Historians have focused upon who is the winner of a war and who loses. The assumption has been that wars occur to determine who the winner will be and who the loser. However, this way of looking at war—how we have looked at it in the past--has become obsolete.
If warfare is not about killing human beings nor about winning or losing, what is war about? We hypothesize that the institution of warfare revolves around the issue of truth. That for which we die for becomes true.
The truth emerges, not only by virtue of the death of our enemy, but also by virtue of the death of our own soldiers. We wage war to demonstrate the sincerity of our commitment. Death is a testament or testimonial demonstrating the power and truth of our sacred ideal. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.
When a soldier is killed in battle, we say he has “died for his country.” will argue about this way of saying things. The soldier has “gives his life” for his nation. But we may put this slightly differently: soldiers are sent into battle by their nations in order that they may die. The soldier's death is not an unforeseen event. We send soldiers into battle so that they may die or be wounded—thus demonstrating the sincerity of our belief—the depth of our devotion to our nation’s sacred ideal.
Each nation has different ideals. Warfare, therefore, is not about dying for this ideal or for that ideal. Death in warfare, rather, constitutes a methodology for determining the truth. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.
After a war (and sometimes while a war is occurring, as was the case in the First World war) nations build memorials to the dead. We build monuments to confer honor upon those who have died.
One may even suggest that the purpose of war, the "final solution," is to build memorials to the dead. Warfare produces sacrificial victims to honor one's nations. Memorials to dead soldiers testify to the soldier's commitment, the sincerity of his belief.
Our understanding of warfare grows out of research on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the war that Hitler waged. What does the Holocaust have to do with war? More than anyone else, Hitler understood the deep structure of the ideology of warfare. SS-men were instructed to become “obedience unto death.” Although many historians embrace the Nazis’ view of themselves as “supermen,” Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels knew better. The objective of these men was to persuade soldiers and other Germans to die willingly.
The Nazis called it the Final Solution. The general public calls it the Holocaust. Whatever one calls it, the intent of Germany was to exterminate the Jewish people. This is clear. But a close reading of statements Hitler made as the war against the Soviet Union began in mid-1942—reveals that he understood that warfare and the Final Solution were intimately bound.
Hitler declared, “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without the slightest regret over the spilling of precious German blood, then I naturally also have the right to destroy millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”
Hitler understood that society gave him the “right” as leader of a great nation to send his own soldiers to die in battle. Given this understanding, Hitler reasoned, why would he not also have the right—why regret—sending the Jewish people to their deaths? The logic of genocide grew out of the logic of warfare.
A characteristic of war is that the death of the soldier on the field of battle is often hidden. The public does not like to know or think about what actually happens on the battlefield. The title of Rene Girard's book is Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. The thing hidden, according to Girard, was the killing of a “scapegoat,” a human being who existed outside the boundaries of society. But Girard was wrong about who the primary scapegoat is not outsiders, but insiders (as Carolyn Marvin put it): one's own soldiers.
Anyone viewing photographs or descriptions of a battlefield at the end of a war knows that soldiers die a miserable, pathetic death. The victims of the Holocaust similarly suffered miserable, pathetic deaths. These occurred first in the Soviet Union when the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) rounded up Jews from towns, then compelled them to stand or lie in ditches where they were shot to death. Historians estimate that 1.2 million Jews were killed in this manner before death camps became the location of extermination.
From a purely physical perspective, viewing the bodies of those who died, there is not a significant difference between the soldier’s death on the battlefield and the death of a victim of the Holocaust. The difference is in how we speak about these deaths. The death of a soldier is viewed as honorable and noble. The death of a Holocaust victim is never described in this manner. The Holocaust depicts death at the hands of the nation-state without sugar-coating, suffering and degradation stripped of words like duty, honor, and loyalty.
Paul W. Kahn says that looking at a field of battle after the battle has concluded, “strewn with severed limbs and broken bodies, men disemboweled and beheaded,” it is not clear who is the object of sacrifice. Enemy and conscript suffer the "same threat and burden of physical destruction.”
We circle back to the question of what these men were dying for. Broadly speaking, human beings in the Twentieth Century died for nations. But do we actually understand what “nations” are? What are these entities that generate death on such a massive scale? And why do human beings give nations the “right” to take human lives?
We know the names of prominent “leaders” who generated mass-death in the Twentieth Century. People like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. However, the massive dying that occurred under the leadership of these men was possible only because they represented their nations. This is the reason these men had the “right” to kill.
People are horrified by the actions initiated by these leaders, but once we evoke the idea of the nation, we are not mystified. People say to themselves, “This is what nations do. They sometimes engage in operations which result in the deaths of hundreds-of-thousands, even a million people. What is to explain?”
The mission of the Foundation for the Study of Political Psychopathology is to explore the question, “What are nations and why do we assume these entities are entitled to bring about the deaths of human beings?” According to Rudolph Rummel, there have been well over two-hundred million deaths in the Twentieth Century as the result of warfare and genocidal episodes. Rummel wonders why textbooks do not focus on the fact that the central characteristic of nations is that they produce death on a massive scale.
Up to now, we have taken for granted the “normalcy” of mass-murder undertaken by nation-states. Our mission is to “bracket” the question of normalcy. What if we begin with the assumption that individual human being would rather live than die. Then we begin to look at ideologies of destruction in a new way; to view that which had been viewed as normal as abnormal. We investigate the psychopathology of normality.