Lethal connections: Terrorism, ecstasy and primal fear

Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971)

Emeritus Professor of International Law

Purdue University

lberes@purdue.edu

ABSTRACT: In its escalating war against terror crimes, Israel’s ultimate challenge is intellectual, not tactical. To proceed successfully in this protracted conflict, Jerusalem’s policies should address four factors that most emphatically drive their sub-state (Sunni and Shiite) adversaries: (1) the need to belong; (2) the need for meaning; the wish for ecstasy; and (4) the need for religion-based immortality. This last factor, an expectation stemming from primal death fears, is potentially most destructive.

 Human Foundations of Terrorism

          Jihadist terror crimes are the latest manifestation of an age-old scourge.  More precisely, terrorist eruptions of mass murder in the Middle East are secondary to broadly underlying urges. As urgently-felt human needs, they are always epiphenomenal or reflective.

          These barbarisms are a telling reflection (Plato would say a “shadow”)[1] of defiling human emotions.[2] This means, among other things, that until Israeli scholars and policy makers finally recognize the root causes of  adversarial terrorism – i.e., the tangible sources of pertinent reflections – they will steadfastly ignore what is critically causal. For Israel, that outcome could become existential.

          Everything in the social world begins with the individual human being. In world politics, refined explanation and prediction must always start with this force-multiplying “microcosm.”[3] Ultimately, Israeli security planners will need to acknowledge that the jihadist adversary, whether Sunni or Shiite, desperately seeks one form of power above all others. This core objective is “power over death.”

          Variously clarifying particulars will continuously challenge Israeli planners. “I believe,” observes Oswald Spengler in his 20^th century classic The Decline of the West” (1918-1923), “is the one great word (sic.) against metaphysical fear.” Though likely among the most important intellectual observations of all time, such primal linkages between geopolitics and immortality still remain generally unrecognized. Moreover, such rarefied theorizing is accessible only by the Few, not by the Many.[4] For Israel, as for any other country, this bewilderingly complex structure of theories and intersections could never be understood by politicians or pundits.

          In all likelihood, Israeli political leaderships will continue to focus on the symptoms of terror-violence rather than the causes. The plausible result of such a focus is predictable. But if jihadist terrorism were approached as an intellectual rather than political or diplomatic problem, Israel could reasonably harbor meaningful hopes for effective counter-terrorism. To be sure, such hopes would also be contingent on Israel’s using apt military measures against terrorist-mentor state Iran

           What specific remedies remain available to Jerusalem? Whatever they may be, they should be uncovered at a conceptual level, not at the glaringly superficial level favored by the Many. Three key concepts will need to be highlighted in all their presumptively complicated intersections. These explanatory concepts are death, time and immortality.

           There will be more for Jerusalem to understand. The three core concepts represent the “building blocks” of a necessary methodology. Capable theorizing could help Israeli thinkers to identify optimal methods of reaching pragmatic conclusions on counter-terrorism, methods that would involve the stipulation, examination and subsequent confirmation or disconfirmation of alternative hypotheses. When taken together, these interrelated operations would exhibit the sequential functioning of scientific method.

Death, Time and Immortality: The Vital Intersections

          A “next question” dawns. How should Israel and the United States proceed in a world political system defined by unceasing acrimony, belligerent nationalism and nuclear weapons?[5] What can the three concepts of death, time and immortality teach us about the world system’s sovereignty-centered landscape, both present and future?[6] Taken as a whole, how should this self-annihilating planet allow itself to advance beyond the illiterate explanations and gratuitous rancor of traditional geopolitics?

          To answer thoughtfully, designated analysts must start with the individual human being, with the microcosm in all its universalized expressions. Although uniformly disregarded and de facto invisible, power over death represents the ultimate political reward for dutiful and “faithful” compliance. Generally, though it is only uttered sotto voce, only in whispers, there can be no greater power to confer on earth. By definition, “power over death” offers the unrivaled promise of immortality.[7]

          We may learn something of head spinning import from Emmanuel Levinas: “It is through death,” says the philosopher,  “that there is time….”[8] It follows, among many other things, that a state or sub-state which can allegedly enhance the promise of personal immortality could also heighten the promise of time.[9]

          Could there possibly be any more enviable forms of power?

