83 Pat Buchanan & Niall Ferguson omit crucial evidence in their depiction of WWI & WWII

Pat Buchanan & Niall Ferguson omit crucial evidence in their depiction of WWI & WWII

(1) Russia buys 12 spy drones from Israel
(2) Russian Armed Forces to acquire new drones in 2010 - Popovkin
(3) Pat Buchanan omits evidence that Hitler wanted war in East (not West) - with Russia (not Britain)
(4) Niall Ferguson omits the Jewish role in WWI (eg Balfour Dec), Creation of USSR (but Stalin overthrew them), & WWII

(1) Russia buys 12 spy drones from Israel

http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20090622/155314762.html

MOSCOW, June 22 (RIA Novosti) - Russia has bought 12 unmanned aerial vehicles from Israel in a recent deal worth $53 million, a Russian government official said on Monday.

"The contract envisions the purchase of 12 UAV, including two heavy vehicles and 10 small vehicles. The delivery has not yet been made because the contract was signed only recently," Vyacheslav Dzirkaln, deputy head of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, said in an exclusive interview with RIA Novosti.

Dzirkaln said the main goal of the purchase was to study the Israeli achievements in the development of spy drones in order to build reliable UAVs domestically.

"We must take their know-how and put it to practical use [in developing our own craft]," the official said.

The Russian military stressed the need to provide its Armed Forces with advanced means of battlefield reconnaissance in the wake of a brief military conflict with Georgia last August, when the effectiveness of Russian military operations was severely hampered by the lack of reliable intelligence.

The Russian Air Force has launched a number of UAV development programs for various purposes. Air Force Commander, Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin said last year that Russia would deploy advanced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with a flight range of up to 400 kilometers (250 miles) and a flight duration capability of up to 12 hours by 2011.

However, Russian defense companies, including the Irkut aircraft maker and the Vega Radio Engineering Corp., have failed so far to provide the military with effective spy drones.

According to various estimates, the Russian military needs up to 100 UAVs and at least 10 guidance systems to ensure effective battlefield reconnaissance in case of any military conflict.

(2) Russian Armed Forces to acquire new drones in 2010 - Popovkin

Guarding the borders: Russia tests new drone

13:24 28/04/2009

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090428/150009837.html

ISTANBUL, April 28 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's Armed Forces are to be equipped with new domestically-produced drones in 2010, a deputy Russian defense minister responsible for military procurements said Tuesday.

"Russian drones not inferior to foreign varieties will appear in a year, no earlier," General of the Army Vladimir Popovkin said at the IDEF 2009 defense industry exhibition in Istanbul.

The issue of insufficient modern weaponry, including drones, in the Russian military came to the fore in August 2008, when Russia and Georgia fought a five-day war after Tbilisi launched an offensive of its former republic of South Ossetia in an attempt to bring it back under central control.

The lack of advanced reconnaissance equipment severely hampered the effectiveness of Russian military operations in South Ossetia due to an absence of reliable up-to-date intelligence.

Popovkin confirmed Russia had concluded a deal to buy a number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from Israel, which he earlier called a "temporary measure," and without specifying a figure.

"Despite that, we have not stopped any of our efforts on developing them in Russia. We have maintained funding and concentrated our work in one

http://en.rian.ru/world/20090218/120204750.html

Iran develops spy drone capable of reaching Israel - official

17:18 18/02/2009

TEHRAN, February 18 (RIA Novosti) - Iranian scientists have developed an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of reaching Israel, an Iranian news agency said on Wednesday, citing a senior military official.

Deputy Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi made the announcement on Tuesday and described the development as "an important achievement," the Fars news agency reported.

"However, we cannot disclose the details of this project at present," the official said.

The reported range of 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) would make it possible for the Iranian drone to reach Israel.

Iran launched a domestic arms development program after a U.S. weapons embargo was imposed during its 1980-88 war with Iraq. Since 1992, Iran has reportedly produced its own Saeqeh and Azarakhsh jet fighters, stealth-capable Ghadir submarine, missile boats, torpedoes, tanks and armored carrier vehicles.

Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said on January 27 that Iran had achieved self-sufficiency in manufacturing combat missiles of various modifications.

He added that Iran would continue to build up its defense capability to ensure regional stability and security.

"Our greater defense power is no threat to other countries," he said. "Iran only needs a system to deter and repulse possible external aggression against it."

Both Israel and the United States have refused to rule out the possibility of military action against Tehran over its failure to obey international nuclear non-proliferation demands.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090127/119821066.html

Russian army to improve combat effectiveness with spy drones

15:58 27/01/2009

MOSCOW, January 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's Armed Forces will receive three new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the next 3 years to boost the reconnaissance and precision-strike capabilities of ground units, an industry official said on Tuesday.

The new-generation Tipchak mobile aerial system has been designed for reconnaissance and target designation purposes on the battlefield in any weather conditions. The first Tipchak system was put in service at the end of 2008. (Moscow hosts UAV exhibition - Image Gallery)

"We will deliver one Tipchak UAV system to the Defense Ministry every year until 2011," said Arkady Syroyezhko, director of UAV development programs at the Vega Radio Engineering Corp.

Tipchak operates up to six UAVs launched from a pneumatic catapult. Each UAV has a range of 40 kilometers (25 miles) and can provide targeting for artillery and theater-based ballistic missiles at distances up to 350 km (about 220 miles).

The drone is fitted with infrared and video sensors and has a real-time digital data link for communication with artillery units for laser-guided targeting.

The Russian Air Force has launched a number of UAV development programs for various purposes.

Air Force Commander, Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin said last year that Russia would deploy advanced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with a flight range of up to 400 kilometers (250 miles) and flight duration of up to 12 hours by 2011.

The UAVs of both fixed- and rotary-wing types will perform a variety of tasks, including reconnaissance, attack, retransmission of radio signals and target designation, the general said.

A source in the Russian Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation said on Tuesday that the Defense Ministry was also considering buying UAVs abroad, but the decision has been delayed by lobbyists from the Russian defense industry.

"The purchase of several UAV's from Israel worth $100 million is still being discussed," the source said.

(3) Pat Buchanan omits evidence that Hitler wanted war in East (not West) - with Russia (not Britain)

Did Hitler Want War?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

September 1st, 2009

http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.

Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.

By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.

What cause could justify such sacrifices?

The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.

Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland’s rescue.

But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?

Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn’t want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.

Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative “to stop Hitler” after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.

If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro’s, was out to conquer the world?

After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.

The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary’s ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate.

Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?

Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland’s turn, then Russia’s, then France’s, then Britain’s, then the United States.

We would all be speaking German now.

But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can’t get out of the Baltic Sea?

If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?

Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?

Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?

Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?

Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.

Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia.

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Winston Churchill was right when he called it “The Unnecessary War” — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.

(4) Niall Ferguson omits the Jewish role in WWI (eg Balfour Dec), Creation of USSR (but Stalin overthrew them), & WWII

From: Josef Schwanzer <donauschwob@optusnet.com.au> Date: 06.09.2009 10:30 AM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/05/second-world-war-background-causes

Why did the second world war begin

In September 1939 the world plunged into the most violent conflict in its history. But to understand why, argues Niall Ferguson, we need to look beyond the familiar story of Hitler's rise to power

Niall Ferguson

The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009

German soldiers dismantling a tank outside Berlin in 1919. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Germany was required to disarm. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Why did a second world war begin in Europe on 1 September 1939, little more than 20 years after peace had been concluded at the end of the first world war? The question has been posed repeatedly for seven decades now and answered in myriad ways. But it is the wrong question – one that is not merely too Eurocentric but too Anglocentric to make sense of the events that led to the bloodiest war in human history. Far more than the first world war, which was a genuinely European war, fought mainly in Europe by Europeans, the second world war was a truly global affair. Only by taking a world-historical view of events can we hope to grasp its true character.

