Human being seek some thing to kill and die for. We find it difficult to imagine or believe that the sound and fury occurs in the name of no thing.

Political "history" is the story of the development of a series of ideas that human beings have valued greater than life itself. How pathetic to resign ourselves to being a simple, biological creature.

We create ideas and ideologies seemingly greater and more significant than life itself, then generate wars and episodes of genocide to demonstrate the reality or validity of these ideas.

The wonderful books written by historians to identify seek to come to terms with the horror--to master the trauma--by documenting" what occurred. How did it come to be that human beings were slaughtering one another? What were the causes?

But the causes are fungible, and besides the point. What matters is that there is some thing to kill and die for.

The Law of Sacrifice operates regardless of the nature of the ideology. We may like or not like a given ideology (judge it to be “good” or “bad”). It doesn’t matter. Societies seek to validate (prove the truth of) their sacred ideologies by dying and killing for them.

One may sacrifice one’s own people—or kill “others.”

A society sacrifices its own young men to demonstrate its devotion (die for Germany, or for France, or for the Communist revolution, or for Allah).

One kills people in the other society to prove the power of one's own society and its ideals. "Aggression" seeks to compel members of the other society to die for our own sacred ideal, e. g., for freedom and democracy. "Kill for peace."

Meanwhile, historians remain stubborn: stuck in their delusion of "rationality," pretending that wars are fought for "real" objectives. Fifty-million dead for "living space in the East."

The dynamic is the same, regardless of the "cause." A society generates episodes of killing, maiming and destruction of property (wars, genocidal movements and/or acts of terror) in order to prove that its sacred ideology is powerful, real and true.

My relatives in the Sixties lived in the suburbs of New Jersey. They had a swimming pool in their back yard. My brother visited with his girlfriend, a new kind of person, a hippie chick.

She took her clothes off and--naked--went for a swim. Witnessing this event, my Uncle Same declared, "I don't believe it." "I don't believe it."

Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg