(1)    Leaders and nations immolate people--send them to war and induce them to commit genocidal acts--in the name of proving the greatness of the idea or entity with which they identify. The sacred ideal may be called Allah or Germany or Communism, but the dynamic is the same: willingness to die and kill in the name of an ideology. The number of deaths that occur in relationship to an ideology testifies to its power—proves it is real. 

(2)    Human beings bow down to the gods they worship. Violence represents an effort to compel other people to bow down: acknowledge the power of one’s own god. Slaughter or sacrificial dying constitutes vehicles proving the depth of one’s belief in and power of one’s ideology. The proof of the pudding is in the dying and the killing. Bloodshed and death work to confer substance or actuality upon an ideology: prove it is real. A part of each one of us is thrilled to know that some people believe in something so deeply that they are willing to kill or die for it. 

(3)    Warfare revolves around killing and dying in the name of a sacred ideal--combined with a denial of what happens to the bodies of those who become victims. We prefer not to be reminded that soldiers' bodies are mutilated and destroyed in battle. Fantasies of glory--the excitement of propagating the sacred ideal--can be maintained to the extent that we repress awareness of the results of battle. 

(4)    The fundamental dynamic of warfare: killing innocent people in order to actualize the omnipotent ideal; bring the sacred ideal into reality. It is upon the "altar" of the ideal that sacrifices are justified.

(5)    To "make history" is to spread the word: bring your own culture's ideal to bear upon other societies and cultures that do not experience the greatness of your ideal. The ideal is considered absolute: more significant than the lives of concrete human beings. More precisely, lives of actual human beings are sacrificed in the name of the absolute.

(6)    When Americans dropped a 500-pound bomb or a 1000-pound bomb in Iraq, they were dropping the bomb in the name of "freedom and democracy." The bomb contained the ideal. This is why men in the air force could drop bombs and kill people without excessive guilt: They were dropping bombs and killing people in the name of the sacred ideal. 

(7)   The sacred ideal is the omnipotent object that justifies killing and dying; sacrificing human life. Without this ideal, nothing could take place. When a man in the air force drops a bomb in the name of his country, he does not hate or even dislike the people he is killing. He kills in the name of his society and its sacred ideal. He asks people of the other nation to die--sacrifice their lives—in the name of affirming the absolute value to which his society is devoted.

(8)    We don't call a soldier a sacrificial victim. We call him a hero--when we like the ideals for which the soldier has died. It is estimated that over 360,000 Union soldiers died in the Civil War and that 275,000 were wounded. Most Americans believe in the "goodness" (necessity) of their deaths—because they believe in the ideals for which the soldiers were sacrificing their lives. Union soldiers died to preserve the Union, and to free the sales.

(9)    Killing is designed to demonstrate the power of one’s ideology or religion or sacred ideal: Showing how deeply one believes in it (“kill for peace”). Killing for the ideal is the other side of the coin of sacrificing for the ideal.

(10) Sacrificial dying for a nation is martyrdom. The West has generated the most prodigious acts of martyrdom. During the First World War, nine-million men were killed and twenty-one million wounded in the name of sacred entities like France, Germany and Great Britain. Western people deny that the First World War was a massive martyrdom action by pretending that each nation was trying to “win” the war.

(11)    Some historians claim that the adveraries  “underestimated the power of the machine gun.” Imagine the level of delusive thinking required to write that asking young men to run into machine gun fire and to endure artillery shelling for four years was an undertaking designed to “win the war.” Historians participate in and perpetuate the delusion. This is their job.

(12)    Suffering and dying (martyrdom) has the purpose of showing one is devoted to the sacred object. The idea that one is protecting or defending the object functions as a “releaser”--justifying anything and everything. In war, all acts are deemed justifiable because they are undertaken in the name of protecting and defending a sacred ideal or object. For the terrorist, all acts are deemed justifiable when they are performed in the name of Allah.

(13)    Warfare is based on the relationship between a sacred object and an enemy. The enemy is imagined to be working to destroy the sacred object. George W. Bush asserted that he had identified a new world-destructive force (comparable to Nazism or communism). He sought to replicate earlier struggles against malignant enemies--so that the United States could return to what she once was (a heroic nation that wages war to destroy evil).

(14)    Political violence occurs when killing, dying and destruction are conceived to be “good,” not bad. Violence is undertaken in the name of preserving or rescuing a sacred object (one’s god or nation). The effort to rescue the sacred object (threatened by an evil enemy) justifies any and all forms of action. 

(15)    Hitler said, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” This template guides nearly every form of violent politic action, whether one calls it war, genocide or terrorism. A society (or group of people) perform violent political acts in the name of "rescuing" the object to which the society or group is devoted. Hitler justified everything under the assumption that he was “saving the life” of Germany.

(16)    If the violent actions are performed in the name of one’s own society, they are perceived as noble and good. The violent acts that the other society performs are perceived as evil and dishonorable. But the “other” society is guided by precisely the same ideology that guides one’s own society’s violence: “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue (America/Germany/Allah), we have performed the greatest deed in the world.”

(17)    Wars stem from the proposition that one’s nation is in danger—confronted by an evil enemy. The existence of an enemy mobilizes the nation’s people (or at least its military) to defeat the enemy—eradicate it from the face of the earth. Political violence requires a paranoid leader who declares that as long as the enemy exists, one cannot feel safe. An entire military establishment arises as a response to paranoid fantasy. Political and cultural institutions are psychically determined. Each society collaborates in producing a certain structure of reality that is responsive to a shared fantasy.