Margaret Macmillan Quotes

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

They should have remembered that famous saying of Bismarck: “Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

What may seem like a reasonable way of protecting oneself can look very different from the other side of the border.

The delegates to the peace conference after World War I "tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.

As the American historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, it is like looking in a rearview mirror: if you only look back, you will land in the ditch, but it helps to know where you have come from and who else is on the road.

The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.

IF YOU BELIEVE THE DOCTORS,” Salisbury once remarked, “nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.

Wilson agreed reluctantly to their attempts: “I don’t much like to make a compromise with people who aren’t reasonable. They will always believe that, by persisting in their claims, they will be able to obtain more.

In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. . . .History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.

We should not be impressed when our leaders say firmly, "History teaches us" or "History will show that we were right." They can oversimplify and force inexact comparisons just as much as any of us can. Even the clever and the powerful (and the two are not necessarily the same) go confidently off down the wrong paths. It is useful, too, to be reminded, as a citizen, that those in positions of authority do not always know better.

In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.

Poincaré, unusually for his time and class, was a feminist and a strong supporter of animal rights, refusing, for example, to join the customary hunting parties at the presidential country estate.

His older compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche had entertained no such hopes: “For long now our entire European culture has been moving with a tormenting tension that grows greater from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restless, violent, precipitate, like a river that wants to reach its end.”23

Do you really mean they like it? You wouldn’t fox an old friend, would you?' – in response to Lois Cole’s telegram announcing that Macmillan liked the book that would become known as Gone With the Wind.

We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

Part of Nietzsche’s appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians, feminists, conservatives and, later, the Nazis did. Sadly, Nietzsche was not available to explain himself; he went mad in 1889 and died in 1900, the year of the Paris Exposition.

But the superiority of the British is that it is a matter of complete indifference to them if they appear to be stupid.

Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords.

Anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword!

Louvain was a dull place, said a guidebook in 1910, but when the time came it made a spectacular fire.

The contempt for what the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called Bürokretinismus served further to undermine public confidence in their government.

British would use every means from persuasion to bribery in Morocco and when those failed the wives of British diplomats knew what they had to do to further Britain’s interests.

disarmament was an idea just of Jews, Socialists, and hysterical women

He told conductors how to conduct and painters how to paint. As Edward said unkindly, he was “the most brilliant failure in history.”33

The anarchist who finished his meal in a Paris café and then calmly murdered a fellow diner said merely, “I shall not be striking an innocent if I strike the first bourgeois that I meet.

The failure of the talks between Chamberlain and the German ambassador in London, the public and private outbursts of the Kaiser, the well-reported anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment among the German public, even the silly controversy over whether Chamberlain had insulted the Prussian army, all left their residue of mistrust and resentments in Britain as well as in Germany.

The Italian Futurist artist Giacomo Balla later called his daughters Luce and Elettricità in memory of what he saw at the Paris Exposition. (A third daughter was Elica—Propellor—after the modern machinery he also admired.)

The French would do whatever it took to get Britain to commit itself. In 1909 they produced a carefully faked document, said to have been discovered when a French commercial traveler picked up the wrong bag on a train, which purported to show Germany’s invasion plans for Britain.

Perhaps it was no accident that it was a Viennese, Sigmund Freud, who was to come up with the notion of the narcissism of small differences. As he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, ‘it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other

For the sultan Wilhelm II had brought the latest German rifle, but when he tried to present it Abdul Hamid at first shrank away in terror thinking he was about to be assassinated. The heir to Suleiman the Magnificent who had made Europe tremble nearly four centuries earlier was a miserable despot so fearful of plots that he kept a eunuch near him whose sole duty was to take the first puff on each of his cigarettes.

