| Ideologies of War, Genocide & Terror |
| Part VIII: Vlahos - Winters |
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This is the eighth (and final) Newsletter presenting entries from the Ideologies of War website. This issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter includes links to:
- Michael Vlahos on America is a religion
- Michael Vlahos on "Drone Killings" (WABC radio)
- Video excerpts from The Matrix
- Eric Weitz on genocide in the 20th century
- Robert Whalen on German victims of the First World War
- Human Wave Attacks
- Jeanne Willette on digital publishing
- Jonah Winters on martyrdom in jihad
Please take your time reviewing the list of items below.
Then click through to read any document. |
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| Vlahos, Michael |
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America is a Religion |
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The great sociologist Robert Bellah called America a civil religion in 1967, and he was met with denial and disbelief. Perhaps if he had just gone a bit further he might have mercifully lifted the veil for all of us: America is not just civil religion — it is honest-to-God church religion. |
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America: Imagined Community, Imagined Kinship |
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Imagined kinship is the foundation of national community. Imagined kinship is the cultural process that permits people in a society to collectively believe that they belong to each other—that they are part of the same kinship construct—even though they are most likely strangers to each other. Imagined community also makes the state the trusted manager of this process—powerfully affirming our connection and commitment to each other, for example, in war—so that the collective kinship construct is essential to the very idea of a modern nation state. |
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Counterterrorism, American Exceptionalism, and Retributive Justice |
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“Terrorism” inhabits America’s civil-religious consciousness just as it did for Tacitus, representing “the enemy of mankind:” as an affront to light and truth. Terrorism, in the American experience, issues a divine test: Is America still beloved of the Almighty, and still his agent to redeem humankind? If not, then what shall be America’s path? |
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“Drone Killings, American Exceptionalism—and Retributive Justice” (Audio, John Batchelor Show, WABC) |
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| Weiner, Robert |
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Prof. Robert Weiner: The Nature & Impact of WWI (Video) |
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“All the capacity of industrial society—straining at the bit for destruction. One of the French soldiers called it extermination. I call it routinized, mechanized genocide: The genocide of people on their own citizens.” |
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| Whalen, Robert |
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Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1939 (Book Excerpts) |
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Disabled veteran speaking at a convention in 1930: “Everyone here sensed the demonic quality of the war. It was like some elemental catastrophe, which threw the entire planet into torment. We who have lived through this inferno can never be free from it." |
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German Casualties of the First World War (Statistics) |
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“The Great War lasted fifty-two and a half months. Roughly 9,500,000 soldiers, from all nations, were killed, which comes to about 181,000 deaths per month, or about 6,302 deaths every 24 hours. Of some 15.6 million males born between 1870 and 1899, about 13 percent died in the 52 ½ months of the Great War.” |
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| White, Matthew |
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Wars of the Twentieth Century (Statistics) |
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“Approximately 35 to 40 million soldiers have died in the wars of the Twentieth Century, nearly three quarters of them in the two World Wars.” |
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