been living in this heart of darkness all these years, actually much longer than this--my serious research on war and genocide began in 1989. Actually, longer than this, I wrote my first paper on this topic in 1968.

Why this obsession?

Well, I studied with Norman O. Brown in my Freshman year in college at the moment Wesleyan University Press published Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History in 1959. What was I to do? Run away from the obligation?

Some obsessive preoccupation with KNOWING THE TRUTH on my part, which I've never abandoned. Can I put together a coherent theory, as Darwin did, from all the Newsletters and my Bibliography of nearly 3000 items? This remains to be seen.

I call what I've been studying "the nightmare of history." The nightmare has always been with us. But people viewed this nightmare as "normal history." Rudolph Rummel computes that over 300 million people died in the Twentieth Century as a result of political violence. Well, that's how it goes. That's "history."

But why have we taken "history" for granted? Why have we assumed that an endless series of mass-murders captures the essence or truth of the human being? Well, historians have to write history books. But they take all of this for granted, massive psychopathology as normality.

I see massive psychopathology as massive psychopathology. Why this endless stream of mass-murders? Well, I just finished reading through my notebook containing 3889 Newsletters. The Newsletters themselves are preserved right here within this iContact program you are receiving. Every single one of them. You can read every single one.

Perhaps some of you have the courage to encounter and study these Newsletters--which articulate the nightmare in which we all have been living: The NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY.

Richard A. Koenigsberg