Even the gentle composer Richard Strauss was carried away by anti-French feeling. He told Kessler in the summer of 1912 that he would go along when war broke out. What did he think he could do, his wife asked. Perhaps, Strauss said uncertainly, he could be a nurse. “Oh, you, Richard!” snapped his wife. “You can’t stand the sight of blood!” Strauss looked embarrassed but insisted: “I would do my best. But if the French get a thrashing, I want to be there.”24

while civil servants were expected, for example, to work five to six hours a day, few did even that. In the Foreign Office, a new recruit said he rarely received more than three or four files a day to deal with and no one minded if he came in late and left early. In 1903 the British embassy had to wait for ten months to get an answer about the duty on Canadian whisky. ‘The dilatoriness of this country, if continued in progressive ratio, will soon rival that of Turkey,’ a British diplomat complained to London.

told the Reichstag that the age of “Cabinet” wars, that is wars determined by rulers for limited ends, was over: “All we have now is people’s war, and any prudent government will hesitate to bring about a war of this nature, with all its incalculable consequences.” The great powers, he went on, will find it difficult to bring such wars to an end or admit defeat: “Gentlemen, it may be a war of seven years’ or of thirty years’ duration—and woe to him who sets Europe alight, who puts the first fuse to the powder keg!”89

Nicholas of Montenegro was not so easily swayed, however. He had bribed one of the defenders, an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army, to deliver the city to him. Essad Pasha Toptani, almost as much of a rogue as Nicholas himself, had first murdered the garrison’s commander and then set his price at £80,000 by sending out a message that he had lost a suitcase containing that amount and asking that it be returned.91 On April 23, Essad duly surrendered Scutari to the Montenegrins. In Montenegro’s capital, Cetinje, there were wild celebrations with drunken revelers firing their guns in all directions.

La historia es una forma de hacer valer la comunidad imaginada. Los nacionalistas, por poner un ejemplo, aseguran que la nación siempre ha existido en esa zona convenientemente vaga de la "niebla del tiempo"(...)En realidad, examinando cualquier grupo vemos que su identidad es un proceso y no algo fijo. Los grupos se definen y redefinen a sí mismos a lo largo del tiempo y como respueta a procesos internos, un despertar religios quizá, o a presiones externas. Si uno está oprimido y victimizado(...) esa situación se convierte en parte de la imagen que uno tiene de sí mismo. Y a veces incluso conduce a una competencia bastante indecorosa por el victimismo.

A menudo se usa la historia como una serie de cuentos morales para aumentar la solidaridad de grupo o, cosa más defendible, según mi punto de vista, para explicar el desarrollo de instituciones importantes como los parlamentos y conceptos como la democracia y de ese modo la enseñanza del pasado se ha convertido en algo fundamental a la hora de debatir la forma de inculcar y trasmitir valores. El peligro es que ese objetivo, que puede ser admirable, acabe por distorsionar la historia, ya sea convirtiéndola en un relato simplista en el cual sólo hay blanco y negro, o bien representándola como si todo tendiese hacia una sola dirección, ya sea el progreso humano o el triunfo de un grupo en particular. La historia explicada de este modo aplana la complejidad de la experiencia humana y no deja espacio para las distintas interpretaciones del pasado.

China. The Kaiser had temporarily

3053Geography also gave Russia a rich choice of potential enemies.

The peacemakers were besieged by petitioners. One of the more glamorous was Queen Marie of Rumania, who arrived in Paris with a large entourage, a huge wardrobe and demands for about half of Hungary

Europe’s very success in surviving those earlier crises paradoxically led to a dangerous complacency in the summer of 1914 that, yet again, solutions would be found at the last moment and the peace would be maintained. And if we want to point fingers from the twenty-first century we can accuse those who took Europe into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go to war. There are always choices.

En 1903, el respetable funcionario Erskine Childers escribió su única novela, una historia apasionante de espionaje y aventuras, en la que advertía a sus conciudadanos sobre los peligros de una invasión alemana. El enigma de las arenas fue un éxito inmediato, y aún se reedita.

