Carolyn Marvin agrees with my sacrificial theory of warfare. She boldly proclaims in Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: “We portray soldiers as aggressive warriors so that we can kill them more easily.”

Freud theorizes that sadism is the extroversion of the death instinct. The primary wish is to die. As a protective defense, human beings push aggression, violence and sadism outward, defending themselves against their own wish to die.

Warfare is an externalization or defense against the death instinct.

Hitler is a political example of how this mechanism worked. He attempted to destroy human beings and the nations in which they resided through shooting, bombing, etc., not to mention the torture and killing that occurred in death camps.

Finally, however, the extroversion of his death wish in the form of conquest, killing and torturing spent itself and everything returned in the opposite direction. Now as Germany was conquered, and Germans were killed and tortured. No amount of violence, sadism or aggression--whatever one wishes to call it--could save Hitler.

The death-instinct was the winner: Hitler committed suicide.

One might say that the millions of Germans who were killed in the last years of the war was the true "Final Solution."

Richard Koenigsberg