Why war? An introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Strachey references Jones (1957, 187) as the source of this characterization.

2 An additional set of papers, Money-Kyrle’s article entitled “A Psychological Analysis of the Causes of War”, along with a brief introduction by Heinz Weiss and a commentary by David Bell, are scheduled to be reprinted in Issue 4 (August 2022) of this journal.

3 Bob Dylan elaborated ironically on this concept of sacralization in his song “With God On Our Side”, where he sings of the horrors of history perpetuated with the reassurance that they were done “with God on our side”.

4 Erik Erikson had also noticed this absence, suggesting that humankind tended to suffer from a tendency to categorize the world in overly rigid and false distinctions of “us vs. them” which he called “pseudo-speciation” (Friedman 1999, 442).

5 Taken by Kahn from a speech given by Hitler on 28 February 1926 to the “Nationalklub” in Hamburg.