Ideologies of War, Genocide & Terror Website |
We’ve received requests from scholars around the world wanting to know about the current status of our website. Below, in a single issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter, we’ve presented a crystallized version—listing the items now available. Please scroll down the page and click through any link to read a text or view a video. We hope you find this exciting resource valuable as you pursue your own research.
—Best regards, Orion Anderson |
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Founded in 2006, the Ideologies of War, Genocide & Terror Website has attracted a world-wide audience and is considered the premier online resource for scholars investigating the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence. We pose and seek to answer a fundamental question: why are certain ideas embraced so vehemently—with such passion—that human beings are willing to die and kill in their name? The following concepts are central to our investigation:
- Sacrifice: The Roman poet Horace declared, "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." For a time, it seemed that glorification of sacrificial death was on the wane. Islamic terrorism—suicide bombing—revivified the idea of giving one's life for a sacred ideal. What is it about ideologies that compel people to die (and kill) in their name?
- Sacred Ideals: At the core of each ideology lies a sacred ideal. Hitler is viewed as anomalous, but his statement, "We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world," conveys the structure of thought lying behind many forms of societal violence. Sacred ideals transform acts typically viewed as criminal and pathological—into actions considered noble, honorable and praiseworthy.
- The Nation: Nations are symbolic objects—often thought of as real entities—that permeate everyday existence. Yet however ordinary they may be, nations generate extraordinary forms of violence. Societal killing is undertaken in the name of purifying or preserving one's nation by destroying or eliminating "enemies"—imagined to be a threat to its survival.
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Haig, Douglas |
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Features of the War (Report) |
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“Our total losses in the war have been no larger than were to be expected. Neither do they compare unfavorably with those of any other of the belligerent nations. The total British casualties in all theaters of war, killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners, including native troops, are approximately three millions (3,076,388).” |
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Hillgruber, Andreas |
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War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews (Essay) |
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(Citing Hitler, Mein Kampf): “If during the War 12 or 15 thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” |
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Was World War II the Result of Hitler's Master Plan? (Book Excerpts) |
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“The conquest of European Russia was for Hitler inextricably linked with the extermination of these 'bacilli', the Jews. The racist component was so closely interwoven with the central political element of his program, the conquest of European Russia, that Russia's defeat and the extermination of the Jews were inseparable for him.” |
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Himmler, Heinrich |
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Himmler's Speech at Posen, October, 1943 (Speech-Text) |
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“We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill these people who wanted to kill us. But we don’t have the right to enrich ourselves even with one fur, one watch, one mark, one cigarette, or anything else. Just because we eradicated a bacillus doesn’t mean we want to be infected by the bacillus ourselves.” |
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Himmler's Speech on the Extermination of the Jews (Speech-Video) |
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Pozan, Poland, October 4, 1943 - Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, speaks to SS officers for three hours in a secret meeting. He reminds his officers of the loyalty he expects in their extermination of the Jews. |
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Kahn, Paul |
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Crossing the Border Between Law and Sovereignty (Chapter 5 of Sacred Violence) |
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“The sovereign is born in a sacrificial shedding of blood that marks a new appearance of the sacred.” |
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Evil and European Humanism (Paper) |
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“One of the great puzzles of the West is to understand how culture has been tied to practices of evil. One view is that evil arises from the failure of culture – as if the civilizing forces have not been quite strong enough to overcome the brutish state of nature. The opposite view is that nature is innocent and that evil is the product of culture itself.” |
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Imagining Warfare (Article) |
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Law and Theology (Paper) |
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Philosophy and the Politics of Unreason (Paper) |
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“Regardless of its position on health care, the state is also an institution willing to deploy violence, death, and destruction. Our national narrative is organized around killing and being killed, at least as much as it is around the lowering of mortality rates or increasing gross domestic product.” |
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Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Introduction to the Book) |
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Kantorowicz, Ernst H. |
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The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Book Excerpts) |
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“At a certain moment in history the state appeared as a corpus mysticum comparable to the Church. Hence, pro patria mori, death for the sake of that mystico-political body made sense; it became meaningful, as it was considered equal in value to the death for the Christian faith, for the Church, or for the Holy Land.” |
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Kimura, Akio |
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Mishima’s Negative Political Theology: Dying for the Absent Emperor (Essay) |
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With his spectacular suicide, Yukio Mishima reminded the postwar Japanese of what they had believed in during the war; it was not just the emperor as a god but the emperor as God, the absolute and transcendental being. While his behavior should be criticized for its anachronism, Mishima’s theology gives us a clue to understanding the idea that drove many Japanese to sacrificial death. |
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Mendible, Myra |
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Post-Vietnam Syndrome: National Identity, War, and the Politics of Humiliation (Essay) |
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This essay is concerned with the extent to which Vietnam consistently plays out in popular memory as a psychodrama of humiliation, casting America in the role of victim. News pundits, filmmakers, and political leaders alike have exploited the evocative power of this humiliation tale, invoking its stock characters and themes to elicit predictable responses in target audiences. This affective logic binds subjects to cycles of compensatory violence, fueling militaristic strains in America’s political culture and setting the stage for a series of wars and interventions. |
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Strenski, Ivan |
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How to Think About Suicide Bombers |
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I am trying to see how well I can move along understanding of the phenomenon commonly, but problematically, called suicide bombing. As a student of religion, I am particularly interested in seeing how far some of the perspectives developed in the modern study of religion might assist this process of making sense of a troubling phenomenon of our own time. Here, I propose that we need to pay greater attention to the ‘sacrificial’ designations of these “human bombings”. |
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Thorup, Mikkel |
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Total Enemies: Understanding “The Total Enemy” through Schmitt, Arendt, Foucault, and Agamben |
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When, after the end of the Nazi regime, a doctor who participated in the mass killings was asked how he could reconcile the Hippocratic Oath with his actions during the war, the doctor said: “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.” |
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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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