Please scroll down to read the table below. To summarize: 65 million troops were mobilized in the First World War; nearly 9 million were killed, 21 million wounded and nearly 8 million men were prisoners or reported missing in action. Thus, an extraordinary total of over 37 million casualties, 56% of all men mobilized.

What a fantastic event! What a massive, monumental ritual of self-destruction. Yet historians write about the war without flinching, as if “nothing special” occurred. Omer Bartov observes that the main trend of modern history is to "domestic the fantastic and to normalize the unspeakable."

Norman O. Brown suggests that human history is the "history of a neurosis." Having studied the First World War and Holocaust for the past 30 years, I  go further and suggest political history is the history of  psychosis. Because this psychosis is shared by so many people it is perceived as “normal.”

What is the root of this tendency to “normalize the fantastic and unspeakable”—to conceive and write about horrific episodes of collective destruction and mass-murder as if these events are neither extraordinary nor pathological? What lies behind this desperate struggle to maintain our belief in the “goodness” of civilization—in spite of the vast devastation wrought in its name?

Acknowledged the destructiveness inherent within the historical process, we turn toward comprehending its meaning. Why do human beings create such events--bring them into existence?

Impeding understanding is the assumption of rationality. Western thought revolves around the efforts to pretend that human beings know what they are doing.

The refusal to recognize irrationality as the source of political events is especially common among academic political scientists and historians. After more than 100 years of Freud, we still avoid acknowledging that individuals are driven by motives of which they are unaware. It is more difficult to acknowledge that the entire historical process is driven by motives of which human beings are unaware.

Presumably, the nations of First World War were pursuing “interests.” Each nation had "reasons." Yet we reflect on the results presented in the table below. Did this happen by chance? Was the war a monumental “accident?” If an individual engaged in behaviors that resulted in such extraordinary self-injury, we immediately would be alerted to self-destructive motivations.

Yet we find it difficult to acknowledge self-destruction as the central motive underlying the behavior of historical actors. It is almost as if psychology has been banned from the domain of history, which positions itself as a domain “beyond good and evil;” a realm that goes on by itself, independent human motivation.

In this a domain, anything and everything can happen. Bizarre, fantastic events are at the heart of the historical process. Yet we hesitate to state the obvious: that profound pathology lies at the core of the historical process.

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg