On several occasions I've published LSS Newsletters featuring a lecture presented by Professor Robert Weiner, a historian at Lafayette University. I was especially impressed by his following statement about the First World War:

• All the capacity of industrial society—straining at the bit for destruction. One of the French soldiers called it extermination. I call it routinized, mechanized genocide: The genocide of people on their own citizens.

As readers if this Newsletter know, I've written continually about the First World War as a sacrificial ritual: enactment of a collective fantasy of self-destruction. And yes, the First World War was a form of auto-genocide.

I appreciative Weiner's statement. However, it was almost as if it was blurted out--in a moment of forgetfulness. I've asked him to follow up and write more about this idea, but he's always backed out. What is this resistance among historians about telling the truth about the First World War.

I discussed this with my wife, Mei Ha Chan, who has no ideas about what one is "allowed" to say--and what one is not allowed to say--about the First World War.

She suggests that there is a shared desire to avoid looking at the truth. It's a bond that holds historians together: to pretend that the suicidal military strategy was an "accident." That each side in the conflict was trying desperately to "win," but somehow was unable to do so.

It's as if acknowledging the truth will result in EXCLUSION FROM THE "CLUB:" one will no longer be accepted or acceptable within the historical community.

There is something deeper: the desire to deny the psychopathology of Western civilization: to flee from the knowledge that we in the Western world enacted this monumental episode of destruction and self-destruction.

This denial of the truth is somewhat laughable. Political scientists, historians and others claim to be astonished by the phenomenon of "suicide bombers."

However, they are unwilling to look at what amounted to an episode of suicidal behavior that lasted for over four years.

Richard Koenigsberg