| The ideology or utopian fantasy that generated the Holocaust was identical to the ideology or utopian fantasy that generated the First World War: In order to promote life, life itself had to sacrificed. |
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This groundbreaking book brings an important spatial perspective to our understanding of genocide through a fresh interpretation of Germany under Hitler, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and China’s Great Leap Forward famine under Mao. James A. Tyner's powerful analysis of these horrifying cases provides insight into the larger questions of sovereignty and state policies that determine who will live and who will die.
James A. Tyner is professor in the Department of Geography at Kent State University.
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James Tyner observes that the Holocaust proceeded based on the paradoxical belief that in order to promote life, "life itself must be sacrificed.” The Holocaust, Tyner said, was born from “a utopian fantasy whereby life sprang from death.”
Did an identical ideology generate the First World War? The idea that the promotion of life required the destruction of human beings?
P. H. Pearse—founder of the Irish Revolutionary movement—was thrilled to observe the carnage of the First World War (1916):
The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this—the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.
What a strange idea to someone who is not familiar with the phantasies that dominated the First World War. That it is good for the world to be warmed with the "red wine of the battlefield" (the blood of human beings). That this offering of blood is as an "offering to God" and a form of "homage:" millions of lives given gladly for love of the country.
The French nationalist Maurice Barrès (1918) had this to say about his nation’s soldiers dying on a daily basis:
Oh you young men whose value is so much greater than ours! They love life, but even were they dead, France will be rebuilt from their souls which are like living stones. The sublime sun of youth sinks into the sea and becomes the dawn which will hereafter rise again.
Infantryman Coningsby Dawson fought in the First World War and published two books during the war. British soldiers
in the noble indignation of a great ideal, face a worse hell than the most ingenious of fanatics ever planned or plotted. Men die scorched like moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, torture. And again, other men step forward to take their places well knowing what will be their fate. Bodies may die, but the spirit of England grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its way.
The death of Englishmen, according to Dawson, enhanced the spirit of England.
Over twenty years later, we find a similar ideology at the root of the Holocaust. According to Hitler, the death of Jews enhanced the spirit of Germany.
One hesitates to characterize these forms of action as "utopian fantasies," but this is what they were. The death of certain classes of human beings (soldiers in the case of the First World War, Jews in the case of the Holocaust) were seen as enhancing the spirit of the nation.
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