          It’s a silly question.

          There are still more questions. To begin, what can such dense abstraction have to do with Israeli politics of survival? These are not easy concepts to understand, especially in the context of continuous preoccupations with dissembling jihadist personalities and correlative Islamist rancor.  Still, no society, however righteous,  that remains willing to compromise truth on the terrorist altar of “anti-reason,”[10] should reasonably expect to endure.

          If chronology is contingent upon death – in brief, because human mortality puts an irreversible “stop” to each individual’s time[11] – an antecedent question will need to be posed: How does one actually gain tangible power over death,[12] and what does such gain have to do with the fate of any particular state or nation? It is with this manifestly opaque question in mind that science-based terrorism inquiries should be undertaken in Israel.

           Before venturing proper answers to many-sided operational questions, Israeli and also American strategists should first distinguish between authentic power and the expectation that such power must lie in a primary obeisance to God. Ritualistically, all humans, not just jihadist forces of the Middle East, have sought palpably links to the Divine. In identifying humankind’s pertinent links – those connections that are necessarily prior to acquiring power over death – the most evident and “time-tested” path involves religious faith. Though every one of the world’s major religions offers its adherents certain alluring promises of immortality in exchange for belief, only jihadist terrorists link “power over death” to the wanton slaughter of innocents.

           Fir Israel, it is a lethal and still-growing connection.

          Truth is exculpatory; sometimes it can also be clarifying. In world politics, the State of Israel remains the most conspicuously targeted country by terrorists who seek “martyrdom.” Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and Hezbollah seek “power over death” more sincerely than they seek “recovering territory” or codifying Palestinian statehood. For these terrorists, the “heroic armed struggle” is about the satisfaction of darkly personal and primal wants. Ipso facto, Israel’s negotiations over a Palestinian state will continue to be undertaken without producing any security benefits for Israel.

          Truth is exculpatory. On October 7, 2023, when Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists raped, tortured and murdered Israeli noncombatants, men and boys as well as elderly women and female children, they were seeking more than abstractly legal or diplomatic satisfactions. They were seeking to indulge their most unutterably lascivious visions of ecstasy.

          More than anything else, the Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah terrorist seeks “power over death.” The problem for Israel, and also for the United States, is that this supreme power is contingent on the mass murder of designated “unbelievers.” Always, the most despised “unbeliever” is not “The Zionist,” but “The Jew.”[13] This is because the jihadist’s “heroic armed struggle” is not about geo-political settlements of any kind. It is about God, immortality and an inherently-defiling vision of ecstasy.

“I believe.”

          Additional particularities still need to be noted. On occasion, the doctrinal priority “I believe” (a phrase taken from Oswald Spengler’s post-World War elucidations in The Decline of the West) can demand a faith-confirming end to the individual “martyr’s” life on earth.  At other times, assorted high-minded doctrines of charity, caring and compassion notwithstanding, this priority can require the rape, torture and/or killing of “unbelievers,” “heathen,” “apostates.” As convenient subterfuge, the alleged intention of this patently twisted requirement is to safeguard “the one true faith.”[14] In human history, this is hardly an original rationale for mass killing.

          Regarding elemental adversaries, Jerusalem and Washington still do not understand what is altogether basic: Jihadist terrorism is a current form of religious sacrifice. Whatever special circumstances may be involved[15] – and they need not be mutually exclusive – Reason easily gives way to Unreason. Ironically, such grotesque surrenders are no less likely in the Age of Science than they were in an earlier Age of Belief.[16] Regarding this manifestly unimproved state of civilization, the daily news displays endlessly corroborative “evidence.”

