Mei Ha Chan Associate Director Library of Social Science For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discount rate, click here.

For the past few years, Library of Social Science has published—though our Newsletter—short pieces by Richard Koenigsberg. Our objective is to crystallize his central propositions or theorems. Many of you, however, have asked us to contextualize Richard theories—to provide a broader framework.

The best way to get a deeper understanding of Dr. Koenigsberg’s ideas is to read Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War . To encourage you to purchase this groundbreaking book, we are offering it through Amazon at a very special discounted price. Please click through for buying options.

In a series of LSS Newsletters, we are going to present review essays of Nations. I often ask myself, “Does anyone really understand Richard’s disturbing ideas?” Re-reading the reviews, it’s clear that many of you do “get it.”

In the first review—published below—Younes Abouyoub observes that—according to Dr. Koenigsberg—nations do not go to war for the “rational” reasons typically put forth by historians. Rather, warfare is generated to create “opportunities for killing and dying.”

That’s it, in a nutshell! Beneath the ostensible “reasons,” what is bedrock is the desire to generate death and destruction. Beneath the sound and the fury, the declarations and proclamations, what remains—what is central in every war—is the killing and dying.

We hope you will read the review below, and then purchase Richard’s book—in order to get “the full story.”

In other words, war is not a means to and end but rather an end in itself. By drawing on the Aztec conception of war as a 'sacred activity' Dr Koenigsberg compares modern warfare, especially the First and Second World Wars, to the Aztec martial tradition, which consisted in capturing enemy combatants and ceremonially offering them as a sacrifice to the sun. For the Aztec, warriors who fall in the battlefield bring the sun to life; the sun in turn becomes the reincarnation of the warrior. Likewise by giving their life as an offering, modern soldiers give birth to their nation: 'As the soldier dies, so the Nation comes alive'.

Furthermore, the author examines political violence in its different manifestations and concludes that Genocide like warfare is a societal form of violence and not an individual one, as it is commonly believed. Yet, if warfare is taken for granted and legitimized in the collective consciousness, genocide is commonly perceived as an anomaly, a transgression of the norms established by the human society.

Subtly echoing Hannah Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil', Dr. Koenigsberg concludes that the final solution imagined by the Nazis was not something exceptional in the ideological context of the Twentieth Century, since the logic of genocide grew out of the logic of war. The Second World War and the Genocide were after all two sides of the same coin. For Hitler, since German soldiers were dying by the thousands to allow their Nation to live Jews, whose loyalty was questionable, had to become the sacrificial offering to the God that Hitler worshiped i.e. the German Nation. Hence, the Holocaust represented less an aberration than a sacrifice for the German body politic.

Through its analysis of modern warfare, the author questions rightly the concept of 'country' and 'nation', and wonders why people do have a staunch quasi-religious faith in such concepts. The question of blind obedience is touched upon in many parts of this book but unfortunately never fully developed or answered. Dr. Koenigsberg advances an interesting thesis to explain political violence and modern warfare. Yet, he could have buttressed his account by providing a more detailed analysis of the question of obedience and the institutional and societal mechanisms government put in place in order maintain 'the established order' and the collective 'fundamental beliefs' that make people obey and 'die for the Nation'.