But from any one country’s point of view, those social changes were absolutely necessary, since the only thing worse than winning a war is losing a war.

The idea that an understanding of genocide, that a memory of holo-causts can only lead people to want to dismantle the system is erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the opposite is true: that an understanding of genocide has led people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holo-causts has led people to... See more

The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide—is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong—wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, “The

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