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Below is the third of three Newsletters in which ChatGPT helps to articulates the theory of Richard Koenigsberg and Andrew Hammer on why young men are willing to die for abstractions such as nations, people, races, revolutions, religions, parties, ideologies, or leaders.
Below, they put forward the radical, deeply disturbing hypothesis that the desire to erect monuments to the dead may be a fundamental cause of war.
This is a strong formulation but can be defended by distinguishing “cause” from “trigger.” Monuments rarely start wars directly; they help manufacture the moral world in which wars become thinkable. We can say monuments are a cause of war, but not in the simple sense that a monument directly causes a specific war.
A better formulation would be: War monuments are not the immediate cause of war but are part of the cultural machinery that makes war morally imaginable, emotionally tolerable, and politically repeatable. They reproduce the sacred meanings that allow future generations to accept bodily destruction as noble sacrifice. A monument takes the dead soldier and says: his mutilation was not meaningless destruction; it was service, duty, sacrifice, glory, redemption, national birth, national preservation. This interpretation becomes part of the moral inheritance of the next generation.
George Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers is crucial here. Mosse argues that modern European societies created a “Myth of the War Experience” masking war’s horror, consecrated its memory and helped justify war’s purpose. His argument is not simply that monuments remember wars, but that memorials, cemeteries, and rituals created a public culture in which the war dead became martyrs and war could be accepted as meaningful rather than obscene. So yes: monuments can become part of the cause-chain of future wars because they educate people emotionally. They teach citizens what to feel when they see the war dead.
They teach: The dead did not merely die; they sacrificed. Their deaths were not waste; they were meaningful. The nation is worthy because men died for it. The living inherit a debt. To refuse the sacred cause may dishonor the dead.
That last point is central. Monuments create a debt to the dead. The living are told, implicitly or explicitly: They died for you. Now you must be worthy of them. This can become morally coercive. Once the dead are made sacred, criticism of the war, the state, or the national myth can be felt as betrayal. This is how monuments may help cause war: they do not fire the first shot but help create the citizen who is prepared to accept the shot. They normalize war as a stable institution.
A town square with a war monument says, generation after generation: war is part of who we are. War is one of the ways the nation becomes sacred. The citizen grows up surrounded by stone proof that the community’s highest moral language is attached to military death.
Jay Winter’s work is important because he shows that commemoration after World War I provided consolation and collective mourning for bereaved societies. Sites of memory allowed communities to process unprecedented loss through older symbolic and religious forms. But consolation can shade into consecration. The monument begins as grief, then becomes myth, then becomes inheritance. In Koenigsbergian terms, the monument completes the sacrificial cycle.
First, the nation demands bodies. Then the bodies are destroyed. Then the monument interprets the destruction as sacred. Then the next generation learns that the nation is the kind of object for which bodies should be offered. That is why monuments can be understood as causes of war at the level of culture, imagination, and desire. They help produce what might be called a sacrificial readiness. Not necessarily a conscious desire to be mutilated. Almost no one says, “I want my bowels torn open for the state.” But the monument creates an emotional atmosphere in which one can imagine one’s own destruction as beautiful, meaningful, honorable, and continuous with the honored dead.
The monument says: If you die this way, you will not vanish. You will be gathered into the sacred memory of the people. That promise is powerful. It offers symbolic immortality. And this is where the horror returns. The monument may seem to honor the dead, but it can also recruit them. It uses the authority of their suffering to sanctify the institution that produced their suffering.
So the sharper claim would be: Monuments are causes of war insofar as they transform the mutilated dead into sacred arguments for the legitimacy of future sacrifice.
But we should also distinguish among kinds of monuments. Some monuments glorify war. They show heroic soldiers, charging bodies, uplifted weapons, victory, masculine resolve, national triumph. These are the most clearly war-reproductive. Some monuments mourn war. They list names, show absence, grief, loss, brokenness. These may still sacralize death, but they can also interrupt glory. Some monuments indict war. They force the viewer to confront waste, trauma, civilian death, mutilation, or absurdity. These are closer to anti-war monuments.
So the key question is not merely, does a society build monuments? The deeper question is: What emotional lesson does the monument teach about the destroyed body? If it teaches, “This is glorious,” it prepares war. If it teaches, “This is tragic but sacred,” it may still prepare war, though more softly. If it teaches, “This is what political abstractions do to human bodies,” it may resist war. The most dangerous monument is one that successfully hides the mutilated body while claiming to honor it. That monument turns horror into reverence. It makes the dead usable. It converts bodily destruction into civic religion.
So yes—monuments can be causes of war. Not battlefield causes. Not diplomatic causes. But sacred-cultural causes. They preserve the sacrificial imagination without which war could not so easily recur.
