The problem is less one of forgetting the past and its meaning than of remembering the wrong things about it and drawing the wrong lessons from it. The characterization of “Greatest Generation” is a good example of a myth that, in Walter Lippmann’s phrase, is well meaning but unmeaning.
Maury Klein
A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America in World War II
Nationalism had been, before the war, a claim pressed by minorities against large multiethnic empires, but after Versailles it became a claim that minority groups asserted against one another.
– Yehuda Mirsky
“Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.” (“And do not listen to those who keep saying, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of G-d’, because the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness.”)
— Alcuin, in a letter to Charlemagne
I followed Harry Turtledove on Twitter. He followed me back. And he even sent me a note.
How bloody cool is that?
A Bucket and a Pen 