• I call the process of accepting the reality of war “awakening from the nightmare of history.” The First World War was a nightmare that the nations and people of the world were having at the same time. Reality took the form of a waking dream. A nightmare shaped and defined the nature of reality.
   
• Facing this truth about the First World War is arduous and demoralizing. It is a painful task. But confronting and coming to terms with the truth is worth it. Embracing the truth of the First World War, it’s possible to understand what followed: Hitler’s rise to power, the Holocaust, the Second World War, and perhaps what is happening in today’s world.
   
• The First World War was a monumental form of potlatch or ostentatious destruction. Prestige was conveyed upon the destroyers—the world’s nation-states—by virtue of their capacity to allow and endure millions of casualties. The British Empire was so great it could afford to throw away the lives of hundreds-of-thousands of its own men. This event happened. It’s written up in the history books. And now we can understand what it all meant.
   
• Each war has its reasons. Historians study specific wars from the perspective of the events that led up to each one, the military strategies employed, the battles and shape of the fighting, who was victorious and who defeated, and the aftermath of the war.
   
•  I suggest, however, that wars manifest a single template. Warfare may be conceptualized through the lens of destruction and self-destruction.
   
• Warfare is a gigantic potlatch whereby nation-states give over the bodies of human beings and material goods to the object they worship. In the First World War, the objects to which offerings were made had names like France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy—and so forth.
   
• Yet neither the leaders of Western wars, the combatants, nor the general population understands warfare in these terms. We do not conceive of wars as massive sacrificial rituals.

Richard Koenigsberg with the assistance of 
ANDREW "THE HAMMER" HAMMER