James Tyner is Professor of Geography at Kent State University and Fellow of the American Association of Geographers, the author of 18 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. He is widely regarded for his work on the Cambodian genocide. Among his books are the titles directly below. Please click any or all of the links for order information. Iraq, Terror, and the Philippines’ Will to War received the Julian Minghi Award for Outstanding Contribution to Political Geography. His War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count, received the AAG’s Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Study of Geography. The Politics of Lists: Bureaucracy and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge   For ordering information, please click here.     Genocide and the Geographical Imagination: Life and Death in Germany, China, and Cambodia This groundbreaking book brings an important spatial perspective to our understanding of genocide through a fresh interpretation of Germany under Hitler, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and China’s Great Leap Forward famine under Mao.

Chapter II of Genocide and the Geographical Imagination (James Tyner), “The State Must Own Death,” is the best synthesis of research articulating the origins and development of the Nazi’s “Euthanasia Movement”—how medical killing led directly to the Holocaust.
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Scroll down to the right for information on Genocide & the Geographical Imagination: Life & Death in Germany, China & Cambodian and how to purchase it.
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Tyner cites the famous passage from the 1920 book by Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, the foundational text justifying, authorizing, and generating state murder:

If one thinks of a battlefield covered with thousands of dead youth and contrasts this with our institutions for the feebleminded with their solicitude for the living patients—then one would be deeply shocked by the glaring disjunction between the sacrifice of the most valuable possession of humanity on the one side, and on the other the greatest care of beings who are not only worthless but even manifest negative value.

The message is clear: If the state is willing to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers, why should so many resources be expended to keep mental patients alive? If the state is willing to kill its own soldiers its most valuable citizens, why can’t it also kill human beings deemed “worthless?”

Beginning with this syllogism, we can understand the origins of mass-murder in Germany: why Hitler and the Nazis believed that the state gave them the “right” to kill.

However, the question remains: WHY DO WE BELIEVE THAT NATIONS HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL?.