it was the horror of the two world wars-Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima-that led to our own era's questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationalistic Westerners went to war in an industrial age of weaponry of mass annihilation, but rather because the liberal democracies were unwilling to make moderate sacrifices to keep the peace well before 1914 and 1939-when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism, and then Nazism without millions of the blameless perishing.
( Victor Davis Hanson )
[ The Father of Us All: War and ]
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