Please scroll down to the table below before you read this edition of the LSS Newsletter. To summarize: 65 million troops were mobilized in the First World War; nearly 9 million killed, 21 million wounded and 8 million taken prisoner or reported missing in action. Thus, an extraordinary total of over 37 million casualties, 56% of all men mobilized.

What a fantastic event! What a massive, monumental ritual of destruction or self-destruction. Yet historians write about the war without flinching, as if “nothing special” occurred. Omer Bartov observes that the main trend of modern history is to "domestic the fantastic and to normalize the unspeakable. "Norman O. Brown suggests that human history is the "history of a neurosis."
I've studied the First World War and Holocaust 40 years and suggest human history (“political” history, that is) is the history of a psychosis. Because this psychosis is shared by so it has come to be perceived as “normal.”

What is at the root of this tendency to “normalize the fantastic and unspeakable”—to conceive and write about horrific episodes of collective destruction and mass-murder as if these events are neither extraordinary nor pathological? What lies behind this desperate struggle to maintain our belief in the “goodness” of civilization—in spite of the vast devastation that has been wrought by "civilized" societies?

Having acknowledged pathology and destructiveness inherent within the historical process, we turn to comprehending the causes and meanings of these fantastic events. Why did human beings bring them into existence?

The most significant factor impeding our effort to understand historical episodes of mass-murder is the assumption of rationality. Western thought revolves around this persistent, determined effort to pretend human beings are guided by “rational thought.”

The assumption of rationality—refusal to recognize the irrational source of politics—is especially common among academic political scientists and historians. After more than 124 years of Freud, people acknowledge that individuals are driven by motives of which they are unaware. Many find it difficult to acknowledge, however, that the entire historical process is driven by motives of which human beings are unaware.

Presumably, the nations of First World War were pursuing their “interests.”  Each nation had "reasons" for going to war. Yet look at the results below—the massive casualties. Did this happen by chance? Was the entirety of the war a monumental “accident?” 

We find it difficult to conceive the self-destructive motives underlying the behavior of historical actors. Massive volumes show how one event led to another.  Yet few articulate the psychological dynamics that generated these events.

It is almost as if psychology has been banned from the domain of history, which positions itself as a discipline “beyond good and evil;” a realm of human behavior that goes on by itself, independent of human desire or motivation.

"History" is a domain where anything and everything can happen and does happen. We are witness to extraordinary, bizarre, fantastic events. Historians document these events—but refuse to state the obvious: that a profound sickness or pathology lies at the core of the historical process.