The looming centenary of the outbreak of the first world war offers an opportunity to break away from the Blackadder/Oh! What a Lovely War vision, which dominates popular perceptions. Nobody sane suggests a celebration. But, in place of the government’s professed ‘non-judgmental’ approach to commemoration, ministers could assert that although the war was assuredly ghastly, it was not futile.
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Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard and author, most recently, of Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War.
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