THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS COLLECTIVE SUICIDE
Richard Koenigsberg
  • What is war? What is the purpose of this social institution? Do we understand what war is? Do nations fight for economic gain, conquest, self-defense, glory…or what? Although we’ve read about war throughout our lives and seen it depicted in movies and videos, I don’t believe we know what war is. Pretending war expresses “male aggression,” in actuality it is precisely the opposite: a manifestation of masochism or self-destructiveness. Waging war, soldiers offer themselves to be slain; give their bodies over to the nation-state.
     
  • The motto of the SS-man, “obedience unto death,” applies to all warriors. The soldier’s job is to die—to become a sacrificial victim. Having studied Twentieth Century warfare for forty years, I conclude that hidden narratives lie beneath the surface of events—shaping the historical process. My research begins with the First World War, July 28, 1914-Nov. 11, 1918.
     
  • On the Western Front, soldiers hunkered down in opposing trenches, France and Great Britain on one side, Germany on the other. So-called “attacks” or battles occurred when soldiers stood up (carrying rifles and heavy knapsacks), got out of trenches, and advanced en masse toward the enemy trench—where there was a substantial probability they would be mowed down by machine-gun fire or artillery shells.
     
  • A typical battle is described by historian Madres Eksteins:
  • Attackers got out of their trenches and walked into ‘no man’s land’ without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe or so many blades of grass.
     
  • A German machine-gunner describes a typical British attack at the Somme:
     
  • We were very surprised to see them walking. The officers went in front. I saw one of them advancing calmly carrying a walking stick. When we started firing, we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You idn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.
     
  • Reading and watching video documentaries of these battles, one is astonished. As one could have predicted, the battles were continually futile. What was going on?
     
  • In spite of the absurdity of attacks and massive casualties—the initial battle strategy persisted throughout the war’s duration. Eksteins writes that belligerents on the Western front hammered at each other in battles costing millions of men their lives that “moved the front line at most a mile or so in either direction.”
     
  •  The prominent historian, Jay Winter, concludes his video series, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, in a tone of bewilderment, summing up forty years of research:
     
  • The war solved no problems. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.
     
  • Endless battles, in short, produced no significant results—apart from the monumental wastage of human lives.
     
  • The method of fighting—attacking an opposing trench and being met with machine gun-fire and artillery shells—ended only when the war ended on November 11, 1918. The idea in the minds of British General Douglas Haig and other military leaders was that men would reach the opposing trench, cut through barbed wire strung out in front of the trench, and somehow achieve a “break-through” by penetrating the opposing line.
     
  • Breakthroughs rarely occurred. During the early stages of my research, I didn’t understand what was going on. The obvious question: Why were men getting out of trenches and running into machine-gun fire? Why were military leaders asking soldiers to do this continually— in spite of the fact that attacks nearly always failed? Were officers crazy? Sadistic? Were the soldiers masochistic? Suicidal?
     
  • Studying historical narratives of the battles, a perspective emerges. Commentators don’t scratch their heads. They pretend that what they observe made sense. Generals were trying to win, but made mistakes or blunders; their strategies were wrong; they “underestimated the power of the machine-gun.” What seems insane is rendered normal or normative.
     
  • Our sense of bewilderment begins to fade. If historians are not surprised or astonished, why should I feel this way? If historians are not disturbed by the endless slaughter, why should I feel disturbed? After all, it’s “written up in the history books.” Was I missing something? Each nation was doing its best, but somehow…
     
  • Writing about “suicidal battle strategies,” historians don’t pursue the idea, rather flee from the truth. The entire war enacted a suicidal battle strategy; a monumental episode of collective self-destruction in which most of the world’s important nations participated. How did it happen that the most advanced civilizations in the world engaged in this extended episode of self-destruction.
     
  • Leaders and nations insisted that “winning” was the objective as do most historians. No one can avoid the reality that the War was monumentally self-destructive. But historians and commentators can’t say that the war was intentionally self-destructive. Historians use the term “suicidal” to describe battles. But they won’t say that these battles were intentionally suicidal.
     
  • In today’s world, we do have societies that acknowledge they are engaging in suicidal military strategies. I’m referring, of course, to Islamic methods of waging war featuring “suicide bombings.” Islamic leaders are aware that suicide—the intentional death of one’s own warriors—is an essential part of the deal.
  • The objective of warfare, we assume, is to “win” battles and wars. Of course, inevitably soldiers die or get blown up or wounded. This is unavoidable. But Western leaders, commentators and historians do not say that the objective of warfare is the death of the soldier.
  • The “potlatch” was a festive, ceremonial distribution of gifts practiced by the American Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast.  The ceremony reached it most elaborate development among the southern Kwakiutl from 1849 to 1925.
     
  • The word potlatch means “to give away” or “a gift.” The potlatch was a ritual allowing nobles to validate their status positions by giving away gifts both to friends and enemies through lavish distribution and ostentation destruction of resources and property.
     
  • Status was achieved through the ability and willingness to give things away. The potlatch ceremony often took the form of  “war:” The “winner” was the chief who gave away the most. The host challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his ‘power’ to give away or destroy goods. If the guest did not return one-hundred percent of the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his ‘power’ was diminished.
     
