We Are Not Merely Historians But Also

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.

The Different American Experience Of The 20th Century Is Crucial Because The Lesson Of The Century For Europe, Which Essentially Is That The Human Condition Is Tragic, Led It To Have A Build A Welfare System And A Set Of Laws And Social Arrangements That Are More Prophylactic Than Idealistic. It's Not About Building Perfect Futures; It's About Preventing Terrible Pasts. I Think That Is Something That Europeans In The Second Half Of The 20th Century Knew In Their Bones And Americans Never Did, And It's One Of The Big Differences Between The Two Western Cultures.

If We Remain Grotesquely Unequal, We Shall Lose All Sense Of Fraternity: And Fraternity, For All Its Fatuity As A Political Objective, Turns Out To Be The Necessary Condition Of Politics Itself.

I Don't Believe In An Afterlife. I Don't Believe In A Single Or Multiple Godhead. I Respect People Who Do, But I Don't Believe It Myself.

We Need To Learn... How War Brutalises And Degrades Winners And Losers Alike And What Happens To Us When, Having Heedlessly Waged War For No Good Reason, We Are Encouraged To Inflate And Demonise Our Enemies In Order To Justify That War's Indefinite Continuance.