HISTORIANS AS GASLIGHTERS

If one cannot understand--or accept--what occurred  during the First World War, one cannot understand Nazism--or the rest of the 20th century.

General Douglas Haig had it right (see below): The soldiers of the First World War--for four years--were sent to "certain death." And "all must have known this before they started."

The word "gaslighting" has recently come into existence. Leaders who make things up. The advent of the use of this term is fortunate.

Those who pretend that asking young men to run into machine-gun fire for four consecutie years were doing so with the inent of "winning"--are GASLIGHTING US.  Nations were slaughtering their own young men. This is obvious.

Historians exist in a state of collective denial.

I wonder what the great historian Omer Bartov (who has been receiving our Newsletters since August 4, 2018--and has clicked through to read them 846 times) thinks about this.

Is he still devoted to the pursuit of truth? Or is he in the process of writing yet another book?
Douglas Haig was the British General who planned and executed the Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1, 1915. Visiting the battlefield on March 31, 1917, Haig reflected (De Groot, 1989) upon the hundreds of thousands of British casualties:

Credit must be paid to the splendid young officers who were able time and time again to attack these tremendous positions…To many it meant certain death, and all must have known that before they started.

Modris Eksteins observes that the “victimized crowd of attackers” moving into no man’s land has become the “supreme image” of the First World War. Attackers moved forward, usually without seeking cover, and were “mowed down in rows, with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass.”

A German machine-gunner wrote of his experience of a British attack on the first day of the Somme: “We were surprised to see them walking. The officers went in front. When we started firing, we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”

The experience of this machine-gunner was not unusual; it was the norm. John Buchan described the first day of the offensive at the Somme in his pamphlet, The Battle of the Somme (1916):

The British moved forward in line after line, dressed as if on parade; not a man wavered or broke ranks; but minute by minute the ordered lines melted away under the deluge of high explosives, shrapnel, rifle, and machine-gun fire. The troops shed their blood like water for the liberty of the world.

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, Library of Social Science
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com