THE TRUTH AS VISCERAL HORROR

From Timothy K. Bartlett
Subject: Re: Warfare as verification

Your theory, Dr. Koenigsberg, is brilliant, and nauseating in its obviousness and in the immediateness of the sense it makes.  The sense of visceral horror generated by even considering the truth of this line of reasoning evokes Kafka’s old chestnut that the sign that one is awakening is a desire to die.  If the truth is this horrible, then we must all be baptized in horror to awaken. 

In either case, I score another point for Il Maestro and you may count me among the numbers of those who are “awakening from the nightmare of history.”  I hope that you’re wrong, but fear most vividly that you are right and as such stand ready, if terrified, to accept the awful truth of it if you are.

Sadly and sincerely yours, Tim

The goal of war is death

If people die, wars are successful. "History" is the generation of death in the name of a sacred ideal. That which we die for varies, but in our hearts the dream remains the same.

We may believe the cause is evil; we may believe the cause is virtuous: Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao--and yes Abraham Lincoln--all used the same methodology: killing to prove the truth and reality of one's ideology.

If so many people die in the name of an Ideology, it must be real. Nazism, Communism--and "saving the Union"--became real by virtue of the number of deaths generated. There is a linear relationships: the greater the number of deaths, the greater the reality.

The essence of warfare  is VERIFICATION. 

From Paul H. Kahn, Sacred Violence

“The battlefield is strewn with the disemboweled and beheaded, with severed limbs and broken bodies. All have died a terrible death in a display of sovereign power. Viewing the battlefield from a certain distance, it is not even clear who is the object of sacrifice: the enemy and the conscript suffer the same threat and burden of physical destruction for the sake of making present sovereign power.”

Dead soldiers on a World War I battlefield.