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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
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.
Ackerman, John Wolfe
Why Political Theology Again? Reviewing Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty and Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Book Review)
Alvarez, Josefina Echavarría
Re-thinking (in)security discourses from a critical perspective (Paper)
Anderson, Orion
Selected Photos of Dead Soldiers in Trenches (World War I)
Selected Photos from World War I
Selected Photos from World War II and the Holocaust
Atran, Scott
War as a Moral Imperative (Not Just Practical Politics by Other Means) (Paper)
Atta, Mohamed
Last Words of a Terrorist (Letter/Document)
Bartov, Omer
“Genocide and War: The Holocaust as a War Goal or an Obstacle to Victory” (Video)
Industrial Killing: World War I, the Holocaust, and Representation (Lecture)
Behnke, Andreas
‘Postmodernising’ Security (Paper)
Bein, Alex
The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with Special Reference to Germany (Paper)
Berman, Paul
Terror and Liberalism (Book Excerpts)
Bessel, Richard
Nazism and War (Book Excerpts)
Bin Laden, Osama
Declaration of War Against the Americans (Text)
Interview with Osama Bin Laden (Interview)
Bloom, Peter
Fighting the “Real” Enemy: Fantasizing the Liberal “Final Solution” (Essay)
Bonadeo, Alfredo
Mark of the Beast: Death and Degradation in the Literature of the Great War (Book Excerpts)
Bowman, Glen
Xenophobia, Fantasy and the Nation: The Logic of Ethnic Violence in Former Yugoslavia (Book Chapter)
Browning, Christopher S. & McDonald, Matt
The Future of Critical Security Studies: Ethics and the Politics of Security (Paper)
Brownstein, Daniel
Mapping the New Authoritarianism? Trumpism, Tampons, and the Nation’s Electorate (Article)
Bteddini, Lida
Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Paper)
Buhrmester, Michael & Swann Jr., William
Identity Fusion (Paper)
Burrin, Philippe
Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (Book Excerpts)
Buzan, Barry
Security Concepts (Video Series)
Campbell, David
Writing Security (Article)
Carpentier, Nico
Strengthening Cultural War Studies (Book Chapter)
Caverly, Matthew M.
Nazi Militarism (Paper)
Chirila, Alexander
Creating the Idealized Nemesis: The Collective Psychology of the Red Scare
Cocks, Geoffrey
The Body Politic: Hitler, Paranoia, and “the Jew” in Modern Germany (Essay)
Conversi, Daniele
Modernism and Nationalism (Paper)
War and Nationalism (Article)
Crim, Brian E.
Wernher von Braun’s “Rocket Team” and America’s Military-Industrial Complex (Essay)
Demopoulos, Panayiotis
Götterdämmerung: Suicide Music and the National Self as Enemy (Essay)
Denton-Borhaug, Kelly
De-escalating U.S. War-culture: A Primer for Peace Advocates (Presentation)
Frank, Walter S.
The Reality of Battle: First World War, 1914-1918 (Book Excerpts)
Frčkoski, Ljubomir
Restless Nationalism (Book)
Freud, Sigmund
The Mechanism of Paranoia (Book Excerpt)
Fritz, Stephen G.
Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Book Excerpts)
"We are Trying... to Change the Face of the World"—Ideology and Motivation in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: The View from Below (Paper)
Gardiner, Steven
Heroic Masochism: Masculine Privilege and the Uses of Pain (Paper)
Gentile, Emilio
A Never-Never Religion, A Substitute for Religion, or a New Religion?
Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism (Paper)
Geyer, Michael
“There is a Land Where Everything is Pure: Its Name is Land of Death” (Book Excerpts)
Goebbels, Joseph
Dr. Goebbels' Last Broadcast Speech, April 25, 1945 (Video)
The Jews are Guilty”: An attack on the Jews, November 16, 1941 (Essay/Speech)
Goldhagen, Daniel
A reply to my critics: Motives, causes, and alibis (Article)
Hitler's Willing Executioners (Book Excerpts)
Goschler, Juliana
Embodiment and Body Metaphors (Paper)
Griffin, Roger
Longing to Belong: Cultivating Transcultural Humanism as a Source of Identity (Paper)
Shattering Crystals: The Role of ‘Dream Time’ in Extreme Right-Wing Political Violence (Paper)
Staging the Nation’s Rebirth (Book Chapter)
The Metapolitics of Terrorist Radicalization (Paper)
The Palingenetic Core of Generic Fascist Ideology (Book Chapter)
Gullestad, Anders M.
Parasite (Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon) (Paper)
Haig, Douglas
Features of the War (Report)
  “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).”
Harendra de Silva, D. G.
The Use of Child Soldiers in War with Special Reference to Sri Lanka (Article)
Hassan, Nasra
An Arsenal of Believers: Talking to the “human bombs” (Article)
Hemming, Judy & McKinley, Michael
Major Wars and Regional Responses in Australia and New Zealand: International Relations as Apologetics and Exegesis (and Inadequate) (Paper)
Henry, Adam
Nationalism, Politics, History and War (Article)
Herf, Jeffrey
Narratives of Totalitarianism: Nazism’s Anti-Semitic Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Paper)
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Book Chapter)
The Jewish Enemy (Book Excerpts)
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Video Presentation)
The Jewish Enemy: Rethinking Anti-Semitism in the Era of Nazism and in Recent Times (Paper)
The “Jewish War”: Goebbels and the Antisemitic Campaigns of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry (Paper)
Hicks, Stephen
Explaining Nazism Philosophically (Book Chapter)
National Socialist Philosophy (Audio Chapter)
National Socialist Philosophy (Book Chapter)
Hillgruber, Andreas
War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews (Essay)
  (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.”
Was World War II the Result of Hitler's Master Plan? (Book Excerpts)
  “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.”
Himmler, Heinrich
Himmler's Speech at Posen, October, 1943 (Speech-Text)
  “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.”
Himmler's Speech on the Extermination of the Jews (Speech-Video)
  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.
Hinchliffe, Alexander
Contamination and Containment: Representing the Pathologised Other in 1950s American Cinema (Dissertation)
Hinton, Alexander
Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (eBook)
Hippler, Fritz
The Eternal Jew (Video, Nazi propaganda film)
Hitler, Adolf
Mass Nationalistic Insanity (Video)
  Excerpt from the 1935 Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will, chronicling the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 supporters.
Mein Kampf (Book)
Metaphor of the Jewish Parasite: “The National Body is Being Consumed” (from Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology)
Sacrifice (from Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology)
The Political Testament of Adolf Hitler
Hitler Historical Museum
World War 2 Death Count (Statistics)
Hobbes, Thomas
Frontispiece to Leviathan (Image)
Hussein, Saddam
Address by the Iraqi President to Mark the 82nd Anniversary of the Establishment of the Country's Army (Speech, Jan. 6, 2003)
President Saddam Hussein's Address on the 9th Anniversary of the Grand Battle, "Mother of all Battles" (Speech, Jan. 17, 2000)
Iraq Body Count
Total violent deaths including combatants (Statistics)
Jones, Adam
Case Study: Soviet Prisoners-of-War (POWs), 1941-42 (Paper)
  “In a mere eight months of 1941-42, the invading German armies killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war through starvation, exposure, and summary execution. This little-known gendercide vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated mass killing in human history.”
Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Book Chapters)
Jones, James
Why Does Religion Turn Violent? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Religious Terrorism (Paper)
Kahn, Paul
Crossing the Border Between Law and Sovereignty (Chapter 5 of Sacred Violence)
  “The sovereign is born in a sacrificial shedding of blood that marks a new appearance of the sacred.”
Evil and European Humanism (Paper)
  “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.”
Imagining Warfare (Article)
Law and Theology (Paper)
Philosophy and the Politics of Unreason (Paper)
  “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.”
Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Introduction to the Book)
Kantorowicz, Ernst H.
The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Book Excerpts)
  “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.”
Keim, Randy
War Memorials, Anzac, and National Identity (Paper)
Kimura, Akio
Mishima’s Negative Political Theology: Dying for the Absent Emperor (Essay)
  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.
Krauthammer, Charles
America, Battle-Tested (Article)
Lacquement, Jr., Richard A.
The Casualty Aversion Myth (Paper)
Levene, Mark
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, Vol. 2: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (Book)
Lim, Timothy C.
Constructivism and International Relations (Presentation Slides)
MacMillan, Margaret
The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War (Essay with Photos)
Mahoney, Mark J.
The Death Penalty: Three (of Four) New Perspectives (Essay)
Marx, Anthony W.
Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Book, Chapter 1)
Mayer, Ruth, & Weingart, Brigitte
Discursive Contamination: Terrorism, the Body Politic, and the Virus as Trope (Paper)
Mendible, Myra
Post-Vietnam Syndrome: National Identity, War, and the Politics of Humiliation (Essay)
  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.
Mineau, André
SS Thinking and the Holocaust (Book Extracts)
Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik
From Iwo Jima to Iraq (Video)
War and National Renewal: Civil Religion and Blood Sacrifice in American Culture (Paper)
Mumford, Lewis
The Myth of the Machine (Volume I): Technics & Human Development (Book Excerpts)
The Myth of the Machine (Vol. II): The Pentagon of Power (Book Excerpts)
Musolff, Andreas
Health and Illness of the Leviathan. Hobbes’s Use of the Commonplace Metaphor of the Body Politic (Paper)
Immigrants and Parasites: The History of a Bio-social Metaphor (Paper)
Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic (Book Extracts)
Metaphorical Parasites and "Parasitic" Metaphors: Semantic Exchanges Between Political and Scientific Vocabularies (Paper)
The metaphor of the “body politic” across languages and cultures (Paper)
What can Critical Metaphor Analysis Add to the Understanding of Racist Ideology? Recent Studies of Hitler’s Anti-Semitic Metaphors (Paper)
What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice? The function of antisemitic imagery in Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Paper)
Neocleous, Mark
The Fate of the Body Politic (Paper)
Neumann, Boaz
The Phenomenology of the German People’s Body (Volkskörper) and the Extermination of the Jewish Body (Paper)
O'Brien, Gerald V.
Indigestible Food, Conquering Hordes, and Waste Materials: Metaphors of Immigrants and the Early Immigration Restriction Debate in the United States
  The central feature of the organism metaphor is that the social community is viewed as analogous to a physical body. Just as the integrity of our own bodies may be threatened by contaminating external elements, so too is the social body vulnerable to corruption by invading sub-groups.
Social Justice Implications of the Organism Metaphor
  The denigration of marginalized groups is frequently supported through the widespread employment of metaphors that present a pejorative image of the group in question. The organism metaphor, wherein the target group is portrayed as a threat to the integrity of the social body, is a particularly important metaphoric theme in the advancement of social injustice.
O’Donnell, Meghan
Dangerous Undercurrent: Death, Sacrifice and Ruin in Third Reich Germany
  Beneath the Nazi façade of racial supermen and cultural glory, another ideology developed, one obsessed with death, ruin and martyrdom which helped bring Hitler’s Germany to its apex, and then to its ultimate climactic end.
O'Dwyer, Thomas
Not The 9 O'Clock News (Article)
Osho/Rajneesh
Waking Up the World (Video)
Paprocki, Maciej
Infecting the body politic? Modern and post-modern (ab)use of IMMIGRANTS ARE INVADING PATHOGENS metaphor in American socio-political discourse (Paper)
Petrović, Predrag
Enemy as the Essence of the Political (Article)
Rayle, Crystal
Captives of Hell: The Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War Captured by the Nazi Army 1941-1942 (Paper)
Romaniuk, Scott Nicholas
Becoming Hitler's Army: Nazi Killers and the Making of Genocidal Warfare (Paper)
Rummel, Rudolph J.
