"Awakening:" becoming aware of how we human beings create warfare and genocide--as the fulfillment of our own desires
When I write about "awakening," I'm speaking--very simply—of becoming aware of the sacrificial fantasy--the foundational mechanism--that lies at the heart of the historical process.

Awakening means recognizing how we human beings ourselves generate death and destruction in the domain of politics. We produce this death and destruction in order to create "history."

The history of the human race is death and destruction undertaken and performed in the name of abstractions we call or "Kingdoms" or "Empires" or "nations."

This is a highly spiritual and spiritualized process: dying and killing in the name of entities that we cannot see or touch: the very opposite of the evolutionary psychological view that human violence is a form of biological aggression. 
Richard Koenigsberg received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. 

AWAKENING FROM THE NIGHTMARE
OF HISTORY: Psychological Interpretation
of War and Genocide

by Richard A. Koenigberg

Read the complete paper here.

Table of Contents
I. The Psychological Interpretation of Culture
II. Hitler's Ideology
III. War and Genocide
IV. The First World War
V. War as Sacrifice
VI. Training Soldiers to Die
VII. Like Sheep to Slaughter
VIII. The Psychopathology of War
  Works Cited

I. The Psychological Interpretation of Culture

A psychological approach to the study of society seeks to identify the sources and meanings of its cultural formations. For any ideology or institution, I pose the question: “Why does it exist?” To understand an element of culture requires uncovering the psychic function that it provides or performs. An ideology or institution comes into being, is embraced and perpetuated insofar as it does something (psychologically) for individuals within that society.

Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War

Nations Have the Right to Kill is now available as an inexpensive ebook. For information on ordering,  click here.

“Koenigsberg’s ideas cut trenchantly through conventional, rationalized notions about culture, the nation, and war, and enable us to see through the psychic machinations of human institutions in utterly new ways.”
  —Ruth Stein, New York University, author of For Love of the Father