When Bad History Meets Warmongering

I should probably be inured to articles arguing that even though europe endured “two twentieth-century apocalypses that left it depopulated and permanently traumatized” it is wrong for europeans to have drawn any conclusions, or learnt any lessons, from the First and Second World Wars. And yet, I’m afraid, I continue to be irritated by such pieces, not least because they invariably demand that europeans prove their moral seriousness by going to war more frequently, regardless of the cost or even the cause involved. Equally, it’s startling quite how many people never met a war they couldn’t embrace and champion.

Michael Oren, historian and prospective Israeli ambassador to Washington, seems to be one such chap. His latest rant  – dressed up in learned clothes of course – in the New Republic is pegged to the unveiling (some time ago) of a couple of memorials to those soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice during the First World War.