It is wrong to celebrate war. Many here condemn government policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet celebrate events such as Dresden and the Battle of Britain.

We do not need myths when it comes to war. There are two powerful myths about war and its relationship to change. One is the liberal myth. The other is the myth of redemptive violence, a source of the romanticisation of violence that infected many in the west through much of the 20th century and that appears in other guises around the world now.


The Second World War was not "about" the liberation of the concentration camps. Similarly, the American civil war was not at first "about" the abolition of slavery - Abraham Lincoln only rather gradually came to be an abolitionist and to see this as an issue key to the war. And the Korean war was not "about" the developmental state that, in South Korea, eventually and extraordinarily emerged after the carnage.

War is wrong and governments don't always tell the people their true reasons for going to war.