Their society was deeply marked by the years under corrupt Ottoman rule. Rumanians had a saying: “The fish grows rotten from the head.” In Rumania almost everything was for sale: offices, licenses, passports. Indeed, a foreign journalist who once tried to change money legally instead of on the black market was thrown into jail by police who thought he must be involved in a particularly clever swindle. Every government contract produced its share of graft. Although Rumania was a wealthy country, rich in farmland and, by 1918, with a flourishing oil industry, it lacked roads, bridges and railways because the money allocated by government had been siphoned off into the hands of families such as Brătianu’s own. Rumanians tended to see intrigues everywhere. In Paris they hinted darkly that the Supreme Council had fallen under the sway of Bolshevism or, alternatively, that it had been bribed by sinister capitalist forces.280

The Rumanians themselves were the Neapolitans of central Europe. Both sexes loved strong scents. Among the upper classes, women made up heavily, and men rather more discreetly, but even so the military authorities had to restrict the use of cosmetics to officers above a certain rank. Even after Rumania entered the war, foreign observers were scandalized to see officers strolling about “with painted faces, soliciting prostitutes or one another.” Noisy, effusive, melodramatic, fond of quarreling, Rumanians of all ranks threw themselves into their pastimes with passionate enthusiasm. “Along with local politics, love and love-making are the great occupation and preoccupation of all classes of society,” said a great Rumanian lady, adding: “Morality has never been a strong point with my compatriots, but they can boast of charm and beauty, wit, fun, and intelligence.” Even the Rumanian Orthodox Church took a relaxed view of adultery; it allowed up to three divorces per individual on the grounds of mutual consent alone

As the light faded on that cold afternoon, Brătianu presented Rumania’s case. Rich and polished to the point of absurdity, Brătianu had a profound sense of his own importance. He had been educated in the Hautes Ecoles in Paris, and never let anyone forget it; he loved to be discovered lying on a sofa with a book of French verse in a languid hand. Nicolson, who met him at a lunch early on in the conference, was not impressed: “Brătianu is a bearded woman, a forceful humbug, a Bucharest intellectual, a most unpleasing man. Handsome and exuberant, he flings his fine head sideways, catching his own profile in the glass. He makes elaborate verbal jokes, imagining them to be Parisian.” Women rather liked him.

thinking of themselves as members of a “nation,” sharing such characteristics as culture, language, history, religion, customs and, on the edge where racial theories flourished, biology.

So while we formally mourn the dead from our past wars once a year, we increasingly see war as something that happens when peace—the normal state of affairs—breaks down. At the same time we can indulge a fascination with great military heroes and their battles of the past; we admire stories of courage and daring exploits in war; the shelves of bookshops and libraries are packed with military histories; and movie and television producers know that war is always a popular subject. The public never seems to tire of Napoleon and his campaigns, Dunkirk, D-Day or the fantasies of Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. We enjoy them in part because they are at a safe distance; we are confident that we ourselves will never have to take part in war. The result is that we do not take war as seriously as it deserves. We may prefer to avert our eyes from what is so often a grim and depressing subject, but we should not.

War is not an aberration, best forgotten as quickly as possible.

Thucydides said, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Today new weapons, from fighter planes to aircraft carriers, are often obsolete by the time they are in service. The world’s arsenals are immense: it is estimated that there are over a billion small arms alone in the world and, at the other extreme, nuclear weapons capable of destroying humanity several times over. And serious disarmament measures remain more distant than ever. Yet so many of us, our leaders included, still talk of war as a reasonable and manageable tool. CHAPTER 4 MODERN WAR “From this place, and from this day forth, begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.” —GOETHE

La moda, la comida, la diversión, los viajes, todo se regulaba en aras del esfuerzo de guerra.

Atenas también necesitaban remeros, lo cual significaba que los hombres libres que no poseían mucho más que su fuerza podían obtener la ciudadanía empuñando el remo.

La guerra no es una aberración, algo que es mejor olvidar lo antes posible.

La posibilidad de librar una guerra y la evolución de la sociedad humana forman parte del mismo relato.

historiadores diplomáticos e historiadores militares se quejan del poco interés que suscitan sus campos de estudio y sus trabajos.