The first point to clear up is that the war did not begin in Europe in September 1939. Rather, it began in Asia at least two years earlier, with the escalation of the Sino-Japanese conflict at Luokouchiao, known in the west as the Marco Polo Bridge. Nor, from a global point of view, was there anything approaching 20 years of peace before September 1939. There was scarcely a year after 1918 without serious violence in some corner of the world. For that reason a number of historians have sought to represent the period from around 1914 until 1945 as a unity: a second 30 years' war, give or take a year, or a prolonged "European civil war". Yet even this conception does not quite suffice. For the world historian, it makes more sense to conceive of the period from 1904 until 1953 as something more like a 50 years' war. The key issue of this period was not the Anglo-German or Franco-German relationships, for so long the focus of European historiography. The key was the sustainability of western imperial power over the rest of the world, and most importantly over Asia.

Western hegemony – the dominance of the world by the European empires and their far-flung colonies of settlement – had its origins in the explorations and migrations of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Thereafter, a succession of revolutions – scientific, agricultural, financial, political and industrial – gave the west overwhelming advantages over "the rest". This great global divergence reached its maximum point in around 1900, when a coalition of western forces was able to invade Qing China and suppress the Boxer Rising with impunity. But with Japan's victory over Russia in the war over Manchuria that broke out in 1904, the historic tide at last began to turn. From then until the 1950s the leitmotif of history was conflict between and against the western empires over the central question of who should rule the great Eurasian landmass, and how power should be projected from its prosperous west to its populous east. Only when the familiar events of the mid-20th century are set in this perspective do the origins of the second world war make sense.

Invasion of Poland

Consider the conventional version currently taught to most British schoolchildren (including my own). It goes something like this. War broke out in 1939 because Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France were pledged to resist this act of aggression. To understand why this happened, it is first necessary to know how that fascinatingly wicked man Hitler came to be the ruler of Germany. The answer is that he offered the Germans answers to two problems. First, they resented the peace that had been imposed on them at Versailles after the first world war. This had involved losses of territory, including a whole "corridor" of Prussian land that had been handed over to Poland. It had also involved a huge bill for reparations, supposedly to pay for the damage caused by German aggression in 1914.

Second, Germans were unhappy because of the economic events of the early 1920s and early 1930s. They had suffered hyperinflation in 1923, primarily as a consequence of reparations, which Germany could not afford to pay. They had then suffered severe deflation between 1929 and 1933 as a result of the great depression. The huge unemployment of the early 1930s helped Hitler's National Socialist party win votes, so Hitler became Reich chancellor. He was then able to embark on his long-cherished ambition of destroying the Versailles peace settlement. Reparations payments had already been suspended, but there was plenty more for Hitler to overturn. First he rearmed. Then, in 1936, he put troops into the demilitarised Rhineland. Two years later he annexed Austria. All these steps violated the Versailles treaty, but neither Britain nor France did anything to stop Hitler. When he demanded the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia, they caved in once again, despite the fact that these territories had never previously belonged to Germany. However, when Hitler went a step further, occupying and partitioning the remainder of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, western resolve finally stiffened. Guarantees were given to other east European countries, including Poland. When Hitler nevertheless attacked Poland, war was inevitable.

Like a lot of stories that have been told many times, this story is satisfying more because it is familiar than because it makes sense. Reflect for a moment on the sheer scale of the second world war. The best available figures indicate that around 60 million people died as a direct result of the conflict – close to 3% of the world's entire pre-war population – roughly half of them civilians. No one knows how many people suffered physical injury. Probably more than 110 million people – most of them young men – spent at least a part of the war in uniform. An even larger number suffered bereavement or some other kind of mental suffering. The damage to the world's stock of housing, factories and other physical assets was huge. Not only were Japan and Germany laid waste, they themselves devastated cities, towns and villages all over eastern Europe and eastern China.

How could a German invasion of Poland lead to carnage on such a vast scale? Poland was strategically insignificant and relatively poor. The allies often claimed to be fighting for democracy, but as far as political freedom and civil rights for minorities went, Poland was little better than Germany in 1939. At the end of it all, to be sure, Poland once again existed as a state. But close to one-fifth of its pre-war population were dead. Its borders had radically changed (the whole country shifted westwards and shrank by 20%). And its independence very quickly became a fiction as all of Europe east of the river Elbe exchanged one form of totalitarian rule for another.

