THE FIRST WORLD WAR: NATION-STATES MURDERED THEIR OWN SOLDIERS

Richard Koenigsberg argues that the First World War was fundamentally an act of national self‑destruction, in which nations effectively murdered their own soldiers in the name of sustaining the symbolic life of the nation. His view is consistent and explicit across his books and essays.

🧩 Core Idea: Nations “fed” on their own soldiers

Koenigsberg maintains that the war was driven by the belief that “the individual must die so that the nation might live.” Nations were imagined as living entities whose survival required the sacrifice of human bodies. Soldiers became sacrificial victims, offered up to keep the nation alive.

He describes Germany, France, and Britain as being “fed with the bodies and blood of soldiers”—a ritualistic process in which the nation-state consumed its own people to affirm its existence.

🔥 The First World War as “perpetual slaughter”

Koenigsberg emphasizes that the war’s strategy—especially the doctrine of the “offensive at all costs”—produced continuous, futile killing. He argues that military leaders persisted in sending men into hopeless assaults not because it made strategic sense, but because the ideology of national sacrifice demanded it.

He stresses that historians have struggled to explain the war’s meaning because its logic was not rational or strategic, but sacrificial and symbolic.

🩸 “The nation-state kills its own soldiers”

In Nations Have the Right to Kill, Koenigsberg states plainly that warfare is a sacrificial ritual in which the nation asserts its right to destroy its own people. The First World War becomes the clearest example:

• Soldiers are sacrificial victims

• Their deaths are seen as necessary for the nation’s vitality

• The nation-state exercises a “right” to kill millions of its own men

This logic, he argues, later informs genocidal thinking: if a nation can sacrifice its “best” people (soldiers), it can also sacrifice those it deems “worst.”

🧠 Summary of Koenigsberg’s View

• The First World War was not a rational geopolitical conflict.

• It was a massive sacrificial project, a form of collective self‑destruction.

• Nations imagined themselves as living beings requiring human blood to survive.

• Soldiers were ritually sacrificed, not merely killed in battle.

• The war’s meaning lies in its symbolic logic, not its strategic outcomes.