Elaine Scarry states that the content of a wounded soldier’s body on the field of battle constitutes the precious “ore of confirmation.” In war, Scarry says, the “incontestable reality of the body”—the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of—is “conferred on an ideology.” The ideology thus achieves for a time the force and status of material “fact” by the “sheer weight of the multitudes of damaged and opened human bodies.” Warfare, in other words, is that cultural activity that seeks to produce dead and wounded soldiers in order to establish the truth of a society’s ideology.
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Scarry's statement is precisely what I mean when I write of warfare (dying and killing) as testaments or testimonials to the truth of an idea or ideology (see directly below).
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Human beings die and kill to prove the reality of a sacred idea or ideal. The nature of the entity or idea for which human beings die and kill is fungible. Among significant entities or ideas for which human beings have died and killed:

The mechanism is the same, regardless of the nature of the idea or ideal or entity: whether or not we think the idea is good or bad, positive or negative.

Memorials erected in the name of those who have died testify to the reality of the idea or ideal. Memorialization perform a validation function.

The best way to begin to understand the bizarre history of the human race (in the 20th century) is to pose the question (for any given moment in time): what was the nature of that "thing"--in the name of societies killed human beings?