I have been arguing for many years (3000 Newsletters) that the essence of warfare is creating soldiers as sacrificial victims. Perhaps I might try to summarize this hypothesis as follows:

The perpetuation of warfare is based on our belief that sacrifice (the death of soldiers in warfare) is good. Indeed, soldiers are honorable and virtuous because they have taken upon themselves the burden of sacrificing their lives for their nation. 

They are the "chosen ones. The essence of their "goodness" is their willingness to "die for their country." The soldier symbolizes the sacrificed Christ, dying for all of us--so that our nation may "live on."

The phrase "dying for one's country" renders this dynamic as a cliché. One puts it more bluntly by saying that we wage war in order to kill our  own soldiers as a demonstration of devotion. Or as Carolyn Marvin puts it, even more bluntly, soldiers become "sacrificial delegates." We "turn men into murderers so that we can kill them more easily."

Where are the arguments refuting this hypothesis? Out to lunch, that bunch. Where is the development of this profoundly important, revolutionary idea?

Agnieszka Monnet writes about the "troubling argument" about modern national cohesion as being dependent upon blood sacrifice. She says that the idea that nations "might actually 'need' members to be will to die for them can appear prima facie as a revolting claim." 

A "revolting claim." Imagine if when Darwin proposed that the human beings descended from lower forms of animal life, the best critics could say was that this was a "revolting claim."

Cowardly scholars. Is it the truth that terrifies them? Or fear that the wrath of patriots and nationalists that might descend upon them? Or fear of seeming "politically incorrect;" saying what students and administrators might not like to hear?

Richard Koenigsberg