In short, the costs of the war in blood and treasure are wildly out of proportion to both its origins as conventionally described and its outcome.

The conventional explanation for the extraordinary destructiveness of the second world war emphasises the role of extreme ideologies. Fascism and communism in particular encouraged adversaries to act with savagery towards the allegedly subhuman foe. This helps us understand why the most lethal struggle was waged between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the eastern front. The Spanish civil war, with its smaller-scale atrocities, had been a kind of dress rehearsal.

Stalin had spurred on the process of dehumanising the enemy by calling for the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" during the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. But whereas ethnic conflict was a byproduct of Stalin's campaign of forced industrialisation, for Hitler it was an end in itself. His visceral hatred of "Jewish Bolshevism" went far beyond earlier variants of antisemitism, which tended to emphasise the allegedly malign role of Jews in the German economy. The real threat to the German Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic community), Hitler argued in his rambling manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle), was that Jews aimed at the "racial pollution" of "German blood" by means of inter-marriage and even rape.

Power of propaganda
A German poster featuring a Nazi flag flying over the country's colonies, overlooked by an eagle, 1935. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

The repetition of such arguments in Nazi propaganda clearly established the idea in the minds of many Germans that Jews – and especially Soviet Jews – were indeed Untermenschen (subhumans), and no more "worthy of life" than the mentally ill, homosexuals and Gypsies (also targets for systematic elimination). Other "isms" also played their part in the tragedy. In 1938 the British were distracted by imperialism. In 1940 the French were enfeebled by defeatism. These, along with pacifism, were the roots of the policy of appeasement. The Americans were paralysed by isolationism.

The problem is that these ideologies were not freshly minted in 1939. Radical socialism and radical nationalism both dated back to the 19th century. Nor is it clear why fascism was so much more successful in some countries than in others. All the major European powers had suffered heavy casualties in the first world war. Why did they make the French so much more reluctant than the Germans to fight another war?

Other awkward questions suggest themselves. Why should the treaty of Versailles be blamed for so much, when the other post-1918 treaties imposed on Austria-Hungary (those of Saint-Germain and Trianon) and the Ottoman empire (Sèvres) were, at least in terms of territory, much harsher? Why did the depression – which was a global phenomenon, and affected the United States just as badly as Germany – lead to the innocuous New Deal in the former and the odious Third Reich in the latter? Why, when democracy yielded to dictatorship in so many countries, did only a minority of dictators embark on wars of aggression as opposed to civil wars of repression (such as the one Franco waged in Spain)? Why, if the arguments for appeasement were so strong in September 1938, did they cease to be just a year later, when the strategic position of Britain and France had significantly worsened?

Japanese regiment marching over a section of the Great Wall of China in Peiping on November 5, 1937. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis/Corbis

Let us now revisit the events of the 1930s from a global vantage point. The first point to emphasise is that Japan and Italy led Germany when it came to outright aggression. Japan's incursion into Manchuria dates from 1931. Mussolini went to war in Abyssinia in 1935. His bid for Balkan territory began in April 1939, with the invasion of Albania. Aside from the involvement of German pilots on the nationalist side in the Spanish civil war, German armed forces saw no action before September 1939. And when they did go to war, they did so as allies of the Soviet Union under the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. So much for the power of ideology. When it was expedient to do so, both Hitler and Stalin made their diplomatic calculations on the basis of a 19th-century realpolitik that Bismarck would certainly have understood.

The second point is that for the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires, which were the true losers of the first world war, there scarcely was any peace after 1918. The so-called "successor states" of Austria-Hungary experienced a series of internal and cross-border conflicts in the early 1920s. The Turkish Republic was forged in a full-blown war against Greece that culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Orthodox population of Anatolia (a sequel to the wartime genocide of the Armenians); though secular in its constitution, Atatürk's state was born after two major purges of its Christian population. Meanwhile, those parts of the Ottoman empire that were acquired as "mandates" (de facto colonies) by the British and French were far from peaceful. The British had encouraged both Arab nationalism and Zionism during the war; they soon discovered the difficulty of reconciling them in strife-torn Palestine.

