A rejuvenated EU was never more important

IT is a tenet of today’s Europe, even if it is not articulated too often, that the barbarism so active in the middle of the last century could never, under any circumstances, be repeated. 

Nobody who lived through that apocalypse, and they are fewer and fewer of them today, could imagine that humanity would implode so terribly again.

Equally, anyone born in the immediate aftermath of that catastrophe was exposed to eyewitness accounts deliberately shared to ensure that Stalingrad, Belsen, Dresden, London, Auschwitz, and Nanking lived on in our consciousness as the most powerful anti-war arguments. That objective has, by and large, been achieved but it is becoming difficult to hope that time has not weakened the argument or at least a real appreciation of it. The nuclear stand off between Washington and Pyongyang could hardly have happened if the main players had a basic understanding of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.