Why Don't We Learn from History?

Perhaps the most astonishing lesson of World War Two is that, in the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, a hard reset of two very different cultures was possible. Judging from the Allied victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it certainly seems that one can bomb ideas—by obliterating many of the people who hold them. Kill a s

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We learn from history that the compulsory principle always breaks down in practice. It is practicable to prevent men doing something; moreover that principle of restraint, or regulation, is essentially justifiable in so far as its application is needed to check interference with others' freedom. But it is not, in reality, possible to make men do so

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The germs of war find a focus in the convenient belief that "the end justifies the means." Each new generation repeats this argument while succeeding generations have had reason to say that the end their predecessors thus pursued was never justified by the fulfilment conceived. If there is one lesson that should be clear from history it i

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“No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance,” Clausewitz writes of war in On War. It’s a “paradoxical trinity,” composed of the passions that cause combatants to risk their lives, the skill of their commanders, and the coherence of the political objectives for which the war is being fought. Only the last is fully

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