Mis dos abuelos estuvieron en la Primera Guerra Mundial, como médicos; el galés con el Ejército Indio en Galípoli y en Mesopotamia, y el canadiense en el frente occidental. Mi padre y mis cuatro tíos combatieron en la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

organizada de todas las actividades humanas, y a su vez ha estimulado una mayor organización de la sociedad.

A medida que ha mejorado nuestra capacidad para matar, también nos hemos vuelto menos tolerantes con la violencia.

Nos inspira miedo, pero también nos fascina. Su crueldad y su despilfarro pueden horrorizarnos, pero también somos capaces de admirar la valentía del soldado y sentir su peligrosa atracción. Algunos

La violencia no es guerra a menos que se lleve a cabo en nombre de una unidad política […]”.

La guerra –violencia organizada con un propósito entre dos unidades políticas– se fue volviendo más elaborada cuando desarrollamos sociedades sedentarias establecidas y ayudó a que estas fueran más organizadas y poderosas. De

Al igual que la mayor parte de especies, de aves a mamíferos, somos territoriales, pero también somos seres sensibles y tenemos capacidad de decisión, de escuchar a la mejor parte de nuestra naturaleza o a la peor. Hemos creado culturas que establecen

Las pruebas arqueológicas e históricas apuntan resueltamente hacia Hobbes y hacia la guerra como parte integral y duradera de la experiencia humana.

Los romanos solían levantar columnas y arcos de la victoria en honor a la gloria del emperador y del Estado.

monopolio cada vez mayor del uso de la fuerza

Los mejores leviatanes tienen leyes coherentes, impuestos razonables y garantizan la propiedad y, en algunos casos, como en

En los siglos xvi y xvii los españoles financiaban sus guerras europeas principalmente gracias al oro y la plata de los Imperios azteca e inca derrotados.

Fascists have been particularly enamored of traditional gender roles. Vichy France made Mother’s Day a major festival and awarded medals to good mothers. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, argued that “Man should be trained as a warrior and woman as recreation for the warrior,” a precept he put into practice in his own life as far as the recreation was concerned.

Far more than women, men learn to fear being cowards. Being accused of behaving like a woman carries connotations of emotionalism and weakness.

Junker children, girls as well, were brought up to be tough and bear pain uncomplainingly.

Sukhomlinov was made governor-general of a larger area which includes much of today’s Ukraine. He restored law and order and put an end to the disgraceful and brutal treatment of the local

The root of evil is that the Paris writ does not run- Lloyd George

Jews, something for which many conservatives never forgave him.

There are only two perfectly useless things in the world,” he quipped. “One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!

Between 1890 and 1911 there was a 200 percent increase in the numbers of bureaucrats, most of them new appointments. In Austria alone there were 3 million civil servants for a total population of some 28 million. Even

Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.

In Vienna, the rising politician Karl Lueger discovered that he could mobilize the lower classes by appealing to their fears of change and capitalism, their resentment of the prosperous middle classes, and their hatred of Jews, who came to stand in for the first two. He did so with such success that he became a mayor, over the opposition of Franz Joseph, in 1897 and remained, highly popular, in office until he died in 1910.

Yet militarism was a more general phenomenon across Europe and throughout societies. In Britain small children wore sailor suits and on the Continent schoolchildren frequently wore little uniforms; secondary schools and universities had cadet corps;

As the Prussian Minister of War, General Erich von Falkenhayn, said on August 4 as the war became a general one: “Even if we will perish, it was nice.”10

Dueling was accepted in artistic circles as well with the young Marcel Proust challenging a critic of his work while Claude Debussy drew a challenge from the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck for not casting his mistress in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, for which Maeterlinck had written the libretto.14 In Germany Kessler challenged a bureaucrat who blamed him for a scandal caused by a show of Rodin drawings of naked young men. The only European country where dueling was no longer accepted as something that gentlemen did was Great Britain. But then, as the Kaiser was fond of saying, the British were a nation of shopkeepers.

