Much of what we think we know is false; what really happened matters desperately to us today.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
This summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, and we should reflect on the “lessons” we have been taught so often on how to avoid another such devastating conflict. Chief among them seems to be the canard that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that officially ended the war caused a far worse one just 20 years later — usually in the sense of an unnecessary harshness accorded a defeated Imperial Germany.
But how true is that common argument of what John Maynard Keynes called a “Carthaginian peace”? Continue reading “Lessons of World War I”