Just for the record,

[fpb]

- I loved all the seven Harry Potter books, with one exception: I thoroughly hated the epilogue. I regard it not only as bad, but as unredeemable. Its message (destroy the bad guy equals live in peace afterwards) is both dangerously escapistic (was the world any safer after 1945? And what about the widespread hope of a "peace dividend" after 1989?) and plain incredible. What, nineteen years of unbroken peace? On what planet? If that is the chapter that JKR kept in her safe all those years, it should have stayed there.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That's funny, I am a historian and I do not think there is any consensus that the "reparations" did anything to inflame German war mania. National vanity, the excessive power of the officers corps, the whole complex of neuroses and political positions one might call "Prussia", the universal certainty that Germany had never been defeated at all, meant that no peace treaty whatsoever could be accepted by Germany. That loathsome individual Woodrow Wilson did his part in treating the Allies as though they were America's enemies and the Germans as though they were allies, thus strengthening their sense of entitlement. War was inevitable from the moment Wilson declared that his country was not an ally, but a co-belligerant.