          Several intersecting truths are revealed by these dispassionate assessments. Any cumulative hopes for a death-centered individual rising “above mortality” can have critical consequences for the “macrocosm,” for planet earth in its entirety.[17]  In the nineteenth century, at his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.”[18] Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel had opined in his Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.”

           These widely-cited views in political science and philosophy tie loyalty to the state (usually an unquestioned loyalty) to the promise of “power over death.” By definition, this must always express a delusional promise, one recognizable only in the Platonic “shadows” of authentic political activity.[19] Whenever the historian looks beyond the distracting shadows of true images, he discovers no plausible evidence of such promise ever having been kept. Paradoxically, that discovery need not be unwelcome. “It is in his failure,” observes Soren Kierkegaard, “that the believer finds his triumph.”

          These are complicated interconnections. According to logic and science, immortality necessarily represents an unfulfillable promise, but it is one that must nonetheless remain incomparable.[20] During his openly incoherent tenure as US president,[21] Donald J. Trump’s openly pernicious brand of belligerent nationalism[22] (“America First”[23]) offered its believing adherents a partially secularized variant of this seductive promise. In the end, because it was founded upon a rabid fusion of cultivated ignorance with doctrinal anti-reason, “America First” advanced a vision of time that conspicuously enlarged the perilous spheres of violent death.[24]

          What has been learned? Among other things, it is to expect the intermittent death of Reason even in the most civilized states. Donald J. Trump is now poised to become America’s president for a second time (“Trump II”). Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient Roman philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.”

          Additional nuances warrant competent intellectual examination. In related matters, faith and science intersect with coinciding considerations of law.[25] The fearful “deification” of Realpolitik, a transformation of ideology from a simple principle of action to a sacred end in itself, drew its germinal strength from the doctrine of sovereignty.[26] Conceived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a juridical principle of internal order, this doctrine underwent several far-reaching metamorphoses, whence it also became the justifying legal rationale for international anarchy. More formally, this structural decentralization was identified by classical political philosophers as a “state of nature.”

Terrorism and Sovereignty

          To understand complex intersections involving jihadist terroir violence, Israeli and American policy-makers must first have a better understanding of “sovereignty.” Established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty came to be regarded as the supreme human political power, absolute and above all other forms of law.[27] In the oft-recited and oft-studied words of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Where there is no common Power, there is no law.”

          As to any correspondences with time, which is how we have come to consider such complex issues in the first place, Hobbes explains why this “no law” condition should be called “war,” even when there exists no actual “fighting.”  More precisely, because  “war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of Time….,“[28] pertinent policy-makers will need to broaden their most fundamental ideas of “war.” Though this would first appear to be an esoteric requirement, one without discernible links to real world terrorism issues, exactly the opposite is true.

           When it is understood in terms of modern international relations, the doctrine of sovereignty encourages the refractory notion that states  (a) lie above and beyond any legal regulation in their interactions with each other, and (b) act rationally whenever they seek identifiable benefits at the expense of other states or of the global system as a whole.[29] Following the time of original Trump derangements[30] (Trump I), this doctrine threatened a wholesale collapse of civilizational order. This dis-establishment was spawned  by the “timeless” human wish for immortality and by variously misconceived human associations of personal “wish fulfillment”[31] with policies of “everyone for himself.”

           “O my soul,” warns Pindar, “do  not aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible.”[32]

          Without suitable changes in the Hobbesian “tract of time,” the global State of War, nurtured by always-refractory ideas about absolute sovereignty,[33] points not only toward immutable human mortality but toward unprecedented levels of violent death. One such notion is climate change denial, a posture of anti-reason expressed most insidiously by Trump-world derangements (past and potentially future) of science and law. Left unaffected by more proper considerations of scientific analysis and refined intellect, such denial could produce another mass extinction on Planet Earth. At that presumptive “end-point,” time will have lost all its once-residual meanings, and violent death will inherit all that still is.

