Dear reader,

For the past ten or more years, we‘ve been sending out newsletters to the people on our mailing list, which include many of the world’s top scholars writing on war, genocide, and terrorism. If you are receiving this newsletter, you are one of these 7,243 top scholars.

Up until now, our newsletters have been text. We’re now moving to a new format–presenting our ideas through video presentations. In this first video, our executive director, Andrew Hammer, presents how soldiers die to prove the validity or truth of a society's sacred ideal and how memorials erected to fallen soldiers remind us of the idea for which they died.


Richard Koenigsberg

Director

Foundation for the Study of Political Pathology 

 

Soldiers Die to Prove the Validity of a Society's Sacred Ideal: Death as Truth

 

TEXT: Wars are fought to testify to the truth of a society's sacred ideal. That for which we die, we imagine, must be true. Death in battle represents a form of validation.


Memorials erected by nations remind us of the truth for which soldiers died. If so many human beings gave their lives for an idea or entity, we imagine, it must be real; it must be true.


This hypothesis applies equally to the wars brought into existence by men or ideas we consider good, and by men or ideas we judge to be evil, for example, Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s soldiers in the Second World War died to prove the greatness of Germany. Northern soldiers in the Civil War died to prove that slavery was evil.


The proof of the pudding is in the dying.

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