Martin Wolf

And I won't even talk about what happened to Jews.

And then, of course, the same thing happened with nationalism, which led to some pretty spectacular wars.

And communism, that was more mass murder internally.

So...

Europeans became, and this is part of, I think, European culture, civilization after the Second World War, became exhausted.

with ideology.

We wanted to stop that because when we, I think it was very widely shared, whenever we got one of these, we ended up with mass murder.

And the truth is nothing bad has ever happened to the US except your idiotic civil war, which should never have been fought because the civil, because slavery should have just been abolished by then.

It wasn't

justifiable.

So the point is, but one of my favorite statistics, I can't remember the exact figures, but if you compare the number of Americans who've died in war, I think it's somewhere over a million, including the Civil War, million and a half.

You can probably give me the exact figures.

In Europe, it's many tens of millions.

So the idea of

really believing in things, really, really believing things to the point that you actually want to go and kill people who don't share those beliefs, which is where it seems to go, is very, very frightening.

Now, the younger generation may now have forgotten enough history to start it again, so it might happen.

But that was a dominant part.

Yes, we wanted to defend ourselves against communism because it was one of those European ideologies.

That had gone wrong, pretty obviously.

We had realized, most of us, Stalin's death camps meant in terms of deaths.