          This dark “inheritance” will be absolute.

          Considered by itself, immortality remains an unworthy and unseemly human goal, both because it is scientific nonsense[34] (“An immortal person  is a contradiction in  terms”[35]) and because it fosters such endlessly injurious human behaviors as war, terrorism, genocide and “martyrdom.”[36] The dignified task, therefore, is not to remove any individual human hopes to soar above death (that is, to achieve some tangible form of immortality),[37] but to “de-link” this futile and vainglorious search from grievously destructive human behaviors.[38]

De-Linking Death Fear and Ecstasy from Terror-Crimes

          How should Israeli and American planners best proceed with such a multi-faceted task? This is not an easy question, and is one that can never be answered in the purely philosophic terms of Platonic reflections. There are available here no science-based guidelines. And even if there were such availability, this is not just another ordinary problem that could yield ipso facto to rationality or reason-based solutions. On the contrary, the infinitely-distressing wish to immortality and ecstasy is so deeply compelling and universal that it can never be dispelled by logical argument alone. What unreason could never accomplish, remarks Friedrich Nietzsche in Zarathustra, could never be accomplished by reason.[39]

          Further clarifications are in order. Philosopher Karl Jaspers writes in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952): “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” The  most seductive of these irrational whisperings are those that offer to confer a distinctively selective power over death.[40] It is from the expressed criteria of such “selection” that ostentatiously far-reaching evils can quickly or incrementally “be born.” This is because the promised “power over death” demands the “sacrifice” of certain despised “others.” Jihadist terror against Israel, it ought never be over looked, is ultimately a form of religious sacrifice.

          For science, death is a function of biology. Moreover, because it “presents” together with decomposition and decay – and because it calls for human comprehension of nothingness within a flow of time – there can exist no plausible ways of replacing mystery with rationality. By its very nature, which inevitably brings forth inconsolable fears and paralyzing anxieties, individual death fear could never submit to even the most refined sorts of management by Reason.

          Still, at least in principle, some measure of existential relief could be discovered in transience, in the empathetic awareness that nothing is forever and that everything is impermanent. What is required, by this discovery, is some conceptual reciprocal of individual human decomposition. This would mean deliberately cultivating the imagery of expanded human significance that must stem from any deeper awareness of life’s limited duration. In scientific  terms, relevant scholars might best describe this particular quality of life as a “scarcity value.”[41] Though seemingly paradoxical, such gainful “cultivation” could represent the optimal strategy of “overcoming” human  mortality.[42]

          How did humankind arrive at such an intellectually-challenging conclusion?  We began with the view that daily news reports and assessments are just the changing reflections or shadows of much deeper human activities. In order to deal satisfactorily with the recurrent horrors of jihadist terror-violence, Israeli planners will first have to understand the verifiably true sources of such reflections.[43]

          It’s time for a preliminary synthesis. The underpinnings of daily news events in the Middle East, Israeli planners should observe, are rooted in complex conceptual intersections of death, time and immortality. It is only with more determined understanding of these vital intersections that Israel can meaningfully protect itself from murderers who link criminal-terrorism to presumed ecstasies (usually deviate sexual crimes, as on October 7) and to primal fantasies of eternal life.

In the end, for Israel. tangible geopolitics must always remain a distinctly second-order activity, a distorting reflection of what is actually causal. For now, adversarial politics continue to thrive on a vast intellectual emptiness, on an evident delusion that mass killing of “others” can offer incomparable powers over death. Plainly, this delusion is not “merely” murderous and medieval; it is also futile. “Conscious of his emptiness,” warns German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), “man [human] tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In Vain.”

Terrorism and Time

          “Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.” The insightful answer, one which lies far beyond any measuring hands of watches or clocks,[44] is by no means apparent. Yet, determining this challenging answer has now become a fundamental expectation of global political destiny. For the world as a whole, not just for Israel and the United States, nothing could be more important.

