Koenigsberg observes that people are not ready to embrace the truth that suffering and dying are integrally involved in bringing countries into existence. Countries, he says, are built on mounds of corpses, corpses nations produce by virtue of their own violence, and corpses that result when their own combatants die.

Dead soldiers are material facts that convey the existence of an abstract idea, a nation. Where dead corpses are produced by battle, there do nations exist. Dead soldiers and nations are bound together like horses and carriages: you can’t have one without the other.

And nations produce massive numbers of corpses. The greatest mass-murders of the Twentieth Century, people like Al Capone, can’t compete. Of course, mass-murderers in everyday life are called criminals. Al Capone was convicted and sent to prison. Nations are entities that “get away with murder.” They kill for “good” (virtuous) reasons. Hitler declared, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.”

Today’s Russian state is engaged in the mass murder of Ukrainians and slaughter of its own soldiers. It was reported in the Kyiv Independent that Russians disabled a Ukrainian internet site that Russian soldiers were using to surrender. Russians took it down, apparently, since it prevented Russian soldiers from dying for Russia. Today—in American politics—the reality or horror that Putin has orchestrated in the Ukraine has not fully set in. And President Donald Trump, more than any American politician, seems to remain an avid supporter and admirer of Putin.

One would expect that Putin and his reign of terror would be at the forefront of current politics. But this does not seem to be the case. Perhaps political elites believe that American voters cannot handle ongoing campaigns of terroristic mass-murder. Things hidden since the foundation of the world, as Rene Girard (and David Gornowski) put it..

There are presently no Americans “on the ground” attempting to thwart Putin’s reign of terror. American politicians seem to believe that Americans care more about “groceries” than mass-murder. 

Americans and American leaders do not have the courage to state the truth of what is occurring in front of our very eyes: that Putin is a mass murderer or serial killer, a little man who tries to imagine that he is a BIG MAN by wrapping a Russian flag around his body.

Barry M Dank

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Cal State Long Beach