20th Century Democide (Statistics)
  “The new total for the 20th Century = 262,000,000.”
20th Century Mortacracies (Statistics)
Definition of Democide (Book Chapter)
Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers (Book Chapter)
War Isn't This Century's Biggest Killer (Article)
Sang, Hea Kil
A Diseased Body Politic (Paper)
Scarry, Elaine
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Book Excerpts)
Schmelowszky, Ágoston
The Corporation: Variants of an Unconscious Phantasy in European Cultural Discourse (Paper)
Seiyo, Takuan
The Last Samurai and Europe's First Suicide (Article)
Sharpe, Matthew
The Sociopolitical Limits of Fantasy: September 11 and Slavoj Zizek's Theory of Ideology (Paper)
Snider, Don M.
Army Professionalism, The Military Ethic, and Officership in the 21st Century (Report)
Sokołowska-Paryż, Marzena
Reimagining the War Memorial, Reinterpreting the Great War (Book Excerpt)
Spencer, Alexander
The Social Construction of Terrorism: Media, Metaphors and Policy Implications (Article)
Spielberg, Steven
Omaha Beach Landing, June 6, 1944 (Video, excerpt from Saving Private Ryan)
Stein, Ruth
Evil as Love and as Liberation: The Mind of a Suicidal Religious Terrorist (Paper)
Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire (Paper)
Stickle, Douglas R.
Malignants in the Body Politic: Redefining War through Metaphor (Paper)
Strenski, Ivan
How to Think About Suicide Bombers
  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”.
Suzuki, Shunryu
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Book Excerpts)
Swann Jr., William
When Group Membership Gets Personal: A Theory of Identity Fusion (Paper)
Thorup, Mikkel
Total Enemies: Understanding “The Total Enemy” through Schmitt, Arendt, Foucault, and Agamben
  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.”
Trueman, Chris
First World War Casualties (Statistics)
Tunç, Hakan
What Was It All About After All? The Causes of the Iraq War (Paper)
Tustin, Francis
Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients (Book Excerpt)
Twemlow, Stuart W.
The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death (Paper)
Tyson, Paul
The key role of Myth in Australian Refugee and Asylum Seeker Policy (Paper)
Vlahos, Michael
America is a Religion
  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.
America: Imagined Community, Imagined Kinship
  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.
Counterterrorism, American Exceptionalism, and Retributive Justice
  “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?
“Drone Killings, American Exceptionalism—and Retributive Justice” (Audio, John Batchelor Show, WABC)
Vuorinen, Marja
Enemy Images in War Propaganda (Book Excerpt)
von Urach, Albrecht Fürst
The Secret of Japan's Strength (Booklet)
Wachowski Brothers, The
The Matrix (1999) (Video Excerpts)
Wæver, Ole
Securitization and Desecuritization (Chapter 3 of Lipschutz, R. On Security)
Securitisation Theory - International Relations (Video)
Waldman, Paul
American War Dead, By the Numbers (Article)
Warner, Frank
Dictatorships’ Death Toll (Statistics)
  “262 million murdered in the 20th century -- and not by war”
Weiner, Robert
Prof. Robert Weiner: The Nature & Impact of WWI (Video)
  “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.”
Weitz, Eric D.
Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Book Chapter)
Wertham, Fredric
The Geranium in the Window: The "Euthanasia" Murder (Book Chapter)
Whalen, Robert
Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1939 (Book Excerpts)
  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."
German Casualties of the First World War (Statistics)
  “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.”
White, Matthew
Wars of the Twentieth Century (Statistics)
  “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.”
Wikipedia
Human Wave Attacks (Article)
Willette, Jeanne
What Counts: Producing Knowledge in a Digital Age (Paper)
Winters, Jonah
Martyrdom in Jihad (Paper)