          Soon, to survive as a species, and not just as a singular state, humankind will need to rise above (Nietzsche would say “to overcome”) the defiling hazards of geopolitics, beyond the homicidal “shadows” of what is most gravely important. Immutably, literally countless residents of planet earth will continue to regard “power over death” as the highest conceivable form of power. The flesh-and-blood consequences of such ubiquitous anti-reason could rival or even exceed this planet’s prior encounters with total war. These consequences could be sui generis.

           To look suitably beyond Platonic “shadows,” Israeli strategic thinkers and planners must first acknowledge that their Islamist foes are animated by two further compelling needs: meaning and belonging. These needs represent values that are additional to ecstasy and immortality. Taken together, in varying but indeterminable proportions, they spawn the conceptual foundations of anti-Israel terror-violence. Ipso facto, ongoing Israeli military efforts against Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and Iran should always take operational note of these esoteric adversarial drives.

          This will not be a task for the intellectually faint of heart. This will not be a task for politicians or pundits. It will require the intellectual giftedness of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues on the Manhattan Project, but with an entirely different goal in mind.

          The task will not be to build a bomb (any bomb), but to ensure that jihadist terrorists do not make it easier for Iran to fashion an advanced “device” against Israel. Accordingly, Israel’s politicians and pundits ought to remind the “civilized world” about their country’s strategic depth: Israel is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.

          In a modern philosophical classic, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls (in German) das Mann, or “The They.”  Drawing fruitfully upon earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can all-too-quickly suffocate intellectual growth. For Heidegger’s always-threatening “The They,” the crowning human untruth lies in (1) “herd” acceptance of immortality at institutional and personal levels; and in (2) herd encouragement of the notion that personal power over death is sometimes derivative (recall philosophers Hegel and Treitschke) from membership in nation-states. History reveals that this can become an altogether insidious notion. Presently, this notion can also be associated with membership in such sub-state terror groups as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and Hezbollah.

          There is more. Any reassuring hopes about potential for personal immortality are invariably contingent on a specific group’s (state or sub-state) “sacredness.” Here, only membership in a presumptively “holy” group can serve to confer “life-everlasting.” In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler underscores this ultimate form of power in world politics – power over death. By definition, such power is indispensable to the conquest of “metaphysical fear.” By tradition, it has long been associated with belligerent international relations. Though not readily apparent, what we are witnessing in barbarous jihadist crimes directed against Israel[45] is at least partially epiphenomenal. That is, these crimes are more-or-less reflective of utterly primal human fears, hopes and expectations.

           Before “civilized nations”[46] such as Israel could ever be rescued from accumulating jihadist terror crimes – crimes that could soon involve assorted kinds of unconventional weapons – scholars and policy-makers will require a more theoretical understanding of potentially lethal intersections.[47] These intersections represent variously complex and hard to fathom fusions of mass murder, belligerent nationalism and “metaphysical fear.” It follows, among other things, that current Islamist operations in Gaza (Iran/Hamas/Fatah/Islamic Jihad) and Lebanon (Iran/Hezbollah) should be understood in Jerusalem (and in Washington) at more challenging intellectual levels. For Israel, it is only with such an expanded theoretical understanding that operationally pragmatic counter-terrorist measures could conceivably succeed.

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Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of twelve major books and several hundred journal articles dealing with international relations and international law. Some of his publications have appeared in The Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard University); The Atlantic; US News & World Report; The National Interest; Yale Global Online; Modern Diplomacy; World Politics (Princeton); The Brown Journal of World Affairs; The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The New York Times; Jewish Websight; The Hudson Review; American Political Science Review; American Journal of International Law; JURIST; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS);  Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Air and Space Operations Review (Pentagon); The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv);  BESA Perspectives (Israel); INSS (Tel Aviv);  Horasis (Zurich); and Oxford Annual Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence (Oxford University Press).

           Professor Louis René Beres was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.

[1] See Plato, The Republic.