Josef Stalin whose crimes against humanity rivaled Hitler's. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

But the violence was most egregious in the Russian empire. From the moment of their coup d'état in October 1917, the Bolsheviks distinguished themselves by the bloodthirsty character of their rule. Ruthlessness towards their opponents was the way they won the civil war. Ruthlessness towards his rivals was the way Stalin seized power. And ruthlessness towards all real and imagined enemies of the revolution was the way Stalin ruled for the rest of his life.

The extent and intensity of terror under Stalin remains extremely hard for anyone born in a free society to imagine. Unlike in Hitler's Germany, where the targets for persecution were identifiable minorities, in Stalin's Soviet Union no one could feel safe. Lifelong active communists were, paradoxically, most vulnerable. Almost any peasant risked being identified as a "kulak". Nearly all non-Russian ethnic minorities (Poles above all) were subject to discrimination. A knock on the door in the middle of the night was something every Soviet citizen had reason to fear; it could mark the beginning of a journey to the gulag that was likely to be one-way.

Allied propaganda after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union strove with might and main to recast Stalin as lovable "Uncle Joe". Yet when war broke out in 1939 he was the dictator with by far the bloodiest hands. And he was as much an aggressor as Hitler. It was not just Germany that invaded Poland, after all. It was the Red Army from the east too. And Stalin simultaneously annexed the three Baltic states. He would have taken Finland too if he could.

The great divide

The third and perhaps most important point to note is that the world in 1939 really was a world divided between "haves" and "have-nots". Even before the war began, Stalin's vast empire extended from Minsk to Vladivostok: 8 million square miles, 44 times the size of Germany. The British empire was at its maximum territorial extent: 23% of the world's land surface. The French had an empire 10 times the size of France. And the United States, too, was an empire in all but name. All four were Asian superpowers: the Russians in central Asia, the British in south Asia, the French in Indochina and the Americans in the Philippines.

The true character of the second world war was a three-pronged attack on these Asian empires. Hitler's goal, as he had repeatedly said since Mein Kampf, was to acquire "living space" in the east. He renounced the earlier dream of German colonies overseas; what Germany needed was contiguous land extending as far east as the Volga. That implied not just the disappearance of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland as independent states – that was merely the first phase – but also the destruction of Russia as a European power with the annexation of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Byelorussia and conceivably parts of the Caucasus.

The second prong of the attack on the Asian empires was Japan's. It must be remembered that by the time war began over Poland, Japan already controlled a large part of eastern China. But as the Japanese got bogged down there, they looked for alternative prizes. Having experienced a heavy defeat at the hands of Soviet forces at Nomonhan in August 1939, the Japanese opted to strike south against the French, Dutch and British empires in Asia. American sanctions (particularly the oil embargo of July 1941) then forced them to attack the United States too. Though Pearl Harbor was less successful than the Japanese needed it to be, their attacks on Europe's eastern outposts were triumphs, symbolised by the humiliating British surrender of Singapore in February 1942.

The third prong of the Asian attack on European dominance was internal. Encouraged by Japan's initial crushing victories, many Asian nationalists in India, Indochina and Indonesia felt emboldened, if not to join the axis side (as Subhas Chandra Bose did), then at least to redouble their efforts to achieve independence after the war. In this they were largely successful, to the extent that very little remained of European power in Asia after 1950, aside from those vestiges the United States sought to preserve.

For all these reasons, the events of September 1939 look less like the beginning of a world war and more like a critical moment in the escalation of an ongoing global conflict. It was a war, above all, for dominance in Eurasia. It was a war begun by the "have-nots" – Japan, Italy and Germany – but won by the least deserving of the "haves" – the Soviet Union, which had begun on the wrong side in 1939, and the United States, which entered the war more than two years later. It was a war that was not really over until 1953, by which time its two most hotly contested zones – central and eastern Europe and Manchuria-Korea – had been divided in two, with deadly, impassable borders dividing each of them.

That we describe this cataclysmic world war as having begun in Poland on 1 September 1939 is thus merely a trick of the historical light – an illusion caused by our own parochialism.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard University and the author of The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (Penguin)