Even when he went to the House of Commons as a Liberal he remained the city’s undisputed ruler. In Parliament he surprised his colleagues by not being a wild demagogue but a highly polished debater making concise and pointed speeches. “The performance,” according to the British journalist J. A. Spender, “was, if anything, too perfect. ‘It is all very nice, very nice, Mr. Chamberlain,’ said an old member whose advice he sought, ‘but the House would take it as such a great compliment, if now and again you could manage to break down.’ ”49 CHAMBERLAIN REMAINED A RADICAL, advocating social reforms, and attacked such privileged institutions as landlords and the established Church of England. Yet he also developed a passionate attachment to the British Empire which he believed was a force for good in the world. That conviction led him to break with the Liberals in 1886 when they proposed Home Rule for Ireland; Chamberlain and his supporters argued that it would undermine the unity of the empire. In time, the Liberal Unionists, as they were known, moved towards the Conservative Party.50 Chamberlain never defended himself to his former colleagues. He simply moved on. He had, said Spender, “a deadly concentration” on what he was doing and that was mainly politics: “Everything

One night as the two men sat in a café in Paris, Jaurès described what a future war would be like: “the cannon-fire and the bombs; entire nations decimated; millions of soldiers strewn in mud and blood; millions of corpses …” During a battle on the Western Front some years later, a friend asked Gérard why he was staring into space. “I feel as though all this is familiar to me,” Gérard replied. “Jaurès prophesied this hell, this total annihilation.

Messimy wanted to follow the example of the other European armies and put the men into uniforms that would make them difficult to see on the battlefield. The right seized on this as a threat to France’s glorious military traditions. The new uniforms, said the right-wing press, were appalling and against French taste. The caps looked like something jockeys would wear and the officers were to be dressed like stable boys. It was an attempt, said the conservative Écho de Paris, to destroy the authority of the officers over their men and the Masonic lodges that had plotted it would no doubt be pleased.

The Commission’s report noted with dismay the tendency of the warring peoples to portray their enemies as subhuman and the all-too-frequent atrocities committed against both enemy soldiers and civilians. “In the older civilizations,” the report said, “there is a synthesis of moral and social forces embodied in laws and institutions giving stability of character, forming public sentiment, and making for security.”120 The report was issued early in the summer of 1914, just as the rest of Europe was about to learn how fragile its civilization was.

Social Darwinism, that bastard child of evolutionary thinking, and its cousin militarism, fostered the belief that competition among nations was part of nature’s rule and that in the end the fittest would survive. And that probably meant through war. The late nineteenth century’s admiration of the military as the noblest part of the nation and the spread of military values into civilian societies fed the assumptions that war was a necessary part of the great struggle for survival, that it might indeed be good for societies, tuning them up so to speak.

As Gustave Flaubert said, “I defend the poor Republic but I don’t believe in it.

Among artists, Pissarro and Monet were Dreyfusard, Degas and Cézanne Anti.

The most stable country in Europe, Britain, had had centuries to build its parliament, local councils, laws, and law courts (and had weathered crises including a civil war along the way). More, British society had grown incrementally and slowly, taking generations to develop attitudes and institutions, from universities to chambers of commerce, clubs and associations, a free press, the whole complex web of civil society which sustains a workable political system.

He was probably right. Russia at the turn of the century, with all its problems, might have been too much for any ruler, but Nicholas was better fitted to be a country squire or the mayor of a small town.

Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia would have been amusing if it had not had such tragic consequences. Since he had melodramatically closed his embassy in Belgrade, Berchtold found himself at a loss as to how to deliver the news to Serbia. Germany refused to be the emissary since it was still trying to give the impression that it did not know what Austria-Hungary was planning and so Berchtold resorted to sending an uncoded telegram to Paši?, the first time that war had been declared that way.

historian Margaret MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Profile, 2020)

Culture, technology and war are so interdependent that it is hard to say which drives which. War pushes ahead the development of technology but it also adapts what is already there.