[2] See by this writer at Horasis (Zürich), Louis René Beres: https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/ Such human emotions include individual (hence existential)  fears and expectations.

[3]Pertinent sentiments can be found in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s remark: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built.” This is the present author’s own translation from the original German: “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert warden.” See: Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, xi (Henry Handy, ed., 1991) quoting Immanuel Kant’s Idee Zu Einer Allgemeinen Geschichte In Weltburgerlicher Absicht (1784).

[4] This useful bifurcation is best known to political philosophers in terms of the work of Jose Ortega y’Gasset, especially The Revolt of the Masses (1932).

[5] See by this author, Louis René Beres:  https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/10/24/to-prevent-a-nuclear-war-americas-overriding-policy-imperative/

[6] A common aspect to these three core concepts is the inherently vague idea of “soul.” Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provided a precise definition of the term, but it was not intended by either in an ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by express references to “soul.” He was disgusted by a civilization so wittingly unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., an awareness of intellect and literature). Freud even believed that the crude American commitment to a perpetually shallow optimism and material accomplishment would inevitably occasion sweeping psychological misery. Judging, among other things, by the extent of America’s expanding addiction crises, this prediction was entirely on-the-mark.

[7] This succinct phrase, the “hunger of immortality,” is central to Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (1921). During my more than fifty years as a Purdue University professor, I often identified this seminal work as the single most important book I had ever read. Interestingly, it was another great Spanish existentialist, Jose Ortega y’Gasset, who came in as a close second.

[8] See Emmanuel Levinas, “Time Considered on the Basis of Death” (1976). In another essay, Levinas says: “An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.” Though seemingly an obvious assertion, it also runs counter to promises of the world’s principal religions, and therefore to the most common catch-phrases of US domestic politics.

[9] For an early examination of time’s impact on foreign policy decision-making, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. VIII, No.3., Fall 1974, pp. 175-186.

[10] For the best available assessment of this concept, see: Karl Jaspers, Reason and anti-Reason in our Time (1952). The German philosopher clarifies the “fog of the irrational” that bedeviled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and later the United States during the Trump years. In a distillation of his conspicuously grand thought, Jaspers proclaimed: “Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no logical argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition….”

[11] The charming idea that time can somehow “have a stop” is raised by Indiana writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Slaughterhouse Five (1969).

[12] Interestingly, observes Spanish existentialist philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958): “History is an illustrious war against death.”

[13] On the primacy of hatred toward Judaism, not Israel (i.e., Israel is despised be-

cause it is Jewish), the Hamas Charter states: “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish

and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims. ‘Let the eyes of

the cowards not fall asleep.”‘

[14] But killing need not always be linked to promises of power over death. Sometimes, per Eugene Ionesco, “People kill and are killed in order to prove to themselves that life exists.” See the Romanian playwright’s only novel, The Hermit, 102 (1973).

[15] Already aware that blind fanaticism is the ultimate scourge of all decent politics, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard recognized that there are too many individuals, not too few, who take it as their sacred duty to sacrifice others on the blood-stained altars of personal immortality.

[16] See, for example, by this author:  Louis René Beres, https://besacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1053-Terrorism-as-Power-over-Death-Beres-final.pdf

[17] Here it ought also to be kept in mind that the incremental destruction of biodiversity on Planet Earth is producing a continuous natural climate catastrophe, one that naturalist David Attenborough suggests will likely end in another mass extinction. This means, inter alia, more-or-less predictable synergies between growing catastrophes of the natural world and catastrophes of specifically human misunderstanding. In synergistic interactions, by definition, the cumulative harm (the “whole”) is greater than the sum of component sufferings (the “parts”).

[18] By using the modifier “earthly,” von Treitschke may be suggesting that this particular   realization of immortality falls short of an authentic power over death, that it represents more a triumph of personal fame or recognition than a true life everlasting.