But more radically, might we say that the cause of war is the desire to erect monument to the dead? That formulation pushes the argument from “monuments justify war afterward” to “war is partly desired because it produces sacred dead.” Let's treat it as a psychoanalytic/cultural thesis rather than a literal claim that governments declare war only to build statues.
Yes—more radically, we might say that one cause of war is the desire to erect monuments to the dead. But we have to phrase it carefully. The claim is not that governments consciously say, “Let us wage war so we can build statues.” The deeper claim is that societies may desire the kind of death that can later be monumentalized—death that can be turned into sacred proof, national myth, heroic memory, and symbolic immortality.
So the formulation becomes: War is driven, in part, by the desire to produce sacred dead—dead bodies that can be transformed into monuments, myths, and evidence of the nation’s greatness.
That is a profound and disturbing thought. The monument is not merely something that comes after war. It may be present before the war as an unconscious fantasy: the fantasy of heroic death, immortal names, sacred ground, “the fallen,” glorious sacrifice, the birth or redemption of the nation through blood. The physical monument is erected after the bodies are destroyed, but the monumental imagination precedes the destruction.
In this sense, war is a monument-producing machine. The war creates corpses. The corpses become sacred dead. The sacred dead become monuments. The monuments become proof that the nation is real. The next generation inherits that proof as a demand.
Richard Koenigsberg’s work supports this kind of radical reading. He argues that in war, actual human bodies are sacrificed to perpetuate the “magical entity” of the body politic, and that societies go to war not only for territory, honor, or defense, but to prove that the nation is real. That is where the monument enters. The monument is the visible form of the proof. It says: look, men died for this. Therefore this must be real. Therefore this must be sacred. Therefore this must continue.
Benedict Anderson saw something similar in the centrality of cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers to modern nationalism. He called them among the most powerful emblems of nationalism, precisely because their emptiness or anonymity allows the nation to imagine the dead as belonging to the whole community. The unknown soldier is almost pure monumentality: not John, not Michael, not a boy with a torn abdomen and burned hands, but the Nation’s Dead. That abstraction is essential. The dead man is stripped of his ordinary individuality and raised into sacred anonymity. His destroyed body becomes a national object.
Ernest Becker helps explain the psychic force behind this. Becker’s central argument was that civilization is a symbolic defense against the knowledge of mortality; human beings seek hero-systems that allow them to participate in something imagined to outlast death. War monuments are among the most literal embodiments of that system. They promise that bodily death can be overcome by symbolic survival: your body may be destroyed, but your name, your cause, your nation, your glory, your sacrifice will live. So yes: the desire to erect monuments may be another name for the desire to defeat death through collective symbolism.
But there is a terrible price. The monument needs bodies. Not metaphorical bodies. Actual young bodies. Torn bodies. Burned bodies. Missing bodies. Bodies that can be gathered into the story. This is the horrifying reversal: We usually think monuments are built because men died. More radically, we might say men are made to die so that monuments can be built.
Not consciously. Not mechanically. Not as the only cause. But structurally, psychologically, culturally: war produces the sacred dead that the nation requires in order to experience itself as eternal. George Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers is crucial here. Mosse argues that modern societies reshaped the memory of war through what he called the “Myth of the War Experience,” a vision that masked war’s horror, consecrated its memory, and justified its purpose. That means commemoration is not merely remembrance. It is the transformation of slaughter into usable meaning.
The monument is therefore not passive. It is active. It teaches the living how to desire.
It teaches them:
To desire honor.
To desire immortality.
To desire entry into the sacred story.
To desire the approval of the dead.
To desire a death that will not be mere death.
That is why the monument can become a cause of war: it makes death desirable under certain symbolic conditions. No one desires being disemboweled. No one desires burning alive in a tank. No one desires lying in mud with half a face. But people can be taught to desire the meaning attached to such death: honor, glory, national gratitude, immortality, masculine fulfillment, sacred belonging. So the desire is split.
The body does not want war. The symbolic self may want war. The body wants to live. The patriotic imagination wants to be worthy of the monument.
This is why this formulation is so powerful. It shifts the question from strategy to metaphysics. War is not only about defeating an enemy. It is also about producing sacred evidence: graves, names, ruins, martyrs, battlefields, anniversaries, monuments. A nation without dead may feel historically thin. A nation with sacred dead feels deep, ancient, proven, baptized. Blood gives metaphysical weight to the abstraction.
The monument says: this nation has been paid for. Paid for how? With bodies. So yes, in a Koenigsbergian-Beckerian-Mossean sense: The desire to erect monuments to the dead may be one of the hidden causes of war, because monuments promise to redeem bodily destruction by converting it into immortality, sacred national meaning, and proof that the collective object is real.
The most radical version would be: War is not only remembered by monuments; war is waged in order to create the dead who make monuments possible. That sentence is brutal, but it names something usually hidden. The monument does not simply cover over the corpse. It may have needed the corpse from the beginning.
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