This summer we will rightly remember the outbreak of the First World War.
My grandfather, a Dorset farmer, served in the cavalry during this war. He died when I was very young and my clearest memory of him was his persistent cough that plagued him in his armchair. Only later did I understand the cough to be a permanent effect of mustard gas encountered 60 years earlier on the battlefield. The Great War, as it is known, left 16 million dead and 20 million wounded. It is right to remember such tragic but important events.
Bloodiest war?
But myths also creep into the memories. For example, the claim that it was the bloodiest war in history up to that time is false. In the previous century, 30 million died in a war in southern China that lasted 14 years. Historian Dan Snow points out that as a proportion of the population more were killed in the English Civil War (1642–1651) than in the Great War.
Comedy, free speech and warnings from the past
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher who grew up in Nazi Germany. Eventually she had to flee to France and, …