[19] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zürich):  https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/

[20] Still, we must consider the contra view of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1932). Here, Ortega identifies the state not as a convenient source of immortality, but as the very opposite. For him, the state is “the greatest danger,” mustering its immense and irresistible resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority that disturbs it….” Earlier, in his chapter “On the New Idol” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote similarly: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters…All-too-many are born – for the superfluous the state was invented.” Later, in the same chapter: “A hellish artifice was invented there (the state), a horse of death…Indeed, a dying for many was invented there; verily, a great service to all preachers of death!”

[21] During “Trump I,” the White House consistently sought to persuade Americans by way of deliberate simplifications and falsifications. See, on the plausible consequences of such deceptive measures, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation in On Certainty:  “Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry….”

[22] The belligerent nationalism of former and potentially forthcoming US president Donald Trump stands in marked contrast to authoritative legal assumptions concerning solidarity between states. These jurisprudential assumptions concern a presumptively common legal struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, had already been mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).

[23] See, for example, by this author, at JURIST, Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-first-2/; and https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2019/06/louis-beres-america-first/

[24] To wit, the current Russian aggression against Ukraine and the accelerated North Korean process of nuclearization.

[25] Though still not widely understood, international law is a part of US law.  In the words of Mr. Justice Gray, delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The more specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called “Supremacy Clause.”  For pertinent earlier decisions by Justice John Marshall, see: The Antelope, 23 U.S. (10 Wheat.) 66, 120 (1825); The Nereide, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) 388, 423 (1815); Rose v. Himely, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 241, 277 (1808) and Murray v. The Schooner Charming Betsy, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 64, 118 (1804).

[26] See, on this doctrine, by this author: Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984). By definition, the doctrine of sovereignty is at cross-purposes with humankind’s most overriding goal. “The ultimate aim of history and philosophy,” we learn from Karl Jaspers’ Truth and Symbol (1959) (Von Der Wahrheit), “is the unity of mankind.”

[27] We may recall here Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Augustine: “St. Augustine says: `There is no law unless it be just.’ So the validity of law depends upon its justice. But in human affairs, a thing is said to be just when it accords aright with the rule of reason; and as we have already seen, the first rule of reason is the Natural Law. Thus, all humanly enacted laws are in accord with reason to the extent that they derive from the Natural Law. And if a human law is at variance in any particular with the Natural Law, it is no longer legal, but rather a corruption of law.” See: SUMMA THEOLOGICA, 1a, 2ae, 95, 2; cited by A.P. d’Entreves, NATURAL LAW: AN INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL PHILOSOPPHY (1951), pp. 42-43.

[28] Thomas Hobbes argues convincingly that the international state of nature is “less intolerable” than that condition among individuals in nature because, only in the latter, the “weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” With the spread of nuclear weapons, this difference is plainly disappearing. Interestingly, perhaps, in the pre-nuclear age, Samuel Pufendorf, like Hobbes, was persuaded that the state of nations “…lacks those inconveniences which are attendant upon a pure state of nature….” Similarly, Spinoza suggested that “…a commonwealth can guard itself against being subjugated by another, as a man in the state of nature cannot do.” (See: Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10, No.3., 1972-73, p. 65.)

[29] In studies of world politics, rationality and irrationality have now taken on very specific meanings. More precisely, a state or sub-state actor is presumed to be determinedly rational to the extent that its leadership always values national survival more highly than any other conceivable preference or combination of preferences. Conversely, an irrational actor might not always display such a determinable preference ordering.

[30]One such derangement was Trump’s willful movement away from cooperative world politics to an exaggerated “everyone for himself” ethos. Says French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955): “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.”

[31] A term made famous by Sigmund Freud in both The Interpretation of Dreams and The Future of an Illusion.

[32] Pythian, iii.

[33] In this connection, notes Sigmund Freud: “Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all shall be handed over. There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary power. One without the other would be useless.” (See: Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, cited in Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10 (1973-73), p, 27.) Interestingly, Albert Einstein held very similar views. See, for example: Otto Nathan et al. eds., Einstein on Peace (New York: 1960).

