Today, Neither Left Nor Right Can Find

Although The United States Lost A Quarter Of A Million Men And Women, Civilians And Soldiers, In World War Ii, That's Considerably Less Than The Russians Lost In Soldiers At The Battle Of Stalingrad Alone. It's Important To Convey To Countries And To People And To Generations Who Have No Experience Of The 20th Century As It Was Lived In Europe Just How Catastrophic It Was.

Apparently, The Line You Take On Israel Trumps Everything Else In Life.

It's Important To Remember That World War Ii Was Experienced Very Much As A Continuity In That Sense. Most Of World War Ii In Most Of Europe Wasn't A War; It Was An Occupation. The War Was At The Beginning And The End, Except In Germany And The Soviet Union, And Even There Really Only At The End. So The Rest Of Time It's An Occupation, Which In Some Ways Was Experienced As An Extension Of The Interwar Period. World War Ii Was Simply An Extreme Form, In A Whole New Key, Of The Disruption Of Normal Life That Began In 1914.

We No Longer Ask Of A Judicial Ruling Or A Legislative Act: Is It Good? Is It Fair? Is It Just? Is It Right? Will It Help Bring About A Better Society Or A Better World? Those Used To Be The Political Questions, Even If They Invited No Easy Answers. We Must Learn Once Again To Pose Them.

Yugoslavia Served As A Reminder That The Lessons Of World War Two Were Only Partially Learned. There's A Great Line Someone Wrote In The Middle Of The 1990s, At The Time When Clinton Was Agonizing About Whether Or Not To Go Into Bosnia: "everyone Says, 'never Again. Never Again.' But All They Really Mean Is Never Again Will Germans Kill Jews In The Streets Of Warsaw".