  • Franco Fornari compares warfare to the institution of potlatch—calling war a “voluntary destruction of previously accumulated reserves of human capital” performed with the intention to “sacrifice a certain number of lives.” These acts of ostentatious destruction are intended to intimidate the rival and give prestige to the destroyer.
     
  • Infantryman Coningsby Dawson fought in the First World War and authored two books in 1917, writing:
  • In the noble indignation of a great ideal, British soldiers face a worse hell than even the most ingenious of fanatics ever planned or plotted. Men die scorched like moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, tortured. And again other men step forward to take their place well-knowing what will be their fate.
  • Dawson concludes: “Bodies may die, but the spirit of England grows greater as each soldier speeds along its way.” How extraordinary: this suggestion that the perpetual slaughter of British soldiers enhanced the spirit of Great Britain. Loss as gain.
     
  • 880,000 British men died in the First World War, 12.5% of those who served, 6% of the adult male population. The Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, was the bloodiest in the history of the British Army. British forces suffered more than 57,000 casualties. Nineteen-thousand soldiers were killed on the first day of the battle alone. |
     
  • I rephrase Dawson’s conclusion: “Bodies may die but the spirit of England grows greater as each soldier speeds along the way” becomes “Bodies may die, therefore the spirit of England grows greater as each soldier speeds along the way.”
     
  • The growth of the spirit of England was directly proportional—to the number of British soldiers who sped along their way to death. The greater the number of dead soldiers, the greater the spirit of England.
     
  • The First World War was a gigantic episode of potlatch or ostentatious destruction. Each nation sacrificed the lives of soldiers; offering their bodies as “gifts.”
     
  • General Douglas Haig directed the Battle of the Somme. In spite of the disastrous failure of this and subsequent battles, he retained the title Commander-in-Chief until the end of the war, November 11, 1918. Although battles he directed resulted in enormous casualties, Haig received encouragement and support from the King and a substantial portion of the British population. The following letter addressed to Haig was found among his papers:
  • Illustrious General, the expectation of mankind is upon you—the ‘Hungry Haig’ as we call you here at home. You shall report 500,000 casualties, but the Soul of the empire will afford them. And you shall break through with the cavalry of England and France for the greatest victory that history has ever known. Drive on, Illustrious General!
  • This note was preserved by Haig probably because it expressed his own feelings. Similar messages received by Haig from the British public reinforced his belief that there was a great mass of people who shared his willingness to pursue victory even at the cost of the lives of hundreds-of-thousands of men.
     
  • It’s taken years for me to come to terms with the phrase: “You shall report 500,000 casualties, but the Soul of the Empire will afford them.” It will take years for historians and all of us to acknowledge the truth of the First World War: that the British nation took pleasure in—was gratified by—the slaughter of its own soldiers.
     
  • I call the process of embracing the reality of war “awakening from the nightmare of history.” The First World War was a nightmare that the nations of the world were having at the same time. A nightmare or waking dream defined the nature of reality.
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  • Facing the truth of the First World War is arduous, demoralizing and painful. But coming to terms with the truth is worth it. Embracing the truth of the First World War, it’s possible to begin to understand much of 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.
     
  • Each war has its own reasons. Historians study specific wars from the perspective of the events that led up to each, 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 warfare manifests a single template. War 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 wars as massive sacrificial rituals.
     
  • Moslems, on the other hand—throughout their history—have been conscious of the suicidal dimension of warfare. The willingness of the warrior to die in the process of trying to kill an enemy is an integral part of the Islamic conception.
     
  • Suicide bombers kill themselves as they attempt to kill an enemy. Leaders who send bombers to die are well aware that the death of the warrior is intentional. The bombers themselves know that their own death is part of the deal.
     
  • In the West, on the other hand, we rarely conceive warfare as a form of suicide. Taking pains to avoid focusing upon the sacrificial dimension, we pretend that the objective of war is “winning” or defeating an enemy, annexing territory, obtaining material goods, etc.
     
  • From this Western perspective, the death of a soldier occurs incidentally or accidentally in the process of trying to achieve “realistic” objectives. We don’t say that warfare is a form of self-destruction—even though the result of each war is massive destruction. We don’t say the purpose of war is to produce sacrificial victims, even though each war produces sacrificial victims.|
     
  • It would appear, however, that Douglas Haig was aware of the suicidal or sacrificial nature of the First World War. Like Islamic leaders, he understood battle as a form of martyrdom.  Writing in the London Gazette on April 8, 1918, Haig observed that total British casualties in all theaters of the war—killed, wounded, missing and prisoners of war—was approximately 3,076,388. Reflecting on the Battle of the Somme, he stated: “For many soldiers it meant certain death, and all must have known this before they started.” Certain death!
     
  • Haig discussed the meaning of “heroic death” citing a speech by the Moslem Emperor Baber before sending his troops into battle in 1527: “The most High God has been propitious to us—that if we fall in the field we die the death of martyrs; if we survive, we rise victorious avengers of the cause of God.”
     
  • Reflecting on this statement made by the Moslem Emperor Baber in 1527—Haig stated that the Emperor’s words “convey the root matter of the First World War.” What is the difference between the Islamic martyr—a suicide bomber—and British soldiers fighting in the First World War? The number of casualties.