[34] Just having been born augurs badly for immortality. Always, in their desperation to live perpetually, human societies and civilizations have embraced a broad panoply of faiths that promise life everlasting in exchange for “undying” loyalty. In the end, such loyalty is transferred from the Faith to the State, which then battles with other States in what is generally taken to be a “struggle for power” but which is often, in reality, a perceived Final Conflict between “Us” and “Them,” between Good and Evil. The advantage to being on the side of “Good” in any such contest is nothing less than the promise of eternal life.

[35] See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time (1993); originally in French as Dieu, la mort et le temps (1993).

[36] Paradoxically, the terrorist martyr kills himself or herself not in deliberate search of death, but rather to avoid death. In other words, this “martyr” kills himself or herself in order not to die.

[37] The philosopher George Santayana reveals: “In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation. The truth of mortality…. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.” (See: George Santayana, REASON IN RELIGION, 260 (1982). This Dover edition is an unabridged republication of Volume III of THE LIFE OF REASON, published originally by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1905.

[38] How does killing in war and terrorism hold out a promise of immortality? According to Eugene Ionesco, “I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.” This comment from Ionesco’s JOURNAL appeared in the British magazine, ENCOUNTER, May 1966. See also: Eugene Ionesco, FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL (Grove Press, 1968).

[39] More precisely, queries Nietzsche in Zarathustra: “What the mob once learned to believe without reasons, who could overthrow with reasons?”

[40] The idea of death as a zero-sum commodity is captured playfully by Ernest Becker’s paraphrase of Elias Canetti: “Each organism raises it head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” (See Ernest Becker, ESCAPE FROM EVIL 2 (1975).  Similarly, according to Otto Rank: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.” (See: Otto Rank, WILL THERAPY AND REALITY  130 (Knopf, 1945) (1936).

[41] This term is drawn here from a lesser-known 1913 essay by Sigmund Freud “On Transience.”

[42] The language of “overcoming” is drawn, of course, from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

[43]In the language of formal philosophy, this should bring to mind Plato’s doctrine of Forms. As explained in dialogues Philebus, Phaedo and Republic, the Forms are always immaterial, uniform and immutable. To be useful to humankind, by definition, they must express not the concrete or physical events of any specific moment in time, but rather an idea that necessarily soars above all such tangible particularities.

[44] Chronology is not the same thing as temporality. To acknowledge a useful metaphysics of time, one that can assist us in a better understanding of world and national politics, we may recall William Faulkner’s novel view in The Sound and the Fury that “clocks slay time…time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” Real time, the celebrated American author is telling us, eludes any measurement by clocks. Real time, in essence, is always “felt time,” an inner stream of duration Moreover, it is precisely this durée that is suggested by Plato’s cave analogy.

[45] Following Nuremberg, responsibility of leaders for pertinent crimes is never limited by official position or requirement of direct personal actions.  On the principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb) 12 LAW REPORTS OF TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS 1, 71 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp. 1949); see: Parks, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR CRIMES, 62 MIL.L.REV. 1 (1973); O’Brien, THE LAW OF WAR, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY AND VIETNAM, 60 GEO.L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. DEPT OF THE ARMY, ARMY SUBJECT SCHEDULE No. 27 – 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907) 10 (1970).  The direct individual responsibility of leaders for aggression, genocide and genocide-like crimes is unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the Act of State defense.  See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Strat.  1544, E.A.S.  No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S.  279, Art. 7.  Under traditional international law, violations were the responsibility of the state, as a corporate actor, and not of individual human decision-makers in government or the military.

[46] This phrase is found at several codifying documents of international law, e.g., The UN Statute of the International Court of Justice (art. 38).

[47] “Theory is a net,” 20th century philosopher Karl Popper learned from the German poet Novalis; “only those who cast, can catch.” See epigraph to Popper’s classic work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).