THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS SELF-IMMOLATION

Following up on Professor Robert Proctor's question about Tibetan "self-immolation."

Probably the greatest case of self-immolation was the First World War. Political leaders at the time of the war understood this. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George stated that every nation conducted the war as if there were no limit to the "number of men who were fit to be thrown into the furnace" to feed the flames of war.

Lloyd George was at the front--at the "door of the furnace" and saw British soldiers "march into the furnace."

Harry Pearson was at the front and spoke about the "the callous, perpetual driving by some great force--which shoveled warm human hearts and bodies, warm human hopes, by the million into the furnace.”

I've begin to think of historians of the First World War as "gaslighters." And to think of those who write about Islamic Suicide Bombers--as if a similar phenomenon is unknown in Western history--as fatuous and in denial.

The First World War was the greatest martydom operation in human history (statistics are here). Once we understand this, it is possible to understand Hitler, Nazism, and the Final Solution. In denial of this (trying to preserve the "goodness" or innocent of Western civilization) we are like human beings living within a dream. The nightmare of history.

Richard Koenigsberg