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The summaries or epigrams published during the past few years are the result of a series of full-length papers or lectures authored by Dr. Richard Koenigsberg. This Newsletter represents a few of his conclusions or "Final Solutions" on the nature and meaning of war, genocide and terrorism.
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1. Dying for the Country: Death in warfare is depicted as honorable and noble. The Holocaust depicts the ugliness, futility and meaninglessness of submission to the nation-state: sacrificial death stripped of words like honor, heroism and glory.
- Eliminating the Enemy: The ideology of nationalism undertaken in the name of one’s nation is based on a binary. On the one hand is one’s own country, conceived as absolutely good. On the other is the enemy, conceived as absolutely evil. Absolute goodness is imagined to be threatened by absolute evil. To rescue goodness from evil, the source of evil (the enemy) must be destroyed. Collective forms of violence grow out of this ideology—or myth—projected or externalized into reality.
- The First World War as Sacrificial Ritual: According to Jacques Soustell (1970), the Aztecs believed that the sun was born “from sacrifice and blood.” Warfare was a sacred activity whose purpose was to capture enemy soldiers and feed them to the gods. Lopez Austin observed that as long as men could offer the blood and hearts of captives taken in combat, the sun god would “continue on his course above the earth.” It was necessary to feed the sun every day with its food, the precious water, human blood.
- COMPARING THE AZTEC SACRIFICIAL RITUAL TO THE WESTERN SACRIFICIAL RITUAL CALLED THE FIRST WORLD WAR:
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Aztec Ritual Sacrifice
Removing the heart of a captured warrior:
feeding the Sun God.
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Western Ritual Sacrifice: Battle of the Somme: British soldiers about to run into machine gun fire: feeding Great Britain.
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Aztec Sacrifice. Post-Conquest Nahua Painting, c. 1560. (Priests hold excavated heart to sun atop teocalli).
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Carnage: British soldiers go over the top to be slaughtered by German machine guns.
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- Genocide as Immunology: The Psychosomatic Source of Culture. In Hitler’s Ideology (1975) and numerous other publications, Koenigsberg analyzes recurring images and metaphors in Hitler’s writings and speeches. He concludes that Hitler’s ideology possessed a coherent structure revolving around the idea of Germany as an organism and Jews as pathogenic micro-organisms whose presence within the body politic could lead to Germany’s demise. The Holocaust grew out of the logic contained within this ideological fantasy.
- History and Sacrificial Death: The creation of ‘History’ requires: (1) Political leaders who persuade human beings to perform acts of violence. (2) People (journalists and historians) who record performances of political violence. It is not as if the violent acts that constitute history are separate from the recording of these acts. Journalists and historians are full participants, not simply bystanders. Their role is to ‘witness’ violent political acts thus, to create “history” by recording them.
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