Awakening from the Nightmare of History
Richard Koenigsberg

This post is the last (ninth) part or conclusion of a nine-part essay which began Thursday evening and extended throughout today. There were three parts on Thursday and six parts today (Friday). When you receive this post (the Ninth part of the essay) and read it, you can relax. Phew. Now you know everything. 

Perhaps it has been a nightmare to read these pieces. However, I'm merely conveying what actually occurred. Most people don't want to know about these things, or why they happened--how nation-states kill their own soldiers. 

But if you're reading this, it means you are one of the courageous ones. 

Best,
Richard K.
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What would it mean to “awaken from the nightmare of history?” In the first place, the ability to awaken means recognizing exist as if in the midst of a bad dream, one that is occurring however within the space of reality or waking life. Many aspects of political history possess the characteristics of a nightmare. One need only read or watch “the news” to apprehend this “waking nightmare” to which I refer.

The fact that one is present within “reality”—or awake—does not mean one is not dreaming. War may be conceived as a shared fantasy, like a bad dream that many people are having at the same time. What is the nature of the shared fantasy that is the source of the ideology of war, this bad dream that defined and dominated the Twentieth Century?

The ideology of war is generated based on the fantasy that nations are real entities or bodies politics that substantially exist. The fantasy of the nation as an actual body politic is complemented by another fantasy, namely the idea that these bodies will continue to exist as long as we feed them with sacrificial victims. It is this grotesque fantasy—of sacrificing human bodies for the body politic—that is the source of collective acts of mass-murder manifesting as war and genocide.

Awakening from the nightmare of history means we become aware of this sacrificial fantasy and how it functions. Becoming aware of the sacrificial fantasy means perceiving how the “victimage mechanism” operates within human communities (Girard); revealing the “totem secret” (Marvin); and “making conscious the unconscious on the stage of social reality” (N. O. Brown).

If the ideology of sacrificial violence depends on “collective unknowing” in order to be effective, perhaps our capacity to know—become aware of how human beings act to generate this violence—will lead to abandoning this ideology and the violence it generates.

On the other hand, perhaps conscious of the fantasy will not result in its abandonment. Perhaps the human attachment to the fantasy of the nation or body politic is so profound that we are unable to live separately from the idea of these entities.