All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional ones, such as territorial aggrandizement or the acquisition of scarce resources, are cast as clashes of civilizations - culture wars - with each side claiming the high ground, and characterizing the other as barbaric. The enemy is invariably a threat to 'our way of life,' an infidel, a desecrator, a polluter, a defiler of higher or better values. The current war against the very real threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clear example.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in whi…

Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical - or a bellicose - mood. Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: th…

Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invente…

War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How l…

The great Gaels of Ireland Are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad.

As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me.