Commentary on Nations Have the Right to Kill
By Walter A. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University
In this his latest book Richard Koenigsberg continues his intrepid pursuit of the core psychological disorder that leads nations and individuals to value war and especially to value dying for one's country. This is psychological inquiry of great depth and tragic urgency. Koenigsberg finds in Hitler and Hitler's genocide the example that can be used to expose a disorder that many nations and individuals share. Perhaps that's the best use we can make of Hitler. A deep humanity and ethical urgency informs this book which is full of original and provocative insights.
Commentary on Nations Have the Right to Kill
By Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs, Department of Religious Studies and Chair of Judaic Studies, University of Alabama
“Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide studies will welcome Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War. Richard Koenigsberg shows how Hitler’s obsession with the death of millions of German youth during the First World War—combined with his belief that Jews had shirked their military responsibilities—led to the Holocaust. Combining solid historical scholarship and profound psychological insight, he opens the door to a host of further explorations. This book is recommended for courses that address the whys of the Holocaust, as well as historical and contemporary genocides.”
Commentary on Nations Have the Right to Kill
By Babak Rahimi, Program for the Study of Religion, University of California, San Diego
In this illuminating study of warfare, Dr. Richard A. Koenigsberg discusses the ways in which collective acts of violence serve to safeguard the idea and the practice of the nation. War, Koenigsberg argues, is a form of sacrificial violence, a ritual process through which a nation becomes alive. Individuals must sacrifice themselves in order for the nation to survive. He induces this persuasive argument from a dazzling array of historical examples across centuries, with a special focus on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. With great precision, he shows how in the Second World War Hitler encouraged the death (murder) of thousands of his obedient soldiers as a way for the German nation to attain vitality and permanence. Accordingly, Hitler engaged in acts of genocide not because he was a maniac but that he believed the slaughter of Jews would serve a way to balance out the loss of his heroic soldiers. It was because of such ideology of sacrifice that Hitler was able to justify the murder of millions of Jews, who refuse to give up their lives for the nation and therefore must be terminated for the sake of the nation. A fresh and passionate mode of theorizing war, Nations Have the Right to Kill provides a tantalizing look at how nations are constructed through sacrifice of self and other.
Commentary on Nations Have the Right to Kill
By Ruth Stein, Ph.D., Clinical Professor, New York University. Author of For Love of the Father, Stanford University Press
Richard Koenigsberg is an intrepid generator and disseminator of novel ideas regarding the psychodynamics of human violence and destructiveness, ideas that are startling all the more for being self-evident once they have been absorbed. The identification of the individual with the collective/country/nation and, reciprocally, the equation of the collective with oneself, can create a horrific psychic situation whereby ameliorative or redemptive actions are invoked that can be suffused with bloody violence and destruction. Koenigsberg’s ideas cut trenchantly through conventional, rationalized notions about culture, the nation, and war, and enable us to see through the psychic machinations of human institutions in utterly new ways.
Commentary on Nations Have the Right to Kill
By Brian A. Victoria, Professor of Japanese Studies, Antioch University, author of Zen at War
Despite the vast body of research devoted to the Holocaust, Nations Have the Right to Kill marks a seminal contribution to our understanding of this act of genocide. Dr. Koenigsberg reveals that as warped and twisted as Hitler’s thinking was, his actions were firmly rooted within the ideology of nationalism. That is to say, Hitler was a radical nationalist who believed that—just as he had the right, even the duty, to sacrifice the cream of German youth in his struggle against the nation’s external enemies—so too must he mercilessly destroy those he regarded as the nation’s internal enemies, first and foremost the Jews. Thus, Koenigsberg claims, “The logic of genocide grew out of the logic of war.”
Nations Have the Right to Kill challenges the popular belief that Hitler was a uniquely inhuman monster. Hitler is placed squarely within the narrative of a much more widely held nationalist ideology that claims dying for one’s country represents the apogee of love and devotion. The Holocaust thus becomes “a perverted, degraded version of dying for the country – sacrificial death at the hands of the nation-state stripped of words like honor, heroism and glory.” Given that both war and genocide remain all too pervasive in today’s world, Nations Have the Right to Kill forces us to reexamine, and reflect, on the true causes of these phenomena.